A Deeper Listen

Merrill Garbus says the lyrics simply poured out of her mouth on several tracks for the new Tune-Yards album, Better Dreaming. This time, she and her partner Nate Brenner trusted their gut more in the writing process. The record is heavily inspired by current events domestically and abroad, the ongoing fight for LGBTQ+ rights, and unexpected lessons from unexpectedly becoming a parent.

“I'm not a maker of sad music generally,” Garbus says in the interview. “My general take on music is: Let's sweat this out because we have to keep moving on. I love music for that. It allows that kind of movement through grief, through trauma, through hardship.”

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Hiro Ama, born in Japan and based in London, plays drums in the indie pop band Teleman. In late 2024, he released his debut solo album, Music for Peace and Harmony, which leans heavily into the sounds of a 1980s Japanese synthesizer called Waraku, which literally means “peace and harmony” in Japanese. KEXP's Dusty Henry spoke with him shortly after the release. 

“I used to be quite a perfectionist,” Ama says in the interview. “Then again, when you listen to old jazz records, you can hear a lot of mistakes, the bad notes, and people chanting in the background, and that becomes part of the character of the music. Once I realized it, I started putting in a lot of field recordings and embracing the imperfection.” 

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In this bonus episode, we hear from Martin Oldgoth, cofounder of World Goth Day, in conversation with Sharlese, host of Mechanical Breakdown, about the holiday’s origin in 2009. What started as a sort of joke on BBC Radio 6 Music rapidly spread across the world as a celebration of goth culture, which is constantly evolving. And, no, you don’t have to wear black.

“The goth scene is very inclusive,” Oldgoth says in the interview. “There are no rules. If someone tells you, ‘You’ve got to listen to this band’ or ‘You’ve got to dress like that,’ they’re wrong. It’s as simple as that. It’s gone from being an offshoot of the post-punk scene in the early 80s to being a global family of misfits.”

Oldgoth’s music recommendations as heard in the episode:

Harsh Symmetry (Los Angeles, California)
Night in Athens (United Kingdom)
CORIN (United Kingdom)
Bambara (Brooklyn, New York)
HAPAX (Italy)
Octavian Winters (San Francisco, California)
KĀVE (Poland)
Soft Scent (Italy)

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Seattle-based musician Rocky Votolato has formed a new band called Suzzallo, who put out their debut album The Quiet Year earlier this year on Thirty Something Records. Through loud guitars and cathartic screaming, Suzzallo offers an outlet to help him grieve the loss of his child, Kienan, who died in a car accident in 2021.

“Without a way to express this pain, it probably would have killed me,” Votolato says in the interview. “Being able to turn it into this rock band and all this noise, light, pain, carnage, and everything that’s coming out in the record, I’m really happy that some of the light made it into the lyrics, too. I tried not to just focus on the darkness of the tragedy.”

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Denver-based punk group Dead Pioneers recently released their second album, PO$T AMERICAN, on Hassle Records. They’ve been opening for Pearl Jam on their U.S. tour this spring.

KEXP’s Dusty Henry caught up with lead vocalist Gregg Deal to discuss the band’s rapid success, how their new album portrays disillusionment with modern America, and how the band reclaims and recontextualizes Indigenous representation seen in media – from Dances with Wolves through One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. In a divided moment in history, PO$T AMERICAN feels perfectly timed for imperfect times.

“I know that there are different mediums out there that exist to create places of safety and understanding and articulation of frustration,” Deal says in the interview. “I know music is one of those places, I know art is one of those places, and I am grateful to have any part in either of those things.”

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Photo by Carlos Cruz

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Emily Fox, host of A Deeper Listen and Sound & Vision, is taking maternity leave form now until the fall. Before she left, shared an essay about why she went to Las Vegas sober and 8 months pregnant to see Pitbull in concert and why she thinks Pitbull deserves “a deeper listen.”

Best wishes to Emily and her family! In the meantime, the A Deeper Listen feed will continue to stay active with stories from the editorial team and guest host Roddy Nikpour. Keep it tuned in here and thanks for supporting A Deeper Listen.

Photo by Scott Legato 

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SASAMI has just released a new pop album called Blood on the Silver Screen. While her first record fell in the indie rock realm and her second album had a lot of metal influence, this album represents another left turn. SASAMI talks with Emily Fox about what draws her to make music from so many different genres, and how her family’s story of immigration and involvement in unconventional religious communities might have impacted her self-described identity as a “weirdo outsider.”

“As long as they're okay with me finding my own path, which they have really been supportive of as I've gotten older," SASAMI says. "For them, it was getting mass married in Madison Square Garden. For me, it's playing with a metal band."

Photo by Andrew Thomas Huang

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On this week’s episode, songwriter Ela Minus talks with KEXP's Albina Cabrera about her new album, DÍA—a fully nomadic project with songs written and recorded between Mexico, Seattle, and her native Colombia. With DÍA, she steps away from her analog era and embraces everything at hand: broken microphones, acoustic instruments, and digital synths. It’s a search for freedom that began the moment she left her comfort zone. The album is out now via Domino Records.

Photo by Alvaro Ariso

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Mike Hadreas of Perfume Genius talks with Emily Fox about how his inner fears, struggles with mental health, paranoid fantasies and reflections on gay lust and love show up on his latest album, Glory.

“I think I was just really afraid and I felt really tender and mortal and the world felt really fragile and scary and I couldn't figure out how to move through it very well,” Hadreas says speaking writing through depression. "And I didn't really know how to hold all of these things that I was feeling and move towards getting out of my head. I was just kind of stuck.”

Photo by Cody Critcheloe

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Liz Pelly, author of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist talks through the many practices at Spotify over the years that have impacted independent musicians-- from outsourcing stock music Spotify pays a lower royalty rate for and flooding Spotify's in-house playlists with that stock music, to paying artists a 30% lower royalty rate in exchange for promotion on Spotify.

Then, guitarist and independent musician Lance Allen talks about how he was able to pay off his mortgage and buy a car off Spotify royalties and how he’s continued to find success on the music streaming service.

Photo by Felix Walworth

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