Pressing Concerns: TV Star, Urq, Dipper Grande, Lupo Citta

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In this Monday Pressing Concerns, we’ll be looking at brand-new albums from TV Star, Urq, Dipper Grande, and Lupo Citta. That’s a good haul, so be sure to check them out below.

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TV Star – Music for Heads

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Father/Daughter
Genre: Indie pop, shoegaze, fuzz pop, dream pop
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
Pull Track: Reality Cheque

The debut album from Washington indie pop quintet TV Star has been a few years coming now. The group (vocalist/keyboardist Ashlyn Nagel, guitarists Bryan Coats and Che Hise-Gattone, drummer Tucker Devault, and Supercrush frontperson Mark Palm on bass) put out two EPs in 2023 and a collaborative release with similarly-minded Seattle group Spiral XP in 2024 before signing with Father/Daughter Records (The Softies, Mui Zyu, Remember Sports) for Music for Heads. TV Star’s first album is the latest example of the strong shoegaze/dream pop-inspired indie rock scene in the band’s home cities of Seattle and Tacoma (chronicled on the 2024 compilation From Far It All Seems Small, on which they appeared). Compared to some of their noisier peers, TV Star’s take on the genre is more crystal-clear and pop-forward, with a psychedelic and even “alt-country” bent that claims Mojave 3 and The Brian Jonestown Massacre as influences (I’m not sure how large the Paisley Underground looms over this record, but I’d imagine it would appeal to fans of those acts, too).

Music for Heads doesn’t hide its penchant for jangly, dreamy, often acoustic-heavy indie pop, as the majority of the LP’s first half indulges in it to some degree. “The Package” is an easing-into-things opening track, “Two Revolutions” turns towards anthemic folk-dream-indie-rock, “Texas Relation” adds strings from Spiral XP’s Max Keyes into the mix, and the two-minute “Greener Pastures” streamlines things to little more than acoustic strumming and Nagel’s vocals (helped out by harmonies from, I believe, Lena FM of Coral Grief). Fans of more electric, perhaps even “power pop”-curious indie pop will enjoy “Reality Cheque” and “Lodestar”, as well as “Out of My Bag”, which adds just a bit of the Madchester/Primal Scream-indebted sound to the mix. TV Star may not “rock out” or hide behind walls of sound as frequently as their shoegaze-revivalist peers, but their pop songwriting and infectious confidence ensure their place in the scene is well-earned. (Bandcamp link)

Urq – This Dismal Village

Release date: April 24th
Record label: Exploding in Sound
Genre: Post-punk, math rock, art punk, egg punk, psychedelic punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: We Don’t Need This Song

Matthew Urquhart may be known to blog readers and general music weirdos as one-half of Spllit, the New Orleans-based avant-post-punk duo who put out an album on Feel It Records in 2023. Now known simply as Urq, the Louisiana artist has entered the “solo project” sweepstakes with This Dismal Village, an art punk/psychedelic concept album (of a sorts) recorded entirely on cassette Portastudio. The album’s Bandcamp page mentions that “all songs except track nine utilize a custom tuning: C# A C# E F# C#” and that the design of the physical record’s lyric sheet is inspired by the quilt artist Susan Shie; for the album itself, Urq lists everything from a 1960s instrument called the Optigan to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness to Fitzcarraldo to math rock weirdos Palm as influences. 

While This Dismal Village bears the mark of an “egg punk”-associated artist (just check out the trebly, noodly guitars and rickety tempos of “Another Mystery” and “Airs of the Sledgehammered”), Urq is beautifully unrestrained by garage rock parameters: This Dismal Village hops from the math-pop/soft rock-esque “Glutton’s Coupon” to the towering, Ty Segall-esque psych-rock title track to the creepy-crawling “An Honest Film” to the lovely Elephant 6-esque dream-psych-pop piece “Kings in Bed” at lightning speed. The whole thing is over in a mere twenty-three minutes; before we know it, Urq is waving goodbye from This Dismal Village via the tape-warped guitar pop finale “We Don’t Need This Song”, straight out of the Bee Thousand cutting room floor (another one of This Dismal Village’s myriad influences, by the way). With This Dismal Village, Urq makes a bid for one of the most innovative guitarists in the wider indie punk underground and has some head-scratching fun with it, too. (Bandcamp link)

Dipper Grande – Sunset Provisions

Release date: April 10th
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Cosmic country, alt-country, psychedelia, college rock
Formats: CD, cassette, digital
Pull Track: Sunset Provisions

Dipper Grande are an “alt-cosmic bootgaze” quintet from Athens, Georgia, made up of a bunch of veterans of other local bands in bassist Mark Callahan, drummer Rick Field, and vocalist/guitarists Iain Cooke, Jackie Hales, and Jesse Wooten. Their first release was a three-song live EP last December, previewing their debut LP, Sunset Provisions. The five of them headed to Watkinsville, Georgia to record Sunset Provisions with engineer Matthew Greer at Full Moon Studio, and they received help from guitarist Hampton Campbell and vocalist Julia Barfield on some of these eight songs. Dipper Grande pull together several strains of “alt-country” and “Americana” on Sunset Provisions; there’s undoubtedly the Rust Belt country rock traditionalism of Magnolia Electric Co. here, with a Deep South molasses-slowness and, indeed, a cosmic side reminiscent of the spacier aspects of their hometown college rock.

“Well, they shut down the power plant / Guess they couldn’t keep the lights on,” goes the first line of the opening title track, a motif that returns in the psychedelic country rock of penultimate song “Decommissioned” (“Sundown over the decommissioned power plant,” Dipper Grande set the scene for us). While parts of “Decommissioned”, “Bodies”, and “Tape Tricks” are genuine rockers, Dipper Grande typically practice a sunny, lackadaisical version of psychedelia/cosmic country, aided by unhurried tempos and Cooke’s pedal steel. With Sunset Provisions, Dipper Grande effectively survey an expanse of industrial decay and decide to take their time with their art, giving it a better chance at outliving the manmade ruins around them. (Bandcamp link)

Lupo Citta – Inverno

Release date: April 24th
Record label: 12XU
Genre: Garage rock, 90s indie rock, fuzz rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Profile

Boston’s Lupo Citta made an intriguing debut at the beginning of 2024 with their first LP, Lupo Cittá, which found three longtime indie rockers (guitarist/vocalist Chris Brokaw, guitarist/bassist Sarah Black, and drummer/vocalist Jenn Gori) making “ragged garage rock with plenty of impressively screeching guitars” (as I said at the time). The second Lupo Citta album, Inverno, continues Lupo Cittá’s trend of mixing crashing rock and roll numbers with more pensive material, and, like a good sophomore record should, reflects a band getting more comfortable and automatic in traversing the different waypoints of their sound. The almost-dub influenced drone-rock of opening track “Wandering Eyes” and the quiet “Something Else” are a bold duo with which to lead off your indie rock record, but you’re rewarded with fuzzed-out garage rockers “Can’t See” and “Southern Forests” if you can hang with them (particularly in the former, they sound like their 12XU labelmates Weak Signal). For such a jagged-sounding band, Inverno is a smooth journey–the closing stretch is perhaps the trio’s most impressive work yet, moving from the dreamy “Red & Yellow” to the noisy indie pop of “Profile” to the minimalist, witchy title track to the perfunctory fuzz-rock closing track “Nap at Dawn” with ease. Lupo Citta have a very nice “greater than the sum of their parts” thing going on with Inverno. (Bandcamp link)

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