July is jam packed with all sorts of happenings, both on the internet and in real life. Real life is the actual bummer that we deal with every day—the place where bills are due and you are not attractive enough to get laid. Let’s talk about the good stuff that might ease that pain, especially now that scientists have discovered that pain pills are bad for you. First up is the new album from Tiny Vipers called Life on Earth that comes out July 7th. If you pre-order Life on Earth from us at subpop.com anytime before July 7th, you’ll also receive a truly limited Tiny Vipers home-recorded ambient piece on CDR called Blades of Grass. Sweet. On July 21st we’re releasing a 7” by Zak Sally of Low fame called “Why We Hide”. This single is one song from a full length album (to be released this summer by La Mano 21 as a handmade and signed, limited-edition CD) and another that’s not. And they’re both great. On the 21st our buddies at Hardly Art are also releasing the debut album from Seattle’s own Talbot Tagora called Lessons in the Woods or a City on CD and LP. Get ‘em all—you won’t be sorry.

Sub Pop will be headed out to Chicago July 17th – 19th for our 4th annual trip to the Pitchfork Music Festival. We’ll be manning a booth at the CHiRP Record Fair with all sorts of Sub Pop merch and a new limited tee. Stop by and meet Sam, Richard, and Alissa and make sure to get right up front for Blitzen Trapper and The Dutchess & the Duke and be sure to yell “Free bird” as much as possible. Bands live for that.

Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes will be headlining the grand finale of the VERA Project’s annual Drink for the Kids benefit this year on July 11th at Neumo’s. This fundraiser is a local favorite because it mostly involves buying booze in the name of the city’s coolest all ages venue, and it takes place at many bars all over Seattle from July 5th – 11th. Click here for participating bars and more info, and click here to get tickets for the Grand Finale show at Neumo’s.

Last year Seattle’s beloved roots-music magazine No Depression had to shut its doors, an all too common trend in print publications over the last few years. This year they’re saying fuck it and partying their asses off at Marymoor Park (the same place and same date as the SP20 Fest, coincidentally) with the first ever No Depression Festival featuring our very own Sam Beam of Iron & Wine. Get thee to the Eastside, y’all. Tickets and info available here.

So, last month I pointed out some of our new web junk, including our new blog format and our widely beloved Cybersex Sampler, which is still available for download btw; and I promised that we’d become more interesting and post more content. Well, we only lie sometimes around here, and this time we’ve really stuck to our word. Behold the new Tuesday Sales Program, invented by our very own Welshy dreamboat Dick Laing and his trusty Aryan sidekick Sam Sawyer! It’s kinda hard to explain, but basically we’re running little sales on t-shirts and staff picks on most Tuesdays when we do not have a new release, which, if you’ve been paying attention, has been most of the time in 2009. Just click here and here to see what I’m talking about, and make sure to check back often to see what we’re doing next.

And finally…

If you’ve been to the office anytime over the past six or so years you’re sure to have met Dinky Hudson—Border Collie, friend, and overall good dude. He spends most of his working hours trying to herd people together in the warehouse, playing fetch, napping, and avoiding other dogs like the plague. After work he can be found roaming the streets with Dean and hanging out in front of whatever bar or restaurant Dean is frequenting. He won’t run into the street, he knows how to high five and shake, he doesn’t need a leash, but he will take a dump right in the middle of the sidewalk, especially when you’ve just run out of bags. Here’s to you, Dinkman, a prince among men and the king of dogs.

So, in keeping true to our vague oath to put more t-shirts up for sale in the near future, I present to you another limited-time t-shirt sale. Now through Thursday, July 2nd, we’ve got Pissed Jeans, Sub Pop, Band of Horses, and Handsome Furs shirts on sale for $10! It’s summer dudes, treat yourself to a t-shirt.

Pissed Jeans

Band of Horses

Sub Pop Sketch

Handsome Furs

Password: SUNNYDAY

September 17th
Vancouver, BC
Commodore Ballroom
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10am here

September 18th
Portland, OR
Crystal Ballroom (Musicfest NW)
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale to the public Saturday at 10am here

September 20th
Salt Lake City, UT
Murray Theater
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale to the public Saturday at 10am here

September 21st
Denver, CO
Ogden Theater
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale to the public Saturday at 10am here

September 23rd
Minneapolis, MN
First Avenue
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale to the public Saturday at 10am here

September 24th
Chicago, IL
Metro
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale to the public Saturday at Noon here

September 25th
Detroit, MI
St. Andrews Hall
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale to the public Saturday at 10am here

September 27th
New York, NY
Terminal 5
Presale happening now here
Tickets go on sale to the public Friday at Noon here

September 28th
Boston, MA
House of Blues
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale to the public Saturday at 10am here

September 30th
Washington, DC
930 Club
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale to the public Saturday at 10am here

October 1st
Philadelphia, PA
Trocadero
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale to the public Saturday at 10am here

October 3rd
Atlanta, GA
CW Center Stage
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale to the public Saturday at 10am here

October 5th
Dallas, TX
Granada Theater
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10am here

October 6th
Houston, TX
Warehouse Live
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10am here

October 7th
Austin, TX
La Zona Rosa
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10am here

October 9th
Tempe, AZ
Marquee Theatre
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10am here

October 10th
Anaheim, CA
House of Blues
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale to the public Saturday at 10am here

October 11th
Los Angeles, CA
Henry Fonda Theater
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10am here

October 13th
San Francisco, CA
Fillmore
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale to the public Sunday at 10am here

October 15th
Spokane, WA
Knitting Factory
Tickets go on sale Friday at 10am here

October 16th
Seattle, WA
Paramount Theatre
Presale starts Friday at 10am here
Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10am here

Wondering how one of Sub Pop’s favorite non-profits, the Vera Project, has been holding up? Well, despite the dreary economy, swine flu and all the other downers out there today, the Vera Project is thriving with amazing shows including a solo show by none other than Robin Pecknold of that one band, what are they called…Fleet Foxes, as part of the annual A Drink for the Kids fundraiser! Last year alone over 37,000 people came through Vera’s doors, and over 1,000 people volunteered and took classes at Vera. Vera exists because of the people who support it, be they volunteers, contributing artists or donors. Music and art help all of us get through doldrums, economic or otherwise, and Vera continues to keep music and art accessible and affordable to people of all ages in the city of Seattle.

Nonetheless, Vera is seeing the effects of the weak economy. Vera relies on donations from individuals, businesses and private foundations for over 63% of our annual income. With foundation and corporate giving down due to a hurting stock market and rough economy, Vera needs your support right now.

You can be part of the Vera Project’s 2009 Spring Fund Drive! This month we are asking you, as true and sincere friends of all-ages music and youth-driven art, to help raise $20,000 for Vera. To countless people in the Seattle area Vera is a stable place for awesome all-ages shows, a place to meet friends and like-minded artists, a place to learn skills in music and arts production and a place to launch careers in the music, arts and non-profit industries. By supporting Vera you will help keep Seattle’s music and arts community strong and contribute to the lives of tens of thousands of young people. Please donate now!

Following a more than 10 year hiatus, all four original members of pioneering Seattle rock band Sunny Day Real Estate will regroup for a 20-date US tour starting Sept. 17th, 2009. In addition, Sub Pop Records will re-issue both Diary and the band’s second full-length album, commonly known as LP2 (or The Pink Album for its entirely pink cover). Both re-mastered albums will include rare bonus tracks as well as newly written liner notes and will be released on both CD and LP Sept. 15, 2009, just prior to the start of the tour. Tour dates can be found here.

Originally formed in Seattle in 1992, Sunny Day Real Estate featured Nate Mendel (bass), William Goldsmith (drums), Dan Hoerner (guitar,vocals) and Jeremy Enigk (vocals, guitar). Diary, the band’s first full-length album, was released in 1994 on Sub Pop, going on to become the seventh-best selling record in the label’s history with more than 231,000 copies scanned in the US alone. Diary was recorded at Chicago’s Idful Studios with producer Brad Wood and released to critical acclaim. Following the completion of a US Tour to support the debut release, the group headed back into the studio with Wood to record the follow-up.

But during the recording sessions, internal tensions splintered Sunny Day Real Estate, resulting in a sudden break-up and the finished album being turned in to Sub Pop without a title or artwork. LP2 was released in November 1995, by which time both Goldsmith and Mendel had joined Foo Fighters and Enigk had begun a solo career. Without Mendel, Sunny Day Real Estate reunited in 1997 and released two more studio albums (the 1998 Sub Pop release How It Feels to Be Something On and in 2000 The Rising Tide on Time Bomb) before disbanding again in 2001. Sunny Day Real Estate’s influence has grown exponentially since the band’s initial split.

“I wasn’t around for the second version of the band that recorded the 3rd and 4th albums, so I’ve always had a feeling of unfinished business there,” Mendel explains. “We had all these out-sized ideas back then, ‘Everyone’s going to learn a new instrument,’ and ‘Let’s do a rock opera,’ but before we could get anywhere with them, the band broke up. We left behind all these weird and beautiful songs, though, and they’ve stuck with me all this time. I’m really happy that we get a chance to play them together again.”

These new editions of both Diary and LP2 will be available everywhere including sunnydayrealestate.fm and here at subpop.com.

Welcome to a new feature of the internet (and more specifically subpop.com): “For the Record”. It’s going to work something like this: one of us picks a record we are fond of, writes a few lines about why we like it and then we put it on sale for 48 hours. You, enticed by the the review and overcome by feelings of inadequacy for not having listened the first time we told you it was great, buy the record. Deal?

Band: Foals
Record: Antidotes
When we told you the first time: April 8th 2008

Antidotes is unlike any other record Sub Pop has put out. Talking Heads, Steve Reich, Arthur Russell, Fugazi, the Kompakt label, The Cure and “dance rock” (ugh) aren’t reference points for many bands we work with. What Foals do have in common with many of the best loved Sub Pop records is the spirit of outsiders playing their own distorted vision of pop music. Descriptions of the band’s “taught rhythm section” and “insect like guitar lines” litter the internet, so I won’t bore you with those (try the mp3s and video links to hear for yourself or Bing Foals). My favorite track is Heavy Water, or to be precise the second half of it, so look out for that when you buy it. Foals themselves will be the first to tell you that they didn’t pull off everything they attempted on Antidotes, but it’s cruel to be too critical of a band for having too many ideas. The band is currently working on their second record back in Oxford, England. Until LP2, please satisfy yourself with Antidotes, the first Foals record.

For the next 48 hours you can pick up Antidotes for $6 on CD and LP and for $4 digital. The CD contains UK singles “Hummer” and “Mathletics” as bonus tracks, those tracks are included on a 7” in the sleeve with the vinyl.

Click here to buy!

Watch the video for Olympic Airways here

Listen to Balloons here (right click to save or left click to listen now)

It’s with a heavy heart that we bid farewell to Oxford Collapse. The band has announced that their last two shows will be July 17 and 18 in Hoboken and NYC respectively. After releasing two albums on Kanine (Some WIlderness in 2004 and A Good Ground in 2005), the boys from Brooklyn released their first album on Sub Pop, Remember The Night Parties, in 2006 and followed it up in 2008 with Bits. I will particularly miss their fondness for road food (especially hot wings) and their tendency to only refer to each other as “asshole” on stage. Thanks for the good times, boyz.

Official band statement:

Hej friends,
After eight years, 450 shows, and four albums, we’ve decided that we’ve reached the end of the line. To paraphrase the Grateful Dead, “what a long, strange, eye-opening, stomach-bursting, heart-breaking, bittersweet, educational, enlightening, mind-numbing, ‘why-are-we-doing-this-shit?’ / ‘who-gets-to-do-this-shit?,’ absurd, amazing trip it’s been.” To paraphrase another sage poet, “you gotta know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.”

Thanks go out to a million friends—all the awesome, talented people who helped us make records and put them out, everyone who put together tours for us, our families (who are still wondering when we will get real jobs), all the other wonderful and terrible bands we’ve loved touring, playing, hanging and eating with over the years. And of course a heartfelt thanks to everyone who ever came to see us play, bought something we were selling, said something nice, or let us sleep on their diarrhea-encrusted floors. (Except you, Branson, Missouri!)

To have one final go of it, the three of us are meeting up for a pair of shows in and around the city we called home in our time. Come out and party with us! Seriously, do not miss!!! Friday July 17th we are very psyched to be playing with old and dear friends Frightened Rabbit at Maxwell’s, and Saturday July 18th, for our last show ever, we’ll share the stage with best buds CaUSE Co-MOTION!, under-age phenoms The Beets, and our beloved Rape Excape, freshly reformed from the rubble of Princeton ‘04; plus a bunch of special guests! If you missed the original Last Waltz in ‘76, now’s your chance!

Friday, July 17th
Maxwell’s (early show) (SOLD OUT)
Hoboken, NJ
w/Frightened Rabbit

Saturday, July 18th
Under the Tracks
508 W. 25th Street
New York, NY
w/CaUSE co-MOTION!, The Beets, Rape Excape
Starts at 9pm, won’t cost too much
(Don’t worry about advance tix—this place is huge!)

After a couple months of reissues and ultra-deluxely packaged b-side comps (see: Iron & Wine and The Vaselines), Tiny Vipers brings us our first new full-length release of the summer. Life on Earth, Tiny Vipers’ second album is available on CD and MP3 July 7th, and as per usual, we’re going to sweeten the metaphorical pot with some proverbial sugar. If you pre-order Life on Earth from us at subpop.com anytime before July 7th, you’ll also receive a truly limited Tiny Vipers home-recorded ambient piece on CDR called Blades of Grass. This Blades of Grass CDR is only available only to online pre-orderers only! So become one of those pre-orderers! By pre-orderering! To show you we aren’t fooling around with this incentivizing business, we’ll also throw in a button and a couple stickers.

Pre-order Life on Earth here.

Download “Dreamer” from Life on Earth here.

Last night Hardly Art General Employee Nick “My Big Fat Greek” Heliotis was sitting around the fire with his mom and grandmamma watching Jeopardy!, discussing the origins of democracy and butt sex just like they always do, when Nick nearly choked on his baklava. That’s right—the $1,000 answer was this: This Seattle label, the first to release Nirvana & Soundgarden albums, turned 20 in 2008. … Crickets. NO ONE got the question! Host Mark E. Trebek was obliged to answer with, “What is Sub-uh Pop-uh Records-uh” (Finally, definitive proof that absolutely everyone likes The Fall?). COME ON, MOTHERFUCKERS! We need to get more Jeopardy fans signed up for our Twitter feed, I guess.

No one answered the Atlantic and/or Capitol ones correctly, either, so we’re not really sweatin’ it. Other labels mentioned include Apple and Motown, and as our own Andy Kotowicz says, that’s pretty good fucking company to be in.

Thanks so much to all of the kids who applied for the Sub Pop Loser Scholarship 2009! We didn’t get as many applications this year because we dropped the ball and announced it pretty late, but you get to be totally stoked on account of less competition! We’ll announce the lucky losers on July 2nd, so check back to read more about who we’ve selected for our 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place prizes of $6,000 / $4,000 / $3,000! Also, that picture is of my cousin Michael just because he’s a high school senior. I’m trying to turn him on to the good stuff.

Fleet Foxes were up against some stiff competition (LEONARD COHEN!, Seasick Steve, RADIOHEAD!, and PAUL WELLER!) for the MOJO awards Best Live Act category, and lo and behold they’ve won! According to a Reuter’s article, the organizers of the MOJO awards called Fleet Foxes “one of the greatest live bands in the world.” Woah. If that’s not crazy enough, check out this photo of Robin Pecknold sandwiched between photos of YOKO ONO and Billy Gibbons of ZZ TOP. Congrats boys!

Jesse Sandoval, ex-drummer of the Shins recently opened a New Mexican themed taco cart in downtown Portland called Nuevo Mexico and Vendr.tv did an interview with him that you can watch here. Jesse’s food looks delicious, and there’s a surprise visit from Marty Crandall in the video. Read more about Nuevo Mexico here and on the official website. (The official one doesn’t have anything on it yet, presumably because Jesse’s too busy making sopapillas.)

Recently, I was at a high-end boutique where I saw a plain white shirt with a bunch of holes in it for $260 (not a lie made up for the sake of this posting). What a crazy and very fashionable world we live in! In protest of high fashion and what I would consider high prices, for the next two days, we’re having the first of future limited-time t-shirt sales. We’ve selected a few favorites among our collection and priced them at a mere $10. This low-price, low-fashion sale goes through Thursday, so I would suggest not delaying, just a thought.

Sick to Death of LOW here
Helio Sequence here
Spanning the Globe for Profit here
Flight of the Conchords right here

The only thing that I remember from my high school graduation is what I wore. I had a hand painted Misfits t-shirt, torn jeans and combat boots. And I refused to smile when I got my graduation certificate—not because I wanted to look like a bad ass, I just didn’t want people to see that I was a punk rocker with braces. I remember thinking that my parents wouldn’t be too pleased with any of it and that was a good thing.

If I had graduated with the seniors at Lexington High School this year, I think I would have remembered a whole lot more. They asked Eugene Mirman to give the commencement speech at their graduation. Check it out!

He includes such invaluable advice as: “Don’t get too excited when you read The Fountainhead.”

Seriously.

Ya’ll Seattle folks see those thongs thrown on stage at Handsome Furs? That was me and Hardly Art’s own Nick Heliotis having a grand ol’ time at Neumos on Friday! What a show! If you haven’t been able to catch the duo on their current tour, you should check out their fabulous in-studio with KEXP tomorrow at NOON PST right here.

No Age’s Randy Randall partnered with the Director’s Bureau to create a new video for Mika Miko’s “I Got A Lot” and it’s pretty killer. Check here to see it, and make sure to post more comments about there not being enough, ahem, “titties” in the video. God, I hate the internet.

• I stole this photo from Mika Miko’s blog

Vetiver is on tour now and they played an in-store at Toronto’s Sonic Boom Records. Check it.

The remarkably industrious lads in Blitzen Trapper just recently wrapped up work on a video for the song “Black River Killer” from their album Furr. We’ve seen this video and it’s really great. In the very near future, we’ll be doing all we can to try to show this video to you as well. But, in the meantime, you can read some behind-the-scenes stuff from someone down in Portland who has also seen it, and evidently both helped to make some props for the video and appears in the thing as an extra! There’s a Portlandesque post on the making of Blitzen Trapper’s “Black River Killer” video here. Read it!

In related news, we have plans to release a 7-song “Black River Killer” EP this summer. More on that shortly…

Credit for the photo here goes to Betsy Cross and was taken, wholly without permission, from where it appears on the aforementioned Portlandesque blog.

Hello, Friends of Sub Pop on the Internet! We’d like to take this opportunity to give back a little something to you, the Sub Pop fan and lover of music. We’ve just recently put together a little sampler of our upcoming releases and we’re giving them away for free in the hopes that you might like what you hear and then buy these releases for actual dollars. Click this sexy link to see what we’ve got for you. And, since you’re here on the internet already we thought you might want to check out our other web goings-on on wildly popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter. We give away free tickets and post dumb videos on these sites sometimes so it might be worth your while to friend and/or follow us. Plus, this way you can stay on top of all our new releases and other important mumbo jumbo. Come on, do it. We have a Youtube channel, too, with all our videos and a Myspace, too, but who uses that anymore? Also, Dean and Stuart just restructured our blog so that it looks more like a blog and less like whatever it looked like before. It’s easier to read now, and we’ll promise to update it more often with good stuff if you promise to read it.

Speaking of reading, the deadline for the Sub Pop Loser Scholarship is rapidly approaching. We’re giving away $13,000 in scholarship money to eligible high school seniors in the Pacific Northwest who are interested in the arts, so make sure to get in on this action or to spread the word, whichever applies. Look here for a more info about the great folks that won last year. Come to think of it, maybe we should check in with them and make sure they haven’t squandered their winnings on Ramen and mini-thins….

Every June Seattle is host to the world’s longest film festival, aka the Seattle International Film Festival. This year our boys No Age are performing an original live score in accompaniment to Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Césár winning film, The Bear (France, 1988). The debut of this never before seen or heard work takes place on Friday, June 12, at the Triple Door at 7:00pm (all-ages) and 9:30pm (21+). Tickets are $20 in advance, $22 day of show. Tickets available here. These things are always a good time—I highly recommend checking this out if you’re in Seattle that day. Have a lovely June, dudes.