S.G. Goodman returns from the Western Kentucky bottomland with her latest full-length album, Planting by the Signs, Available June 20, 2025 on her very own Slough Water Records via Thirty Tigers. Composed of songs inspired by love, loss, reconciliation, and the aforementioned ancient practice. Eleven tracks highlighted by the critically-acclaimed and award-winning artist’s singular voice and her penchant for juxtaposing vulnerable folk music with punchy rock ‘n roll, replete with chiming guitars, ethereal atmospherics, and her DIY ethos. Goodman provides a timely reminder that the only way forward is together, and that we must always take into account humanity’s dependence on and responsibility to the natural world.    Back in the early hours of 2023, Goodman told her late friend Mike Harmon and his wife Therese that she wanted to base her next album around the concept of planting by the signs, which she had heard about growing up, and recently rediscovered while reading a volume of Foxfire. She remembered general points from her rural southern childhood - how planting a garden, or weaning a baby, or getting a haircut are best timed in accordance with the cycle of the moon. A concept diametrically opposed to the tech-obsessed, profit margin-driven mania swirling around her. Through exploring themes related to planting by the signs, Goodman hoped to help herself and others reconcile this jarring disconnect, as well to pass along the story of the practice to her nieces and nephews - the latter being a role she took very seriously.   But it wasn’t an easy path to writing Planting by the Signs or to the recording studio. 2023 saw the passing of her beloved dog, Howard, as well as the tragic death of Harmon, a father figure and mentor. Mike was mentioned in Goodman’s song, “Red Bird Morning” on Old Time Feeling, her debut. Her band used to practice in the quonset hut behind his house. He would check on her house while she toured. Often, Goodman would call him for advice from the road. A few days before he died, he advised her about putting chains on her van during a snow storm. He once drove that same van from Boston to Chicago so the band could play a one-off in the middle of a tour. He was a rock for Goodman, and a rock star in his own right.   Harmon’s death led to Goodman reconciling with her longtime collaborator and guitarist, Matthew Rowan, who had become estranged from her following a year of grueling live shows in 2021. Rowan and Goodman had met in their early 20s while at college in the Murray, KY, indie rock scene, and eventually began playing music together. His idiosyncratic guitar work became an essential part of her production. He wrote most of the guitar parts on her first two records, and their creative relationship stretched for nearly 10 years. But life on the road isn’t for all, one thing led to another, and Rowan decided to step away. After Harmon passed, Matt was one of the first people Goodman called. From there they began to mend their relationship, and eventually, once she started working on her new album, S.G. asked Rowan to be her co-producer. The album would not exist in its current form without their reconciliation.   With over 150 performances on the books in ‘23, including headlining sold out tours and opening for the likes of Tyler Childers and Jason Isbell from Red Rocks to the Grand Ole’ Opry, there was also little time for songwriting, much less recording. As she sings on “Fire Sign,” S.G. was working like “the sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass everyday.” So, after a restful, somewhat celebratory winter in the beginning months of 2024, she began writing and demo-ing a new album, eventually Drew Vandenberg, who also co-produced and engineered Teeth Marks, to join he and Rowan as co-producers.   Finally, after nearly three years of promoting her critically-acclaimed and award winning album, Teeth Marks, with a touring schedule that would make the most seasoned road-dog wince, Goodman decamped to the Nutt House in Sheffield, AL, in the fall of 2024. Alongside co-producer Drew Vandenberg, Rowan, and a cast of musical characters, Goodman tracked what is by no exaggeration her best record to date. With songs like “Fire Sign,” “Satellite,” “Snapping Turtle,” “Michael Told Me,” “Heaven” and “I’m In Love,” Planting by the Signs finds Goodman exploring this old story and other themes in the only way she knows; with a fresh musical and lyrical perspective, vivid, incisive detail, and a heaping dose of empathy and compassion. 

Fust — the Durham, North Carolina-based band — announce their new album, Big Ugly, out March 7th via Dear Life Records. Big Ugly arrives after the release of 2024’s Songs of the Rail––“one of the best alt-country compilations…in a long, long time” (Paste) –– and 2023’s standout Genevieve, which unassumingly introduced new listeners to Fust’s unmistakable blend of “small-town poetry” (Mojo) with a familiar yet probing “country-tinged folk-rock” (KEXP) that made it “one of the most fun rock records of the year” (Pitchfork). Big Ugly finds Fust taking its “gutsy, blue-collar Americana” (New Commute) further than it has before. Songwriter Aaron Dowdy pushes his obsessions with country-storytelling to more mystifying places, telling stories of Southern life teeming with utopian possibility that arises uniquely from the contradictions for which the south is infamously known. In this way, it is a record that could easily be filed on the record shelf alongside lyric-forward indie or Southern rock, as well as on the bookshelf amongst the throngs of Southern literature hellbent on proving the elegance of grittiness. Big Ugly is also Fust––above all a group of close friends––uncovering a freedom within their sincere form of loose and fried guitar rock, emboldened to deliver both their most intimate songwriting and biggest sound to date. While perhaps “few voices can write a song quite like Aaron Dowdy” (Paste), it is clear upon listening that Big Ugly is an album of fully recognizable voices. One hears in the music the years of interplay between Avery Sullivan (Sluice) on Drums, Justin Morris (Sluice, Weirs) on guitar and vocals, Oliver Child-Lanning (Sluice, Weirs) on bass and vocals, Frank Meadows on piano, John Wallace (Colamo) on guitar and vocals, and Libby Rodenbough (Mipso) on fiddle and vocals. Big Ugly is also the second collaboration with the Asheville-based engineer Alex Farrar, recorded together throughout the summer of 2024 at Drop of Sun Studio. And with the help of many friends including Merce Lemon, Dave Hartley (The War on Drugs), and John James Tourville (The Deslondes), Big Ugly is exactly what one feels it to be: a huge group of people gathered together, stumbling upon songs amidst long days and even longer nights.