Substitute Scene Records
Since the launch of their first record in 2017, this independent label has exclusively represented female, non-binary, and queer artists from around the country. I've written and edited bios for several of their artists as they’ve released new albums and embarked on cross-country tours.
No Swoon
No Swoon opens their upcoming self-titled LP with startling admissions. “I don’t know what’s my own,” Tasha Abbott intones on the lead track. “I don’t know what’s controlled.” Her confusion is warranted given what feels like everyone’s current mental state—increasingly critical, and alienated by everything from misogyny to power imbalance to rising rents—and she and bassist and synthesizer Zack Nestel-Patt explore such themes in fittingly reciprocal form over the course of nine searingly critical tracks. Abbott’s distorted guitars are cradled by Nestel-Patt’s lulling synths and her own hypnotic vocals, the musical equivalent of a fever dream recalled with surprising sharpness.
Ambiguous yet urgent, No Swoon’s full-length debut searches for answers to questions that may never be resolved. “Kate” sinks inward, portraying a depressed woman whose numbness is compounded by the lack of empathy from those closest to her, whereas “Forward” frets about indifference on a global scale. “Is the ice really splitting? / Are the ceilings getting smaller? / Couldn’t notice through these headlines / Couldn’t notice through the mud.” The aforementioned “Don’t Wake Up, Wake Up”, their most straightforward rock ‘n’ roll track, finds the narrator existentially lost amid fuzzy, electronic rhythms reminiscent of Diiv and Joy Division. The LP reunites the band with producer Jorge Elbrecht (Wild Nothing, Japanese Breakfast) and adds Robi Gonzalez (A Place to Bury Strangers, This Will Destroy You) on drums.
No Swoon’s previous effort, 2018’s EP 1, was written in Los Angeles during a self-imposed exile from the East Coast. For Abbott, a native of Ontario, CA, it was about getting back to her geographic and musical roots, driving around the suburbs listening to everything from the goth and new wave her mom played in the car when she was little (Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, New Order) to the indie- and punk-rock of her teen years (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The White Stripes). The result was a mesmerizing trio of songs that Podcart called “a prismatic wonder...that will have you hitting repeat.”
Having just picked up the electric guitar and analog synthesizer in 2016, Abbott and Nestel-Patt cut their teeth playing dozens of shows throughout New York as they recorded and released EP 1. They continued to fine-tune their sound on stages around the country before eventually returning to LA for the famed Part Time Punks residency at The Echo.
No Swoon will head on tour after the release of their new album on November 1.
Desert Sharks
On the heels of a nonstop year of performances that landed them on Oh My Rockness’s list of New York City’s Hardest Working Bands of 2018, Desert Sharks are releasing their first full-length album. Baby’s Gold Death Stadium juxtaposes elements from iconic ‘90s bands Sleater-Kinney, L7, Veruca Salt, and Toadies with Desert Sharks’ own musical history. Named for DIY venues and small stages they’ve regularly played over the years, the album is an edgier, more organic effort from the Brooklyn-based foursome.
Baby’s Gold Death Stadium showcases their guitar-driven brand of grunge-garage punk as a perfect synthesis of their individual talents. Charged by guitarists Stefania Rovera and Sunny Veniero’s fiercely relentless compositions, the LP is grounded by formidable rhythms from drummer Rebecca Fruchter as well as the introspective songwriting style of bassist and lead singer Stephanie Gunther. Gunther mined her experiences with everything from anxiety to social archetypes for subject matter. “Sorceress” embraces personal power and challenges the dismissal of the aging woman, while “I Don’t Know How to Dress for the Apocalypse” reflects on the general anxiety of younger generations as they grapple with social and environmental concerns in a divisive political climate. “Dating?” is Gunther’s real-life plea to Veniero, who kept getting back together with a toxic ex—“You know she’s bad for you. / Don’t make the same mistake.”
These three advance singles are part of a 12-track LP that, in trademark Desert Sharks’ style, clocks in at a brisk 35 minutes. Baby’s Gold Death Stadium was recorded live in a Brooklyn basement studio straight to tape and then dumped to digital for a gritty vibe.
It’s a sound Desert Sharks has been fine-tuning since finding each other through a trio of Craigslist ads that quickly led to their self-titled debut EP. Their follow-up, the garage-pop-inspired Sister Cousins, was recorded at Brooklyn’s Converse Rubber Tracks studio. The following year they released Template Hair, a heavier EP that landed them a spot on tour with SWMRS (f.k.a. Emily’s Army), playing venues throughout the East Coast, New England, and the Midwest.
In support of Baby’s Gold Death Stadium, Desert Sharks will return to the road in the fall of 2019.
Verdigrls
Borrowing from both their classical-music training and early forays into indie rock, Verdigrls’ Anna and Catherine Wolk have been crafting their unique sound since grade school. The Connecticut-bred sisters left their rural childhood home for the crowded streets of New York and began working at songs that would become their debut EP, 2014’s Heartbreak Hour. The title track snuck onto both the big and small screens (Marvel’s The Fantastic Four and MTV’s Scream, respectively), propelling the duo to keep fine-tuning their introverted brand of bedroom pop.
On their latest effort, Small Moves, they manage to tuck all of their influences neatly into place, the way one only can after living in shoebox apartments in Bushwick, Brooklyn and Ridgewood, Queens. The latter was where they recorded most of the EP, a dreamy macramé of Broken Social Scene–style string arrangements, melancholy electronica, and sweet, breathy vocals reminiscent of Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser. The sisters looked to everyone from Virginia Woolf to The Cranberries to The Organ for inspiration, then took a page from Grimes’s songbook by producing the record on their own over the course of four years.
Small Moves is an album borne from that specific sort of ennui that comes from having the world at your iPhone-gripping fingertips. “I’m too scared to go down the stairs / Or go to the grocery store / Or go anywhere,” Catherine croons on the opener, “Daylight Savings.” The track, inspired by her own struggles with agoraphobia, finds Catherine retreating from the suffocating scene outside her door to a blanket cocoon for sanctuary. “Am I doing this right?” she wonders. “Am I losing my mind?” On “Women of Fiction”, the sisters lament the irony of not feeling seen in a world still so designed for the male gaze. “It’s hard to think of the future / When there’s nothing written for you.”
Though vulnerable, Verdigrls’ DIY music is far from defeated. Over the course of their EP, Anna and Catherine make honest attempts to understand the world, even when fear, depression, and anxiety sometimes hinders their ability to explore it. Restrained vocals find height on swells of violin and cello, somber synths find light among self-aware lyrics—it’s a delicate balance the sisters instinctively provide each other, showing how they continue to tinker with the world they’ve built together.
Whitney Ballen
“It’s easy to get down on yourself / When you’re surrounded by people who don’t know what goes on in your head,” Whitney Ballen sings on the title track of her latest EP, You’re a Shooting Star, I’m a Sinking Ship. It’s the irony of existing in a world filtered through social media—comparing real life to curated ones, and longing for validation that seems further away with every scroll of the touchscreen.
The album’s ten tracks are set perfectly in Ballen’s Pacific Northwest, a place collectively pictured in a romantic mist that blots out its everyday banalities. Vocally, the Washingtonian shares space with the likes of Mirah, Laura Stevenson, and Jenny O. Describing her sound, Seattle Weekly writes, “Imagine Joanna Newsom as a ghost, benevolently haunting a cabin in the woods, and you’ll get an idea...”
In contrast to her unique voice, Ballen’s music resembles many things, and covers endless ground. There are the bedroom dreamscapes, suspended between rousing from sleep and falling back into it (“The Kiss”); nightmarish tones that growl and distort (“Black Cloud”); swells that expand and contract like the breaths of a resting lover (“Rainier”); and a dreamy mountain twang that echoes beautifully in the ear (“Mountains”). It’s all sowed with unabashedly honest lyrics that make Ballen’s music equal parts visceral, vulnerable, and resilient.
Falls, Ballen’s moody first EP, was recorded in 2014 at an old firehouse, with love letters to Olympia, Rainier, and Snoqualmie Falls. Ballen traded the firehouse for Phil Elverum’s church studio for the recording of her second EP, Being Here Is Hard. As its title suggests, this unexpected group of songs was shaped by the experience of losing people and being left to live in their absence.
You’re a Shooting Star combines influences from both of Ballen’s earlier releases—leaving the magnificent beauty of the Pacific Northwest, then longing for it and the intimate connections made with the people in the rearview. Each song is awash with jealousy, threatening to drown in the impossible storm of comparing everything we are to everything but ourselves.
