News

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Matt Espy spent his youth playing every genre of music he could find, starting out in clubs at age 14 and launching his touring career at 18. He moved to Chicago in 1996 and continued his journey drumming and performing rock, avant-garde, jazz, and performance art pieces. Over the past decade, he’s found his home with Dead Rider, also on Drag City.

Hawksworth is Matt’s first solo adventure. In the field of solo drumming albums, it’s an avian psychedelic... (read more)

Alasdair Roberts' new album, Grief in the Kitchen and Mirth in the Hall, serves to highlight the intersection of the mythic, the eternal and the mundane at which we all find ourselves. The latest pre-release peek is here: "The Bonny Moorhen", a Jacobite-era allegorical song that was originally heard by Alasdair from an anonymous recording, made at the 1985 Orkney Folk Festival.

"The Bonny Moorhen" is a fond paean to a waterbird whose regal profile compares to none other than Bonnie Prince... (read more)

Coming in April: the reissue of OM's 2008 Sub Pop single, the first OM recording featuring Emil Amos on drums! B-side features another OM first--the band’s first dub version.

"Gebel Barkel" b/w "Version" will also be available on digital streaming platforms for the first time EVER the same day.

Now accepting pre-orders for a limited pressing 7" record before the April 7th street day--act swiftly before they are all gone!

East coasters, rejoice! After more than a decade as a fixture in Philadelphia's musical scene, Meg returns to its warm and loving embrace, and more, this May. With the release of her latest solo offering Furling in October and a west coast run already under her belt, Meg Baird is headed back to the Atlantic--this time with esteemed duo Damon & Naomi! Since the demise of Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi have worked as a duo, exploring folk music, psychedelia, and collaborations with... (read more)

In May of 1996, with a handful of releases under their belts, the kings of the insanity sound, then known simply as: The Champs, began recording their magnum opus, III. This time their sights were set beyond the still diminutive cassette format and trained squarely on a gatefold double album — the perfect medium for Total Music ™. Over the next year, in between touring up and down the west coast, the band began to mold their Kubrickian monolith.

In May of... (read more)

Drag On Girard, the forthcoming new album from Purling Hiss, cruises through states of mind and places in time — dreams from the past and for the future, firing on all cylinders, careening lawlessly as they slide around loose on the road. Mike Polizze and Purling Hiss have been rock'n down the highway for nearly fifteen years, with each exit landing the band in new, unknown destinations.

Drag On Girard raises the flag of raw, ragged glory, flashing between sentiment-drenched mood pieces and numbers... (read more)

Xylouris White's upcoming long player, The Forest In Me, flows freely through sprawling landscapes of discreet harmonics and cathartic bursts of melody. George Xylouris' Cretan lute and Jim White's drums track their progressive compositions though a spacious sound-field, rambling today down a well traveled path entitled "Red Wine."

Oh, red wine – is there anything that hasn’t been said or sung about you? The Xylouris White varietal is full bodied and pours easy, with generosity. Measures of Greek dance song squeeze through ... (read more)

2023 marks the twenty-seventh year of Suarasama; it is also the first year for this reissue of their 2013 masterpiece, Timeline.

Irwansyah Harahap and Rithaony Hutajulu, Ethnomusicology lecturers at University of Sumatera Utara, founded Suarasama in 1995 after they’d both graduated from University of Washington in Seattle. Their music, as played and sung on both Timeline and Fajar Di Atas Awan (first issued in 1998, reissued by Drag City in 2008) is hypnotic and joyful, progressing ancient North Sumatran music... (read more)

Fresh off a trek through the wild west coast of the USA, and with passports and synthesizers in hand, Bitchin Bajas (Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan) are set to continue their ever-expanding Bajascillators tour overseas, with select dates in Europe this coming April. If you've been out of the loop, the Bajas live show has been particularly (third-)eye opening since the release of Bajascillators, their sonic expansion strengthening into something so formidably life-affirming it's gotta be experienced to be believed.

Cory Hanson’s third solo LP, Western Cum is a high-stepping, hard-dancing, first love/heartbreak, tonight’s-the-night, future nostalgia kind of good time. It follows unpredictably upon 2021’s luminescent Pale Horse Rider, upping the heat to molten levels, six strings at a time.

Insatiably in search of greener pastures, Cory draws with vampiric glee from the madness coursing through the world outside; a spiraling shitshow that’s reawakened a compulsion in him – an old ambition, even! - to crush brutality and elegance together into a fresh... (read more)