Vera Ellen has been traveling on a path that took her from jagged indie rock to an artsy sound, then to her current, folk-inspired material that stands out with its songwriting craftsmanship.
Find out more about her music at https://thepropagandasite.com/artist/vera-ellen
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Vera Ellen | the PROPAGANDA site
Vera Ellen (aka Vera Williams in some quarters) is an indie rock artist who previously worked with various bands, both in her native New Zealand and later in the US, as a member of Girl Friday in the late '10s. Her music has been evolving as a solo artist over the years. Having started in edgy indie rock with an underground esthetic and a progressively softening punkish tones, she gradually moved on to an artsier sound and began to rely less on a jagged rock sound and more on her maturing songwriting. On her 2024 EP, heartbreak for jetlag, she came to a more stripped down, acoustic-heavy, and intimate sound, with a close to bare-bones approach to recording, a combination of which end up emphasizing the inherent lyricism of her songs.
Singer and guitarist Muireann Bradley puts classic blues, ragtime, and folk up front and center of her music with her impressive fingerpicking style and love for the old-timey sound.
Find out more about her music at https://thepropagandasite.com/artist/muireann-bradley
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Muireann Bradley | the PROPAGANDA site
Muireann Bradley is an Irish singer and guitar player who seems to have been fully immersed in the American folk and blues tradition, both in her work and in her overall sound. The acoustic guitar is her instrument, and she plays it in a nimble finger picking style, where she frequently captures the rapid fire quality of ragtime music with her uptempo rendition. Her catalog has thus far been a series of cover songs that go back to old-timey blues and vintage folk songs, plus some more contemporary but ultimately adjacent bits along the way. Her guitar work is fantastic, and she sings in a weathered tone in her delivery that is hard to miss, even though he has an obviously young voice.
Mixing alt-rock and shoegaze with sprinkles of dream pop on top goes a long way for Nara's Room, a band that likes to work some sweet jangle into rough noise in creative ways.
Find out more about their music at https://thepropagandasite.com/artist/naras-room
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Nara's Room | the PROPAGANDA site
Nara's Room is a band led by Brooklyn based indie artist Nara Avakian, who leans into raw alt-rock with heavy tones of shoegaze and lightly applied dream pop flavors. The songs tend to be melodically subtle and stylistically centered around an unpolished, somewhat rough sound and a sandy texture. The band handles the variety of elements that are part of their music effectively as they stitch them into a consistent sound. Avakian's guitar work is particularly noteworthy in the way they cover a range that stretches from post-punk type jangly arpeggios and folk oriented strumming to a ramped up indie and shoegaze attack loaded with distortion.
Julianna Barwick builds ambient electronic pieces through her vocal loops and keyboard layers, maintaining a constant dialogue with the spaces she occupies and the soundscapes she creates.
Find out more about her music at https://thepropagandasite.com/artist/julianna-barwick
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Julianna Barwick | the PROPAGANDA site
Composer, vocalist Juliana Barwick is an artist who works like a sonic sculptor in the way she takes voice recordings and molds them into ambient soundscapes through her loops, electronic effects, and keyboard layers. The result is an immersive and often profound acoustic experience. Her use of the reverb, electronic or otherwise, gives her pieces a deep cavernous quality, subtly transforming them into a meditation on space and the physical objects shaping it. The music has a repetitive core, but it also moves in waves, as she lets moments of tension punctuate its generally relaxing tone. Her work projects plenty of warmth built around melodically well-defined phrases that create an open-ended feel, as if it is part of an ongoing dialogue or a narrative thread.
Muddy Summers and the Dirty Field Whores create engaging songs that follow the traditional British folk sound while loaded with a punk attitude, a wicked sense of fun, catchy tunes, and a strong political punch.
Find out more about their music at https://thepropagandasite.com/artist/muddy-summers-and-dirty-field-whores
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Muddy Summers and the Dirty Field Whores | the PROPAGANDA site
Muddy Summers and the Dirty Field Whores (or the Ws or DFWs) are a throwback to the era of protest music, as well as a sign of things to come, hopefully. They are a one of a kind band made up of musicians who are geographically spread across the UK, led by nomadic vocalist Gail Something-Else, who in turn, is indeed something else: a singer with a smooth and beautiful voice and the mouth of a delightful sailor, keeping the band on a consistent roll. They perform traditionally inspired British folk played on acoustic instruments with infectious tones, politically-charged lyrics, and a biting punk spirit at its core. Their songs are mini anthems of the feminist and anti-capitalist variety that serve as relentlessly hopeful and humorous pieces of agit-prop, delivered with a glint in the eye.
A cinematic feel and crisp delivery marks the music of Burnstick, a folk duo who stands out with their vocal harmonies and warm, immersive sound that is often quite evocative and inviting.
Find out more about their music at https://thepropagandasite.com/artist/burnstick
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Burnstick | the PROPAGANDA site
Burnstick is the duo of folk artists Jason Burnstick and Nadia Gaudet (née Burnstick), whose songs come with a strong romantic tone and a sweeping, panoramic feel. Their songs are presented in cinematic scope, though they tend to be fairly traditional at heart. There is also a resonance to their arrangements, which are sparse for the most part, but are rich in their vocal harmonies built upon their soft and smooth voices and the acoustic texture of their instrumentation (Jason typically prefers a Weissenborn lap slide guitar). They sing in English, French, and Cree, gently so, evoking a sense of warmth and coziness that pretty much defines their sound.
Indie artist Retail Drugs takes a stripped down, lo-fi path to create songs that feel direct and raw, whether he's recording intimate bedroom pieces or cranking up the fuzz.
For more about their music at https://thepropagandasite.com/artist/retail-drugs
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Retail Drugs | the PROPAGANDA site
Jake Brooks releases his solo work under the Retail Drugs moniker, where he gets to go lo-fi and scrappy while taking a much looser approach to recording. Apart from that, his music is stylistically in the same ballpark as the work he does in Laveda, which is his duo with partner Ali Genevich. He opts for a melodic, bare bones, indie style for the most part, with a level of intimacy that partially comes from his home taping type set up. That said, he also has a noisier streak that comes up now and then, hinting perhaps at some no wave influences underneath the surface. He cranks up the fuzz a great deal in those instances, adding bursts of headbanger distortion to his songs.
Multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, composer Dasom Baek integrates loop effects and ambient electronic elements into traditional Korean music to create a sound that's expansive, serene, and evocative.
Find out more about her music at https://thepropagandasite.com/artist/dasom-baek
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Dasom Baek | the PROPAGANDA site
Composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Dasom Baek (백다솜) integrates modern looping techniques and other electronic methods into traditional Korean music to create work with strong meditative and ambient qualities. Her instruments of choice are the bamboo flutes daegeum and sogeum, which she uses to great effect whether she is wailing through them or soaring high. There is an expansive sense of space and serenity in her music, especially in the way she keeps her arrangements sparse and delicate where each instrument resonates directly with the listener, establishing an intimate connection. She occasionally punctures that stillness with tense moments and abrupt jumps to capture the flow of city life in her 2024 album, Mirror City.
Trampled By Turtles grew beyond their original "bluegrass band" label to lean in to folk and country as well over the years, infusing their songs with more emotional breadth and varied textures along the way.
Find out more about their music at https://thepropagandasite.com/artist/trampled-turtles
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Trampled By Turtles | the PROPAGANDA site
Trampled by Turtles is a band that plays it loose with genres even though bluegrass is their home turf, a style that they are most closely associated with. Their earlier work was mostly built around the progressive bluegrass idea, where the band often performed in a high-powered, frantic pace. They gradually developed a strong and nuanced folk streak as well, bringing their sound closer to bands like The Avett Brothers in tone and approach (though with a firmer commitment to acoustic instrumentation). That shift in balance also led to softened edges, along with warmer and more textured songwriting and delivery to go with the technical prowess that has always been an integral part of their music.
On top of their big, guitar driven, well-written, melodic rock sound, Cardinals (out of Cork, Ireland) also stand out with some delicious accordion action that you probably hadn't realized how much you needed to hear.
Find out more about their music at https://thepropagandasite.com/artist/cardinals-0
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Cardinals | the PROPAGANDA site
Indie band Cardinals make old school, guitar-based, somewhat straight-up rock with high-powered, energetic and tuneful songs. They come with a triple guitar attack that swings between grungy and sparkly; leaning on the former more often than the latter, to be fair. Vocalist Euan Manning has a voice that commands attention. His brother Finn is the card up the band's sleeve with his accordion, which adds a lovely texture to their songs, also giving an extra oomph to the whole Irish pub vibe they got going. The big winner, though, has to be the strength of their songwriting. Their music is moody at its core, well-crafted, imaginative, and highly memorable.
The Propaganda Site