Arlie is a band created by singer-songwriter, composer & multi-instrumentalist Nathaniel Banks. It began in summer 2015 as a solo bedroom project and grew to incorporate a full-band live show by fall 2016. Since Arlie started playing live, Adam Lochemes and Carson Lystad have been part of the performing ensemble on drums and guitar, respectively. Ryan Savage joined on bass in 2018. During the pandemic and the year prior, everyone involved in the group wound up going through some of the hardest times of their lives, in one way or another. But despite some major setbacks and challenges, they managed to come together and finish a debut full-length album as a team, with Ryan and Adam as co-producers alongside Nathaniel, Carson as a trusted go-to perspective, all together bringing a new batch of Banks’ songs and demos to full fruition. After finishing the record, the group added Noah Luna to the performing ensemble as a backing vocalist and multi-instrumentalist to complete the live show.
Caroline Kingsbury
Recently, Caroline announced a brand new remix EP, Remixes From Heaven, composed of newly remixed versions of hit tracks off her debut album, Heaven’s Just A Flight (released last year via Fortune Tellers Records). To kick everything off, she has shared the first remix, “Massive Escape (Arlie Remix).”
Speaking on the track, Caroline wrote:
“Every single word I sing in this song happened the night I saw a plane crash into someone’s house on the television screen behind a shitty bar. I threw back a shot and a beer and wrote the lyrics out in a note on my phone as I watched the wreckage settle. I had just ended a long term relationship and felt the weight of that decision that night. The original version of ‘Massive Escape’ came out a full year ago on my debut album….and my original intention with production was to set the scene of the drama I was experiencing the night I wrote it…I chose a driving, syncopated beat to represent the emotional highs and lows and the heights those feelings took me that drunken night. The instrumentals of this version of ‘Massive Escape’ is a breath of fresh air after the wreckage of that heartbreak. I feel it represents the healing after tragedy…That’s exactly where I am in life, healing after losing my brother to cancer and having a strained relationship with family members after I began dating my girlfriend.”
Remixes from Heaven also includes a dance remix from DJ Josh Lumsden and a remix by Fortune Tellers’ Peter Matthew Bauer, as well as two new alternate versions by Caroline herself. Currently on tour with Post Animal down the west coast, Caroline will be throwing a residency at Berlin in NYC all of June.
Caroline’s debut album landed on PopMatter’s Best Indie-pop Albums of 2021. Pitchfork also said: “The album’s instrumentation is a collage of stylistic eras united by their outsized personalities from disco to post-punk…Caroline recalls the naked vulnerability of Kate Bush or Karen O.” It’s a huge and enveloping debut album, one centered around her deeply personal experiences of losing her brother Kyle to cancer as she wrote the album (hence the title track) and her own coming out in public after growing up in a religious home in Florida. Caroline had little access to secular music until her teen years when its discovery led her to run headfirst toward a life in music. That music now is a giant coming out party of its own.
Earlier this year, Caroline shared a brand new single entitled “Strawberry Sheets,” produced by herself and Math Bishop, and out on Fortune Tellers. “The song is a beautiful sonic world I created to retreat to during these difficult times. I needed something repetitive and beautiful to get lost in,” said Caroline on the track.
Sunfish
Formed in 2019 by Carter Sears, Sunfish pulls no punches with their gritty and outlandish alternative music. Cutting their teeth touring the US and Canada. with 100’s of DIY shows, they have caught the attention of many, touring with band such as Dead Poet Society, Friday Pilots Club, and Arlie. The group released their first Mixtape of singles over the pandemic, and the 9 song project took them from local band, to selling out shows in the span of only a year, before Carter graduated from high school. With the gained notoriety, the band also opened for Badflower, IDK how, and many more at home.
After touring nonstop and releasing numerous singles with producers Nate Pyfer, Tyler Harris, Nate Hussey and more between 2021 and 2023, the band took a break to record their upcoming EP, Sunfish is NotaCult (releasing May 31st) which is their first full length project. Recorded with Clayton Blue (of extortionist), shows the bands newfound maturity in writing, and drive to make more full length project.
