Logan Melia: All right, well, you’re hitting the road with The Milk Carton Kids, do you remember the first time you all talked together? Maybe when this tour was starting to get planned out? 

Sierra Hull: Well, we’ve been planning this tour for many months now, but I’ve known these guys for the better part of 10 years or more. But we’ve mostly just gotten to hang out at festivals or cross paths at various events with friends, stuff like that. We’ve never really got to do any serious music making together so I’m excited for this. We’re all kind of hopping on a bus together and just hitting the road for like two weeks and. I’ve been such a fan of theirs. They’re just like amazing singer-songwriters and musicians and I just think it’s going to be so much fun to get to kind of kick back and hear them play every night. It’s one thing to go out and sort of do your own tour, but it’s another thing when you can go do a tour with friends and be inspired every night by other people as well. 

Logan: You have been so active touring this new record of yours, “A Tip Toe High Wire”, but do you remember the very first tour you ever did? 

Sierra: I’ve been playing shows ever since I was a kid. I started playing mandolin when I was eight years old and playing around locally and kind of starting to do like summertime festivals where I would travel and do things here and there, but it was pretty much right after I got out of high school. I mean, as soon as I could sort of really hit the road, I started going out and actually touring more seriously. When I sort of got old enough, I could kind of go without a parent. My parents always worked full-time jobs, so there’s only so much I could do as a youngster. But yeah, I feel like I’ve been kind of touring on and off for many years now. 

Logan: You mentioned growing up and always playing. And you grew up in Byrdestown, Tennessee, a real small town there. And I’ve heard legend of the Dixie Cafe being a lovely place to catch some bluegrass music. Can you attest to that statement? 

Sierra: Oh yeah, the Dixie Cafe. You know, they didn’t do it when I was a kid growing up, it wasn’t a thing yet. So I didn’t like grow up playing there or anything like that. But when I got into my sort of teenage years, probably around the time I was actually like moving away, started hearing, oh, this is a regular thing and there’s jam sessions. And then it was like, oh, well, there’s people playing on stage every week and local musicians. So it just does my heart so good to know that there’s a music scene in my hometown. Because I used to have to go over to the next town, Jamestown, where a lot of my family was from, or kind of go down the road a piece to be able to find any kind of real jams or music. So I just love that The Dixie is bringing music into the community like that so cool.

Logan: Yeah and you are very much at the forefront of this huge bluegrass revival. I’m seeing it as someone who wasn’t really in the bluegrass a few years ago seeing it wash over this this whole music culture right now, and being a part of this leading charge here it seems very cool. How does the bluegrass scene seem now compared to maybe what you were growing up with, does it feel any different? 

Sierra: Well, I just think the music scene, in general, the way we get our music, the way that our culture feels toward music is so different than what it was when I was a kid. I mean, but I’ve been lucky enough to kind of be really immersed in the bluegrass community since I was really young. So in a way, that community is still there. It’s thriving. It always has been, right? It’s always been a big part of my world, but it’s exciting to see it be able to reach a bigger audience in some cases. There’s always been moments I know we’ve got like the big anniversary of the “O Brother Where Art Thou” soundtrack I think hitting this year. And there’s always a wave of something like that that comes along and puts it in the spotlight. You know when I was a kid that was one of the big things, and someone like Allison Krauss kind of being at the forefront of that to see what my buddy Billy Strings is doing these days and the audiences that he’s reaching. The way that bluegrass can kind of coexist alongside a bunch of other styles of music just because I think our culture consumes music that way now, where we can get on our phone and within, 2 minutes we can curate a playlist of everything from bluegrass to hip-hop if we wanted to. So I think it definitely feels different, but I think it’s more, for me, it’s more that the culture around music just feels different. But the bluegrass scene, has always been this beautiful, thriving thing, and it’s cool to see other people start to get a glimpse into that world and that community that I’ve loved since I was a kid. 

Logan: You mentioned the ability to get these wild playlists going on. Do you have anything you wouldn’t expect to be on, you know, bluegrass Grammy nominee Sierra Hull’s playlist these days? 

Sierra: Oh man, I’m all over the map and what I like to listen to. I mean, it’s funny. It’s like I really enjoyed the Justin Bieber performance a lot at the Grammys. 

Logan: With the loop pedal and everything? 

Sierra: Yes, sitting in the room the other night, I mean, he’s such a crazy singer. And so it’s been kind of fun, even some of the things that I was in the room here on the other night, I started going, okay, cool man. Say what you want about pop music and coming from a world like bluegrass and others, a lot of people are like, Oh, I can’t stand the Grammys. That kind of thing is just not their cup of tea. But I’ve always just been someone that loves all kinds of music. And you sit in the room and you hear somebody actually sing live though, I mean, there’s no denying the level of talent in the pop. There really is some incredible singers and some incredible artists so it kind of makes me go home. Maybe I want to listen to some of this stuff that I kind of missed over the last year. I Don’t know, I bop around a lot to be honest with my listening of Joni forever, of course, but then it’s like, I kind of go, oh man, that makes me want to go back down a Joni rabbit hole. There’s so much great music to listen to, for sure. 

Logan: What is the most recent rabbit hole you fell down? 

Sierra: Oh, well, probably Bieber the last couple days, diving into his new record, listening to that a little bit. The total rabbit hole, oh gosh. Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe that just because that’s the last couple days. I’ve probably watched that performance four or five times over the last few days.  

Logan: Do you have any memories of watching the Grammys at all growing up? Do you have any performances that have like stuck in your head? 

Sierra: Oh yeah, it was always cool for me to see as a young bluegrass kid, I mean, I was so immersed in bluegrass. Of course, my friends at school were listening to the popular pop music of the time, but that really wasn’t where I was digging in my heels as a listener. It was all bluegrass, and I was such a big Allison Krauss fan. Of course, Allison’s been a staple of the Grammys for basically her entire career, and has been loved on strongly by those folks. And so anytime I would see someone like her perform, that was always really exciting to me because it felt like there was a part of my world being represented on the big stage like that. 

Logan: You mentioned growing up listening to bluegrass. I saw in some older interviews you brought up how your dad brought home a Larry Sparks tape and Tony Rice and stuff like that. What would you want to show the next generation of bluegrass players right now? What would be your Larry Sparks? 

Sierra: I mean, Larry Sparks is still out there crushing it, to be honest. And I think there are people like Larry, like Belle McCurry, who are still out there really holding the torch for that sort of early bluegrass sound. They’re the closest thing that we have to Ralph Stanley. It’s like you’ve got Larry, who actually played with Ralph ,and you’ve got Dale, who actually played with Bill Monroe. I mean, these guys come come at it with that first generation connection that like the rest of us don’t quite have. And for me, I think for anybody who’s really getting into bluegrass, I love, like I said, all kinds of. The music that I make obviously leans more progressive these days and a lot of what I’m tapping into too, but I mean, at the heart of it, I love that traditional music, and I wouldn’t trade sitting in those jam sessions as a kid singing that. Singing and playing the music of Flatt and Scruggs and Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers and growing up listening to Larry Sparks, people like that, there’s a foundation you build on that first generation music that I think is so important for a young musician who wants to grow up playing these instruments. And even if your heroes are more progressive people, I think there’s no replacement for going back and digging into where this music really comes from. 

Logan: How do you find a balancing act between the two? Because I feel like you do such a good job of doing new and innovative things while also kind of holding down that old Larry Sparks charm. 

Sierra: I don’t think about it that much, to be honest. I think that the foundation and that old-school thing is just a part of me. I mean, I grew up here in Tennessee, too, and that music, kind of the way even culturally, what the music was kind of built on, you know, singing about the little cabin home on the hill and, the hard times in which people, Appalachian people, were facing. It’s like, that’s kind of those stories, even though I grew up obviously in a different time, hence the fact that I think my music reflects a different kind of sound and time as well in order to feel truly authentic to me, I think it kind of has to. But those sounds are like my people, It’s a part of not only just the music I grew up listening to and playing, but the people that I was around too, and people that experienced the music, the things that those stories are all built upon, the sounds of bluegrass really just sound like the part of the world that I come from. So I think there’s the there’s that part of me that will always just reflect in the music because it truly is, as a person, who I am and where I’m from. 

Logan: It’s so ingrained in kind of Tennessee, the culture of it all. Is there anything that you have learned on mandolin or about bluegrass music or anything that has recently come into your ears that you’ve been able to implement into your songs? 

Sierra: I think if you’re really keeping your ears open, there’s always something to be learned and to be brought into the music. You know, I think like coming out of this kind of crazy week I just had, I think there’s a lot of inspiration to be had being in the space, and I was in Los Angeles all week for Grammy stuff. And you’re around all these incredible artists for an entire week, people who are all there celebrating all styles of music and just the love of the craft and the hard work that everybody kind of puts into this too. I know it’s like you kind of go, oh, Grammy week, it’s all about the flash and the awards and getting dressed up and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that’s fun, that’s true, but it also is like a showing of all the hard work that all these artists put into music over the last year and sort of celebrating that. And so, I think coming home even off of that hearing, like I said, a lot of performances that were inspiring to me, conversations I had with people that were inspiring. All that really starts to get me excited to work on the next thing, so it’s always hard to put your finger on, well, something that you’ve learned directly, whether it be an exact musical phrase or just something in life that happened that inspired you. But I know I certainly feel inspired right now and a real desire to kind of be like, okay, that was fun, now let’s get back to work. Let’s get back to the actual thing we all want to do, which is making music. I came home and I said that to my husband. I was like, well, that was fun, but now I’m like, shoot, I can’t wait to get back to actually playing my instrument and singing songs. 

Logan: Are you writing anything new these days? Do you often write new things casually or do you have to be in a certain mindset to like put down some new ideas? 

Sierra: Yeah, the last couple days I’ve been writing like crazy. That doesn’t always mean that’s something ever going to be heard either, but gathering lyrics and ideas and feeling, I think for me, there’s moments where I can like grasp it and go, I can like connect to something like I’m always writing. But then there’s sometimes when there’s this like real inevitable feeling of I must do it, like I have to do it, and so whatever that is, I feel it right now. And that comes in waves for me. That’s not all the time. Sometimes you can think, well, it’d be good if I got back to writing because I hadn’t been doing it much, but you just don’t feel like you can work on it a little bit. But the connection, I’ve got to do this almost in a therapeutic way, is not there in the same way. And I’ve definitely been filling that pole lately. And I think that’s probably as a result too, the whirlwind of being busy and finishing one project, we put “A Tip Toe High Wire” out not quite a year ago, but almost, and you jump into this whirlwind of being so busy around new music and a new album, and then you sort of find yourself near the end of that cycle, and it’s almost like your emotional space frees up for me, where I can suddenly go, okay cool, we sort of did that thing. Now I can get back to the creative side again. 

Logan: In this past year, you played the Outlaw Music Festival with such a cool variety of artists. I believe the dates I saw had Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Billy Strings, and Lake Street Dive, and a few others. Normally, there’s not too big of an age gap between eighty-year-old Bob Dylan and these younger artists right here. Did you learn anything from that tour being around these older artists? 

Sierra: Well, getting to watch him play, I didn’t even get to meet Bob. I didn’t get to hang out with him, unfortunately, or anything and I think it’s understandable. It’s like Willie’s in his 90s. Bob turned 80, actually, while we were on the road, which is pretty cool. But getting to see him take the stage every night as these legends and when you’re on a tour with Willie and Bob, I think the main takeaway for me was man, songs. They just have songs, It’s like we all, we think about, of course, Bob Dylan probably as a songwriter first and foremost. Willie… Willie’s just such a treasure kind of all the way around, but like he has such an incredible catalog of songs and even songs he didn’t write, his ability to be a storyteller. I remember he would sing this song every night on tour called “The Last Leaf on the Tree”, and I swear I didn’t realize it was a Tom Waits song. It wasn’t a Tom Waits song that I knew, But it was like my favorite in the set every night. Just the way he sang it sounded exactly like he wrote it. I think because they’re such great songwriters and they understand the power of words and lyrics, there’s a delivery that those guys have and what they do that is just, I don’t know, it sort of stands on its own. And then the performance is just like the cherry on top, you know what I mean? So yeah, it just reminded me of like, okay, you gotta have good songs first and foremost first and foremost. All the fancy like tricks and talents of like vocal moves or instrumental whatever prowess, that’s really secondary to the song. It’s pointless without having really good songs in my opinion.

Logan: Do you have any songs that you really enjoy covering yourself?

Sierra: You were talking about that tour, we covered a couple things on that tour, most nights, we have a cover of “Mad World” we do a lot, which is one of my favorites.  On sort of the flip side of that, that’s like moody, edgy, or, you know, lyrically a little bit more edgy than something just straight ahead. But then like on something just completely joyful, it’s like we would, to cover Bela Flec stomping grounds, often. So, I mean, we have a wide range of stuff. I just most recently covered, actually during Grammy’s week, the Americana folks have a kind of tradition. They do a music cares fundraiser show honoring an artist at the Troubadour every year. And this year it was Neil Young. So it’s a bunch of artists singing Neil Young songs and I did the song “Look Out for My Love”, which is such a great song. And yeah, such a great catalog of songs he has to. 

Logan: You went to the Berklee College of Music, and I’m in college right now. Was there any party that wanted a more traditional college experience? Because obviously Berklee’s a little intensive, one might say. Do you at all wish it was a little bit more of the classic American college, or were you just too locked in on the music to even think about that? 

Sierra: You know, I don’t think, to be honest, I would not have gone to college at all if the opportunity to go to Berklee hadn’t kind of appeared. I wasn’t really planning on going, and then I got offered this scholarship, kind of out of nowhere, and  just wound up feeling like, okay, well this is an opportunity that is almost too good to pass up. I should definitely give this a try. But I knew all I ever wanted to do was play music, to be honest. And I think the value of getting an education is so important, and I always tried, I was an honor roll student the whole time I was in school. I always tried to make good grades and cared about getting an education, but I also knew that just going to a traditional college and spending four years and spending the money and things like that and the time, if I wasn’t really going to apply it, I didn’t see the point in the path. You know what I mean? It’s kind of like I knew what I wanted to do. I wasn’t even planning to go to music college because I was fortunate enough just to start young and I already had a record deal and I already could see a path in front of me for starting to tour, even at a small level. So yeah, I don’t know. I think there’s times where of course I can go, what would this feel? If I could just have a normal college experience? I think anybody who doesn’t have something like that, you might kind of go, what would that have been like sometimes. But at the same time, I think I was so fortunate, to just already know what I wanted from life, to know at least generally, where my path was headed and what road I was hoping to take. And I have a lot of friends who are still figuring that out, even in their 30s, and it’s tricky. So I don’t know. It’s a mixed question, sort of, because I think it would have been cool to know what that’s like and maybe feel more relatable to my friends who did have that experience. But at the same time, I wouldn’t change anything about where my path has taken me, because I think this is all I’ve ever wanted. 

Logan: You’re on a pretty cool path right now, I’d say. You’ve been playing music your whole life, like you said. But do you remember the first time in Nashville, Tennessee you sat in the pews at the Ryman? 

Sierra: Oh, man. Funny enough, the first time I ever went to the Ryman, I was on stage. 

Logan: Really? 

Sierra: The first time I ever got to go, yeah. I was 11 years old, and I got to go play the Grand Ole Opry with Allison. And the Opry, in the winter months, usually they move it to the original home of the Opry is the Ryman Auditorium. And so they move it from the Grand Ole Opry House to downtown to the Ryman, and they host their shows there for a couple months. And so it happened to be, this was in November, and they were doing Opry at the Ryman. And so, Allison called me up as a young kid. My biggest hero called me up and asked me to come play the Opry with her. I’ll never forget that for so many reasons. And honestly, that was such a magical experience, just even being in the room. Of course, I knew the history of the Ryman, I still think it’s my favorite venue in the world for so many reasons. The stage they say in which Bluegrass was born, when Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs stand on stage playing banjo at the Opry. But to actually be in the pews, it sounds funny to say I probably played it the first few times before I actually got to see a show there. 

Logan: Wow. I don’t think many people are able to say that. So that’s pretty cool. 

Sierra: That’s insane, I know. I’m so fortunate. But I love being able to go see shows there because I never forget that that magical feeling I had as a kid getting to be there for the first time. 

Logan: I hope the Englert Theater in Iowa City is somewhat memorable enough. You know, it’s not the Ryman, but maybe it’ll leave an impression over here. 

Sierra: Hey, I’ve actually played there once before. Like two years ago, I believe two falls ago. It was a fall tour we did maybe in like October or something. So I’ve definitely been there before and yeah, looking forward to getting to come back. You know, there’s a few venues on this tour we’re doing with Milk Carton Kids that I haven’t done, but then a handful that I’m like, oh yeah, we get to go back to that spot. So yeah, I’m looking forward to it. 

If you think bluegrass isn’t your thing and you find yourself saying things like “they play too fast” and “the banjo scares me”, I am prescribing some exposure therapy on February 12^th. This combination of Sierra Hull and The Milk Carton Kids is a viciously entrancing mixture that is bound to make any non-fan into a fan, any fan into an enthusiast, and any enthusiast into a devotee. You can listen to Sierra Hull’s latest album “A Tip Toe High Wire” here and find tickets for Sierra Hull and The Milk Carton Kids at The Englert Theatre here. 

The post Interview: Sierra Hull appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Billy Strings – Highway Prayers

I rarely listen to modern music anymore as I find a lot of it instrumentally bland and lyrically corrupt. So, when my mom played me a few funny songs from Highway Prayers a couple months back, I was hesitant to discover the rest of the album. It was only until a couple months later that I gave this album a chance, to which I was pleasantly surprised! Highway Prayers by Billy Strings is a fantastic display of bluegrass instrumentation, and Billy really shreds on some of these songs, like on “Escanaba” and “Malfunction Junction”. Man, he’s got the fastest fingers around.  

There are some great stories and lyrics here. “Gild the Lily” is a beautifully inspired piece of music that makes me feel like I’m lying on a hill in the summer soaking up some rays. “Catch and Release” is a fun story about getting pulled over on the highway, with a good lesson to boot. There’s a great video on YouTube for the entire album, and I’d highly recommend scooting over there and giving Highway Prayers a listen. 

-Carson Chittick, Music Staff

Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere

For the past few years rock music, and metal in particular, has felt particularly stale. It seems the best riffs ever written have already been played and the best hope for a metal album these days is that it can show great qualities while not being entirely derivative of past masterpieces. However, the album Absolute Elsewhere has given me hope for a better future for metal music. This album is special, and I hope many more people unfamiliar with this band get to experience the most exciting and innovative metal album post-2010.  

What makes Absolute Elsewhere special is the shear amount of artistry on display across its 44-minute runtime and its innate ability to cover new ground that has barely been explored in a largely discovered genre frontier. This album is a melting pot that somehow manages to combine the best parts of electronic music, psychedelic rock, and death metal into a cohesive project. There are electronic passages like in “The Stargate [Tablet II]”, and even a song reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon with “The Message [Tablet II]”. Despite experimenting with various genres, this album’s greatest accomplishment is managing to strongly maintain its identity as a metal album with epic trashing tracks such as “The Stargate [Tablet III]” that go as hard as anything else in the genre.  

To put how awesome this album is in words, listening to Absolute Elsewhere feels like traveling to the outskirts of the galaxy with aliens at light speed. With a larger-than-life sound and immaculate mixing and production, Blood Incantation’s Absolute Elsewhere is an enjoyable project that combines the song structures of progressive rock and metal in creative ways leading to a completely novel musical experience. 

-Maurice Crawford, Editorial Staff

Cosmo Sheldrake – Eye to the Ear

They tell you to touch grass, but never to make music out of it. That’s the simple mindset shift at the core of Cosmo Sheldrake’s sound. It’s the idea that humans, birds, insects, marine life, fungi, and all manner of other species can collaborate with one another to make art. His newest album, mid-April’s Eye to the Ear, is his reflection on the role that nature plays in his music and his life, with songs about youth, decay, melancholy, greed, and exploration all accompanied by various chirps, hoots, and burbles sourced directly from Earth itself.  

There are 21 tracks on this album, making it impossible for me to talk about them all, so I’ll just shout out a few of my favorites. “Old Ocean” is an homage to the wide and briny sea through a modern political lens. While thanking the ocean for its comfort, he uses his lyrics to rip at climate change deniers saying, “Whether truth or just a story/You can’t pick and choose/Whether blunt or whether thorny/It’s not up to you.” “Flora’s Pond” features sounds collected on a hydrophone from a pond Sheldrake and his wife dug in their backyard. It’s calm and meditative, and the perfect instrumental to break up the album. “Interdimensional” is my favorite song on the album, reminiscent of his past hits like “Rich” and “Come Along”. The richly layered backing track of heavy drums and choral accompaniments from HOWL throws me into a whimsical world that begs for a big adventure. 

I love Eye to the Ear because it feels at once enormous and miniscule. Sure, it encompasses the artist’s entire life — his love for nature, his wife, his musical career — but it is also no bigger than the newts at the bottom of “Flora’s Pond” that contributed their own backing vocals. This album encapsulates the beauty of nature. It is big, but also infinitely small. 

-Bailey Vergara, Music Staff

Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee

This kind of seems like the consensus pick from everybody who takes the music ranking thing too seriously, but it’s towards the top of people’s lists for good reason. 

Diamond Jubilee begins slowly gleaming like the red and orange embers of winter sunlight along the flat horizon of the yellowed dead Manitoba plains. From there, that beauty never ends, instead ruminating outwards into the great beyond. It’s manifested through smooth, warm guitars that sear in the right spaces, shimmering cascading riffs, bass tones transuding through the essence of being, and silky falsettos that whisp in the wind. All this is presented in vintage undertones, like with the springiness in reverb or the cracks that break out when certain parts peak the audio. It shows primarily in the surfy acid pop compositions that align with Patrick Flegel’s ‘60s inspired stage alias Cindy Lee. 

This album is bloated. At two hours and two minutes long, there are some songs that lull. However, these parts are few in the overall runtime, and the glitzy allure of Diamond Jubilee is lingering. It lingers in the pit of the record’s soul that encapsulates the feelings of heartbreak, loneliness, and isolation. It pierces in “Dreams of You” with a wail to the stars. It wallows in “If You Hear Me Crying” asking just for someone to listen and understand. It smolders in “Stone Faces” in a trotting indignance towards everyone’s remissness. It flutters in “Kingdom Come” calling out to the distant emptiness for someone lost that was once so close. It also resides in all the gleaming textures in between.

This loneliness buzzes in the air around as you stare off into the horizon contemplating every person that has come and gone. Drifting around like ghosts in your mind, thinking why it happened and what could’ve been done to have kept it from happening, if anything could have been done at all. It’s those sounds and those sentiments that reside inside you while you listen, wandering through the plains. 

-John Glab, Editor-In-Chief

Dj Smokey, Varg² – Psychological Musical Warfare

Emerging from the bowels of Bandcamp, Dj Smokey and Varg²’s collaborative mixtape Psychological Musical Warfare is a drug addled phantasy of trance, trap, and experimental techno. Willfully wild and unabashedly abrasive, this meeting of minds between Canadian producer and Internet enigma Dj Smokey, and the genre bending Swedish EDM artist and frequent Drain Gang collaborator Varg², results in a collection of tracks that oscillate between the ecstatic and the sardonic.  

It is totally hedonistic, with songs that center on drug abuse and conspiratorial government mind control. These topics are presented like sonic shitposts, but the ambitious production explodes with creativity as it throbs and rapidly accelerates to its own reckless tempo. Populated with voice samples that proclaim “I HATE MUSIC” and lyrics like “I LOVE PRESSED PILLS/BUGS IN MY BRAIN/NUKES ARE LEGAL/I ATE A BUG/I LOVE INSECTS/I LOVE PRESSED PERCS/FENTANYL IS GREAT I HAVE A HORRIBLE HEADACHE,” the mixtape is able to flourish in its own irresponsibility and create an acidic grandeur for itself, reminiscent of some of Memphis rap’s greatest underground stars.  

This mixtape is entirely its own beast as it maneuvers through, and excels at, its own overwhelming aspirations of energetic deep dance music. At six tracks, it is a concise and ominously apocalyptic vision of swag rap and boyish nihilism from some of the Internet’s most idiosyncratic artists. Highlights on this project include “Taste the Poison” and “Fent Party – I Just Escaped Rehab HaHaHa Mega Mix”. 

-Ben Romero, Editorial Staff

Grey Factor – A Peak In the Signal

While the contents of A Peak in the Signal were recorded over 40 years ago, in 2024, these live performance audios were first recovered and compiled this year for the preservation of Grey Factor’s work. Before this, there was very little recording of the band’s short lifespan. The album contains ten songs, with tracks 1-6 featuring all of the original band members, Jeff Jacquin, Joey Cevetello, John Pospisil, and Paul Fontana. These first six tracks come from the archives of the Eldorado Recording Studio dated to April of 1979. The second half extends to include the work of John Cevetello and Anne Burns, with a lack of Paul Fontana who left in 1980 at the time of the second half’s recording. 

The album is a glorious time capsule of eccentric and diverse electronic music. At the time when the band was still around, Grey Factor’s work in electronic music and post punk was pioneering and revolutionary. I couldn’t sacrifice my top spot for album of the year to anything but this incredible find. 

-Lee Nienhaus, Editorial Staff

Hozier – Unreal Unearth: Unending

I took a class during my junior year of college about Quests & Travels in the Middle Ages and one of the texts that we focused on was Dante’s Inferno. Most people didn’t know much about the original text, but we referenced the newly released Hozier album, Unreal Unearth. Building on his own unique brand of soulful lyricism from his self-titled debut, along with his jazz and blues influenced sophomore album Wasteland, Baby!, Unreal Unearth is a triumphant blend of Hozier’s craft as a lyricist and a musician. Since the release of the album, Hozier released Unheard and Unaired in a complete album called Unreal Unearth: Unending. 

Following the Inferno as a framing device for the whole album, Hozier takes the listeners through each layer of Hell. The pairing of the reflective melancholy and the aggressive pop rock of the opening tracks “De Selby (Part 1 & 2)” paints the album as one of contrasts. The beauty of love and transcendent spiritualism splendidly mix in a song like “Francesca” directly referencing the figure from the original text from the perspective of her persistent lover. Aside from the obvious Dante references, there’s many other literary and cultural references, especially to Hozier’s home of Ireland. “Butchered Tongue” and “Empire Now” allude to the tumultuous history between the Irish and the British over their own use of the Irish language, as just one example.  

The tracks outside of the original album are more ‘experimental’ with “Wildflower and Barley” mixing a Latin jazz sound with Hozier’s more earthy roots. Hozier’s #1 song, “Too Sweet” and the recently celebrated “Nobody’s Soldier” bring the loud energy and Hozier’s decorated lyricism to the mainstream. Unreal Unearth: Unending is a spiritual tour de force that allows us to celebrate the harmony and discord that life brings as a journey worth taking.

-Griffin Polley, Editorial Staff

Jamie xx – In Waves

Sleek, sophisticated, and meticulously constructed, English producer Jamie xx delivered another spectacular project this year with In Waves. Released nine years after his Grammy winning solo debut In Colour, the new album triumphantly captures the rich duality of a big night out. Hype and bombast like in “Baddy On The Floor” accompany introspection and yearning as found on “Daffodil”, emphasizing the rich, tangled emotions evoked by the dance floor.  

These contradictions, longing and loss, euphoria and melancholy, often collapse into each other within a song. This unfolds in the album standout “All You Children”, which features The Avalanches and an inspired sample of “Dance Poem” by American poet Nikki Giovanni. “All you children, gather round,” proposes Giovanni over the song’s recurring vocal loop and affective synth chords. “We will dance and we will whirl/We will dance to our own song/We must spin to our own world/Won’t you dance with me?” Giovanni’s spoken word poem offers the album a thesis Jamie xx gratefully grasps and majestically threads: building another, better world through community, comradery, and dance. As the album’s second song urges, “All we’ve got to do is treat each other right.” 

-Glenn Houlihan, Editorial Staff

JPEGMAFIA – I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU

I LAY MY LIFE DOWN FOR YOU by rapper and producer extraordinaire JPEGMAFIA lives up to the legacy he has set with his previous albums. As KRUI’s resident Peggy fanboy, I was pumped for this album. He has shown again and again that he is unwilling to conform to typical styles, pushing boundaries in a way that I love. When I first listened to the album and heard the opening track “i scream this in the mirror before i interact with anyone” I knew I was in for a typical Peggy masterclass.  

JPEGMAFIA seamlessly blends rock and rap on tracks such as “Exmilitary” and “vulgar display of power”. The features on the album are also great, with standouts from Vince Staples on “New Black History”, which is over a sample that he himself sampled in the fantastic song “Senorita”, and Denzel Curry on “JPEGULTRA!”.  What I did not expect was the introspective themes that came on the album. It is not that JPEGMAFIA has never been one to be emotional, for example his cover of “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen, but he just has never done it so well. Tracks such as “either on or off the drugs” and “i recovered from this” are introspective and discuss relationships, the end of them, and how that has impacted his mental health. All in all, this album was one of the best of the year. 

-Mason Dunn, Programming Director

Lechuga Zafiro – Desde los oídos de un sapo

The Uruguayan electronic musician, Lechuga Zafiro (aka Pablo de Vargas) on Desde los oídos de un sapo delves into the idea of what would it be like to live music as a toad, which he carefully conceives from a wide collection of field recordings that ranges from hits on tree stumps, splashing water, chirping birds, rocks crashing, and a lot more. Those field recordings are then carefully arranged, distorted, and shaped into pieces of electronic music that are rhythmic in nature and exudes Latin American excellency.  

De Vargas made outstanding journeys around the world that allowed him to record in inconspicuous places that in one way or another, only a toad would be interested in. Nevertheless, it presents an innovative way to showcase field recordings rather than raw expressions of a certain location. These are sounds exclusively collected, curated with intention, and presented with other-worldly sound design.  

Water never sounded so good as it does in “Agua de Vidrio” where rain, streams, and splashes are given life in a percussive nature. Metallic hits accentuate the perceived brittleness of these splashes, while we hear the sub frequencies being filled with what I can best describe as tree trunks being hit. The title track can be perceived as an outlier but rather poses as a cinematic piece that places the rest of the work and the concept of the album into context. The chances of being a toad are few, depending on what you believe. There is a probability that it sounds as bleak and dreary as the title track does, and the fact that Lechuga Zafiro was able to conceive that allows the listener to be closer to embodiment of the amphibian more than ever before.

-Andrés Mora Mata, Music Director

MGMT – Loss of Life

Making their Mom+Pop Label debut, psych rock duo Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser attempt to address modernity and mortality by taking their listeners on a gorgeous, almost spiritual journey. Over the course of nearly two decades now, MGMT has continued to develop one of the most interesting and consistently timeless discographies in 21st century pop music. Their latest project Loss of Life represents their most intimate and sonically organic vision to date and is arguably their most impactful. With themes so grand and interconnected it begins to resemble a similar drug induced concept album that attempted to tackle the woes and optimism of their respective contemporary zeitgeist: The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 

The album contains a healthy and diverse mix of tracks like the shiny and sunny folk opener “Mother Nature” or the noisy and heavy banger “Bubblegum Dog”. In a statement about the former single, MGMT stated that the track “outlines the archetypical MGMT mythology of one hero attempting to get the other hero to come on the journey that they ‘must’ go on.” French singer and songwriter Rahim Redcar makes an appearance on “Dancing In Babylon”, making it the first feature on one of their official albums. The track sounds like a slick Kate Bush ballad pulled straight from the 80s.  

“People In the Streets” is so sincere and clichéd it makes me cry, and its chorus has been an ear worm that’s invaded the vocabulary of anyone in my vicinity this year. “Nothing Changes” was my runner up for song of the year and serves as an existentialist crescendo that spawns the kind of mental imagery you might see flash before your eyes right before death. The following track “Phradie’s Song” sounds like the soundtrack to a dream with its androgynous and youthful vocals accompanied by jazzy electronic special effects.  

The album’s last track wraps up and summarizes the ultimate point about mortality. By the time of that final song and title track, I’m following every lyric like its gospel. They stick the landing beautifully and wrap up their ultimate point about coming to terms with mortality in a kind of absurdist tradition ending with the line “When the world is born and life is ending, then you learn to love your loss of life/When that moment comes and life is over/Anyone can love, anyone can love.” 

-Amman Hassan, News Director

Mount Eerie – Night Palace

Mount Eerie’s most recent album Night Palace follows a five-year artistic hiatus by Phil Elverum who is also behind the project The Microphones. Perhaps less devastating than his past records, Night Palace revolves between noisy and subdued, both gentle and biting. It feels both removed from the psyche, and altogether aware of the emotions of both the individual and the state of the collective. The lyrics on the record are poetic and deeply personal, all while the accompanying sound glitters and oscillates between moods and colors. Mount Eerie delivers another record of a calming wave of hand strung sound and emotion. It’s an altogether haunting, loving, and gentle catharsis. 

-Pauly, Music Staff

POLO PERKS <3 <3 <3, AyooLii, FearDorian – A Dog’s Chance

For those with their ear to the pulse of the underground hip hop scene, particularly revolving around sample drill and the general sprawling Surf Gang extended universe, it’s likely that you were familiar with at least one of the three artists behind A Dog’s Chance. POLO PERKS <3 <3 <3 is a veteran New York rapper and standard bearer of the sample drill wave with his 2021 release Punk Goes Drill+**. That record is a creative and off the wall project featuring his trademark deep voiced inflections, unique ad-libs, and most of all, blatant and generous sampling of material likely to pique many listeners’ ears. Be it “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers, “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol, or “Maps” by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the combination of new and old creates a unique and exciting listen.  

AyooLii is a young up and coming representative of the burgeoning Milwaukee low-end, easily differentiating himself on any given track by his high energy screamed vocals, frequently hilarious bars, and explosive bombastic beats. Finally, FearDorian is a young (having yet to turn 18 as of this article’s writing) but prolific and increasingly in demand producer, operating in a similar manner to POLO PERKS <3 <3 <3’s vein of sample drill. Needless to say, the combination of these three artists was entirely unexpected, and represented an unprecedented collaboration between sounds. The result? One of the most exciting projects underground hip-hop has seen this year.  

Combining elements of each artists’ respective style, the result is an explosive mix of prominent sampling bordering on outright covering songs. With jerk percussion consisting of beefy snares, bass, and hand claps akin to xaviersobased, A Dog’s Chance sounds like a marching band performing trap remixes of pop punk songs. It’s an unexpectedly and excitingly fresh hybridization of each style brought to the table with each MC bringing their respective talents in an immensely complimentary manner. Polo’s driving but understated flows fit perfectly into the grooves, and AyooLii’s screams serve as a palette cleanser of sorts, simply delivering ridiculous but impassioned lines.  

Beyond that, each MC is not only in their element, but also demonstrate a clear sense of chemistry. Both Polo and AyooLii shout one another out in their verses, as well as including interspersed field recordings of the three of them seemingly just geeking out about working together. Furthermore, this album also features instrumental contributions from indie staples Current Joys and Teen Suicide, only furthering the colorful chemistry on display. Ultimately, A Dog’s Chance is greater than the sum of its parts. It serves as a reminder that music, and art broadly, is a collaborative effort, and one that can reflect the joy of the makers in its creation. It provides an exciting new path for underground hip-hop to expound upon in the coming years. 

-Evan Raefield, Training Director

Ryuichi Sakamoto – Opus

As his cancer developed into Stage 4, the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto emptied his exemplary creative journey on a recording done for a film directed by his son Neo Sora. Opus, as the word denotes, may not be enough to describe the magnificent pieces of music we have been gifted on this record. Exploring the five decades of music he has let out, Sakamoto reconvenes with pieces from early in his time with Yellow Magic Orchestra on “Tong Poo” to more recently like with “20220302 – sarabande” from his album 12 released in 2023.  

The listening experience is intimate, as Sakamoto’s breath can be heard as he gently plays the evocative notes of his catalog. The piano pedal allows for a closer relationship of the listener to the instrument, opening to Sakamoto’s position as he performs. Sakamoto understands that emotional evocation lacks perfection and is well exemplified by the inclusion of the sounds that only those in the room could hear.  

Personal stand out pieces include “Andata”, from his album Async released in 2017. The incredible ambient and classical piece reworked on piano serves as a staple for this album, making it hard to even go back to its original composition. Lastly, but no less important, is “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence”, my favorite non-Christmas Christmas song that serves as the soundtrack to the movie of the same name. It’s a celebration of Sakamoto’s life. Overall, Opus is a wonderful and important piece that is worth your time, over and over and over again.  

-Andrés Mora Mata, Music Director

smiling broadly – for a moment i saw myself as inexorably beautiful

I originally found smiling broadly (fka twinkle park) because Hazel, the creator of these projects, makes YouTube essays about anime and console games. I have always had a deep connection to her music, especially her use of electronic instruments and vocal synthesizers. Everything has this warm fuzziness to it that makes me feel the same way I felt at age 11 looping “Angel with a Shotgun” nightcore.  

This album, for a moment i saw myself as inexorably beautiful, is crazy. Like “I don’t even want to describe it because it will ruin the magic of hearing it for the first time” crazy. Basically, Hatsune Miku just slammed four Monster Energy cans, has now played through all of Cruelty Squad, and probably owns a CD copy of “Wispy, No Mercy” by Citrus. 

-Sidney Bakker, Music Staff

Various Artists – Hosono House Revisited

Released on November 1st under Stones Throw Records, Hosono House Revisited is a celebration of an all-time classic album. It contains 14 tracks worth of covers dedicated to Haruomi Hosono’s influential 1973 record. Hosono released the original Hosono House after his previous band had disbanded, the Beatles inspired HAPPY END, and before he went on to pioneer electronica, forming Yellow Magic Orchestra with comrades Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi later in the ‘70s. In 11 tracks, the folk rock and psychedelia infused Hosono House had greatly influenced his contemporaries and future artists alike. Artists like Mac DeMarco, Jerry Paper, Pearl & the Oysters, Akiko Yano, and Cornelius all contribute renditions from Hosono’s now 51-year-old album. 

“Hosono is my hero, I love all of his music, I am eternally at his every beck and call, it is my honor to be a part of this compilation,” DeMarco says in a Stones Throw blog article. He keeps his cover faithful and his influence in full force during “Boku Wa Chotto”. Sam Gendel performs “My Love is Peach-Colored” as a sonically introspective, intimate English rendition of Hosono’s “Koi Wa Momoiro”. mei ehara’s synthesized makeover of “Jusho Futei Mushoku Tei Shunyu,” hits some shibuya-kei and indie pop cues akin to fellow Japanese outfit Lamp. These tracks and many more bring the original 1973 tracks into a new generation. Hosono House Revisited proves the importance of good, timeless songwriting, no matter the genre, no matter the language. If a tune, or 11 of them, is good people’s ears will follow, even more than 50 years after the fact.

-Harry Ginsberg, Music Staff

Witchz – LIFE

I’ve been a huge Witchz fan since I discovered him on TikTok in 2022, and he’s gone from a small artist I thought I could keep to myself to amassing 1.6 million followers on the platform. He just had his first US tour, is about to have his first European tour, and released his album LIFE this past September. LIFE keeps true to Witchz signature style, with dark electronic instrumentals and hard-hitting lyrics. The music has the right amount of heaviness and is simultaneously something I can lip sync and dance to alone in my room, but also something I can have blasting in my earbuds at work or when I’m trying to write in a coffee shop. 

The songs all have themes revolving around the highs and lows of life where it feels like Witchz bares part of his soul to us. He sings about love, loss, spirituality, and what seems like some veiled references to the media and capitalism. There’s little I love more in music than meaningful and relatable lyrics, and this album achieves all of that with lines like “I create this life with no ceiling in the end/Gotta kill the rage/Coming from inside with no feelings in the end” or in the track “Ashes” with “And I’m fucking stressed/In my eyes, in my bones, in my soul they’re feelin’ less,” and “I feel possessed/Layin’ on the floor in this horror and I need some rest/Motherfucker in my heart did I die?” in the song “Possessed”. The album is packaged with cover art of a double-headed snake, taking on the shape of an infinity sign, which contributes to the overall aesthetic of the album.

-Amanda Moy, Editorial Staff

Other Positive 2024 KRUI Album Reviews

Boldy James – Penalty of Leadership

Bedbug – pack your bags the sun is growing

Kim Gordon – The Collective

Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us

Denzel Curry – King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2

They Are Gutting a Body of Water – swanlike

Her New Knife – chrome is lullaby

Two Words – Double Vision

Origami Angel – Feeling Not Found

The post KRUI Staff Favorite Albums of 2024 appeared first on KRUI Radio.