New Music

Video of The Day: Trash Kickers – Come Undone, Live at The Whistler

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There’s something special about a band caught in its element, playing in a room where the music is allowed to breathe, stretch out, and find its own way. Trash Kickers bring that live energy to “Come Undone,” recorded at The Whistler in Chicago on June 1, 2025. It’s a chance to experience the band beyond the studio recording: in the moment, doing what rock and roll has always done best — turning a song into a shared experience.

Live performance has a way of revealing what makes a band tick. The room, the players, the imperfections, the spontaneous shifts in energy — these are the things that remind us that music isn’t just something we stream through headphones. It’s something people make together, in real time, in front of other people. A performance like this captures that connection between a band and the place where its music comes alive.

Trash Kickers have also released their debut album, Way Out, Somehow, now streaming everywhere. If “Come Undone” is your introduction to the band, take the opportunity to dig deeper into the record and discover what else they have to offer. Because it is substantial.

At YTAA, we’re always interested in the bands doing the work: writing songs, playing rooms, making records, and building an audience one listener at a time. That’s the lifeblood of independent music. No grand permission required, no waiting for somebody else’s approval. Just musicians making music and finding their people.

Check out Trash Kickers live at The Whistler, give Way Out, Somehow a listen, and keep supporting the bands that make the independent music scene worth celebrating by coming to The Trolley Stop in Dayton on October 24, 2026.

Listen and follow Trash Kickers at the following:

TRASH KICKERS: NOTHING BUT BANGERS, AND A WAY OUT SOMEHOW

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Chicago’s four-piece rock-and-rollers have a debut album, a warehouse full of bad smells, and absolutely no intention of behaving themselves.

There are two kinds of rock-and-roll bands in this world. There are bands that want to be rock stars, and there are bands that want to play rock and roll. The first kind spends a lot of time worrying about how it looks, whether the lighting is right, whether the photographs make them look sufficiently dangerous, and whether somebody somewhere has decided they are the next big thing. The second kind gets together in a room that smells like things best left unidentified, plugs in the guitars, turns everything up, and gets on with the business of making noise that means something.

The Trash Kickers, a four-piece outfit from Chicago, seem to belong firmly to the second category. And thank God for that.

Their debut album, Way Out Somehow, is the sort of record that reminds you why rock and roll was never supposed to be a respectable profession in the first place. It is a record built on guitars, friendship, musical instinct, a healthy disregard for conventional wisdom, and the deeply subversive proposition that a band ought to make music people actually want to hear. Not music that somebody’s algorithm has determined will be suitable for your lifestyle. Not music that sounds as if it were assembled by a committee of anxious marketing executives. Songs. Riffs. Hooks. Surprises. A little sweat. Maybe a little blood. And enough life in the proceedings to make you want to turn the damn thing up.

When I sat down with the band for a conversation on Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative, I was already playing tracks from Way Out Somehow on the radio. I had heard the Replacements in there, some Big Star, the Rolling Stones, and that glorious, somewhat disreputable strain of seventies guitar rock that never needed to ask permission before kicking down the door. What I didn’t hear was a band simply dressing up in its influences and pretending to be somebody else. The Trash Kickers have been listening to their records, all right. They’ve also been paying attention to the business of being alive.

And that makes all the difference.

The Junk Pickers Become the Trash Kickers

Every great rock-and-roll band deserves an origin story that sounds at least a little improbable. The Trash Kickers’ begins with a pile of songs, a Chicago music venue, a few friends, a conversation over drinks, and a great-grandfather who played in a folk trio during the 1930s.

Tyler, the band’s singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter, had spent more than a decade accumulating songs that had never made it onto a record. He wasn’t necessarily dreaming of conquering the world. He wasn’t even planning to start a band. He simply wanted to record the songs, put them somewhere, and have them for himself.

As origin stories go, that’s a refreshing lack of grandiosity.

Tyler already knew Danny through Chicago’s music and nightlife scene, and John was in the same orbit through Lincoln Hall, where the band members worked. The songs began to take shape as the musicians played together, and a project that had started as an archival exercise gradually became something with a pulse of its own.

Then came Stas, the lead guitarist, who entered the picture through the oldest and most reliable recruitment process in rock history: a conversation at a bar about records.

The discussion turned to Big Star, the Replacements, and the Rolling Stones. Tyler played Stas a demo on his phone. Stas offered to play guitar if the opportunity ever arose. The band invited him to rehearsal, and after a couple of hours, the question was essentially settled.

As the guys recalled it, there was “instant chemistry.”

You can’t manufacture that stuff. You can buy equipment, rent rehearsal space, hire a producer, and spend a fortune trying to convince the world that four strangers have some mystical connection. But sometimes four musicians simply discover that they speak the same language, and the rest follows.

The name required a little more deliberation, though not much more dignity. Tyler’s great-grandfather had played in a folk group called The Junk Pickers. The band liked the family connection but apparently felt that “Junk Pickers” had certain sanitary implications they would rather avoid. So junk became trash, pickers became kickers, and the name Trash Kickers was born.

There were two contenders for the final name, and the band settled the matter by rolling a die. Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll has never needed a more elaborate constitution.

A Record Made The Hard Way

The story of Way Out Somehow is, in its own fashion, a small epic of modern working-class music-making. Not the romanticized kind where everybody quits their job, moves into a loft, and spends six months discovering their artistic truth on somebody else’s money. The real kind, where you work, you pay your bills, you try to coordinate four separate lives, and you squeeze the music in wherever it fits.

The Trash Kickers began recording in July 2025 at a practice space and studio in a warehouse on Chicago’s northwest side. Stas’s description of the building was one of my favorite moments in our conversation: it was a beautiful old warehouse that smelled like “bad things.”

That’s the kind of studio description I trust. Give me an old warehouse with questionable ventilation over a sterile room designed to make every musician feel as though they’re being audited by the Department of Professional Sound any day of the week.

The band members had day jobs, different schedules, and the usual adult obligations that make the fantasy of an endlessly available rock-and-roll life look rather ridiculous. Recording began whenever everyone could manage it. Eventually, Sundays became recording days. Then came weeknights. Then the deadline started looming, and Stas took two weeks off work to lock himself in the studio and get the record finished, telling the others to come whenever they could.

They had set a release date before the album was complete. Back in October 2025, May 2026 seemed comfortably distant. Then February arrived, as February tends to do, bringing the unpleasant realization that time is not a suggestion.

The final push became a race against the clock. Sessions stretched late into the night and sometimes toward four in the morning. The band slept on couches under moving blankets, which Stas helpfully described as “very itchy.” The album was finally uploaded to Bandcamp on the night of the release show, and the digital distribution process got its own last-minute adventure.

The band uploaded the record to streaming distributors just two hours before taking the stage. Two hours! The distributors recommend allowing something like two weeks. The result was a staggered release across platforms, compounded by a plagiarism allegation from the distributor involving a Green Day demo.

Because apparently finishing a rock album isn’t sufficiently difficult unless somebody makes you defend it against a ghost of Green Day. But the record got out. Against the calendar, against the schedules, against the itchy blankets and the warehouse air, Way Out Somehow made its way into the world.

And the title couldn’t have been more appropriate. Many of these songs had been around for over a decade. For Tyler, who had never released a record before, the phrase captured something personal about finally finding a path through the years of writing, waiting, revising, and wondering whether any of it would ever amount to something.

A way out, somehow.

There’s a lot of rock and roll in those three words.

The Replacements Are in the Room. So Are the Stones. Nobody’s Calling the Police.

Let’s get one thing straight: influences are not the same thing as imitation. Every musician worth listening to has stolen something, learned something, misunderstood something, and eventually transformed those things into a language of their own. The question is never whether a band has influences. The question is whether it has anything to say with them.

Tyler admits to being the band’s biggest Replacements devotee. As a younger songwriter, he says he “stole whatever tricks” he could from Paul Westerberg. That strikes me as a perfectly honorable education. Westerberg understood that a great rock song could be ragged and melodic, funny and miserable, tuneful and half a step away from falling apart. He knew that the most revealing things often happen when a singer sounds as though he might not quite make it through the next line.

The Trash Kickers also share a deep affection for Thin Lizzy, the Stones, and Big Star. You can hear the attraction to big guitars, chiming melodies, and the kind of rhythm section that understands a song doesn’t have to be played with laboratory precision to have muscle.

Stas brings his own musical history to the proceedings: seventies and eighties punk, nineties alt-country, Uncle Tupelo, Whiskeytown, Wilco, Son Volt, the Buzzcocks, the Sex Pistols, and the Undertones. His assessment of his own guitar playing is wonderfully self-deprecating. He jokes that “every lick” he played on the album is somewhere on an Uncle Tupelo song; he’s simply hiding it really well.

Danny’s bass-playing instincts lean toward the Clash and Paul Simonon, with a fondness for early-2000s indie rock. John brings the sort of drumming Tyler associates with Charlie Watts: not a lot of fuss, just the kind of feel that makes a band move.

What emerges is a record that understands the difference between playing rock and roll and dressing up as a museum exhibit called ROCK AND ROLL, CIRCA 1974.

The Trash Kickers aren’t trying to recreate some vanished golden age. They’re interested in what happens when four people with different musical histories get together and play the same song.

As Tyler explained, he generally brings in a finished song but gives the others room to find their parts. Unless he has something specific in mind, he lets the guitar, bass, and drums develop their own ideas. Sections get moved. Chords change. Arrangements grow in unexpected directions. The object isn’t to protect the songwriter’s original conception from interference. It’s to discover what the song can become.

That kind of openness is rarer than it ought to be. Too many bands confuse leadership with control, and too many songwriters mistake the first version of a song for its final and sacred form.

The Trash Kickers understand that a song is not a fragile heirloom. Sometimes it needs a good kick.

The Wrench in the Works

Here’s where things get particularly interesting. Tyler has a term for the little musical disruptions that keep his songs from becoming predictable. He calls them a “wrench.”

You know the feeling. A song settles into a familiar groove. Your brain starts predicting what comes next. The chorus arrives where you expect it. The guitar fills the space you’ve already mentally reserved for it. And then something shifts. A chord goes somewhere unexpected, a section takes a left turn, or the rhythm throws you just far enough off balance that you have to start listening again.

That’s the wrench.

“Angel,” Tyler says, is practically “the embodiment of a wrench.” The band jokes that it’s the only country song with a bar of 5/4 in it. The odd meter appears right at the beginning, and the listener is left trying to figure out exactly what happened.

Then there are the “tasters,” a term Stas picked up from an interview with Dean Ween. A taster is a small moment that occurs once or twice in a song, just enough to make you stop and think, Wait a minute. What was that? You go back and listen again. The moment works because it doesn’t happen constantly. If everything is a surprise, nothing is surprising.

This is a deceptively sophisticated way of thinking about rock songwriting. It isn’t sophistication for its own sake. Nobody is asking you to bring a calculator to the dance floor. The point is to keep the music alive, to make the listener a participant rather than a passive recipient of a sequence of familiar gestures.

On “Fly or Die,” a song Tyler identifies as a watershed in his development as a songwriter, the arrangement takes a turn roughly two-thirds of the way through. He remembers writing it after a long run of songs he considered unsuccessful and reaching the point where he finally thought he might actually be good at this.

That is a beautiful thing to hear from a songwriter. Not the triumphal proclamation that he has mastered his art, but the recognition that one song has opened a door he hadn’t been able to find before.

And “Come Undone,” the song that supplies the album’s title, has its own history. Tyler originally developed it with Ben Burns, a Chicago musician from his earlier band, the Weekend Lovers. The idea began with Tyler, hungover on his way to work, falling for a woman sitting across from him on a train. He mentioned the experience to Burns, who immediately recognized the possibility and sent him a phone-recorded demo about half an hour later.

The song was eventually carried into the Trash Kickers, where the new lineup made it their own.

A passing attraction on public transportation becomes a song. A song survives one band and finds a home in another. A riff supplied by an earlier collaborator lives on in a new arrangement. This is how rock and roll actually works: not as a neat sequence of intellectual property declarations, but as a long, messy conversation between people, places, memories, and sounds.

Sometimes you meet somebody on a train. Sometimes you meet your next guitar player in a bar. Sometimes the thing you have been carrying around for ten years finally finds the people who can make it work.

Nothing But Bangers

Every band has a philosophy, even if most of them would rather die than admit it. The Trash Kickers’ unofficial motto is admirably concise: “Nothing but bangers.” The meaning is straightforward. If a song doesn’t feel like a hit to the whole band, they move on. Every track has to earn a unanimous stamp of approval. They’re not interested in padding an album with filler just to reach some arbitrary number of songs.

It’s a simple idea, but it takes a certain amount of nerve to follow it. It means accepting that a song you’ve worked on may not be worth keeping. It means recognizing that the hours you spent writing something don’t automatically entitle it to an audience. It means understanding that a record is not a scrapbook of everything you’ve ever done; it’s a collection of the things you believe are worth sharing.

I brought up Guided by Voices’ Bob Pollard during our conversation, and the band’s willingness to work through a pile of ideas before committing to the best ones seemed entirely in keeping with that spirit. The object isn’t to produce a monument to your own productivity. It’s to find the songs that make people want to hear another song.

Stas described the larger philosophy behind Way Out Somehow as “trusting the process.” Trust the development of the songwriter. Trust the band with the material. Trust the recording. Trust the mixing and mastering. Trust the song itself. That last one may be the hardest.

Because making a record requires a songwriter to let go. First you let go of the song as it existed in your head. Then you let your bandmates get their hands on it. Then you record it, listen to it, revise it, and eventually release it into a world where people will hear it in ways you never anticipated.

The Trash Kickers have built that trust into the way they live and work together. They see one another constantly, often outside of rehearsal. Tyler and Danny live close enough to each other that their proximity has become part of the band’s everyday rhythm. The four musicians have developed a shorthand of looks and nods, a private musical language that doesn’t require a committee meeting every time somebody wants to change direction.

Tyler put it beautifully: “If I can’t trust them with my songs, how can I trust them with anything?” That’s the real story behind the record. Beneath the riffs, the jokes, and the last-minute upload panic, there is a band that trusts itself enough to take chances.

And if you want to hear what that sounds like, start with “Come Undone” and “Fly or Die.” Then play the record again. Those tasters aren’t going to find themselves.

Don’t Suck. Have Fun.

If the Trash Kickers’ recording process is an argument for trust, their approach to playing live is an argument for getting out of your own way. I asked the band about their live philosophy. The answer came back in the form of a concise commandment: “Don’t suck. Have fun, and look like you’re having fun.”

I would put that on the wall of every rehearsal space in America. The band isn’t interested in standing perfectly still while delivering an immaculate reproduction of a recording. Given a choice between playing every note flawlessly without moving and throwing themselves into a performance, having a good time, and taking a few chances, they’ll take the latter. They believe the audience is more likely to have fun watching musicians who are actually having fun.

And they mean it. The Trash Kickers say they’ve received that comment from audiences regularly: the band looks as though it’s having a great time. That’s because it is.

When the crowd doesn’t respond, Tyler admits he can get “combative in his head.” Rather than retreating into the performance, he plays harder. The rest of the band responds, and the energy builds. John has even been known to punch parts of his drum kit that don’t have a song written for them.

I admire this sort of thinking. Not because recklessness is inherently virtuous, but because rock and roll loses something essential when musicians become more concerned with avoiding mistakes than creating an experience. The Trash Kickers put it another way: “We’re a band that plays covers; we’re not a cover band.”

That distinction matters. A cover can be a way of paying tribute, testing your own musical instincts, or simply having a good time with a song you love. It doesn’t have to turn the band into a human jukebox. At their release show, the Trash Kickers tackled the Replacements’ “Can’t Hardly Wait” and an Iron Maiden number, a combination that tells you something about their musical appetite.

They don’t seem especially interested in respecting the boundaries between rock tribes. Punk, classic rock, alt-country, power pop, metal: these are different rooms in the same house, and the Trash Kickers are happy to wander around.

They also play every show the same way, whether there are twenty people in the room or two hundred. “20 people or 200 people, we play the exact same way,” they told me.

Think about that for a minute. It is a declaration of independence from the tyranny of audience size, a refusal to let the number of bodies in a room determine the value of what you’re doing. There are always a couple of people near the front who are losing their minds, the band says. That’s enough. And it should be.

Some of the most important nights in the history of rock and roll happened in rooms that were barely full. Some of the best bands in the world spent years playing to audiences small enough to count without removing your shoes. The point is not to pretend that a crowd of two hundred doesn’t feel different from a crowd of twenty. The point is to understand that the obligation to play your heart out doesn’t change.

The Trash Kickers understand the assignment.

Chicago, Dayton, and the Road Ahead

For now, Chicago is home base. The band members know the city’s music and nightlife scene from the inside, not merely as consumers of its cultural mythology. They’ve worked the venues, built friendships, and developed a band out of the everyday connections that make a local scene function.

But a band can’t live forever in its own neighborhood. Eventually, you have to load the gear into a vehicle, drive somewhere unfamiliar, find the venue, figure out where you’re sleeping, and convince a roomful of strangers that the songs you’ve spent years developing deserve their attention.

The Trash Kickers are beginning to do just that.

Their first out-of-town experience in Madison, Wisconsin, apparently went better than expected and “way dumber than expected.” Six people wound up sharing a hotel room, and the band hauled its equipment inside to keep it safe from possible theft out of the van, blocking the window in the process. The arrangements became sufficiently uncomfortable that some of their companions moved to another room the following night.

Now that’s touring. Not the glossy fantasy of backstage champagne and a personal assistant holding your jacket, but a bunch of musicians trying to protect their equipment, get some sleep, and make it to the next gig with their sense of humor intact.

The next stop is Dayton, Ohio.

The Trash Kickers play the Trolley Stop Tavern on Saturday, October 24.

For those of us who spend our days and nights championing independent music, this is exactly the kind of show worth showing up for. Here is a band with a record we believe in, a set built around original songs, and the sort of live philosophy that makes a small club feel like the most important room in the world for an hour or two.

I’ve already got “Come Undone,” “Fly or Die,” and other tracks from Way Out Somehow in rotation on Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative. I may or may not have entered a few of those songs into the station’s computer more often than strictly necessary, in the hope that the machinery of radio programming will do what machinery so rarely does on its own: give a good band a chance.

The Trash Kickers are also looking ahead to a spring run that, at the time of our conversation, included Cincinnati’s Comet Bar on March 11 and Columbus’s Space Bar on March 12, with additional Midwest dates being explored. The band jokingly referred to it as the “Ohio tour,” which is a fine thing for an Ohioan to hear. Perhaps they’ll become an Ohio band. We could do worse.

But before the spring comes, there’s a Saturday night in Dayton to consider. The Trolley Stop is the kind of place where a band can get close enough to an audience to find out what the songs really do. There are no arena-sized screens to distract you, no elaborate stage production to conceal the musicians, no distance between the people making the noise and the people receiving it.

There’s just the room, the band, and whatever happens when the first chord hits. That is where rock and roll still makes its best argument.

A Way Out Somehow

There is a tendency to talk about rock and roll as though it were a finished historical event, something that happened in the past and now survives as a set of reference points, vintage T-shirts, and reunion tours. We talk about the Stones, the Replacements, Big Star, and Thin Lizzy as if their greatest contribution were to provide a catalog of sounds for later generations to imitate.

But rock and roll isn’t a museum. It’s a living argument about what music can do when people take it seriously without taking themselves too seriously.

The Trash Kickers are part of that argument. They have the records, the influences, the riffs, and the hooks. They also have something harder to manufacture: the willingness to let the music change, the trust to let four people make decisions together, and the determination to keep playing whether twenty people show up or two hundred.

They began with a songwriter who wanted to preserve a decade’s worth of songs. They ended up with a band, a debut album, a release-day scramble involving digital distributors and an alleged Green Day resemblance, and a growing itinerary of clubs beyond Chicago.

Along the way, they learned that the songs became better when they stopped treating them as untouchable objects. They learned to trust the people standing beside them. They learned that a record could take years to arrive and still be worth the wait. And they learned that sometimes the best way to make a song memorable is to put a wrench in it.

Maybe that’s what Way Out Somehow is really about. Not escaping something in the grand, cinematic sense, but finding a way forward through the ordinary complications of life: the jobs, the schedules, the unfinished songs, the doubts, the long nights, the itchy blankets, the records you love and the records you hope to make.

You keep going. You keep playing. You trust your friends. You don’t fill the album with songs you don’t believe in. You don’t wait for a crowd of two hundred before you give everything you’ve got.

And when the moment comes, you turn up the amplifiers and get on with it. The Trash Kickers have a wonderfully uncomplicated motto for all of this: “Nothing but bangers.” Fine by me.

I’ll see you at the Trolley Stop Tavern on Saturday, October 24. Bring your friends. Bring your ears. Bring the kind of enthusiasm that makes a band want to play harder. And if you happen to find yourself standing near the front, losing your mind while the guitars roar and the drums come crashing down, don’t worry about looking cool. The band isn’t. That’s the whole point.

Trash Kickers — Way Out Somehow. Chicago rock and roll, made by four friends who trust one another, refuse to settle for filler, and would rather have a good time than stand still.

Today’s show on Mixcloud

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Dayton’s own American Whale stopped by the YTAA studio for a great conversation about music and songwriting. The show has already aired—and you can catch the whole thing now on Mixcloud. Turn it up and give it a listen!

Lips Speak Louder Means Exactly What It Says

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One of my favorite things about doing Your Tuesday Afternoon Alternative is discovering a band that somehow slipped under my radar and then wondering how on earth that happened.

That was exactly my reaction when a friend pointed me toward Lips Speak Louder.

The Minneapolis-based duo—guitarist and vocalist Rachel Brandsness and drummer Angela Lese—make the kind of rock records that remind you why guitars still matter. Big riffs. Bigger hooks. Songs that are melodic without losing their edge. Their album Consolation Prize has been getting plenty of spins on the show, and after talking with Rachel and Angie over Zoom, I came away even more impressed by the thought and intention behind the music.

Ironically, the band’s name began with another favorite band.

“We’re huge Yeah Yeah Yeahs fans,” they told me. “Lips Speak Louder” comes from a lyric buried inside the song “Soft Shock.” They loved the phrase because it sounded “anthemic,” but over time it took on a deeper meaning.

“It feels like permission to say what you really mean,” Rachel explained.

That philosophy runs through everything the band does.

Rock music, they argue, shouldn’t apologize for existing. It should be loud. Honest. Imperfect. It should refuse to shrink itself to make other people comfortable. “Rock music refuses to be quiet. It’s loud and kind of in your face. You’re saying what you mean, when you mean it, how you mean it.” That isn’t simply a philosophy about music—it’s a philosophy about life.

Angela pointed out that, particularly for women, there is often enormous social pressure to be agreeable and not “take up space.” Playing in Lips Speak Louder became an opportunity to reject that expectation. Angela explained that, particularly for women, there is often enormous social pressure to be agreeable and avoid drawing attention to yourself.

Rachel shared that “I feel like, especially as women, you’re raised to be polite and don’t step on anybody’s toes. Playing and singing is my chance to be loud and take up space.” It’s my chance to be loud and take up space.”

That statement may be the best summary of the band you’ll ever hear.

Of course, the music industry has not always made it easy. Both Rachel and Angie laughed while recounting stories of loading heavy equipment into venues only to have someone ask whether the gear belonged to their boyfriend. They’ve repeatedly encountered audiences and industry professionals who seemed surprised that two women could walk onstage and deliver unapologetically heavy rock music.

Those experiences even inspired the title of Consolation Prize.

The title is more than a clever phrase. It’s a tongue-in-cheek response to years of being passed over simply because they didn’t fit someone else’s expectations of what a rock band should look like. Angie noted that “we named our album Consolation Prize because we can’t tell you how many times we’ve come up short for a gig…just because we were women.”

The satisfying part, they admitted, comes after the music starts.

Angie observed the transformation on the faces of the audience: “We can actually watch people’s expressions change. Watching everyone’s eyes turn from a place of doubt to just being super into it—that’s pretty cool.”

Or, as Rachel put it, “If you can win a crowd over by being two females playing rock and roll, that’s a fun feeling.”

The audience goes from skepticism to raised fists, phones in the air, and enthusiastic applause. Few things are more satisfying than dismantling assumptions with a great performance.

Listening to Consolation Prize, one thing immediately stands out: this is an enormous-sounding record. That becomes even more impressive once you realize only two musicians are creating all that sound.

Rachel has developed an ingenious live guitar setup that simultaneously covers guitar and bass parts while Angela’s powerful drumming provides the foundation. Instead of treating the duo format as a limitation, they’ve embraced it as a creative advantage.

“It forced the vocal melodies to have to be better. It forced the songs to be better,” Rachel said.

Without multiple guitars and layers of studio overdubs to hide behind, “there wasn’t going to be a bunch of extra fluff” – the vocal melodies had to become stronger. The riffs had to matter. Every note had to earn its place. It’s a refreshing philosophy in an era when technology can often become a substitute for songwriting.

As we talked about their writing process, another theme emerged. Neither musician seems interested in showing off. They are interested in making great songs. Every note has to matter. Every hook has to earn its place. Rachel noted that “if I have that chorus hook, I feel like I can build whatever I need around that.” Because, as she admitted, “If the chorus doesn’t really anchor it, the song is only ever going to be okay.”

That’s a remarkably disciplined way to think about songwriting.

Rachel usually begins with a chorus because, in her words, if the chorus isn’t memorable, the rest of the song rarely comes together. From there, the pair trade demos back and forth, constantly refining arrangements while giving one another room to contribute new ideas.

What struck me most was the trust between them. Sure, there are disagreements. Different versions get recorded. Feelings occasionally get bruised. But they always arrive at the same destination because they’re pursuing the same goal.

“We both have the same end goal—trying to make a great song.”

That mutual trust is one reason the record sounds so cohesive. Their move from Nashville to Minneapolis also says a great deal about who they are as musicians and performers.

After years of working in one of America’s music capitals, they wanted something different. Nashville is full of extraordinary musicians, they told me, but it has also become crowded, expensive, and increasingly geared toward hired-session work.

The Midwest kept calling them back.

Every tour through Wisconsin, Minnesota, and surrounding states reinforced the same impression: audiences simply love rock music. “The whole region seems thirsty for some rock, so we’re just excited to be here.”

So, they relocated. The gamble appears to be paying off.

The Minneapolis music community has welcomed them warmly, local radio has embraced their songs, and they already feel at home in one of America’s great rock cities.

One observation Rachel made really stuck with me. Independent artists experience time differently from listeners.

While Consolation Prize no longer feels “new” to the band, it is brand new to nearly everyone discovering them for the first time. “To us the songs don’t feel brand new anymore…but to 99.9 percent of the population they’re brand new.” That’s an important reminder that great records never really have an expiration date.

When I asked about working with Emily Wolfe as producer, Rachel immediately emphasized something every artist hopes to find. “She helped us get the sound we wanted but preserve who we are.” Angela added that Wolfe pushed them creatively without changing their identity. The result is a record that feels polished but never sterile.

As Rachel explained, “We wanted it polished enough to sound professional, but we wanted to harness that raw energy.” That may be the single best description of Consolation Prize.

When I asked about favorite songs from Consolation Prize, the answers revealed another side of the record. Angela chose “Handle With Care,” partly because it lets her unleash an extended barrage of double-kick drumming that she had always wanted to play.

Rachel highlighted “Dog Days of Summer” and “Loser,” two emotionally cathartic songs that build from intimate moments into soaring, full-throttle rock anthems.

I understand exactly why.

“Loser” may have become my favorite track on the record. Every time I hear it, I find myself singing along before I even realize I’m doing it. That’s what good songwriting does.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked about performing live. Their answer wasn’t about gear or logistics. It was about creating an experience. “How can we make it larger than life? How can we create a moment?” That’s exactly what every great rock band should be asking before walking onstage.

I asked the most important question of the afternoon as we neared the end of our conversation: “When are you coming to Dayton?” The answer was encouraging and promising.

Angela actually has family in Kettering, the band is working with a booking agent, and Midwest touring is very much in the plans. I immediately began recommending venues like Blind Bob’s, The Brightside, and South Park Tavern. Hopefully, we’ll see them here sooner rather than later.

If they do make it to Dayton, I’ll probably have a classroom full of University of Dayton students earning extra credit by attending the show. Going to local concerts is the only extra credit assignment I offer students.

After spending an hour talking with Rachel Brandsness and Angela Lese, it became obvious that the name Lips Speak Louder isn’t just clever. It’s a mission statement that encourages all of us to be authentic. Don’t apologize. Write great songs. Turn up the amplifiers. Let the music flow.

Let the music do the speaking.

Video of the Day: The New Old-Fashioned – What In The Hell

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There is something wonderfully disorienting about “What In The Hell.” The New Old-Fashioned has always occupied that sweet spot where power pop, garage rock, country, and indie sensibilities collide, and this latest single turns the amps up while keeping the hooks firmly intact. It’s a song that feels both urgent and effortlessly catchy, asking a question that sounds increasingly relevant in 2026: What in the hell is going on?

The band’s trademark vocal interplay gives the track its personality. Tom Blackbern, Kent Montgomery, Matt Oliver, and David Payne sound less like a traditional lead singer with backing vocals and more like four friends shouting observations from different corners of the same room. The result is energetic, lived-in, and refreshingly authentic.

Musically, the song leans into crunchy guitars, a relentlessly driving rhythm section, and melodic choruses that refuse to leave your head. David Payne’s engineering at Reel Love Recording Co. captures the band’s live chemistry, while Tim Pritchard’s mix and mastering at Great Horned Audio gives every instrument room to breathe without sanding away the grit that makes the performance so engaging. Great Horned Audio and Reel Love Recording both deserve a mention as fantastic contributors to the Dayton music scene. They provide essential recording, mixing, and mastering studios for the local indie and alternative music scene, acting as a key hub for bands and artists on Magnaphone Records. Spaces that allow artists to be themselves are invaluable in contemporary music.

The music video, directed, filmed, and animated through inventive stop-motion by writer, musician, and artist Brandon Berry (The Paint Splats), perfectly complements the song’s restless energy. Rather than simply documenting a performance, Berry creates a visual world that mirrors the track’s quirky humor and anxious momentum. The stop-motion aesthetic gives everything a handmade, tactile quality that fits the band’s DIY spirit, making every frame feel like a labor of love.

Taken together, “What In The Hell” is another reminder of why Dayton’s music scene continues to produce artists with a distinctive voice. The New Old-Fashioned doesn’t chase trends—they make guitar-driven rock with a nod to country music that feels timeless while still speaking directly to the confusion and absurdity of the present moment. It’s smart, spirited, and impossible not to enjoy.

Turn It Up Before the World Goes Silent

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Every few years somebody announces that music is dead. They say streaming killed it. Algorithms killed it. Social media killed it. Attention spans killed it. Artificial intelligence killed it. Radio killed it. MTV killed it. Napster killed it. Vinyl prices killed it. Somebody is always writing the obituary while another kid is sitting on the floor with a cheap pair of headphones hearing a song that rearranges their nervous system forever.

Music keeps surviving because it isn’t a product first. It’s evidence that human beings are still trying to tell each other the truth.

That’s why music still matters.

Not because every new release is a masterpiece. Most records have always been forgettable. If you wandered into a record store in 1974—the supposed golden age—you’d discover mountains of disposable junk stacked beside the classics. History performs ruthless editing. We remember the albums that changed lives and conveniently forget the landfill.

The miracle isn’t perfection. The miracle is persistence.

Somewhere tonight a band is loading battered amplifiers into a rusty van because thirty people in a neighborhood bar deserve something louder than despair. Somewhere a songwriter is spending six hours chasing a lyric that will eventually sound effortless. Somewhere a teenager in a bedroom is discovering that three chords are enough to begin constructing an identity.

That’s civilization.

Music isn’t background noise. It’s one of the oldest technologies human beings ever invented for surviving themselves.

The best songs don’t merely entertain; they interrupt us. They stop the machinery of everyday life long enough to whisper—or scream—that we’re not crazy for feeling what we’re feeling. They give shape to grief before we know how to describe loss. They turn anger into rhythm instead of violence. They transform loneliness into harmony. They make joy communal instead of private.

You don’t dance because life is easy.

You dance because for three minutes somebody convinced you it was worth staying in the room.

And here’s the part the streaming executives and data analysts never quite understand. Nobody has ever cried because an algorithm correctly predicted what they wanted to hear next.

People cry because artists like Jay Farrar, Bruce Springsteen, and American Aquarium sound like they are carrying every factory town in America on their shoulders. They cry because Nina Simone makes heartbreak sound like a moral philosophy. They cry because the Replacements stumble into emotional perfection just as they’re threatening to fall apart. They cry because Aretha Franklin doesn’t simply sing respect—she demands that the universe finally recognize human dignity.

Music matters because authenticity is still audible.

You can’t fake conviction forever. The microphones eventually catch you cheating.

That’s why local music scenes remain sacred. Every city has them. Dayton. Detroit. Austin. Toronto. Minneapolis. Glasgow. Liverpool. Manchester. Places where musicians keep creating despite indifferent audiences, shrinking budgets, and the economic absurdity of trying to build a life around songs. They aren’t doing it because it’s profitable.

They’re doing it because silence would be worse.

Go stand in a club where forty people are watching a band you’ve never heard before. Listen carefully. That’s democracy working better than most legislatures. Complete strangers agreeing that for the next hour they’ll surrender their individual anxieties and become one audience. Every applause break says, “I hear you.” Every encore says, “Stay a little longer.”

We desperately need more of that.

Our politics rewards outrage. Our technology monetizes distraction. Our economy encourages isolation. Music quietly rebels against all three. It insists that listening is an ethical act. Really listening means allowing another person’s experience to occupy your own emotional space.

That’s empathy with a backbeat.

The old critics loved to argue about what was “real rock and roll,” but the argument was always bigger than guitars. They were really asking whether culture could still produce honesty in a world increasingly devoted to image. That’s still the question today, except now image comes filtered, optimized, branded, monetized, and endlessly recycled across glowing screens.

A great song cuts through all of it.

Three minutes.

One voice.

One unforgettable melody.

Suddenly you’re sixteen again, or grieving your mother, or driving nowhere with your best friend, or falling in love, or surviving the worst year of your life. Time collapses. Memory becomes physical. Your pulse syncs with a snare drum. A lyric you’ve heard a hundred times suddenly reveals a meaning it was saving until you were finally ready to understand it.

No other art form enters ordinary life with quite that kind of stealth.

Books demand stillness. Films require schedules. Paintings wait in museums.

Songs climb into your car, your kitchen, your headphones, your funeral, your wedding, your first kiss, your last goodbye.

They accompany us through the ordinary until the ordinary becomes unforgettable.

So no, music isn’t dying.

The industry changes. Formats disappear. Genres mutate. Technologies evolve. Critics grow old. Trends come and go with exhausting predictability. But somewhere, right now, somebody is writing the song another stranger will someday need to survive a terrible Tuesday afternoon.

That possibility alone is enough to keep believing.

Turn it up. Not because louder is always better.

Because sometimes hope arrives disguised as feedback, wrapped inside a melody, played through a beat-up amplifier by people who still believe that a song can change a life.

They’ve been right all along.

Elephants and Stars Kick the Door In, Spill Their Guts, and Call It Philistine Vulgarity—God Bless the Noise

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Elephants and Stars have been stalking the edges of the Canadian underground for years, the kind of band that doesn’t so much arrive as accumulate—record by record, show by sweat-soaked show, turning small rooms into minor revelations for anyone paying attention. They’re not interested in being the coolest band in the room, which is probably why they end up being the most necessary. Literate but never precious, political but allergic to slogans, they deal in the messy stuff: doubt, friction, the uneasy truce between wanting to care and wanting to check out entirely.

And here’s the thing—they don’t sound like they’re trying to prove anything anymore. That fight is over. What you get instead is a band that knows exactly what it is: a guitar and drum band, yeah, but the kind that treats guitars like blunt instruments and percussion you feel in your body, both instruments opening wounds at the same time. There’s punk in there, and heartland rock, and that old alternative ache that used to mean something before it got turned into background noise for coffee shops. But none of it feels curated. It feels lived in, like these songs have been rattling around in their bones for years before anyone bothered to hit record.

Frontman Manfred Sittmann comes off like a guy who’d rather torch the idea of “high art” than ever be caught polishing his feelings for display. And that’s the secret engine here: nothing is overly arranged, nothing is too clever for its own good. The band trusts the songs to stand up straight on their own bruised legs. In a time when so much music winks at you like it’s all one big joke, Elephants and Stars stare you down and mean every word—and somehow that lands harder than any grand statement ever could.

For more than half a decade, Elephants and Stars have carved out a distinctive place in independent music: literate without pretension, political without sloganeering, melodic without sacrificing urgency. That balance defines this record. Across six albums, they’ve built a reputation the slow way—through relentless songwriting, word of mouth, and songs that land somewhere between the gut and the conscience. Philistine Vulgarity feels like the clearest distillation of that identity yet.

The guitars hit first—not with flash, but with presence. They breathe. Each riff carries tension; each melody leans against something just out of frame. Producer Ron Hawkins (The Lowest of the Low) understands the assignment completely. His approach favors clarity over gloss and atmosphere over excess, sharpening the band’s core qualities: passion, confrontation, humanity, and melody. Nothing feels buried or inflated. The songs arrive mid-conversation, as if they’ve been unfolding long before you pressed play.

“Drowning in Doubt” opens with anxious propulsion, a reminder that alternative rock was never meant to feel comfortable. “Propensity for Violence” compresses fury into a tight burst without tipping into caricature. Meanwhile, “Take It All” and “Brief, Shining Moment” showcase the band’s quietest strength: choruses that don’t beg for attention but linger anyway, settling in over time rather than announcing themselves.

By the midpoint, the album reveals its deeper concerns. “Kinda” and the strikingly titled “Of Halfway Houses and Ambulances” resist easy resolution. These are not songs about triumph; they’re about endurance—another Tuesday, another misstep, another fragile attempt at faith in other people. It’s difficult terrain, and Elephants and Stars navigate it with unusual grace.

The album’s title is not incidental. Philistine Vulgarity wrestles directly with political violence, alienation, economic anxiety, and emotional exhaustion, but it refuses to surrender empathy in the process. Echoes of punk, heartland rock, post-hardcore, and alternative textures run throughout, yet the songwriting never feels like a genre exercise. It remains rooted in narrative and emotional truth.

That ethos is summed up by Sittmann: “These songs are just honest rock songs played with feeling… they’ll never be mistaken for high art, and I couldn’t be happier about it.” In a musical landscape that often hides behind irony or self-awareness, that kind of directness feels quietly radical. Elephants and Stars don’t hedge. They mean what they say.

“One Light at a Time” and “Even Out the Lies” carry that philosophy forward with restraint and confidence. There’s no attempt to overwhelm—only a trust that honesty has its own momentum, and that listeners are willing to meet the band halfway.

“The Reckoning (Come On Down)” plays less like judgment than invitation, setting up the closing statement: the seven-minute “Sanctuary Cities.” It’s a rare kind of finale—patient, searching, willing to wander. Instead of racing toward a climax, it expands and circles back on itself, ultimately landing somewhere that feels earned rather than engineered. By the time it fades, the silence it leaves behind feels intentional.

What resonates most is how little of this feels manufactured. Elephants and Stars are not chasing trends or optimizing for algorithms. They are refining a voice—layered guitars, thoughtful construction, and melodies that reveal themselves gradually. The audience they’ve built reflects that same patience: one song, one record, one believer at a time.

Philistine Vulgarity is a reminder that guitar bands still matter—not as preservationists of some sacred past, but as translators of ordinary anxiety into something shared and bearable. The album doesn’t pretend the world makes sense. It simply insists that making honest music within that confusion still matters.

And that’s more than enough reason to turn it up again.

Transmission from the Beautiful Midwestern Static

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You know what I love about radio? One minute you’re getting your soul rattled by Elephants and Stars sounding like somebody spray-painted heartbreak across the side of a collapsing bowling alley, and the next minute The Linda Lindas come flying through the speakers like they just hijacked your older cousin’s garage band and turned it into a revolution. THAT’S radio, baby. Chaos with a heartbeat.

Sonic Whip’s “Survive” sounds like the inside of a jukebox after three cups of gas station coffee and a nervous breakdown somewhere outside Akron at 2 a.m. And I mean that as the highest compliment imaginable.

Cliff Hillis comes in with “The Square Route” like Big Star wandered into a neighborhood bar where somebody’s uncle still argues about whether power pop ever really died. Spoiler: it didn’t. It just learned how to drive at night with the windows down.

And then Bruce Hornsby shows up with Ezra Koenig like some kind of impossible musical blind date that SHOULD NOT WORK but absolutely does. It’s jazz-adjacent adult existentialism for people who still own concert ticket stubs from 1997 in a shoebox under the bed.

American Aquarium’s “History Repeats Itself” sounds like somebody reading tomorrow’s headlines through a busted neon sign in a Southern roadside diner. There’s dust on the boots, blood in the memory, and enough truth in there to make politicians nervous.

You hear a band name like Sports Boyfriend and think maybe you’re getting irony. Nope. You’re getting sharp little pop songs that ricochet around your skull like pinballs in a dive bar arcade nobody’s cleaned since the Clinton administration.

And then BOOM — Pere Ubu crashes into the set like a shopping cart full of sparks and loose wires. “Non-Alignment Pact” still sounds like the future arguing with itself in a Cleveland factory basement. Some songs age. That song mutates.

The Menzingers always sound like they know exactly how it feels to miss somebody while staring out the window of a moving car at 1:17 in the morning wondering where all your old friends went. Nobody writes working-class nostalgia with this much gasoline and heart.

Joe Pernice drops in with “Twenty-Thousand Times” sounding like a man who has quietly mastered the art of surviving disappointment beautifully. Some songs shout at you. Pernice just leans over and tells you the truth softly enough that you actually listen.

And The Laughing Chimes? Man, those songs sound like Midwest summers that disappeared before anybody realized they mattered. Jangling guitars, beautiful ache, tiny moments turned cosmic. Dayton understands that kind of music. Ohio INVENTED that emotional weather.

This is why we do this show. Because somewhere between Kiwi Jr., Humbird, Couchboy, The New Old-Fashioned, and The Long Ryders, somebody listening right now is hearing their new favorite song for the first time. And that little moment? That’s still magic.

Listen along at https://listen.streamon.fm/wudr

The Burned-Down Dance Hall: Avalon Park and the Songs That Hold Us Together

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Let me tell you something about Springfield, Ohio that nobody asked you to care about and you’re going to care about anyway: in 1900, just west of what is now some community college, there was a roller coaster and a merry-go-round and a dance hall and a lake, all rolled into one magnificent sprawling fun zone they called Spring Grove Park, later renamed Avalon Park — until the dance hall caught fire, the roof caved in, and the whole beautiful disaster shut down forever in the 1930s.

I bring this up because that mythology — the burned-down dance hall, the ghost of American leisure, the whole gorgeous wreckage of the past — is exactly what Charlie and Amanda Jackson have bottled on Eta Carinae, their debut record as Avalon Park, and I want you to understand that this is one of those albums you hold up against the light and see something real moving inside it.

Charlie told Brandon Berry of The Dayton Daily News that they “slowly turned into Jackson Browne — so slowly that nobody noticed.” That is one of the finest self-descriptions in rock and roll journalism; I don’t care who disagrees with me. Because that’s exactly what happened. The shift from old-time country into classic 1970s pop with an alt feel is significant but hardly abrupt — leaning into 12-string riffage when appropriate, while still arranging with three- to four-chord progressions, drawing on Jackson Browne and Fleetwood Mac on one end, the Velvet Underground and 1960s pop on the other, with Charlie even bringing back rapid strum patterns from his punk rock days. You hear all of that on this record, and somehow it doesn’t sound like a shopping list of influences; it sounds like one coherent, aching human voice.

Avalon Park at the Oregon Express on May 30h for their release show.

“Bloodshot Moon” kicks things off, and this song is as good an opening track as I’ve heard in years — warm beer on the jukebox, boots full of lead, a man wandering down 5th and Main in the blue hours looking for somebody he’s already lost. It’s classic country-rock structure, but the feel is pure California 1972, the kind of song that makes you want to roll the windows down at two in the morning and drive nowhere specific. Amanda’s harmonies ghost through the background like something half-remembered, and the marriage is audible in every bar.

“Dandelion Wine” is this album’s heart. Four winds blowing you home, the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end resolving into something simpler and better — just dandelion wine. That’s songwriting, folks. Not chord tricks, not production gimmicks. The couple’s voices braid together in the chorus in a way that sounds completely uncontrived, because they’ve spent years singing around the house together, harmonizing because they know each other’s voices — his voice, her voice, twenty years of stories. You can’t fake that. You really can’t.

Then there’s “Broken Branches,” which is where this record stops being pleasant and becomes genuinely important. A bloodstain on the floor, a child left to look after themself. Charlie wrote every word of it, but it’s about Amanda’s childhood — and because he’s known her for twenty-seven years total, he can write from her perspective as if she wrote it herself. That kind of intimacy between writer and subject is what separates the craftsmen from the confessors, and the confessors always win. The lyric “I thought everybody felt” — describing a childhood so abnormal she had no framework to recognize it as such — is the kind of line that hits you in a place beyond words.

“Pink Carnations” is the album’s rawest wound: a eulogy for someone gone too soon, church bells ringing, the singer telling God exactly where he can stick his plan. It earns that anger. And “The Cynic” — written by Amanda — cuts with the controlled precision of someone who’s been dismissed once too often by people who had easier childhoods.

The title track uses Eta Carinae — a binary stellar system so luminous it’s five million times brighter than our sun — as a metaphor for two people locked in a gravitational dance. The only thing keeping those two massive stars from going full supernova is the gravitational pull of each other — locked in what Charlie called a death dance. He wrote the song in 2020, which, as the Daily News noted, feels entirely appropriate. Out of all the years to write about two volatile forces holding each other together.

The album closes with “Feels Like Summertime,” and it contains a reference to “beyond the dusty road” — which was among the first songs Charlie ever wrote for Amanda when they were dating. Now they harmonize on it together. Everything comes back around. If that doesn’t do something to your chest, I’m not sure music is for you.

Eta Carinae was engineered and produced by David Payne (The New Old Fashioned) at Reel Love Recording Company, with the band consisting of son Gideon on bass, Karl Woschitz on drums, Casey Abbott on guitar that simply lifts every song, Emma Woodruff (Novena) on backing vocals, and Charlie’s brother Leigh on additional guitar. It’s a family record in every sense — named for a park that burned down, sustained by the gravity of two people who haven’t let go of each other yet.

Ten songs, forty-two minutes. Buy it.

Dayton Favorites The New Old-Fashioned Return with New Music

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Today on YTAA, The New Old-Fashioned crashes into the studio, carrying the kind of anticipation that only comes when a band has been quietly building something behind the scenes instead of flooding the world with half-finished updates and social media breadcrumbs.

For fans of the Dayton scene, this is a notable moment. The band’s upcoming single, arriving June 6, marks the first new music released since the Big City EP. This record captured their knack for balancing heartland storytelling, jangling guitars, and the restless energy of musicians who understand that the best songs are often born somewhere between nostalgia and forward motion.

Listening to The New Old-Fashioned has always felt a little like finding a stack of well-worn records in a friend’s basement: familiar enough to immediately feel comforting, and alive enough to remind you why rock and roll keeps reinventing itself while recognizing where it came from in the first place. Their music pulls from the past without becoming trapped by it. That’s a difficult trick. Plenty of bands know how to imitate history; far fewer know how to converse with it.

And that’s what makes this new material intriguing. After the long stretch since Big City, the question isn’t whether the band can pick up where they left off. The question is what they’ve discovered in the meantime. What stories have accumulated? What rough edges have become sharper? What melodies have been waiting for the right moment to emerge?

Tune in this afternoon for a sneak peek at the new song and a conversation with the band about the road from Big City to this next chapter. If rock and roll is a continuing argument between who we were and who we’re trying to become, then The New Old-Fashioned sounds ready to pick that argument back up.

Listen here: WUDR YTAA Stream

Walking the Wire: Fragile Voices and Electric Heartbreak

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Some songs sound fragile because they’re carefully arranged that way. And then some songs sound fragile because the people making them are actually coming apart in real time. That’s the feeling you get listening to ‘Walking on a Wire’ by Richard and Linda Thompson.

The song appears on Shoot Out the Lights (1982), a record that has come to feel less like a collection of songs and more like a document of emotional collapse. By this point, Richard and Linda Thompson’s marriage was effectively over, and the tension that had been building for years wasn’t just informing the performances—it was structuring them.

And then there’s Linda Thompson’s voice.

During the recording of Shoot Out the Lights, Linda was dealing with significant vocal strain—problems that had been building and were made worse by the emotional and physical intensity of the sessions. You can hear it in the delivery: the controlled fragility, the slight break in tone, the sense that every phrase is being carefully negotiated in real time. But what’s striking is that the record never tries to smooth it out or hide it. Instead, it turns that limitation into part of the emotional architecture of the song.

A technically “perfect” vocal would actually feel like a lie here. Because ‘Walking on a Wire’ isn’t about resolution. It’s about the attempt to maintain balance when everything underneath you is already gone. Richard Thompson’s guitar is precise, almost cutting in its clarity—circling, tightening, never quite settling. And Linda sings like someone holding herself together by sheer force of will, line by line.

There’s a kind of emotional restraint in the performance that’s more devastating than overt breakdown. No shouting, no collapse—just endurance. And that’s what makes the song so difficult to turn away from.

Knowing what Shoot Out the Lights represents in the arc of their relationship only deepens it, but even without that context, ‘Walking on a Wire’ stands as one of the most harrowing and beautiful performances in British folk rock—intimate, controlled, and quietly shattering.

This is Richard and Linda Thompson.

Still Here and Still Swinging: High on Stress Carry the Minneapolis Rock Tradition Forward

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There are records that sound like they were made for streaming playlists, and there are records that sound like they were made because four guys still believe rock and roll is a sacred, sweaty, half-broken thing that can save your life for three and a half minutes at a time. Still Here by High on Stress belongs violently, gloriously to the second category.

This thing doesn’t stroll into the room. It kicks the jukebox until beer spills on the floor and somebody starts shouting along before they even know the words. It sounds like Minneapolis in winter — cracked lips, cigarette smoke curling outside the club at 1:45 a.m., somebody sleeping in a van behind First Avenue because gas money disappeared two towns ago. The ghosts of The Replacements are all over this record, not in the lazy tribute-band sense, but in the way these songs understand that melody only matters if there’s some damage underneath it. You can hear traces of Soul Asylum too — that desperate, bruised romanticism — and the working-class ache of The Gear Daddies humming beneath the amplifiers like an old furnace in a Midwestern basement.

“House of Cards” opens the album like somebody throwing open the door of a bar just before last call. Guitars slash across the room, Nick Leet sounding like he’s trying to outrun disappointment with pure momentum. It’s got that classic Twin Cities push-and-pull: huge hooks wrapped around the suspicion that everything might collapse tomorrow. Great rock songs don’t solve anything. They just make you want to survive long enough to hear the next chorus.

“Closer to the Truth” is pure heartland voltage. This thing could’ve fit on a lost Westerberg cassette between hangovers and revelations. The guitars don’t polish the pain — they grind it into something usable. There’s a ragged nobility here, the kind you only get from musicians who’ve actually lived inside these songs instead of assembling them from indie-rock instruction manuals.

“Over/Thru,” co-written with Kevin Salem, barrels forward with power-pop precision and bar-band recklessness colliding at full speed. It’s catchy in the way nicotine is addictive. Chad Wheeling’s guitar work throughout the album deserves its own shrine somewhere off Highway 61. These guitars don’t shimmer; they scrape paint off the walls.

Then comes “Uphill Climb,” which is exactly the kind of title Minneapolis rock bands have been earning honestly for forty years. No irony, no fashionable detachment, just exhausted perseverance transformed into a singalong. This is where High on Stress separate themselves from all the poseurs playing Americana dress-up. They understand that resilience is ugly sometimes. You drag it behind you. You don’t post inspirational quotes about it.

“Cliffhanger” barely pauses long enough to breathe before detonating into another tight, melodic punch to the ribs. There’s not an ounce of wasted motion anywhere on this record. Twelve songs, no self-indulgence, no bloated production tricks, just melodies delivered with the urgency of men who still think rock and roll matters because it does.

“Time Will Tell You” carries some of that old Soul Asylum melancholy — the feeling that wisdom arrives about thirty years too late to be useful. Mark Devaraj and Jim Soule lock into the kind of rhythm section groove that doesn’t call attention to itself because it’s too busy holding the whole damn enterprise together. The song rolls forward like an old car with a failing transmission that somehow keeps making it home.

“Can You Feel Me?” is two-and-a-half minutes of pure emotional combustion. No filler. No indulgence. Just direct transmission from nerve endings to amplifier tubes. Somewhere, the spirit of every lost Midwest dive bar is cheering. “Plans Have Plans” is the kind of title Lester Bangs himself would’ve appreciated because it sounds simultaneously profound and completely defeated. The song sways between fatalism and stubborn survival instinct, which is basically the entire emotional history of Minneapolis rock distilled into three minutes.

“Under the Table” brings a little extra grime into the mix, with Soule’s co-writing contribution adding a rougher edge. This is where the band’s love for the Del-Lords and old American garage rock really surfaces. It sounds lived-in. Beer-stained. Earned. “Ambassador” somehow manages to sound triumphant and world-weary at the same time, which is harder than most bands realize. High on Stress understand one of the central truths of rock and roll: the best anthems are usually about losing.

“Parachutes and Bandages” is one of the emotional high points of the whole record, all scar tissue and survival instinct wrapped in chiming guitars. You can practically hear the miles traveled in these songs. Not metaphorical miles. Actual miles. Snowstorms. Cheap motels. Bad coffee at gas stations somewhere outside Eau Claire.

And then the title track, “Still Here,” arrives like the mission statement for the entire album. Not triumphant. Not defeated. Just present. Alive. Scarred up but still standing in front of the amp while the speakers hum. That’s the whole philosophy of Midwestern rock and roll right there. The Replacements knew it. Soul Asylum knew it. The Gear Daddies knew it. And High on Stress know it too.

What makes Still Here hit so hard is the songwriting’s refusal to hide behind irony or studio gloss. High on Stress write songs the old-fashioned way: sharp hooks, emotional honesty, and enough grit in the machinery to make every chorus feel earned instead of manufactured. These songs are built from working-class frustration, late-night reflection, stubborn survival, and the kind of lived experience that can’t be faked. Nick Leet has a gift for writing lines that sound conversational until they suddenly land like revelations at 2 a.m. in a half-empty bar. There is heartbreak throughout the record, but it is never passive or self-pitying. Every song pushes forward with the determination of people who know life can knock you flat, but still insist on getting back up for one more round.

The record’s sound sits beautifully at the crossroads of power pop melody and ragged Midwestern rock and roll. You can hear echoes of many influences in the looseness and emotional urgency, while traces of the Minneapolis of the ’80s emerge in the album’s bruised sincerity and anthemic sweep. There is also that same blue-collar storytelling spirit that made so many indie bands so deeply enduring. But High on Stress never feels derivative. They take those influences and run them through their own sweat-soaked barroom filter until the result sounds completely alive and immediate.

The guitars are the engine that drives the entire album. Chad Wheeling layers ringing rhythm parts, rough-edged riffs, and sharp lead lines that never overpower the songs but constantly elevate them. Nothing here feels overproduced. The band wisely avoids sanding down the edges, allowing the album to breathe with the energy of a real rock band playing together in a room. Jim Soule’s bass lines give the songs warmth and movement, while Mark Devaraj’s drumming keeps everything charging forward with restless momentum. The production captures exactly what this kind of music needs: volume, tension, melody, and the feeling that things could come gloriously apart at any second.

Most importantly, Still Here understands something many modern rock records forget: great rock and roll should sound human. The imperfections matter. The strain in the vocals matters. The guitars buzzing just slightly against the red line matter. High on Stress makes music that feels worn-in rather than polished, and that humanity is exactly what gives the record its power. These songs do not chase trends or attempt reinvention. They simply trust the eternal force of loud guitars, unforgettable hooks, and emotional truth delivered without apology.

The miracle of is that it never sounds nostalgic even while carrying the DNA of every great Minneapolis bar band that ever staggered onto a stage with something to prove. This isn’t cosplay for aging punk survivors. This is a living, breathing rock and roll record made by musicians who still trust guitars, sweat, melody, and truth more than trends.

In an era where so much music feels algorithmically focus-grouped into emotional wallpaper, High on Stress have made an album that bleeds. And thank God for that.