Talking With Hands’ contributions to the recently released split EP The Shit are full-blown rock songs, barreling out of the gate with big riffs and plenty of swagger. With “Hot Shit,” Matthew Smith’s pseudonymous project tells the autobiographical tale of coming up in Nashville’s underground scene. The video takes that personal story further with home footage capturing sweaty rock shows and youthful tour misadventures.
If you’re paying attention to the lyrics, Smith isn’t nostalgic for the rabble-rousing years so much as he’s accounting for them. The swagger is real but so is the punchline: marriage, parenthood, and knowing how the game works turned out to be the better story.
“Hot Shit” is tongue-in-cheek by design. Part takedown, part satire, but mostly a song about enjoying where you end up.
Talking with Hands autobiographical barn burner “Hot Shit” and Telefone’s sardonic takedown “Bullshit” just happened to emerge at the same time. This stroke of pure serendipity sparked an absurd and brilliant idea; join forces and release them together as The Shit – a split EP.
Both artists fleshed out additional songs for the offering and that brilliance bears fruit today. Four songs, starting and ending with the original offerings. It’s a sandwich of “shit” songs that are anything but.
Get Some Magazine premiered the release and had a whole lot of good things to say but I’m particularly pleased with “sonically heavy and spiritually sarcastic.” Or maybe “For not working on the songs directly together, Talking With Hands and Telefone are able to create some serious magic.” High praise.
Less than a week ago, Tower Defense dropped their latest two bangers – “Fit for Purpose” and “Artless Hands” – two catchy songs about corporate powers exploiting the land and commodifying our arts. Believe it or not, both are entertaining jams!
Speaking of entertaining, we just dropped a “Fit for Purpose” lyric video and it’s a hoot. Not only does it provide you with the actual words to sing along to, it’s a real hoot to see the workout routines from a bygone era. No shade to anyone getting fit but I don’t recall the last time I saw anyone lifting in a sweater!
A little levity to go alongside a big blasting rock song. What did those body jiggler machines even do?! Does anyone know??
On Friday, June 12th, Telefone and Talking With Hands will unveil The Shit, a split EP featuring two songs from each band that is anything but. The first peek arrives today in the form of “ESP” and its official visualizer.
Brought to you by a band that exists across two wildly different time zones (Valencia, Spain and Austin, Texas), it feels like a song about bridging distances, both physical and emotional. “Pick up your broken heart / And burn every single part” is as triumphant as it is heartbreaking.
The song is a soaring slice of indie pop-rock that carries all the eclectic influences Telefone expertly blends. It brings the feels but it’s leaving you with a earworm you can’t deny.
“ESP” is the first listen from the forthcoming split release, The Shit, shared with Talking with Hands. The two bands both found themselves with “shit” songs and combining powers was clearly the right move. Look for that on June 12th, 2026. In the meantime, get “ESP” in your ears.
Nashville’s most bombastic double bass quartet – Tower Defense – returns with a pair of new songs, “Fit for Purpose” and “Artless Hands”.
Together, these tracks tackle the frustration of our spaces being controlled and manipulated by the urge to increase the bottom line. “Fit for Purpose” targets Nashville’s sprawling, sun-baked parking lots multiplying across the city. These urban heat islands squeeze out shade, waste valuable space and simply lie in wait for the next sucker to pay.
“Artless Hands” takes aim at the streaming economy. Inspired by a 2021 Nashville Scene column by Chris Crofton, the reflection on “the executive class’s bloody, artless hands, unloading all the world’s music off the metaphorical back of a truck” became the song’s anchor. The track weaves in lyrical threads from Converge and Christina Aguilera, originally placeholders that ended up too right to remove.
Together, the songs form a companion piece: two meditations on commodification, one about land, one about sound, both about profiteers disinterested in the common good.
After long last, the debut full-length album from Bleary has arrived. The songs of Little Brain began forming pre-pandemic with each composition and arrangement being refined in front of live audiences.
When that was no longer an option, the band shifted to building at home studios. Peter Mercer, Callan Dwan and Taro Yamazaki traded demos and chased textures; ideas they never would have considered with in-person performances.
The band found a way to record the earliest tracks with Joshua Ditty during peak pandemic, confirming their pursuit was bearing fruit. As the world returned, they found themselves at County Q with Mike Purcell, completing the process of capturing the album and layering their ideas. Always molding, shaping, and sculpting into the right form. The final recordings that emerged were the result of years of refinement, exploration and relentless experimentation.
The songs are dense and immersive, some with dozens of guitar tracks. Lyrically, the album chases themes of loss, insufficiency and a deep yearning for acceptance. The title track perfectly captures that feeling of finding your place, emphatically inquiring “If I’m gonna be someone, can I be that to you? // I swear on my life I’ll be someone we both like.”
Dwan and Mercer’s vocal harmonies cut through the wall of sound, carrying you through the fray. Sometimes they blur into one another as one voice, sometimes they play off of one another – but they always capture the vulnerability with an eloquent melancholy.
Bleary by Merit Gentile
It’s been a long road to get Little Brain out into the world but the album is a beautiful testament to that persistent, patience and vision.
The last release from General Trust was January of 2025 with “Apologia.” Now, 457 days later, we’re excited to share a brand new batch of songs with the PLANS 2 EP.
If you’ll allow me the courtesy of a metaphor: After land has been cultivated, it must be left fallow. Intentionally unseeded to promote fertility, encourage nutrients, and regrowth. This period will increase biodiversity within the soil and surrounding ecosystem. The more rest and regeneration the land is permitted, the richer the harvest.
PLANS 2 contains two brand new neo-noir duskwave tracks and two remixes; one of the title track and one from the GT catalog. Altogether, a rich harvest unto itself.
If you recall your 7th grade science glass, “mitosis” is the name for the process by which cells divide and produce an identical pair. It is how plants and animals grow, creating roots, sprouts, leaves and limbs. This process happens with all life on the planet and, interestingly enough, there’s even a version of it that is shaped like a star. Elements of the universe reflected back in micro-biological versions.
Infinite Limb’s new album Seeds for Cosmic Radio touches on these ideas conceptually. The microcellular and the interstellar are connected; in proverbial form and in literal atomic formations.
The new video for “Mitosis Bloom” explores this visually with handmade textures; evoking the unseen world of plants and cells, as well as the intergalactic swirl that contains us all.
The single is streaming everywhere; serving as a beacon to draw you to the full album. You can hear the entire journey on Ampwall and Bandcamp. You can even pick up a packet of flower seeds – tended from Infinite Limb’s own garden – to harvest your own mitosis.
Bleary have unveiled their fourth (and final) pre-release single ahead of their full-length debut, Little Brain. The new track, “925,” is the anti-work anthem we all need right now.
Steeped in the same distinctive guitar tone as the prior three singles – “sugar splint”, “bug” and “foyer” – but more bombastic and immediate than we’ve heard before, “925” is the rallying cry to remind you that work can make you sick, get out there and wake up, smelling those flowers in the morning sun.
First and foremost, Infinite Limb (Kyle Numann) has joined the yk roster. The Nashville based artist and musician has an impressively varietal body of work – from his early solo performances with looping pedals, to multiple albums and videos with his art-folk band Cloudmouth, to three prior albums as Infinite Limb; his creations have run the gamut of ideas and always proven to be compelling endeavors.
He’s also curated a monthly series of collaborations called Ambient Sundays. These early evening performances are curated by Numann to help cultivate a community of like-minded creatives in Nashville. It is a damn fine way to spend a Sunday night.
We are excited to work with Infinite Limb on his fourth album, Seeds for Cosmic Radio – an album inspired the unfathomable connection of your home garden, the atom smashing nuclear furnace of our sun and the interconnectedness of each and every one of us in the outlandishly large universe.
Which brings us directly to the second note of good news, Infinite Limb’s fourth album (and debut on yk Records), is available today on Bandcamp and Ampwall.
Watching his front yard become a living ecosystem each summer, Kyle Numann reflected on the intertwining of the plant-cosmos connection – every leaf on the planet powered by star energy, the entire web of life feeding on cosmically produced plant energy. The colliding scales between the minutiae of plant cells and the incomprehensible magnitude of a star’s nuclear furnace inspired Seeds for Cosmic Radio.
The album came together through weeks of listening through archives of multitrack recordings from the previous several years — compositions built on hardware sequencers, performed live, captured in the moment. These were curated and given fresh attention with renovated arrangements. The sequence of pieces was arranged alongside a field recording of ocean waves at night, ebbing and flowing continuously.
Numann’s final 17-track exploration functions as an aural journey from the confines of the garden to the expanses of outer space, a reminder of the constant conversation between the natural world and the human landscape. He notes a second inspiring force, “I find the theme of interconnectedness to be a powerful tool. In an age of environmental uncertainty I find connecting to the natural world helps to keep me grounded. We live in romantic times, where truth flies on a feeling. Maybe one way to progress is to encourage the kinds of feelings we need to float us into a better future… or at least give us the peace of mind to keep trying.”
To commemorate the release, Seeds for Cosmic Radio is paired with a package of Zinnia seeds cultivated and hand-harvested from Numann’s home garden. These are hardy bloomers that pollinators love, each flower capable of producing dozens more seeds. The journey to growth starts in the dirt and yearns for a remnant of smashed atoms from 93 million miles away.
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