Tanukichan is the solo project of classically-trained Bay Area native Hannah van Loon, whose music screeched to a halt when she discovered what she affectionately calls “dad rock” in her tween years. Throughout her self-described “sheltered” adolescence, van Loon taught herself guitar by spending hours in front of the radio, replicating riffs and chords from omnipresent bands like The Beatles and Incubus.
Although van Loon is the creator and leader of Tanukichan, until now, the project could have been considered a collaboration between her and the Grammy-nominated chillwave pioneer Chaz Bear of Toro y Moi. After seeing an early Tanukichan show in 2016, Bear expressed an interest in working with van Loon; Radiolove, Tanukichan’s first headbanger of an EP, arrived on Bear’s own Company Records that same year. The promising four-song project was followed in 2018 by van Loon’s breakout debut LP, Sundays, which prompted her first solo headlining tour and dates opening for artists like Kero Kero Bonito and The Drums. Sundays earned Tanukichan enthusiastic critical acclaim, with Pitchfork writing that it “captures the spirit of a day whose wide-open nature fosters anxieties as well as ambitions” and Rolling Stone lauding its “bruising riffs, taut grooves, and open-road-ready guitar anthems.”
In March 2023, Tanukichan released her sophomore album GIZMO. While still rooted in the eerie shoegaze she’s become known and loved for, it also sees her go beyond her comfort zone, incorporating elements of grunge, industrial synths, nu metal basslines, and electric guitars that culminate into a captivating wall-of-sound. Shortly after the release of GIZMO, van Loon was approached by producer Franco Reid where they bonded over their love for Incubus. That correspondence led to the single “NPC” which was performed while touring heavily in the summer of 2023, opening for artists like Alex G, Alvvays, and Melanie Martinez.
The new EP Circles, out September 20th, 2024, solidifies van Loon and Reid’s new partnership taking Tanukichan to new heights and sonic territory that feels larger, arena-ready, and more like a highspeed night drive than the hazy summer dream of its predecessors.
Wishy
On the heels of their breakthrough debut album, Wishy returns with a new six-song EP titled Planet Popstar. A dreamy and pop-forward compilation of b-side tracks, the EP was recorded in the same sessions that birthed Triple Seven, the band’s widely acclaimed debut (“one of the best indie rock debuts in recent memory” says Stereogum). A critical success, their debut album recently landed on “best of the year” lists from The New York Times, GQ, Alt Press, Paste, Stereogum, Uproxx, NME, and more.
Wishy’s Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites first met in high school in Indiana but didn’t connect as friends until later. For years, their musical paths crossed and diverged, until they finally came together to form a new band. Wishy’s early days were fruitful, with Krauter and Pitchkites already armed with the songs destined for their debut all the way back in 2021. After prior monikers and iterations, Wishy was born as a kaleidoscope of alternative music’s semi-recent history, with traces of dream pop, grunge, and power-pop swirling together, bolstered by the rare musical synergy between Krauter and Pitchkites.
In late 2022, the band had a fateful session in Los Angeles with Ben Lumsdaine, who ended up engineering, mixing and co-producing Triple Seven, and its tangential EPs, Paradise and Planet Popstar. The songs kept coming, and after another trip to LA and a session in Bloomington, IN, the band had recorded a total of 21 songs, with five of them appearing on their 2023 EP Paradise, and another ten on their breakout full-length Triple Seven. Following the enthusiastic reception and critical acclaim of both releases, a buzzy US headline tour, and looking ahead at an already packed-full 2025, the band decided not to leave the remaining six songs on the cutting room floor. “These songs deserved a life of their own,” says Pitchkites.
Enter Planet Popstar. Wishy’s latest offering is a sun-soaked, hazy reflection on the band’s central themes–love, life, self-discovery and having fun. It’s a compilation of tracks that, when presented as a unit, shows another side of the band’s kaleidoscopic sound that deftly plays with nostalgia and genre. “We really wanted to
lean into the high-production style and had a lot of fun in the studio using these songs as an opportunity to explore a more polished, adult-contemporary feel” says Krauter.
Living in Indianapolis, Krauter works as a music teacher, giving drum and guitar lessons to students. Pitchkites is a seamstress by trade and often makes embroidered merch for the band. Coming up in a scene defined by hardcore, Krauter and Pitchkites instead find themselves writing melodies in their heads while driving to work, pulling music from the air and arriving at a more ethereal interpretation of the Midwest expanse.
On Planet Popstar’s title track, Krauter takes the mic amidst a wash of heavy guitar tones and production plucked from the early aughts, sweetened by Pitchkites’ dreamy backup harmonies. Named for the glowing, five pointed star that the iconic bubblegum-pink Nintendo character Kirby hails from, Planet Popstar is a bite-sized antidote to the anxiety and precarity of life in the 2020s.
At the top of the EP, hypnotizing indie-pop swooner “Fly” only solidifies that notion. “I found a way / to be grateful every day / even when I sit and wait / knowing I gotta fly,” sings Pitchites over a wash of doubled vocals and hazy guitars on this sister track to the Pitchkites-led titular track on Triple Seven, also co-written with collaborator Steve Marino. The band delivers another dose of catchy alt pop with “Over and Over,” a track that unwinds into a propulsive chorus, rife with addictive melodies, intricate guitar work and Krauter’s idiosyncratic vocals. The rest of the EP sprawls out across genre and theme, collaging the original GarageBand demos made for the songs with shinier contributions made in producer Ben Lumsdaine’s Los Angeles studio.
From the intimate beginnings of two old friends trading bedroom demos, Wishy’s early discography has bloomed into a bold, ambitious introduction with the release of Paradise and Triple Seven. With the addition of Planet Popstar, Wishy completes a loose web of vignettes and snapshots capturing them in a whirlwind couple of years — exiting the pandemic, embarking on an embryonic project, making sense of their musical pasts while forging a musical future alongside one another, each of them on a journey of self-acceptance and self-understanding.
