The band’s funky singles and singular music videos gained them fans throughout the U.S. and catapulted them to the stage at Pitchfork Music Festival in 2018, but their sound has expanded since their 2019 LP Bounce House, becoming more limber and jammy. Their goofy spirit has grown complicated, insular; their playfulness has gained a political and artistically fruitful angst. This newest LP is a concept album, an LSD-soaked shrug to a world overridden with capitalist corruption and violence. As band leader Mick Fansler sings on lead single “No Money, No Fun,” “no one’s making any money, no one’s having any fun.” The song that follows it, “Stiff Lightning,” consists of the repeated mantra “I live in the world.” The way they say it, it might not be a good thing.   But the Curls’ struggle is our benefit; they suffer for us. They have found a way to translate COVID-era social displacement into a joyful, communal sound. Album centerpiece “Chickens” turns a stoned-out breakdown – key lyric “I can’t believe / I can’t even read” – into a technicolor epic, a la King Crimson soundtracking a Rugrats episode. Their world is ours: iPhone screen-headaches, overly potent weed gummies, weird Joe Biden clips. But their musical palette is ambitious, fun, groovy. The combination of these elements provides something major, potentially essential, to the millennial spirit.   Mick and The Curls will soldier on, regardless of the world’s indifference; I’ve seen them tour Canadian dive bars in the dead of winter. Their spirit of irreverence is resilient. Their music provides a blueprint for a new path forward, in which the trolls and the Bernie Bros and the jam-banders and the acid casualties march together, lock-step, 4/4, 118bpm. I’ll follow them to the gates of CGI Hell.” -- Matthew Danger Lippman

TED TYRO is a Louisville, Kentucky band formed around the tape machine recordings of ex-Murals bassist, Bart Swift.  Swift is a non-musician who turned to music after college “for its visceral, kinetic qualities and because Spotify subscriptions were outpacing creative writing and lit journals.” In 2019, members of Wombo stepped in to act as a backing band and take TT along as their tour opener. The result was an elevation from hazy bedroom pop to bouncing, bass-led post punk reminiscent of Talking Heads, Television, or Omni. Ted Tyro has now reemerged post pandemic as a versatile, energetic act on the rise, supporting White Reaper, Ty Segall, Mild High Club, The Districts, Tonstartssbandht, Mannequin Pussy, Lunar Vacation, and more. 
 The band will release their studio debut "Demo 22" in the spring. New song “Devil” is out 12/14.    

Courtesy began in Memphis, TN when Drew Ryan and Kirk Rawlings met and started trading self-indulgent 4-track scraps, voice memos and private recordings not meant for others’ ears. Drums and guitars were recorded, chopped, and screwed as the two figured out how to combine their ideas into songs.  In 2011, the duo released Idmatic—a collection of collage-based songs constructed via email, crammed with blown out boom-bap drumming and stretched out cassette wonk. By 2012, the duo relocated to Chicago, where they released Slow Bruise in 2015—a darker, colder, and more aggressive effort. They released HEY in 2018, “an unclassifiable electronic blend of off-kilter atmospheric synths, otherworldly vocal harmonies, deep-house grooves, and weirdo-funk bass lines all sewn together via a persistent Oberheim DX drum machine.” (Steve Rosborough, Moon Glyph Records).  With the late-2021 release of CHECK THE MILK, the band finds itself with a new focus, ready-made for basement DJs and glossy pop fans. The pair’s collaged sound stays locked in polyrhythmic interplay, while exploring life’s mundanity and the perils of safety.