Refracting the realities of late-capitalist city life and the impossibility of work-art balance in a high-rent metropolis through satire and sarcasm, Toronto’s KIWI JR. has shaped their own deadpan postmodern indie rock. Their third album, Chopper, overseen by producer Dan Boeckner (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs) was released on Sub Pop Records in Summer 2022.   “On the recent Chopper, this fertile band’s third LP, the singer summons Julie Andrews, Outkast, ‘Parasite,’ and the Superman architect Joe Shuster to evoke trepidation, nostalgia, envy, and elusive sentiments that slip between the cracks. Where the lyrics weave puzzles, Kiwi Jr.’s music cuts a straighter line, with tightly designed pop songs that seem to detonate in tiny private explosions.” - The New Yorker “While stopping short of a full-blown synth-pop makeover, Chopper slathers on enough neon-tinted textures to reorient Kiwi Jr. away from the jangle-rock canon and toward the futurist power-pop of the Cars, New Pornographers, and the Strokes circa Room on Fire.” - Pitchfork "Toronto's Kiwi Jr bring a darker edge to their poppy, indie rock style on their terrific third album.” - Brooklyn Vegan

Having released projects titled Failure to Slide and No More Heroes, The Zells were already fluent in despondency before the storm of 2020 hit — so for once, something went right for these guys. The Pittsburgh quintet’s sophomore LP, Ant Farm, is not just their best, most refined, transfixing, and emotionally seizing project yet, but a uniquely articulate statement about our generational plight. Twelve songs that capture the nihilistic bleakness of toiling in an era of historic social inequality while the very institutions we’re indebted to crumble into the dusty terrain of a world that's burning toward its apocalyptic conclusion.   The band — guitarist trio Frank DiNardo, Jackson Rogers and Phil Kenbok, bassist Roman Benty and drummer Tyler Gallagher — take turns singing about the dejected purgatory of struggling to get out of bed while simultaneously losing the capacity to dream. It’s the sort of downwardly mobile existentialism that could be yelled with a hardcore fury or strummed beneath mawkish folk coos, but The Zells use indie-rock as their medium, flipping a genre that's historically been a playground for well-off kids to opine about their dorm-room insecurities into a microphone for working-class ennui.   Building upon their singular mesh of sounds — slumped-neck indie-rock, fizzy garage-rock, defiant post-punk, and puffy-white shoegaze rips — the gang drafted a personnel sheet of basement indie who’s who’s that doubles as a useful RIYL list. Adam Reich (Titus Andronicus), Jordyn Blakely (Smile Machine, Bartees Strange, Stove, Maneka), Davey Jones (Lost Boy ?) and RJ Gordon (Baked, Titus Andronicus) make musical cameos, while Gordon engineered and mixed the whole shebang and Big Ups’ Amar Lal mastered it. The Zells have been and always will be proudly lo-fi like their idols in Sebadoh and Guided By Voices, but the songs on Ant Farm sizzle, pop, thrash, and moisten the eyes in a way their previous recordings didn’t, and that's largely thanks to the sleeker, roomier production.   Most crucially, it’s the elevated songwriting maneuvers that make Ant Farm feel like the album the band have spent the last half-decade working toward. - Eli Enis