“[Amen Dunes] has proven to be a fearless reinventer, a spiritually attuned songwriter, and a cerebral lyricist who’s well-primed to tell you something about yourself if you simply pay a visit to the flawed characters who inhabit his records” — Stereogum

Amen Dunes – the project of New York City-based Damon McMahon – unveils “Rugby Child,” the final single ahead of the release of Death Jokes, out this Friday via Sub Pop, following “Purple Land,” “Boys” and the album’s centerpiece, “Round the World.” 

With deep kick drums and hi-hats underneath a serpentine guitar riff, “Rugby Child” explores the psychic dis-ease that affected us all at the height of the pandemic and one’s desire to break from this mortal coil. McMahon sings, “You hear that Annie died? / She was straight for fifty days / When they said to stay inside / She must’ve just gone crazy.” “The song was written in April 2020, and flips between memories of touring, and that present moment of spring,” McMahon explains. “A musician from New York I had known had just overdosed. He wasn’t named Annie, but she stands in for him out of respect.”

The “Rugby Child” video completes the Death Jokes trilogy of videos and is once again directed by McMahon’s ongoing collaborator Steven Brahms. Featuring McMahon and modern dancer Jennifer Florentio, the video was filmed in an abandoned detox center in Flatbush. 

Watch the Video for Amen Dunes’ “Rugby Child”

“A daring turn in a different direction” (NPR Music) for Amen Dunes, Death Jokes marks his first record since 2018’s Freedom (named a “best album of the decade” by Pitchfork). Death Jokes sees McMahon immersing himself in the electronic music he’d grown up with at raves and clubs but never imagined himself able to make. For the first time since the project’s incarnation in 2006, the spiritual reflections and meditations of Amen Dunes are turned away from himself and out sharply towards the world. Through samples and lyrics, the album plays like a scathing electronic essay on America’s culture of violence, dominance, and destructive individualism. 

Following a New York City performance next week and a summer tour of the UK and Europe, Amen Dunes will return to the US for an appearance at Pitchfork Music Festival in July and then embark on a North American tour in August, including a festival performance at Outside Lands in San Francisco. A full list of dates is below and tickets are on sale here.

Pre-order Death Jokes

Listen to “Purple Land”

Watch the Video For “Boys”

Watch the Video for “Round the World”

Amen Dunes Tour Dates

(New Dates in Bold)

Wed. May 15 - Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Steel

Mon. July 1 - Paris, FR @ Trabendo

Wed. July 3 - Berlin, DE @ Gretchen

Fri. July 5 - Roskilde, DK @ Roskilde Festival

Sun. July 7 - Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso

Tue. July 9 - London, UK @ KOKO

Fri. July 19 - Chicago, IL @ Pitchfork Music Festival 

Wed. Aug. 7 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Bellwether

Thu. Aug. 8 - San Francisco, CA @ The Independent

Fri. Aug. 9 - Sun. Aug 11 - San Francisco, CA @ Outside Lands

Tue. Aug. 13 - Portland, OR @ Revolution Hall

Wed. Aug. 14 – Seattle, WA @ The Showbox

Fri. Aug 16 – Vancouver, BC @ The Pearl

Thu. Sep. 5 – Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts

Fri. Sep. 6 – Washington D.C. @ Black Cat

Sun. Sep. 8 – Atlanta, GA @ Terminal West

Tue. Sep. 10 – Dallas, TX @ Granada Theater

Wed. Sep. 11 – Austin, TX @ Empire Garage

Fri. Sep. 13 – Denver, CO @ Summit

Tue. Sep. 17 – Toronto, ON @ The Concert Hall

Wed. Sep. 18 – Montreal, QC @ Le Studio

The tour will feature direct support from RCA Records act Debbii Dawson on September 28th, and her Sub Pop labelmate Bully from October 17th through December 21st (select dates).

Special fan presales for THE SPARKLEMUFFIN TOUR begin Wednesday, May 8th at 8am (local) and end Friday, May 10th at 9 am (local). Fans can RSVP here to receive the artist presale code on Wednesday.  Tickets for the general public will be on sale Friday, May 10th at 10 am (local) here.

The announcement comes on the heels of her Coachella debut closing out the Gobi stage both weekends. She performed her new singles “My Fun” and “Faded” along with fan favorites like “Nostalgia,” “Too Love,” “OMG,” and her newly-certified Platinum single “Good Looking,” along with a cover of the Oasis classic “Don’t Look Back In Anger.”

The upcoming series of dates follows a ramped-up year of Suki playing some of the largest crowds of her career in South America (Lollapalooza in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile), the US (Governors Ball, Ohana, Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits Festival, and now Coachella), and Mexico (at Corona Capital).

The tour will be in support of Suki’s forthcoming album, which includes “Faded,” “My Fun,” “To Love,” and “OMG,” and is due out later this year worldwide on Sub Pop.

For more ticket information, please visit https://laylo.com/sukiwaterhouse/m/sparklemuffintour.

SUKI WATERHOUSE ‘THE SPARKLEMUFFIN TOUR’ 2024 DATES:               
Sat. Sep. 28 - Denver, CO - Mission Ballroom *                   
Thu. Oct. 17 - Houston, TX -  House of Blues ^                               
Fri. Oct. 18 - Austin, TX -  ACL Live at the Moody Theater ^
Sat. Oct. 19 - Dallas, TX  - The Factory in Deep Ellum ^     
Mon. Oct. 21 - Phoenix, AZ - The Van Buren ^                    
Tue. Oct. 22 - San Diego, CA - The Sound ^           
Wed. Oct. 23 - Los Angeles, CA - Greek Theatre ^                     
Fri. Oct. 25 - San Francisco, CA - The Warfield                                               
Mon. Oct. 28 - Vancouver, BC - Commodore Ballroom ^                

Tue. Oct. 30 - Portland, OR - Roseland Theater ^

Mon. Dec. 02 - Kansas City, MO - The Truman ^
Tue. Dec. 03 - St. Louis, MO - The Factory ^ 
Wed. Dec. 04 - Indianapolis, IN - Egyptian Room at Old National Centre ^               
Fri. Dec. 06 - Cleveland, OH - The Agora ^  
Sat. Dec. 07 - Brooklyn, NY - Brooklyn Paramount ^
Tue. Dec. 10 - Philadelphia, PA - Franklin Music Hall ^                   
Wed. Dec. 11 - Washington, DC - The Anthem ^

Fri. Dec. 13 - Boston, MA - Roadrunner ^
Sat. Dec. 14 - Montreal, QC - MTELUS ^    
Sun. Dec. 15  - Toronto, ON - HISTORY ^   
Tue. Dec. 17 - Royal Oak, MI - Royal Oak Music Theatre ^
Wed. Dec. 18 - Chicago, IL - The Salt Shed ^

Thu. Dec. 19 - Nashville, TN - Ryman Auditorium ^

Sat. Dec.  21 - Atlanta, GA - The Eastern ^

^ w/ Bully

* w/ Debbii Dawson

About Suki Waterhouse

Sub Pop recording artist Suki Waterhouse has worked nonstop since the May 2022 release of I Can’t Let Go, her label debut. Later that year, she released the “Nostalgia” single and the Milk Teeth EP (featuring the newly Platinum-certified viral hit, “Good Looking”). In 2023, Suki released the monumental ballad “To Love.” She embarked on a wildly successful headline tour and would go on to perform in front of the largest festival crowds of her career in North and South America. 

In 2024, Suki released the jubilant “OMG” and the sparkling “My Fun” and “Faded” ahead of her well-received Coachella debut, closing out the Gobi stage. “To Love,” “OMG,” “My Fun,” and “Faded” will be on her forthcoming album due out this year. Suki will also support that release with “The Sparklemuffin Tour,” her headlining tour this fall.

On June 28th, Sub Pop will release Washed Out’s fifth and most audacious album to date, Notes From A Quiet Life. The music of Washed Out has always levitated over a timeless frontier. You can sense it in his immersive, amorphous vocals, expansive soundscapes, and wistful storytelling. In 2021, Washed Out’s creative force, Ernest Greene, left Atlanta to return to the countryside he knew growing up. Where escapism once flooded his thoughts, today, he is preoccupied with the universe of wonder in the reality around him.
 
He named the former horse farm he moved to “Endymion” (after the pastoral John Keats poem about a lovesick shepherd — its opening line: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”). It has shaped all that he’s created there, from his music to his albums’ creative direction to his planned large-scale visual-art experiments. That purity of vision is what makes Notes From a Quiet Life so potent. It’s the first album Greene wholly self-produced, with mixing assistance from Nathan Boddy (James Blake, Mura Masa) and David Wrench (Caribou, Florence + the Machine).
 
Unabashed and unafraid to pioneer and incorporate new technologies within his art, Greene enlisted multi-disciplinary Artist, Writer, and Director Paul Trillo to direct the music video for the album’s lead single, “The Hardest Part.” Created using OpenAI’s Sora, “The Hardest Part” marks the first collaboration with an artist and filmmaker to be generated entirely utilizing this technology.
 
Director Paul Trillio shares:
“I had the seed of this video concept 10 years ago, where we do an infinite zoom of a couple’s life over the course of many decades, but I have yet to attempt it because I figured it’d be too ambitious for a music video. While the technology is experimental and cutting-edge, I wanted to do something that also felt like a classic music video that would hold your attention no matter what tech was being used in the process. I was specifically interested in what makes Sora so unique. It offers something that couldn’t quite be shot with a camera, nor could it be animated in 3D, it was something that could have only existed with this specific technology. The surreal and hallucinatory aspects of AI allow you to explore and discover new ideas that you would have never dreamed of.  Using AI to simply recreate reality is boring. I wasn’t interested in capturing realism but something that felt hyperreal. The fluid blending and merging of different scenes feels more akin to how we move through dreams and the murkiness of memories. While some people feel this may be supplanting how things are made, I see this as supplementing ideas that could never have been made otherwise. Many artists in this industry are constantly compromising and negotiating their ideas with the reality of what can be made. This offers a glimpse at a future where music artists will be given the opportunity to dream bigger. An overreliance on this technique may become a crutch and it’s important that we don’t use this as the new standard of creation but another technique in the toolbelt.”
 
Ernest Greene says about the song & video: 
“‘The Hardest Part’ is a story about nostalgia and love lost.  With the video, I wanted to bring this narrative to life in a sincere way that was also exciting and unexpected. I’ve been a fan of Paul for a long time and he is amazingly skilled at incorporating cutting-edge visual effects that elevate a story instead of simply supplementing it with shock and awe. He was at the top of my list of potential collaborators. 
 
What he’s come up with is nostalgic, sad, uplifting, and often quite strange.  However, he still manages to make you feel for the characters and invested in the journey of how their lives progress.
I think that Paul is right when he says that this video could only be made using this new AI technology.  In my opinion, the hallucinatory quality of Sora clips feel like the beginning of a new genre unto itself - one that is surreal and unpredictable and entirely unique to traditional cinema or even animation.”
 
About Sora/OpenAI:
OpenAI’s Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative videos from text instructions. Though the model is not yet released, OpenAI is working with a number of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals. 
 
About OpenAI: 
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. 
 
Click HERE to watch. 

La Luz - the band led by Shana Cleveland – has released a gorgeous new single today, “I’ll Go With You.” La Luz is at their dreamiest here — with sparkly instrumentals and soothing vocals, “I’ll Go With You” is a moment of tranquility. The new track is off their forthcoming album News of The Universe, out May 24th via Sub Pop, and follows the two previously released singles “Strange World” (which Uproxx deemed “futuristic”) and most recently, “Poppies” of which Austin Town Hall said, “there was something truly majestic in Shana Cleveland’s vocal performance.” Fans can pre-order the album HERE. 

“This song is heavily influenced by Yanti Bersaudara, a group of Indonesian sisters who released some of my very favorite music originally released in the mid 60s and early 70s,” says lead singer Shana Cleveland on the new single. “Lyrically, this song is a retelling of a dream I had one night when I had gone to bed with the melody of this song in my head. I had some different words in mind, but this sweet little romance dream took over” she continues. Listen/share “I’ll Go With You” here. 

With a credo adapted from science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, an album title from a collection of metaphysical poetry, and an expansion in consciousness brought on by personal crisis, News of the Universe finds guitarist and songwriter Cleveland embracing a changing world with unconditional love. News of the Universe is also a record born of calamity, a work of dark, beautiful psychedelia reflecting Cleveland’s experience of having her world blown apart by a breast cancer diagnosis just two years after the birth of her son. 

La Luz will be touring North America, Europe, and the UK in support of News of the Universe, and the first run of dates will kick off May 23 in Barcelona. The band’s first show stateside is Record Release Party on May 30 at The Crocodile in Seattle, WA.  Their touring goes into full swing starting on September 26 with a show in Chicago, IL, stopping at Brooklyn’s Elsewhere on October 9, before concluding with a 2-night run at Lodge Room in Los Angeles, CA, on November 8 and 9. All shows are listed below.  

Formed by Cleveland in 2012, La Luz is beloved for their ability to balance bedlam and bliss, each new record another fine-tuning of the band’s mix of swaggering riffs with angelic vocals borrowed from doo-wop and folk; a band so reliably great that it makes the huge step forward in confidence and sheer musicality that is News of the Universe all the more formidable. Cleveland, also a writer and painter, has developed into a truly original songwriter with her own canon of haunted psychedelia that, in recent years, has drawn upon the changing landscape around her rural California home for inspiration, notably on last year’s critically acclaimed solo release, Manzanita, a magical realist documentation of her pregnancy and early motherhood that appeared on many year-end lists.

Sonically, the record is all urgency. Songs trip over themselves as if trying to outrun the apocalypse. The powerful sense of openness that permeates News of the Universe is at least partially due to the fact that it is a record made entirely by women—from the performing, writing, and producing all the way through to the recording, engineering, and mastering. “There is something inherently and simultaneously sweet and brutal about womanhood,” says Cleveland. “That is something I hear on this record.”

Working with producer Maryam Qudus (Spacemoth), the all-female environment allowed Cleveland to feel safe tapping into difficult places and expressing hard emotions women are socialized to suppress. Unashamedly vulnerable, unabashedly feminine, and undeniably triumphant, News of the Universe is another knockout record from a band so reliably great that it has perhaps led people to overlook how pioneering La Luz really are: women of color in indie music forging their own path by following their own artistic star into galaxies beyond current musical trends, always led by an earnest belief in the cosmic power of love and a great riff. Never is that more true than on News of the Universe, which might be La Luz’s most brutal record to date but also their most blissful. After everything, how could it not?

La Luz Tour Dates

05/23 Barcelona, ES @ Sala Upload

05/24 Madrid, ES @ Tomavistas Festival

05/25 London, UK @ Wide Awake Festival

05/30 Seattle, WA @ The Crocodile (Record Release Show)

07/27 Portland, OR @ Project Pabst

08/30 Brighton, UK @ Brighton Psych Fest

08/31 Manchester, UK @ Manchester Psych Fest

09/01 Edinburgh, UK @ Edinburgh Psych Fest

09/03 Bristol, UK @ Strange Brew

09/05 Paris, FR @ Point Ephemere

09/06 Sart-Messire-Guillaume, BE @ SMG Music Fest

09/07 Asten-Heusden, NL @ Misty Fields Festival

09/08 Amsterdam, NL @ Indiestadt x Sugar Mountain @ Paradiso

09/10 Cologne, DE @ Bumann & SOHN

09/11 Hamburg, DE @ Prinzenbar

09/12 Berlin, DE @ Badehaus

09/13 Schorndorf, DE @ Manufaktur

09/14 Zürich, DE @ Bogen

09/26 Chicago, IL @ Subterranean

09/27 Madison, WI @ High Noon Saloon

09/28 St. Paul, MM @ Turf Club

09/30 St. Louis, MO @ Blueberry Hill

10/01 Louisville, KY @ Zanzabar

10/02 Nashville, TN @ The End

10/03 Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade - Purgatory

10/04 Durham, NC @ Motorco Music Hall

10/05 Richmond, VA @ Richmond Music Hall

10/06 Washington, DC @ The Atlantis

10/08 Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s

10/09 Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere - Hall

10/10 Boston, MA @ Brighton Music Hall

10/11 Montreal, QC @ Bar Le Ritz

10/12 Toronto, ON @ Horseshoe Tavern

10/13 Ferndale, MI @ The Loving Touch 

10/28 Denver, CO @ Marquis

10/30 Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge

10/31 Boise, ID @ The Olympic

11/03 Vancouver, BC @ The Pearl

11/06 Sacramento, CA @ Harlow’s

11/07 San Francisco, CA @ Great American Music Hall

11/08 Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room

11/09 Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room

News of the Universe is available to preorder now on CD/LP/DSPs from Sub Pop. The album can be pre-ordered in North America from megamart.subpop.com, select independent retailers, and the band’s website, and in Europe and the UK from independent retail stores, and Mega Mart 2 (the new, UK-based sibling site to the world-famous Sub Pop Mega Mart), with vinyl available on limited variants. All colored vinyl versions are available while stock lasts.