Release Roundup: Sleigh Bells, SASAMI/Clairo, Phil Cook

* Sleigh Bells have ended a three-year break from releasing music with the arrival today (Jan. 28) of “Wanna Start a Band?” (Mom+Pop Music). The duo of Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller will also embark on their first tour since 2022 this spring, beginning May 7 in Phoenix and running through June 15 in Madison, Wi.

Recalls Krauss, “in 2008 while eating at a restaurant in Brooklyn with my mom, our server, Derek, wasted very little time asking me, essentially, “Wanna Start A Band?” Hard to believe that almost 17 years later we are still hyped and obsessively making records together. Derek started messing with the riff for this song around 2014 — it needed a lot of work but a spark was there. We had a band by then but didn’t know how long it would last. For us, this song is a reminder of how we started but it’s also the first part of a new story we want to tell — more on that very soon! We hope you will come along for the ride.”

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* SASAMI and Clairo have teamed for the former’s “In Love With a Memory,” which precedes her new album, Blood on the Silver Screen (March 7, Domino). The track was co-produced by Rostam and is accompanied by a video directed by Jay Swuen.

“I grew up going to Japanese or Korean ‘noraebang’ private karaoke rooms with my mom, who was secretly the most incredible singer,” SASAMI recalls. “Most of her go-to numbers were old Japanese and Korean folk songs that low key kind of made me feel like I was in a horror film or David Lynch movie. I can picture my mom in a Julee Cruise-type setting — single, jazz lounge spotlight and cigarette smoke hanging stalely in the air — singing one of those old songs with the most gorgeously haunting vibrato and breathtaking vocal control. That’s the feeling I was tapping into.”

SASAMI will tour this spring in support of Blood on the Silver Screen, beginning April 19 in Los Angeles.

* Multi-instrumentalist Phil Cook enlisted longtime friend and bandmate Justin Vernon to produce his new solo piano album, Appalachia Borealis, which will arrive March 21 on Sylvan Esso‘s Psychic Hotline imprint. The 11-track set was inspired by bird songs Cook encountered while living on a remote North Carolina farm in recent years and was recorded at Vernon’s April Base studio in Eau Claire, Wi. It includes 10 originals as well as a cover of Gillian Welch‘s “I Made a Lovers Prayer.”

Cook says the title track, which is out now, “is my favorite song I’ve written, written in a dreadfully torrential downpour on a particularly lonely and difficult day. A recording of loons calling on a lake at night enters on the last stanza, the moods exactly complementing one another respectfully. I don’t believe I could’ve written this song in my 20s or 30s and I certainly couldn’t have written it without experiencing some real losses in my life and the hole that remains in the aftermath. It heals me to play this song.”

Cook will begin a tour in support of Appalachia Borealis on March 27 at the Big Ears festival in Knoxville, Tn., and will be on the road through May 15 in Seattle.

* Indie rockers Sunflower Bean will return with their first album in three years, Mortal Primetime, on April 25. The lead single from the self-produced effort is “Champagne Taste,” which the group played live on a handful of occasions in 2024. “This song came after a period that felt like rock bottom for the band,” they say. “It is about feeling beaten down but still driving forward, to keep faith, to grow and to continue to create on our own terms, our Mortal Primetime.”

Following a February European tour and an appearance at South by Southwest in Austin in early March, Sunflower Bean will hit the road in North America beginning May 15 in Troy, N.Y.

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