CLUTCH shares more in common with The Grateful Dead, Rush, and the Allman Brothers than their heavy riffs and heady twists-of-phrase might suggest. Because like those bands, the supporters who adore CLUTCH are there for the experience, community, and authentic connection.   To love CLUTCH is to feel a sense of ownership, membership, and belonging.   Seneca Valley High School classmates Neil Fallon (vocals), Tim Sult (guitar), Dan Maines (bass), and Jean-Paul Gaster (drums) share an unshakeable musical and personal bond now three decades strong. Shaped by the same region which birthed Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and Rites Of Spring, CLUTCH crafts hyper-literate and libertine jams informed by hardcore fury and fuzzy, athletic, stoner rock.   A worldwide cabal of fans and critics cherish the band’s dense and diverse catalog of underground classics, released through major labels, indies, and since 2009, Clutch’s own Weathermaker imprint. Sunrise On Slaughter Beach, the band’s thirteenth studio album, is a slamming summary of everything that makes the band great and another giant leap forward into career longevity.   “There’s no question that Clutch etched themselves a name in the pantheon of great rock bands,” Lambgoat wrote in 2004. Classic Rock Magazine counted 2013’s Earth Rocker and 2015’s Psychic Warfare among the 50 Best Rock Albums of the 2010s. Rolling Stone described 2018’s Book of Bad Decisions as “bathed in the grit and liberal fuzz tone that have made their live shows legendary.”   Those live shows over the years include tours with Slayer, System Of A Down, and Marilyn Manson, and more recent co-headlining treks with Dropkick Murphys, Killswitch Engage, and Mastodon. Like Slayer or Iron Maiden, CLUTCH outlasted rock bands anchored to “hit songs” and the pressure of replicating them. The foursome from Germantown, Maryland, isn’t bound by trends. Across 13 studio albums and assorted releases since 1991, they’ve earned a reputation as one of the best around.

One of the most crowd-thrilling bands to burst onto the national scene in recent years, Giovannie and The Hired Guns have pushed the boundaries of rock-and-roll and country to forge an irresistibly gritty sound all their own. After building a massive grassroots following on the strength of their explosive live show, the Stephenville, Texas-based five-piece ascended to new heights with their smash hit “Ramon Ayala”—a 2021 release that climbed to #1 on the Active Rock Radio Chart and the Alternative Radio Chart, marking the first time in over 15 years that an artist’s first career-charting radio single reached the top spot on both tallies. Fueled by the enormous success they’ve achieved as an entirely independent act, Giovannie and The Hired Guns have now signed to Warner Music Nashville just in time for the release of their third full-length, Tejano Punk Boyz: an immediately vital body of work cementing their status as an essential new force in redefining the possibilities of Texas music.   The start of a bold new era for Giovannie and The Hired Guns—vocalist Giovannie Yanez, guitarists Carlos Villa and Jerrod Flusche, bassist Alex Trejo, and drummer Milton Toles—Tejano Punk Boyz expands on the wildly catchy brand of guitar-heavy alt-rock they first honed back when Yanez was working the counter at a local pawnshop. Like their self-titled 2020 sophomore effort, the 10-track album finds the band joining forces with producer Taylor Kimball (Koe Wetzel, Read Southall Band, Austin Meade), fully harnessing the band-of-brothers chemistry that makes their live set so exhilarating. In addition to delivering songs in both English and Spanish for the very first time, Tejano Punk Boyz doubles down on the culture-bending sensibilities that have long guided the band, fusing elements of everything from Red Dirt country to post-grunge to la musica norteña. “We didn’t want to hold back at all with this album,” says Yanez. “We all come from different walks of life, and we wanted to mesh those influences together and come up with something that feels really free. Because of that, I feel like we created something that’s completely true to us, and like nothing else out there right now.”   With its title taken from an inside joke between Yanez and his cousin, Tejano Punk Boyz infuses that free-spirited energy into every song, ultimately embodying a more joyful mood than their past work. “‘Ramon Ayala’ really set the tone for the album,” says Yanez. “Songwriting is an outlet for me, and on the last record I was going through some dark times in my life. But ‘Ramon Ayala’ came from thinking about my family and the music we love to listen to when we’re all partying together, and that sort of carried over into the rest of the album.”   Along with “Ramon Ayala”—a track that spent five weeks at #1 on Billboard’s Rock & Alternative Airplay Chart and earned acclaim from outlets like American Songwriter, who hailed it as “a cathartic anthem for the underdogs and rejects of society”—Tejano Punk Boyz features more emotionally raw offerings like the album-opening “Overrated.” Rooted in the band’s signature collision of combustible guitar work and unforgettable melodies, the sing-along-ready track serves as a prime showcase for Yanez’s reflective yet down-to-earth storytelling (from the chorus: “I’m such a freak/I love the way she hates it”). “At the time I was fighting with my girlfriend, so it was the perfect moment for that kind of song,” he notes. On “Numb,” Tejano Punk Boyz shifts into a darker tone as Giovannie and The Hired Guns channel the ache of disconnection, amplifying the track’s moody urgency with serpentine rhythms and brooding guitar tones. “Recording ‘Numb’ was probably the most fun we had in the studio—we didn’t try to force anything, we just let it all out and put everything we were feeling into the song,” says Yanez. And on “The Letter,” Giovannie and The Hired Guns share one of the album’s most vulnerable moments, a heart-on-sleeve love song that slips between English and Spanish as Yanez bares his soul with brutal honesty. “I’d always wanted to sing in both languages, but for some reason I was always too scared,” says Yanez. “When I was writing ‘The Letter’ it just happened naturally, and it instantly felt right.”   Originally from the Northern Texas town of Mineral Wells, Yanez first explored his unfiltered approach to songwriting at the age of 17 (“It pretty much started right after the first big heartbreak,” he notes). Around that same time, he began performing at local dive bars while holding down a job at a rock quarry. “I’d go play gigs and be out till about three in the morning, then get up to go to work at seven—it was a struggle for a while, but I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life,” says Yanez. Not long after landing his job at the pawnshop, Yanez crossed paths with Trejo and soon began assembling the Hired Guns lineup, then pushed forward with an equally grueling gig schedule. “When we first started out it was always, ‘Hey guys, can you play a four-hour set with two breaks? Here’s $200,’” Yanez recalls. As word got out about their can’t-miss live performance, the band began selling out shows all across Texas, in addition to sharing stages with the likes of Read Southall Band and Kody West.   With the arrival of their self-released 2017 full-length debut Bad Habits, Giovannie and The Hired Guns offered a first glimpse at the unbridled eclecticism that now defines their sound: Toles, for instance, brings a soulful intensity informed by playing music in church as a kid, while Flusche’s background includes session work with such prominent country acts as Sam Riggs & the Night People. Another independent release, Giovannie and The Hired Guns featured standouts like “Rooster Tattoo,” a slow-burning track that quickly amassed millions of streams on Spotify thanks to word-of-mouth buzz. As they set to work on Tejano Punk Boyz, Giovannie and The Hired Guns landed on Amazon Music’s 2022 Artists to Watch list, then later inked their deal with Warner Music Nashville in a partnership with Warner Music and Warner Music Latina.   With their career highlights to date including opening for platinum-selling country star Jason Aldean to a crowd of 36,000 at Globe Life Park stadium, Giovannie and The Hired Guns have spent much of the band’s lifespan on the road, delivering an electrifying show that invariably leaves audiences sweat-drenched and ecstatic. “At this point my house is mostly just a place where I collect mail,” says Yanez. “We’ve played an insane amount, but we love getting out there and connecting with the fans. The craziest thing is when they tell us that our music has saved their lives, because I’ve had that happen to me with the music I really love.”   As their following continues to grow far beyond the borders of their home state, Giovannie and The Hired Guns have found their sense of purpose ineffably deepened with each new album they create. “To me making music is a godsend,” says Yanez. “I generally don’t tell people what’s on my mind or how I’m feeling; I hold it in and then get it all out by picking up a pen and paper or strumming my guitar. So the fact that our songs might end up helping other people in some way just makes it all even sweeter.” And with Tejano Punk Boyz dropping in the midst of another extensive tour, Giovannie and The Hired Guns look forward to strengthening their extraordinary bond with their audience. “The goal for the live show is always to take people away for that hour and a half,” says Yanez. “Whatever problems they’re dealing with, whatever they’re going through or whatever’s happening in today’s world, we want them to forget all about it for those 90 minutes. If they want to get sad and cry, then I’ll cry with them. If they want to let loose and have fun, I’ll do that too. We just want to feel connected to everyone, because we truly are—we’re exactly the same as every single person out there in the crowd.”  

Mike Dillon & Punkadelick makes its recorded debut with Inflorescence, an album of heady, instrumental rock highlighting a band deep in the throes of creative freedom, road tested and wild. Consisting of 10 tracks in 42-minutes, it’s an expansive, focused, and fearless collection, representing a world where Duke Ellington and Augustus Pablo rub shoulders with crate-digger exotica, the freak-funk of Parliament and the ‘anything fits’ outsider ethos of acid-fried punks like The Meat Puppets.   A trio featuring Mike Dillon (Ricki Lee Jones, Ani DiFranco, Les Claypool) on vibraphone, marimba, Prophet 6, congas, and bongos, Brian Haas (Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey) on Fender Rhodes, piano, bass Moog and melodica and Nikki Glaspie (Beyonce) on drums, cymbals and vocals, Punkadelick is the unified vision of six hands creating a world that often sounds like the work of an ensemble three times the size.   During 2020 and 2021, while many music venues were still shuttered, the group began touring, sweating their way through cuts Dillon and Haas had composed during quarantine writing sessions. Locking in on stage, it quickly became clear the band was functioning at a level that made the hair on their arms stand at attention—even for three live music veterans accustomed to life on the road.   “It became obvious to let this become a collaboration,” Dillon says. “This is really something all three of us are doing because we have so much love for one another and a love for the music that we started creating.”   “There’s only three of us, but we move together like a big, nasty school of fish,” Haas adds, laughing.   During the tail end of a 2021 tour, the band booked time to record with engineer—and functioning fourth band member—Chad Meise, and Inflorescence sprouted. Opener “Desert Monsoon,” sets the stage with a spiritual-jazz intro of organ, vibraphone, percussion, and wordless vocal coos before crackling to life as a swaggering funk strut. The title track, and “Pandas,” dig into thick dub textures built around Glaspie’s drumming and Haas’s subwoofer-straining bass synths.   “Apocalypse Daydream,” which appeared as an exotic head-nodder on 2020’s Shoot the Moon (titled “Apocalyptic Daydreams”) is reborn as a meatier jazz-rock slab where Dillon and Haas circle each other like Television performing as a lounge act on a cruise ship sailing seas of psilocybin.   Bending ears and surprising audiences has long been part of Dillon’s MO and Glaspie and Haas act as perfect foils for forays into the weird. While Dillon bristles at the “punk jazz” tag, punk rock and jazz remain core influences to the band, in sound and spirit.   “We’re students of the titans of music. We grew up listening to punk and rock ’n’ roll but we also love instrumental music—particularly the forefathers of Black American Music. In our minds, Led Zeppelin and Milt Jackson, Parliament-Funkadelic and The Minutemen, The Bad Brains and Frank Zappa are interconnected influences,” explains Dillon. “All that comes together in how we approach instrumental creative music. Both punk rock and jazz are not prefab things, they’re about the freedom. We have no genre restriction in this band, and people who get it really respect that.”   Maybe the greatest example of the band’s punk-steeped sonic free-for-all is “Slowly But Surely,” a track Dillon told Haas to compose as if he were “writing for Queens of the Stone Age.” The song plays like QOTSA translated to piano runs, vibes and deeply swinging drums—big-riff stoner rock upended and played with huge smiles by America’s premier proponents of the unclassifiable.   “We try to challenge our listeners,” Dillon says. “We’re touching a nerve with people who maybe don’t want to see the same songs done in the same variations all night long,” continues Dillon. “Part of my mission is taking these instruments that are primarily designed for the orchestral or jazz world and taking them to the rock world, the club world, running them through pedals and effects. We’re not afraid to be soft, or to surprise. That’s what we all do in this band — get beyond our own conceptions of what music is supposed to be.”   “We are so blessed and lucky to do what we do for a living — it’s apparent in the music,” Glaspie chimes in. “It doesn’t matter how the day is going, but we get to the club, set up and crush the gig, all the other stuff doesn’t matter. We’re likeminded individuals who love life, love people and want to spread happiness.”   Mike Dillon & Punkadelick’s Inflorescence is out Jan. 27, 2023 via independent record label, Royal Potato Family.