It’s finally March, and you’re starting to feel the madness. While winter should be over, the month will likely continue to taunt you with blissful – albeit terrifyingly unseasonable – 70-degree days before plunging you into another snowstorm. Your joints can barely handle the whiplash caused by the fluctuating temperatures. While you should be pretending to finally start prepping your garden, you are instead writhing on a heating pad while cursing the cruel and unforgiving outside world.
Just because your body is getting old, doesn’t mean your music taste should follow suit. Since you’re just lying around wasting away, you might as well listen to all of this new music we’ve picked out for you. It won’t help your increasing knee and shoulder pain, but it will at least help you get a head start on a sick playlist to jam during the one week of the year you actually enjoy being outside.
St. Vincent “Broken Man”
Many fans of Annie Clark’s avante-pop guitar wizardry have split her discography into two categories: Pre-abduction Annie and post-abduction Annie, with her eponymous fifth album marking the dividing line between earthly and otherworldly. With the release of her latest single, ‘Broken Man’ from her forthcoming album ‘All Born Screaming,’ a new category is born: Alien Overlord Annie. We here at the Hard Times would like to be the first to bow down to the almighty ruler that is St. Vincent. May her revived reign over us be long and unforgiving.
TWRP “A Human’s Touch ft. McKenna Rae”
If you’re anything like us, you spend the majority of your time wracked with indecision when trying to choose between listening to E.L.O or ABBA during your sad little workout regime. Your physical and mental health is rapidly depleting and you wish there was a way to combine the qualities of both bands so you can hop on that treadmill or whatever and move on with your day. Fortunately, Canada’s costumed heroes TWRP have done just that with their latest McKenna Rae featuring single ‘A Human’s Touch.’ Now you only have yourself to blame for skipping leg day for the sixth month in a row.
Hinds “Coffee”
When Hinds announced last year that their rhythm section had quit the band, many feared that the Madrid-based indie-punk outfit might be calling it quits for good. Fortunately, those fears have been effectively vanquished. The detour only meant that lead vocalists, guitarists, and founding members Carlotta Cosials and Ana García Perrote would be going back to basics. Their latest single “Coffee” finds the duo picking up right where they left off, delivering their trademark dueling vocals with hooks that are as catchy as they are bratty.
Chastity Belt “Chem Trails”
Last year, Chastity Belt’s seminal debut LP ‘No Regerts’ celebrated its tenth anniversary, reminding several of our writers that they were a band. You’ll have to excuse their forgetfulness, as the indie outfit has been a bit dormant since their 2019 self-titled album was released. Much of our staff can’t remember last week, let alone five years ago. Anyway, the band’s latest album, ‘Live Laugh Love,’ will be out at the end of the month and it seems the effort will be worth the wait. The latest single, ‘Chem Trails,’ finds the quartet in classic form with a truly hypnotic arrangement. If you don’t feel like you’re floating by the time the chorus hits, you probably aren’t listening close enough.
FEVER 333 “READY ROCK”
FEVER 333 have been teasing their highly anticipated, but still unannounced, second album since the early spring of last year. After announcing a new lineup in early spring last year – which includes ex-Mars Volta drummer Thomas Pridgen and viral bass sensation April Kae – the band dropped the chaotic single, $WING, before taking their unhinged live show on the road for an extended run of summer dates. This left us and other fans chomping at the bit for new rumblings of music from the act. Our collective wishes have been more than fulfilled with the release of ‘READY ROCK’ – a dizzying punk, hip-hop, metal, and funk fusion that will make your head feel like it’s been plucked from your body and thrown into a forest fire.
Pissed Jeans “Everywhere Is Bad”
Spring is just around the corner and you might be starting to plan out your next vacation. Perhaps you’re already narrowing down your shortlist of cities and attractions to visit. Before you go any further, you might want to ditch your travel planner and listen to ‘Everywhere Is Bad’ from Pissed Jeans excellent new album ‘Half Divorced.’ Three and a half minutes in the hands of this ferociously biting track about the sad state of America will have you too depressed and listless to go anywhere, saving you tons of money in the long run. Who needs a vacation when you can just listen to this album on repeat, anyway?
Okay, so we definitely did say these would help you get a headstart on making a sick playlist, but we all know you’re actually not going to do it. That’s why we’ve made one for you. It doesn’t just have these songs on it, either. It has every song we’ve ever written about this year, and will continue to grow until it becomes so long and disorienting that it develops sentience and tells you to get a job. You can click here to check it out unless you’re a coward who hates great music.
Apple Music describes The Darling Fire as “hard rock,” and while that is an apt description, the band is also so, so much more than that. Featuring band members from Shai Hulud not named Chad Gilbert and from Further Seems Forever not named Chris Carrabba, TDF’s female spin on a typically male-dominated arena provides a new and fantastic lens on a non-foreign populus. If we can up the ante from 459 monthly Spotify listeners to something in the 460 category moving forward, then our hands will forever remain clean, and life will be the antonym of a freaking downer. On another note, if you need/want/crave/yearn for a home in South Florida, well frontwoman/realtor Jolie Lindholm is for you, and you can reach her directly by ringing 867-5309. Please leave a message at the beep or our collective hearts will stop beating.
You may not expect to hear modern kindred spirits of The Replacements, Elvis Costello, R.E.M., and other 80s college indie rock acts prior to spinning the most bloodthirsty and violent band named band ever as of press time, Her Head’s On Fire, but the four-piece act composed of members from Saves the Day, The Bomb, Small Brown Bike, and Large White Plane loves to keep you guessing and keep all of the goons complaining. Since “College Rock and Clove Cigarettes” is the band’s only full-length LP as of now, we hope that they’re all hunkering down and creating more ear candy for us all. It’s a common shame that this act fell through the cracks of the most indie of indies, but we’re obviously here to remedy that, as our pristine hearts will beat for you forever and ever amen. Are THEY enough? YES they ARE!
New Orleans, Louisiana is normally known for beignets, voodoo, Neutral Snap, and non-neutral by any stretch of the imagination drinks, but Hey Thanks! deserve your time too, and plenty of public and private accolades from the peanut gallery known as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness! Blending nearly every genre of rock from Warped Tour that doesn’t involve yelling antiquated Christian ideals at unsuspecting teens with vulgar neon v-necks, Hey Thanks! is so, so much more than a The Wonder Years song, and all twelve tracks that comprise their slasher LP known as “Start/Living” are quality jams that even your bitter and boring cousin Mortimer will bop to. Also, if you like your gallons and gallons of falsetto more than you like Adam Levine’s miles and miles of tattoos inspired by M. Shadows, the vocals here are uber pristine and candylike.
“Consume and Burn” is the most concise and short listen here with just eight songs and a runtime under twenty minutes, but it is still technically a full-length studio effort! Florida men come in many shapes and sizes, and these four Florida men from the full of fury location known as Tampa Bay, for lack of a better word, whip your horses known as humans into oblivion from the first seconds of “Cutting Through” to the final ones in “Circadian Rhythm,” and we’re all better/lighter jockeys for it. There’s a song called “Pain” here at track number five, and that may as well be the genre of the tunes on this LP, as no other word would do them justice. If you want campfire acoustic classics, steer clear, but if you want to firebomb the warehouse party a la Ass Life, these eight songs will certainly do. HORSEWHIP!
Blending elements of pop, punk, pop-punk and a genre that doesn’t exist, unless it does, known as punk-pop, Elkton, Maryland’s The Iron Roses’ self-titled studio album is a unique male and female dual vocal masterpiece with a healthy amount of power chords and upstrokes. You may not expect to hear such saccharine from Nathan Gray, who also is the lead vocalist for your favorite act and ours known as BoySetsFire, but Gray likes to keep ya guessing with a hearty amount of Becky, and not the aunt with the same first name. Some roses aren’t made of stone and deserve some metal, though not in musical style form. Also, this album’s actual cover could work as cool art for your studio apartment or your friend Albie’s garage. In closing, inferior publications dug this band but here it is for you!
Screw apostrophes, amirite? San Francisco, California’s Jeromes Dream doo-wop harmonious hooligans open their recent LP “The Gray In Between” with a somber and short instrumental known as “Conversations: In Time, On Mute,” which is quite a misnomer by a stretch AND that’s where the mellowness ends. If you dig the aforementioned MA icons Converge that will allude to again later, but think that they should write heavier and more dissonant music for your eardrums, well Jeromes Dream is for you. We must admit, it sounds more like Jeromes nightmare than a happy and peaceful slumber, but that’s the way, uh huh, uh huh, we like it, uh huh, uh huh. “The Gray In Between” has another thing going for it in that it is ten tracks clocking in at just under twenty-five short minutes, so your commute to your in-laws will be THAT much more meaningful.
“Don’t give up” is not only a song on Onelinedrawing’s recent LP “Tenderwild,” but it seems to be a daily affirmation mantra of sorts for vocalist/svengali Jonah Matranga, who also moonlit in influential acts Far, Gratitude, New End Original, and Old Corner Cover. If you like folk music with an emotional/sweet twist, “Tenderwild” is a good one for your record collection, and if you don’t, don’t. Special credence is particularly in order for Matranga, who has been a scene mainstay for longer than many of you have been alive, and we’d bet a large sum that fact won’t change till he’s on his deathbed, or even you on yours. If you only have three minutes and two seconds today to halt doom scrolling and actually listen to quality music, check out this album’s solid title track; hell of a year.
If you like Braid and Jawbreaker, but dislike impropriety and dentists, then Orange Island’s “Everything You Thought You Knew” is most certainly for you, despite its album title potentially or kinetically, intentionally or unintentionally, ripping Glassjaw’s breakout LP’s title off! Oh well, consider them unlucky. Anyway, it is still shocking that the mega post-hardcore/emo boom of the early-aughts left Orange Island on their own, err, island, and it wasn’t a long one at that. Clinton, Massachusetts is usually more known for Sliding Billy Hamilton than OI, but we are here to change that grassroots guerilla style via this studio album shoutout. We can’t entirely blame Iodine Recordings for this band not blowing up as they eventually signed to Triple Crown Records and even Rise Records, and called it a day in 2005, the year that acts like Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Avenged Sevenfold, and The Turtles exploded.
At just six songs over the course of nearly forty-five minutes of epic music and musicianship, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s Ritual Earth’s full-length is a trippy and heavy masterpiece appealing to fans of psychedelic rock and doom metal, and we’re all for it! As you know, “MMXX” in roman numeral form means “2020,” which may reference the year that Covid-19 quarantined the planet or it might just be a cool combo of letters, fam. Regardless, fans of Meshuggah, Between the Buried and Me, Moon Tooth, and the substance ayahuasca NEED Ritual Earth in their meal plans. Also, if you look at a photo of the band, they certainly look the part, whatever the part is. In closing, this entry may look like a gaffe as it is six songs long but since the tunes are long as hell, it’s technically an LP, suckas!
There were wires and there must have been something in the water in Massachusetts in the late-’90s/early-’00s, as many acts from this region around that revered time period were stinking mad whilst being wicked pissa, kid! There Were Wires should have climbed to the heights of MA peers Converge, but sadly the band called it a day just one year after “Somnambulists” came out. If you have a BA in English Language and Literature or even climbed the academic mountain higher to a master’s degree or doctorate, you know that “Somnambulism” is a pretentious way to say “sleepwalking” and we blame external factors, dumb luck in a dumb way, and this literal heady album title for the band not being on the metalcore or whatever the hell you want to call it pantheon.
