This week’s best new indie releases featuring Oso Oso, Spoon, Nala Sinephro, Toro Y Moi, Kelly Lee Owens, and more.
Indie music has grown to include so much. It’s not just music that is released on independent labels, but speaks to an aesthetic that deviates from the norm and follows its own weirdo heart. It can come in the form of rock music, pop, or folk. In a sense, it says as much about the people that are drawn to it as it does about the people that make it.
Every week, Uproxx is rounding up the best new indie music from the past seven days. This week, we got new music from Kelly Lee Owens, Adrianne Lenker, Oso Oso, and more.
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Spoon’s beloved eighth album, They Want My Soul, recently turned 10. To commemorate that milestone, the Austin indie rockers have shared a deluxe version of it, which features 11 bonus tracks. Who knew the indie-pop banger “Inside Out” started as a sub-two-minute piano dirge? Or that “Do You” was once called “The Way Love Comes” and had a swung rhythm pattern? Mostly consisting of early demos recorded by Britt Daniel solo or the whole band, it’s a fun peek behind the proverbial curtain to hear the beginning stages of these now-classic songs.
The reality television star-to-musician pipeline has its fair share of participants. But usually they aren’t indie rockers who collaborate with Illuminati Hotties and once played guitar in Guerilla Toss. That is, most reality television stars aren’t Ben Katzman, a finalist on the 46th season of Survivor whose forthcoming new solo album, Tears On The Beach, documents his time competing in Fiji over distorted guitar riffs, aggressive punk drumming, and thrash metal-inspired vocal delivery. Such is the case with “Buckwild Blindsides,” in which, alongside Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin and Mannequin Pussy’s Kaleen Reading, Katzman showcases his musical eccentricities and aptitude for writing indelible hooks. It blazes by with playful ferocity in under a minute and a half. The new music proves that Katzman isn’t your typical reality TV star, and, with his genuinely wild ideas, neither is he your typical indie rocker.
