Rolling Stone AU | Up-And-Coming Australian Artists: Swapmeet
We caught up with Swapmeet guitarist, drummer and vocalist Jack Medlyn to chat about about finding success in the music industry
We caught up with Swapmeet guitarist, drummer and vocalist Jack Medlyn to chat about about finding success in the music industry
Australian group surge forwards...
Inspired by a brush with mortality—and featuring an encounter with Lou Reed at the gates of Heaven—his new album My Days of 58 is a midlife reckoning with fatherhood, grief, and his calling as a songwriter.
Death Lens have released new single “Drown,” the track is off the band’s LP What’s Left Now? available April 24 via Epitaph. The group worked with Producer Zach Tuch (Knocked Loose, Touché Amoré, Movements). Of the song, frontman Bryan Torres comments: “The world keeps moving while I spin in circles of my own design. ‘Drown’ is my frustration of being trapped in my own loop, seeing the world pass by and knowing I’m the reason I can’t catch up. An ode to stagnation and a fear of being forgotten.”
To kick off his new song “Pathol O.G.,” Bill Callahan speak-sings “you know, I’ve been writing songs and singing them nigh on 30 years/I like it/I love it.” Callahan clearly does like and love it. He has been releasing a lot of music and for a long time. Which is why it’s hard to believe My Days of 58, his eighth solo record, is his first since 2022. Throw in his 11 full-lengths as Smog and we have a veritable canon and institution.
Bill Callahan has loosened up in middle age. Within the pantheon of inscrutable indie legends, the veteran singer-songwriter is a Mount Rushmore-worthy figure. From his early lo-fi releases as Smog to the rootsier records under his own name, he's struck a delicate balance between heartfelt conviction and emotional distance. It's a posture akin to towering figures like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and Callahan's catalog deserves to be mentioned in the same breath. But domestic life has softened him.
Australian quartet Swapmeet chronicle adolescence to adulthood with a debut-era highlight blurring jangle pop, shoegaze, and alt-rock.
On his new record, My Days of 58, the cult songwriter fights passivity with effort, tenderness, and a newfound suspicion of his own myths.
The New Orleans punk duo channels American country and folk music for a raw, righteous, and impressively original sound. Their second record is Southern garage rock at its best.
Jana Horn, Otto Benson, and Noveller will join him on the run
Listen to the debut single from My New Band Believe
Their "massive and hallucinatory" debut album is set to arrive in April