Taken from the album Golden Doubt.

Melbourne-via-Tasmanian four-piece Quivers first released their 2018 debut We’ll Go Riding on the Hearses as hand-made cassettes. The album dealt with singer Sam Nicholson’s loss of his brother in a free-diving accident, and “trying to not think about that, and often coming back to ghosts, benders, water, and pissing in the snow.” When demand for the album grew, it received a vinyl release and led Quivers to tour the US, film a KEXP session, and be selected by NPR Music for both the Austin 100 SXSW preview and as a ’Slingshot’ artist to watch. Their life-damaged but hopeful jangle pop has only sharpened since then, and while 2021 follow-up Golden Doubt conjures up REM or The Clean there is a lyrical directness that sets this record apart as always its own.

Golden Doubt is carried by shimmering guitars and the harmonizing vocals of members Holly Thomas and Bella Quinlan. Elevated by the production of Matthew Redlich (Holy Holy, Husky, Ainslie Wills), the record explores what comes after grief, and how we throw ourselves back into love. As Nicholson explains, the album tries to bottle “the rush of feelings and fears when you give in to falling for someone. It’s also an album in love with other albums, and the other bands around us.” Before each take at Woodstock and The Aviary studios in Melbourne, Australia, the band would imagine a scene together (a waterhole for “Laughing Waters”, an overgrown carpark for “Videostores”) and then dive in to capture live group takes. 

Quivers need to get words on the page and sounds out to keep moving on. Both Sam and Holly lost their brothers in the same year, and through that shared vulnerability they all have together that runs deep. Golden Doubt is also a love letter to playing music as a band and processing it all together rather than just carrying it as a weight. The cancellation of a 21-date US tour they had slated for 2020 has left them undeterred; Quivers plans to continue being a band and get back out into the world as soon as it’s possible.

Of the title, Sam says: “Golden, because musically we daydream with the guitars of Teenage Fanclub and The Cure, the singing of The Roches’ sisters, the basslines of Another Sunny Day, and the drums of Lower Dens or Car Seat Headrest. Golden Doubt, because hitting your thirties
after losing people knocks you off balance for a while, but no longer caring what the world thinks is always a breakthrough feeling.” Quivers may have created the antidote to existential dread by embedding it in songs that feel so present and alive, we might not find firm ground, but there’s bliss in swinging from hook to hook as they sing “we stayed out ‘til there was glitter in our lungs.” Sooner or later you wake up and the doubt has long gone.

Quivers - Gutters Of Love

Taken from the album Golden Doubt.

Melbourne-via-Tasmanian four-piece Quivers first released their 2018 debut We’ll Go Riding on the Hearses as hand-made cassettes. The album dealt with singer Sam Nicholson’s loss of his brother in a free-diving accident, and “trying to not think about that, and often coming back to ghosts, benders, water, and pissing in the snow.” When demand for the album grew, it received a vinyl release and led Quivers to tour the US, film a KEXP session, and be selected by NPR Music for both the Austin 100 SXSW preview and as a ’Slingshot’ artist to watch. Their life-damaged but hopeful jangle pop has only sharpened since then, and while 2021 follow-up Golden Doubt conjures up REM or The Clean there is a lyrical directness that sets this record apart as always its own.

Golden Doubt is carried by shimmering guitars and the harmonizing vocals of members Holly Thomas and Bella Quinlan. Elevated by the production of Matthew Redlich (Holy Holy, Husky, Ainslie Wills), the record explores what comes after grief, and how we throw ourselves back into love. As Nicholson explains, the album tries to bottle “the rush of feelings and fears when you give in to falling for someone. It’s also an album in love with other albums, and the other bands around us.” Before each take at Woodstock and The Aviary studios in Melbourne, Australia, the band would imagine a scene together (a waterhole for “Laughing Waters”, an overgrown carpark for “Videostores”) and then dive in to capture live group takes.

Quivers need to get words on the page and sounds out to keep moving on. Both Sam and Holly lost their brothers in the same year, and through that shared vulnerability they all have together that runs deep. Golden Doubt is also a love letter to playing music as a band and processing it all together rather than just carrying it as a weight. The cancellation of a 21-date US tour they had slated for 2020 has left them undeterred; Quivers plans to continue being a band and get back out into the world as soon as it’s possible.

Of the title, Sam says: “Golden, because musically we daydream with the guitars of Teenage Fanclub and The Cure, the singing of The Roches’ sisters, the basslines of Another Sunny Day, and the drums of Lower Dens or Car Seat Headrest. Golden Doubt, because hitting your thirties
after losing people knocks you off balance for a while, but no longer caring what the world thinks is always a breakthrough feeling.” Quivers may have created the antidote to existential dread by embedding it in songs that feel so present and alive, we might not find firm ground, but there’s bliss in swinging from hook to hook as they sing “we stayed out ‘til there was glitter in our lungs.” Sooner or later you wake up and the doubt has long gone.

Quivers - Hold You Back

Quivers - Chinese Medicine

Taken from the album The Watchful Eye of the Stars.

One stormy night in Ireland, Adrian Crowley’s brother brought home a wounded crow. After taking care of it for a time, the crow flew away on its own, leaving an impression behind: Crowley wrote a story, which would later become the aptly titled “Crow Song” on his brand new record & ninth studio album The Watchful Eye of the Stars.

Suffused with a hazy and surreal quality, Crowley describes Watchful Eye’s poignant narratives as those which insisted themselves upon him. After the fact, it seemed these songs came to him more or less fully formed. “It’s a beautiful and mysterious thing,” he says. Perhaps it is a tendency to hold onto memories (“It’s taken me so long to write to you / Well I just couldn’t find a pen,” he laments in “Bread and Wine”), that allows him to unleash them lyrically in completion. For Crowley, the creative process is an organic event rather than a practice he feels compelled to regulate or control. He approaches lyrics much like he does short story writing. “The songs straddle the conscious and subconscious world and some are even psychedelic in my mind, but to me they are all at once true stories and born of another place,” he shares. 

In making the album, Crowley moved between studio and at home recording, while John Parish (Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey) produced. The pair worked from tracks made initially by Crowley on a charity shop ¾ size nylon string guitar or Mellotron: “In this way, John wanted to keep some of the magic of that first take”, says Crowley. Contradictions and complexities are left intact, initial recordings were limited to one or two takes, and the songs feel more like a dream recounted upon waking.

Adrian Crowley - Bread And Wine

Taken from the album Me And Ennui Are Friends, Baby.

Comprised entirely of minimal solo piano arrangements, Ennui is despondently clear-eyed and smirkingly self-deprecating, completing a trilogy of records that started with 'The Queen Who Stole The Sky' and her only outing to date featuring a full band, 'Please Daddy'. 

Each record has followed Chadwick’s internal processing after a traumatic event, with Chadwick’s zeal for psychoanalysis front and centre. On Ennui, Chadwick presents an exacting intensity with her choice to pare back to piano and vocals. It's in this stark setting that she focuses on the attempt she made on her life in 2019. 

Just weeks before the Ennui recordings in 2019, Chadwick endured the breakup of a long term relationship and attempted her own life. These events followed the deaths of her father and a close friend, and it’s from this weighty internal mire that Chadwick emerges throughout the trilogy. Imaginably, the result is staggeringly abject. 

However, the incandescent nature of her will, knack for reportage and searing dark humour sets fire to the world she describes over these 12 songs. Lead single “Every Loser Needs A Mother” offers a glimpse into this dark humour, as Chadwick describes an undesired need to take care of a dependant man: “Well I laid out his clothes // And I laughed at his jokes // And I stumbled around in // Heels and no clothes // And I went to his hell // And he kicked me out.” The track touches on all-too familiar tropes, Chadwick’s voice commanding and wryly confessional over piano. 

The methods Chadwick employed on Ennui contrast those of her previous full-band record, which thrust her into a very different world of rehearsal, planning, restraint and control as a functional tool. The result, 2020’s critically acclaimed Please Daddy, was her most aching and engaging achievement to date: “a raw, often unnerving experience,” which “delivers compelling and uplifting catharsis” (Mojo). Recording Ennui shortly after the Please Daddy sessions, Chadwick concludes her trilogy by returning to the most immediate compositional process she can muster, doing it alone, with less between her and the microphone than ever before. Joined by long time production collaborators, Ennui was mastered by David Walker at Stepford Audio and mixed and recorded by Geoff O’Connor at Vanity Lair - both expertly bringing scale, subtlety and intangible ascendence to this recording. On Ennui, Chadwick is free, there is nowhere for her or us to run from the need to very presently and repeatedly articulate her trauma until it is simply, “articulated out.”

Sarah Mary Chadwick - At Your Leisure

Taken from the album Me And Ennui Are Friends, Baby.

Comprised entirely of minimal solo piano arrangements, Ennui is despondently clear-eyed and smirkingly self-deprecating, completing a trilogy of records that started with 'The Queen Who Stole The Sky' and her only outing to date featuring a full band, 'Please Daddy'.

Each record has followed Chadwick’s internal processing after a traumatic event, with Chadwick’s zeal for psychoanalysis front and centre. On Ennui, Chadwick presents an exacting intensity with her choice to pare back to piano and vocals. It's in this stark setting that she focuses on the attempt she made on her life in 2019.

Just weeks before the Ennui recordings in 2019, Chadwick endured the breakup of a long term relationship and attempted her own life. These events followed the deaths of her father and a close friend, and it’s from this weighty internal mire that Chadwick emerges throughout the trilogy. Imaginably, the result is staggeringly abject.

However, the incandescent nature of her will, knack for reportage and searing dark humour sets fire to the world she describes over these 12 songs. Lead single “Every Loser Needs A Mother” offers a glimpse into this dark humour, as Chadwick describes an undesired need to take care of a dependant man: “Well I laid out his clothes // And I laughed at his jokes // And I stumbled around in // Heels and no clothes // And I went to his hell // And he kicked me out.” The track touches on all-too familiar tropes, Chadwick’s voice commanding and wryly confessional over piano.

The methods Chadwick employed on Ennui contrast those of her previous full-band record, which thrust her into a very different world of rehearsal, planning, restraint and control as a functional tool. The result, 2020’s critically acclaimed Please Daddy, was her most aching and engaging achievement to date: “a raw, often unnerving experience,” which “delivers compelling and uplifting catharsis” (Mojo). Recording Ennui shortly after the Please Daddy sessions, Chadwick concludes her trilogy by returning to the most immediate compositional process she can muster, doing it alone, with less between her and the microphone than ever before. Joined by long time production collaborators, Ennui was mastered by David Walker at Stepford Audio and mixed and recorded by Geoff O’Connor at Vanity Lair - both expertly bringing scale, subtlety and intangible ascendence to this recording. On Ennui, Chadwick is free, there is nowhere for her or us to run from the need to very presently and repeatedly articulate her trauma until it is simply, “articulated out.”

This track is not available anymore.

Other tracks from Ba Da Bing Records/Grapefruit Records