News

Drag City Press - the final frontier! Or so we thought back in the year 2000 (whotta coincidence) when we put out John Fahey's How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life. For a record label like ours, releasing books somehow implied the big time - and so we continued to search for projects that we could get behind and continued to find goods ones that now fill our catalog - or as we like to call it, "library." Now it's 2019, and we're still... (read more)

"Wasted" is a reflection of Nashville legend Chris Gantry's long and winding path through this world - but the vitality of the songwriting stops the music from becoming simple elegy or denouement. Chris' crafty old-school way with a tune and his smooth melodicism gives him the space to tell his tales with ease; lovers, losers and madmen are depicted with warmth and empathy, a genuine love of the human spirit and the singing chops of a man who's known tens of thousands of... (read more)

Put the hot 'n humid back into summer! Deep, drippy and super trippy, Purling Hiss' latest EP, Interstellar Blue, is packed to the brim with four new tunes available exclusively on the digital doo-dad of your choice! The first single, "Useful Information", is a euphoric outpouring of sugared guitar and insta-catchy vocals atop a steadfast n' slithering rhythm section, kaleidoscopically coloring what you hear like a full-on head rush. Mike Polizze's got a penchant for executing perfect "stuck-in-your-head" songs... (read more)

They say good things come in threes-and the new Mike Donovan album is back to remind us! Exurbian Quonset is his third solo outing, less than a year after his second solo, How To Get Your Records Played In Shops (which proved that good things came in twos last year). The opener, "Digital Dan", peels out like a dragster doing donuts behind the Dunkin Donuts - a bit meta, sure, and a bit just plain FUCKED too. Thankfully that's as far as the ol'... (read more)

Roots of Confusion Seeds of Joy is here, and just in time for everyone! As one of the practitioners of an increasingly rare form of musical alchemy, Major Stars have proven to be an antidote to all sorts of real-world trauma. Put on an album of theirs, and you're bound to be catapulted into a world of rock-based abstraction, diffraction, and finally, sweet distraction.

Playing material arranged for a sextet fronted by a trio of guitars, Major Stars have developed a habit of rehearsing... (read more)

There's breakup records. There's apocalypse records. Then there's the Purple Mountains  record! This new musical expression from David Berman is his most to-the-bone yet, very frankly confessing to a near-total collapse from the word go, before delving into the sorry subtext with twin lasers of personal laceration and the saving grace of a professional songwriter's natural remove. Our unofficial Gen X poet laureate has written a collection of songs that cries to be understood in the misbegotten country that made everything great about... (read more)

It's no wonder Soho Theater booked a long string of gigs for Neil Hamburger this month - laughter is always the best medicine, and given the will-they-won't-they state of things in Great Britain, London-types must be in need of a salve! But let's get serious - all jokes have some semblance of truth to them, and in case you missed it in the previous sentence, the important thing to notice is that Neil Hamburger is playing two back-to-back residencies at Soho Theater in London this... (read more)

"What Comes After Certainty" - that's what the whole Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest album is about. But what comes after "What Comes After Certainty"? On this album, that would be Side 3 - the traditional side in pop-rock lore in which an album may attempt to reach its farthest-out point,  a dizzying apex of music and meanings where the thinness of penultimate air produces a sense of abstraction in the ear of the traveler.  
 
That said, we know that Bill... (read more)

Crack open those whip-its and give 'em a deep pull, Dead Rider are hot on the trail once again! Chicago's weirdest, wildest and whacked out band are bringing it all back home again baby with freshly announced tour dates dotted across the US of A. Wafting through the room is the gloss and shine of shattered rhythm and blues, whether it's the swelling of bareback drones, surreal organ chords or the deft tailing of guitar lines designed to shock the body into attention or, even... (read more)

"Our salivating makes it all taste worse," croons Ty Segall in "Taste", the lead single from his forthcoming album, First Taste, due August 2nd. He's talking about us: how we're the masters of our own destiny, tellers of our own prophecy, makers of our own sickened choices. It's a warning, but this time, the finger is pointing back at him too. He's one with us. First Taste is an introspective set for Segall after the extroversions of 2018's Freedom's Goblin. Lines of... (read more)