Chasing Fridays: Alex G, Wednesday Q&A, forty winks live, more
My favorite artist returns, a convo with an indie mainstay, a report from the shoegaze frontlines, and screamo.
It was a good week to be Eli Enis. My favorite artist dropped a new song. Another one of my favorite artists did a Q&A with me for this very newsletter. I saw a fun-ass house show with some of my favorite people. And I listened to a bunch of baller screamo that reminded me how thrilling it can be to deep dive a style of music that I've needlessly kept at arms length my whole life. All of those experiences with music are reflected in this week's Chasing Fridays.
In case you missed last week's newsletter, I've launched a new segment called Chasing Down where I interview artists, friends, and other industry acquaintances about their taste in music. The inaugural edition was with They Are Gutting a Body of Water frontman Douglas Dulgarian, and this week's Chasing Down stars Wednesday mastermind Karly Hartzman. I'm really happy with how that section has been coming together so far, and I hope you are too.
Alex G - "Afterlife"
Alex G has been my favorite artist for 10 years. When I think back on the music I listened to a decade ago, very few of it still resonates with me. Most of it feels juvenile or dusty to me in one way or another. Not Alex G. Every time he releases new music I take a deep breath and prepare to be disappointed. To finally accept that he's on a tip that doesn't connect with me anymore. That he's past his prime. That his new stuff is whack. And it never, ever happens. Ever. His last two records, 2022's God Save the Animals and 2019's House of Sugar, contain many of my favorite Alex G songs. I think, objectively, they're his best records. In the three years since his last LP, Alex G has signed with RCA Records and had the baby with his longtime partner that he sang about on "Miracles."
Alex G is a very private person, but from what I've gleaned through rooting around his most invasive fan accounts, Alex G's child is a boy. I think "Afterlife" is about him. In this song, a shiny and pumped-up take on the Americana-tinged indie sound he's been tinkering with since 2017's Rocket, G sings about beginning a new life "when the light came big and bright." I don't think he's singing about the glow of Kingdom Come. I think he's singing about the light of his child – the sun/son that he intones about during the hook of "Afterlife." When he's singing about running on "in between heaven and the TV screen," I think he's singing about finding harmony between the heaven of family life and the professional music career that's propelled him onto TV screens.
The tension between art and fatherhood is a topic he addressed with a rare bluntness on "Miracles," but sonically, "Afterlife" feels like it's connected to the following song on God Save the Animals, "Forgive." "Forgive" is the final song on that album, and it ends with one of the best licks Alex G has ever written. A lick I've been humming periodically since the first time I saw him play it live several months before the album came out in 2022. I knew as soon as I heard "Afterlife" that I recognized the chord progression – especially once Alex G pointedly returned to that very lick during "Afterlife"'s denouement. "Forgive" is a much more ambiguous song than "Miracles," but I interpret it as a song about coming to terms with past mistakes and accepting that it's time to move forward. "Forgive" is a conclusion. "Afterlife" is a new beginning. And oh, what a wonderful dawn it is.
Cash Only Tony's/Autumn Sonata - Split
Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 10, 2020
After binging that Told Not to Worry album last week, I went on a bender listening to as many white-belt emoviolence bands as I could find. So many fucking young groups have dropped amazing EPs/demos in this milieu within the last year, but the one I literally cannot stop listening to is Cash Only Tony's side of their new split with Autumn Sonata. Cash Only Tony's are a Brooklyn screamo band who dropped their demo back in January, which was a patchy blend of ripping emoviolence and mildly cloying folk-punk.
The three songs on this split are so much better. Heavier. Slicker. Angstier. Stormier. The way the femme clean vocals come in during "What Size Shoes Are Those? My Size!" sounds genuinely beautiful to me. The Autumn Sonata side of the split is just OK. The Richmond band have a more conventional emoviolence sound, but the recording quality is weak and only one of the songs ("Bad Day at White Rock") feels serious enough to earn my full attention. The Cash Only Tony's side is so good, though, that I don't even care. This is some of my favorite 2025 music of any genre.
forty winks, Gaadge, Ear Training @ Hammer House
Last week, Feeble Little Horse played a secret house show in Pittsburgh. This week, their hometown disciples in forty winks played a not-so-secret house show in the basement of a Feeble Little Horse member's apartment. To me, these two shows happening on back-to-back weekends felt like a passing of the torch between Pittsburgh's best indie export this decade and a group who could very well be the city's next breakout act. For the uninitiated, forty winks are a fresh-faced quartet who make noisy, prickly, technically dexterous shoegaze that I've situated in a burgeoning wave of post-Feeble 'gaze bands taking over Pittsburgh's DIY scene. Of the three groups I wrote about in that piece (Gina Gory and James Castle being the others), forty winks are the most promising, and the EP they dropped on Crafted Sounds (Feeble, Merce Lemon, Gaadge) last week, Love Is a Dog From Hell, demonstrates why. The songs are great, the sound is great, and their vibe is alluring. Live, they still have some kinks to work out.
I insisted to my friends that we get to the show early because the last time I was at Hammer House – to see Her New Knife and Hooky in January – I arrived late and was so far back from the stage area that I could barely catch a glimpse of the bands the whole time. The venue has a peculiar layout where the bands perform in what's basically a moat on one side of the narrow room, meaning the crowd stands a solid foot-and-a-half above them, making it hard to see anything if you're more than five rows back from the monitors. This time, we rolled up during forty winks's soundcheck and hovered by the merch booth so we could scoop tapes and CDs before they all sold out (they were gone before forty winks even took the stage that night). I saw several of the same college kids from the Feeble show milling about, including a dude with a different Jane Remover shirt than the one he was wearing last week.
Like the Feeble show, a DJ-producer named Ear Training opened the set with jerk mashups of pop and rap songs. It was fun for about eight minutes and then the songs began to blur together and my mind drifted elsewhere. The next act was Gaadge, one of Pittsburgh's best shoegaze bands who are technically contemporaries of Feeble Little Horse even though their members are a half-step older. (Ex-Pilots, Nasty Nancy, Living World, and EKGs are among the other bands the Gaadge dudes play in). I last saw them open for Bleary Eyed at a bar back in the fall, but their sound is more well-suited for a basement setting where the dust in the air seems to accentuate their dirty tones and floaty grooves. It's clear that Gaadge have studied Isn't Anything like a sacred text, but they don't waste all their time dialing in the perfect textures. They realize that solid riffs, gratifying dynamic builds, and jaded 90s hooks are equally important to shoegaze as picking the correct fuzz pedal, all of which makes Gaadge such a fun band to see live. They sounded like a band playing great songs rather than a band playing great tones.
It was cool to see Gaadge get an enthusiastic reaction from a room of college kids who've probably never seen them, but it was clear that the night belonged to forty winks. While the headliners tuned their instruments, I was sandwiched next to a gaggle of teens who were doing Family Guy impressions and shouting out nonsense to whoever was in earshot. As soon as forty winks kicked into their set with "Noise," their ear-burrowing first single, the amateur Peter Griffins to my right began bashing and thrashing like maniacs, and the whole center of the room opened up into a feisty push-pit. For the first couple songs, forty winks sounded amazing. They played a nightcore'd version of "Every Time We Touch" during their first tuning break, and the more aggressive songs off of Love Is a Dog From Hell were delivered with the right amount of quasi-screamo gusto.
It was the slower tracks where things fell apart. There was one song where they had to stop and start five times before getting it good enough play through the shakiness. The crowd cheered them on after the fourth attempt, but it was the type of amateurish mistake that more time in the practice space surely would've ironed out. It was also an odd move to close the set with EP opener "liadfh." It's one of my favorites on the project, a purring ambient-gaze smokestack in the vein of Lovesliescrushing and m b v- era MBV, but it was too quiet a note to end what began as a floor-scuffing punk-gaze set. I don't know how many shows forty winks have under their belts, but it's probably less than 10. Their members are all in college but they look roughly 15. I'm not harping on them by saying that their set was uneven: I'm simply holding them to the standards they set for themselves with Love Is a Dog From Hell, which is one of the best shoegaze projects I've heard all year. Regardless, in five years, I won't remember that forty winks' EP release show had its shoddy moments. I'll just remember that I was there, and that'll be cool because forty winks will be – so long as they keep practicing – a much, much bigger band by then.
Chasing Down
KARLY HARTZMAN
of
Wednesday
Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.
I usually find it gauche to be the "I'm an OG fan" guy, but I'm an OG Karly Hartzman fan. I saw the first-ever set by her old band Diva Sweetly and have been listening to Wednesday since the yep, definitely years (iykyk). Their 2020 shoegaze reinvention, I Was Trying to Describe You To Someone, was one of my favorite shoegaze records of that year, and I've liked every successive Wednesday album more than the last. The North Carolina band's new single, "Elderberry Wine," strips away the distortion and reveals the balmy country-pop band that lives beneath the fuzzy bramble. I never thought a Wednesday song sans the blown-out guitars would sound so attractive to me, but "Elderberry Wine"'s hook has been bopping around my head all week. Hartzman's writing has come a long way since I first heard her inimitable warble all those years ago, and it's been rewarding to hear my taste developing in tandem with Hartzman's musical progression. It's fun to be a Wednesday fan.
For this edition of Chasing Down, I talked to Hartzman about her interest in hardcore, her favorite Drive-By Truckers and Lucinda Williams music, some of her "Hot Topic t-shirt wall" faves, and other inquiries related to her own music. Check out the full Q&A below.
I know you've been listening to a lot of hardcore this year. Tell me about your relationship with that genre and why those sounds are hitting for you right now. Any standout faves?
I moved to Greensboro from Asheville earlier this year (I see myself moving back to Asheville soon but it's been a cool trip to be back in my hometown for a lil while) and the local DIY venue here throws a lot of hardcore/screamo shows. I feel like I need to be put in a retirement home a lot of the time when I roll up to the gigs, but the energy is just so fun and exciting it's been fun to support the local bands who are making that music. I honestly don't listen to most of their recordings, I just try to show up to the shows when I see 'em on the calendar.
There's a band called Middle Earth that is really popular here in Greensboro but they might've broken up. The front person of that band is in this other speed core band called Negative Bias that I fuck with.
brant213
I got really into Carry On last month but the gang vocals sometimes give me Warped Tour era PTSD lol. I think Gel is one of the coolest bands to ever exist but they broke up recently, too... idk if you covered that on ur blog but... fuckin crazy implosion. I hope that front person does vocals in some other band....they're a fuckin star!!!
I fucking love Gouge Away. Their discography has really worn a hole in my music listening pocket. One of my favorite voices of all time. My real faves when it comes to screamier/noiser music aren't really hardcore...I'm really obsessed with stuff like Harvey Milk, Sumac and Skullflower. I just love expert guitar tone and intentional/beautiful feedback. You wouldn't know it from listening to my guitar live, though, my tone fuckin sucks – I have no ear for it. Luckily Jake and Xandy fill in those gaps for me usually lol.
I think skramz is cool.... I like that its a genre that's getting built up rn. I don't really know any of those bands by name, though, but the 21-year-olds who give me my tattoos when I'm touring are always playing that shit and I enjoy 85% of it. I've been listening to a lot of shit you write about in your newsletter (Holder, Ted Williams, Haywire, the list goes on) and it's been cool to get some new listening that way. There's a record store in NC called Sorry State also that puts out a really comprehensive hardcore newsletter every week.
Idk, I'm kinda playing catch up with this shit... I wasn't raised on it so my knowledge is all over the place and I'm back tracking to make up for lost time. Honestly would love a crash course on some foundational stuff to really beef up my knowledge if there's any recommendations of resources you have for that.