On August 14th, Sub Pop Records will be unbearably full of themselves to release “You Say I Romanticize,” the crucial new album from Sweeping Promises. Recorded over an 18-month period, “You Say I Romanticize” is a tribute to the chaos of creation and collaboration under shifting circumstances. Guitarist Caufield Schnug and bassist/vocalist Lira Mondal found and tested themselves in their combination tour house and recording studio in Kansas, annually working on dozens of albums from other bands, hosting tour stops, planning shows, and the like. After an immersive process of tracking and whittling down demos for the album and carving out an idiosyncratic chamber-recording method for its intentional wall-of-sound, the duo brought in touring drummer Spenser Gralla to play the songs as the band would on stage. “You Say I Romanticize”‘s frenzied execution, akin to the group’s renowned live show, prevails most of all in Mondal’s exhilarating vocals. Whereas previously, you might have heard a growl here and there on certain Sweeping Promises tracks, the band’s formidable singer shouts, roars, hits all sorts of tricky notes, and shreds her throat all over the record. Hear for yourself on the debut single and pummeling opener “Shooting Shadows.” Following up their #1 Single at new music shows nationwide ““Holding Out” (Top 10 Year To Date As Well on the SubModern Report!), New York City’s King Falcon next confront the weight of difficult decisions on their new single “Wait.” With their signature blend of vintage guitars, NYC grit, and 21st century attitude, the trio continue to blaze a path of their own on this new share. “’Wait’ is an emotional moment of reflection and a plea for forgiveness over thunderous drums and energized guitar riffs. We all mess up, but growth happens in those moments. This song is about confronting mistakes and realizing that sometimes you can’t fix the past.” – Michael Rubin (King Falcon) “Holding Out” is a bonafide slice of modern alt pop…..I can hear this song everywhere.” – Matt Pinfield/KCSN Formed in 2020 in the local Brooklyn music scene, King Falcon consists of frontman and primary songwriter Michael Rubin (vocals, lead guitar), bassist Joe Conserva, and drummer Dipayan “Dip” Chakraborty. Since before their 2023 self-titled debut album, the trio has cut their teeth in the live space across the country, playing over 150 shows in the last two years. With over 1.5M streams and 900K in 2025 alone, King Falcon have cemented themselves as a band to watch. King Falcon‘s 2025 single “Plastic Crown” rose to #1 on Amazon Music’s Breakthrough Rock Playlist for multiple weeks and landed at #45 on Mediabase in its first week. MXDWN named the trio ‘Best New Artist,’ and Guitar World praised the group as “one of NYC’s most exciting indie-rock bands.” The group has since shared stages with artists as diverse ranging from The Struts and Sublime with Rome and is only Just getting started! The Bug Club will release “Every Single Muscle,” the Welsh band’s incredible new album on Friday, May 29th, from Sub Pop. The 18-track long player features the first single, “Watching the Omnibus,” along with approximately 17 other tight, anxious, and engaging garage-punk number. “Every Single Muscle” was produced and mixed by Tom Rees at Rat Trap Studios in Cardiff, Wales, and mastered by Mikey Young. “Every Single Muscle” will be the band’s fifth album, making it a hat-trick for the Welsh duo and their esteemed Seattle-based patrons. Since “Very Human Features,” which emerged in June of 2025, the non-stop tour has seen the BBC 6 Music and KEXP favourites ping-pong across the Atlantic like they used to the Severn Bridge. Various festival slots in the summer kept them from having any sort of holiday – who needs one when you live in Wales anyway? – until it was time to head back to the writing room. “Watching the Omnibus” is the first reveal of many sub-two-minute tracks on the album, setting the tone for The Bug Club’s punkiest offering yet and recalling both the short, sharp snaps of their very first singles and the grunt of recent releases. Initially comprising the songwriting core of Sam Willmett (vocals/guitar) and Tilly Harris (vocals/bass) with Dan Matthew (drums), The Bug Club started plying their trade in 2016. They were signed by UK label Bingo Records in Autumn 2020 and first single “We Don’t Need Room for Lovin” was released in February 2021, followed by EP “Launching Moondream” One. It quickly established the band as the tongue-in-cheek and live-focused antidote to the previous year’s penned-in pandemic drudgery. BBC 6 Music’s Marc Riley was an early champion. During a trip to America they caught the eye of Sub Pop, just in time to get them on board to serve up a beefy slab of garage-punk on “On the Inner Workings of the System,” gaining an appropriately beefed-up stateside following in the process. The partnership proved fruitful, and with Sup Pop firmly in The Bug Club club they got cracking on “Very Human Features.” Is three the magic number? Probably not. But “Every Single Muscle” – number three for The Bug Club and the label – certainly comes close enough to convince your average strange human person that it might be. Weird Nightmare‘s new album “Hoopla,” the engaging and melodic second LP from former METZ frontman Alex Edkins, is out now! Every band worth its salt has a member who worked in a record store. In METZ, the fearless noise rock trio who released five full-length albums on Sub Pop between 2012 and 2024, it was singer and guitarist Alex Edkins. Slinging indie rock and hardcore records in his hometown record store while attending university, Edkins became an ardent student of rock ‘n’ roll; from the psychedelic 1960s to the DIY 1990s and beyond. The new Weird Nightmare album “Hoopla,” mixes and matches these wide-ranging influences in fun, exhilarating combinations, showcasing his sophisticated musical mind. Bursting to life with hooks and earworms. Co–produced by Edkins and Spoon’s Jim Eno at Seth Manchester’s Machines With Magnets in Providence, RI. Edkins expands Weird Nightmare’s dimensions to new heights, gilding the direct emotions of his straightforward songwriting with musical textures such as piano, bells, and castanets, giving these well-wrought tunes a shiny luster. “‘Might See You There’ is about going back to visit my hometown and being flooded with teenage nostalgia. Small-town boredom and isolation almost feel like a gift in today’s highly connected world. I feel fortunate for that time spent idly, down in the basement, learning the entire Rancid ‘Let’s Go’ album on guitar with my friends. I find it easy to romanticise that time in my life, even though I was, without question, a disgruntled kid who badly wanted to escape my surroundings and see the world.” —Alex Edkins The newly released self-titled debut from Brooklyn’s Amiture Music is a confluence of abrasive power and precision. The album’s new reveal “Last Summer,” follows up the first taste “Mountain”. Focusing on the psychology of a person who falls from grace out of boredom, this new single from the band once again animates the contradiction of ‘new enough’ and ‘classic forever,’ shifting from heady avant-garde to old fashioned, thrashing rock n’ roll. “‘Last Summer’ is inspired by the film of the same name by Catherine Breillat. We wanted to capture the feeling of speeding in a car with your arms wrapped around someone who compromises your life.” – Jack Whitescarver of Amiture Music “designed for you to mosh with your shadows” – Pitchfork “from genre splicing into something standalone and eminently replayable” – TheFADER Experimental music is playful at its core—a venturing out that is necessarily optimistic in its belief in the potential goodness of the new. For Jack Whitescarver, this ‘play’ is rooted in a pursuit of beauty in the unlikely site of rock music—particularly within the genre’s angularity and deconstructive tendencies. Underneath the hard edge, there is a coy expression of query that animates his process. On Amiture Music, such adventure had to be balanced with getting-the-feeling-across. Amiture Music‘s Whitescarver began making dark, synth-heavy pop as Amiture in 2018, releasing “The Beach” (2021) before pivoting to the experimental trip-hop of “Mother Engine” (2024). Drummer Justin Fossella, bassist Max Berine Shafer, and multi-instrumental Allie Wrubel joined Whitescarver later in 2024, and the project blossomed in character and scope from textured experiments in songwriting and genre into a fully-fledged band, Amiture Music. With this new name comes a move toward a collectivist approach. No longer just Whitescarver, Amiture Music is the sum of its parts, four distinct perspectives working in tandem to write adventurous yet accessible songs that are based on a shared belief in using dissonance to transcend rather than transgress. It’s Finally Here! Nation of Language have released their fourth album and full-length Sub Pop debut “Dance Called Memory!” Synthpop, minimal wave, post-punk, goth, new romantic — fans and critics alike have dug deeply into their vintage thesauruses to describe the beguiling work of the Brooklyn trio. And if you can’t precisely define the band, that’s the point. Current breakout radio single “Inept Apollo” is Now followed by focus “I’m Not Ready for the Change”! Nation of Language frontman Ian Richard Devaney has become prodigious in expanding what synthesizer-driven music can evoke, such that his output is as much an extrasensory journey as it is an all-too-human destination. With that experience in mind, he wrote the band’s fourth album — the spectral, spacious 10-track “Dance Called Memory”— in the most humble of ways: chipping away at melancholia by sitting around and strumming his guitar. On the new album Nation of Language once again collaborated with friend and returning producer and collaborator Nick Millhiser (LCD Soundsystem, Holy Ghost!). “What’s so great about Nick is his ability to make us feel like we don’t need to do what might be expected of us,” says synth player Aidan Noell, who, along with bassist Alex MacKay, rounds out the Nation of Language lineup. They imbued the new album with a shifted palette — for example, smashing all of the percussion of “In Another Life” through a synthesizer to cast a shade of early-2000s electronic music or by sampling chopped-up drum breaks on “I’m Not Ready for the Change,” for a touch of Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine. Ultimately, the trio’s hope was to weave raw vulnerability and humanity into a synth-heavy album. “As much as Kraftwerk is a sonically foundational influence, with this record I leaned much more towards the Eno school of thought,” Devaney says. “In this era quickly being defined by the rise of AI supplanting human creators I’m focusing more on the human condition, and I need the underlying music to support that… Instead of hopelessness, I want to leave the listener with a feeling of us really seeing one another, that our individual struggles can actually unite us in empathy.” Nation of Language’s first three albums, “Introduction, Presence” (2020), “A Way Forward” (2021), and “Strange Disciple” (2023) came as pandemic-era godsends: gorgeous, relatable soundtracks to our collective doldrums. Nation Of Language – “I’m Not Ready For The Change” (radio edit) Child Seat‘s new album “Hyperphantasia” is out! The SubModern faves peel from it their next reveal and new single “My Broken Heart”—the shimmering, emotionally charged new single’s truly a triumphant gem, that’s glowing with neon-lit longing, and we’re thrilled to deliver it to you first! Built on pulsing new-wave textures, cinematic hooks, and a chorus that aches to be sung through tears and windshields, Child Seat’s “My Broken Heart” captures the tension between knowing you should walk away and not being able to let go. Whether it’s a relationship or a friendship, nothing is worse than feeling like someone could so easily let you go. It’s the sound of emotional déjà vu: when you already know how the story ends, but you go back anyway. It’s the kind of heartbreak that doesn’t explode, it just lingers. Fronted by the commanding voice of Madeleine Mathews and shaped by producer/guitarist Josiah Mazzaschi’s textured, tension-driven sound design, Los Angeles’ Child Seat continues to carve out their signature space where post-punk urgency meets disco momentum and emotional immediacy. “My Broken Heart” showcases the band at their most vulnerable and anthemic, turning romantic collapse into something irresistible and euphoric. “My Broken Heart” on the band’s third album “Hyperphantasia” (on Moonboot! Records) further cements the LA indie outfit as one of the scene’s most dynamic and emotionally magnetic voices.
Listen: Sweeping Promises – “Shooting Shadows”
Listen: King Falcon – “Wait”
Listen: The Bug Club – “Watching The Omnibus” (radio edit)
Listen: Weird Nightmare – “Might See You There”
Listen: Amiture – “Last Summer” (radio edit)
Listen: Nation Of Language – “I’m Not Ready For The Change” (radio edit)
Listen: Child Seat – “My Broken Heart”
Artist Development and Exposure–Specializing in Modern Rock Radio Promotion
