Lomelda is Hannah Read’s musical project. In swampy, sweaty, Silsbee, TX, she first formed the band with her high school best friends. Throughout the next decade, Lomelda mad a habit out of stretching to fit new friendships and shrinking down to solo strummings. Four albums and a never-the-same live show chronicle these shifts in shape and sound.
Lomelda’s fifth album is called Hannah. The album stretches and shrinks into many of Lomelda’s different forms, from expansive “Wonder” and rock band “Reach” to meandering “Stranger Sat By Me” and finger picking “It’s Infinite.” Through this range of moods, Hannah sings stories of strangers, suns, dogs, moms, brothers, favorite bands, “oh god!”s and big shots as well as herself, by name. She rejoices and reviles her god-given name and then flips it around to name herself Hannah once again. It is an album of confession and transformation made ultimately singable.
Greg Mendez
First Time / Alone, Greg Mendez’s new EP came together in late summer and early fall of 2023; The experience of listening through is like waking up from a half-remembered dream, a shadow in the corner of the room, a strange solitude, a temporal New York autumn with gray skies and naked trees. While the release is sparse and spontaneous, it’s also tactile and consuming, a glimpse into the beautiful, lonely worlds that live in the core of a Greg Mendez song. Mendez has released music in various capacities across 15 years living in Philadelphia and New York, but the self-titled was what propelled him to a wider attention, a critical breakthrough on best-of lists from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Paste, and more. Mendez is an intuitive songwriter, melodies channeled through ether, a storyteller who across his catalog has chronicled vivid violence and instability – a wallet chain to the head, a crack house arrest, the misdeeds from addiction that hang around like a ghost of past lives – but it’s threaded together with love songs, too, with odes to friendship, true dedication, the things that can buoy one through the worst. Mendez has a habit of noticing those things, of finding the light, exacting poetry from even the bleakest, shit-caked situations. In his songs there is an innate ability to balance grit with gentleness, cruelties rewritten through preternatural sweetness, a heart thrumming unendingly, confidently, through the dark.
