Brooklyn-based artist Avery Friedman has announced her debut album, New Thing, for release via Audio Antihero on April 18. The album features James Chrisman (Sister.) and Felix Walworth (Florist / Told Slant), and the pre-order launches today.

Friedman had always felt that songwriting was just something that other people did until she was pushed by a transcendent live music experience and a traumatic mugging to seek catharsis through music. Playing her first show in July 2024, she soon shared stages with h. pruz, Dead Gowns, and Sister., and she impressed the latter’s James Chrisman enough that he offered to record her debut album. The result was a sonically deep and layered debut that sees Friedman explore her trauma and queerness with a raw open-heartedness inspired by artists like Adrianne Lenker, Squirrel Flower, and Babehoven.

The lead single, ‘Flowers Fell’, is an ode to transitional stages that uses the changing seasons to demonstrate the growth Friedman has experienced by finally immersing herself in her art. The song’s tense guitar bursts offer an illustration of resistance before a starry-eyed chorus blooms, and Friedman sings, “The flowers fell off when I was asleep / But that’s okay, ‘cause now it’s all green,” as she finds acceptance and resilience in the face of change.

“The opening melody for ‘Flowers Fell’ came to me on a headphone-less walk home one night down Greene Avenue in Brooklyn. I had noticed that the flowers that once lined the branches had been replaced by leaves -- seemingly in the blink of an eye. I was briefly disappointed until I considered that the petals had made way for something more sustainable – and equally full of life.  The song became a meditation on the concept of place – how things of our surroundings like ‘sidewalks,’ and ‘balconies’ and ‘trees,’ can act as fixed backdrops upon which we measure our personal evolutions (and the evolutions of our relationships) across the span of many seasons.” – Avery Friedman

Bad News is a new EP from Magana, the solo project of acclaimed LA-based multi-instrumentalist and photographer Jeni Magaña. Best-known as the current bassist and backing vocalist for Mitski (recently performing on the ‘Coyote, My Little Brother’ / ‘Buffalo Replaced’ single), Magaña is also one-half of the pen pin pop duo with Emily Moore, and has previously played with Lady Lamb, amongst others.

In March, she returned to the Magana project after a three-year-absence with the critically acclaimed Teeth LP, which reunited her with Audio Antihero Records (Frog / CIAO MALZ / Nosferatu D2) who issued her debut in 2016. Released to coincide with the peak illumination of the Worm Moon, her return was marked with a “witchy rock” sound that combined acid folk, synth pop, and indie rock. Magaña followed this in October with ‘DREAMS,’ a multimedia project released via the UK’s Hand Drawn Hand label, which combined ambient electronic music with a spoken word dream diary and a book of her photography.

The Bad News EP is her third release in a ten-month period. Teasingly described by Magaña as “cozy core” and “winter pop,” these four songs see her return to the singer-songwriter focus of works like Golden Tongue and Teeth but strip away the rock and ambient layers, so to emphasize words, meaning, honesty, and change.