Pillow Queens' latest record, Leave the Light On available on vinyl or CD.

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To make Leave the Light On, the second full-length album from Dublin’s Pillow Queens, the band looked towards introspection. It’s a lonely record, evoking feelings of late night drives on back roads where you digest the day and quietly change lanes. Make no mistake: loneliness doesn’t mean alone, necessarily. On Leave the Light On, the band’s first record with Royal Mountain, loneliness is a warm space to reflect, to meditate. To quote the writer Maggie Nelson in her experimental work of auto-theory Bluets: “When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.” Leave the Light On is a record not of longing but of light. It glows in tungsten. It is a record of queer dream blues. 

Leave the Light On comes at a time where things are rapidly accelerating for the band, which consists of Pam Connolly, Sarah Corcoran, Rachel Lyons, and Cathy McGuiness. After the success of their first record, 2020’s In Waiting, Pillow Queens went on to play bigger venues, festivals, and played James Corden. Music became a full time occupation for the band. At a point where most artists would get less personal and inward, Pillow Queens did the opposite. Leave the Light On is their most inward-focused release to date. It’s also a record about exploring the unknown, and for yearning. 

Just take a song like “Hearts and Minds,” as one such offering. It’s a song about being perceived, by yourself, and by everyone else around you. It’s about feeling like a teenager again. And it feels anthemic, tinged by C86 power pop and varicolored harmonies. “Well I’m not fixin to move/I’m atrophied from winning over all these hearts and minds,” sings Connolly in her pristine and muscular voice. 

The record is also a sonic departure for the band. Leave the Light On sounds huge, but also soft and intimate. It encourages a sense of duality—it is a record you can blast and a record you can also listen to on headphones in a moment where you just need to be alone with your thoughts.“Well Kept Wife,” is sparse, with iridescent guitars and crystalline bass. It takes inspiration from the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, and the appeal of the banal and the everyday. Meanwhile “My Body Moves,” feels like a heartbreaking spark, a lift, it makes you want to dance and hold on for dear life. “Is it cool if I hold onto/Every inch of you/Till my skin turns blue.”

Leave the Light On is an inherently collaborative piece of work. Recorded in the Spring of 2021, the band wrote over the course of three months, and then went into the studio to work with producer Tommy McLaughlin, who the band worked with on In Waiting. The record came together quickly and naturally, becoming the most realized Pillow Queens release to date. 

Cuffed Up's EP, Asymmetry, on Limited Edition vinyl or CD.

ONLY AVAILABLE IN NORTH AMERICA

In Waiting is Pillow Queens’ debut album, the result of four years of brotherly love in a sisterly unit from Ireland’s most urgent, yearning, rock band. Crafted from our lives, and honed in a studio in rural Donegal in the northwest of Ireland, this is a record by queens in waiting and kings in the making.

 It’s an album about love; self-love, queer love, the anxiety-inducing fault lines of romantic love, and the love for a city and a country that simultaneously has your back and is on your back.

 It’s an album about the in-between; the transitionary period of an adulthood that never seems to arrive, while you wait for that lightbulb moment when everything makes sense, even though part of you knows deep down it will never come.  

It’s an album about the purgatorial aspect of late-stage capitalism, where the systems conspire to burden and punish; job insecurity, housing crises, income inequality, and social inequity.

 It’s an album about family; chosen, given, received and earned.

 It’s an album about spirituality; from the engrained confines of religion, to the expanding borders of spirituality, and the iconography and ritual that populates the emotional interior of anyone who grows up in Ireland.

It’s about resilience of the politics of the self and belief in the power of art. The wounded deer’s leap highest. Tiocfaidh ár lá.

Anyway Gang is comprised of four members of prominent Canadian rock groups. Menno Versteeg (Hollerado), Dave Monks (Tokyo Police Club), Chris Murphy (Sloan), and Sam Roberts (Sam Roberts Band) came together to create nine tracks of punchy pop showcasing singalong hooks.

“peppy sing-alongs aplenty and hooks gargantuan enough to clog any arena” - Exclaim!

 Please note the image included in a mock-up. Actual vinyl colour may vary slightly.

Ultra Q's latest EP, Get Yourself a Friend, on black ice vinyl

Please note the attached image is a mockup. Actual vinyl colour may vary. 

Le Ren's debut full length, Leftovers, available on vinyl or CD.

 

Kills Birds sophomore album on limited edition Milky Clear Translucent Vinyl or CD.

Tracklist:

1. Rabbit
2. Cough Up Cherries
3. Natalie
4. Glisten
5. Reasoning
6. Offside
7. Woman
8. PTL
9. Good Planning
10. Wallowing
11. Married
 

Gustaf's debut full length record, Audio Drag For Ego Slobs, available on vinyl or CD.

Ducks Ltd.'s, Modern Fiction, available on Vinyl or CD.

Tracklist:

1. How Lonely Are You

2. Old Times

3. 18 Cigarettes

4. Under The Rolling Moon

5. Fit To Burst

6. Patience Wearing Thin

7. Always There

8. Sullen Leering Hope

9. Twere Ever Thus

10. Grand Final Day

girlpuppy - Official Swan CD

Bad Waitress, No Taste, available on Red Vinyl or CD.

Tracklist:

1. Rabbit Hole
2. Yeah Yeah Yeah
3. Lacerate
4. Strawberry Milkshake
5. Manners
6. Delusions Of Grandeur
7. Standards
8. Live In Reverse
9. 12 Years Old
10. Restless Body

Please note, this image is a mock-up. Actual vinyl colour may vary slightly.

 

Ducks Ltd., Get Bleak, repressing on Forest Green Vinyl.

Rochelle Jordan, Play With The Changes, on Translucent Vinyl.

For Rochelle Jordan, a desire for sonic expansion has long been embedded into her fusion of futuristic and ancestrally soulful R&B. To hear a Rochelle Jordan song is to absorb a blend of sampledelic 90s pop, vintage UK house and garage, 31st century electronic bangers, airy late night ballads, and progressive hip-hop. On Play With the Changes, Jordan showcases not just her own personal evolution, but a path to pushing sound forward. Produced by KLSH, Machinedrum, and Jimmy Edgar, the album presents her as a modern heir in a lineage of powerhouse vocalists with style and imagination: everyone from Whitney Houston to Celine Dion, Aaliyah to Amerie, Kelis to Mariah Carey. 

** Please note this image is a mock-up. Actual vinyl colour may vary. **

PACKS, Take The Cake, on Vinyl or CD

 Islands', Islomania, on black vinyl or CD

Roll the dice and get four mystery CDs, handpicked by the RMR staff.

Wild Pink, A Billion Little Lights, on Blue Jay vinyl or on CD.

Gustaf, Mine, 7 Inch in red. 

$1 from every record sold will be donated to Corona Comunidad Fridge, a community fridge located in Corona, Queens.

Please note this image is a mockup. Actual vinyl colour may vary slightly.

New self-titled album from Montreal's emo heroes Gulfer on tri-colour vinyl (limited edition pressing of 150), CD or cassette.