IN THE VALLEY BELOW PRESENT “LIE WITH ME”

ACCLAIMED DREAM POP DUO SHARE MOST PERSONAL SONG TO DATE VIA ARTS & CRAFTS
WATCH / SHARE “LIE WITH ME” HERE
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NORTH AMERICAN TOUR SUPPORTING ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK BEGINS APRIL 22

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Acclaimed dream pop duo In The Valley Below have shared an intimate and emotionally charged new single, “Lie With Me”, available now via Arts & Crafts, and an official music video directed by Uto X (a.k.a. In The Valley Below co-founder Angela Gail Mattson).

Jeffrey Jacob Mendel and Angela Gail Mattson of In The Valley Below were nothing more than friends until one MDMA-infused night when their chemistry completely changed. Less than a year later they were married and expecting a child. The couple currently lives in Grand Rapids, MI where they self-produced and recorded “Lie With Me” in their basement studio. They are still madly in love.

“‘Lie With Me’ is one of our most personal songs,” say In The Valley Below. “It’s about the night we fell head over heels for each other, even though we were both in relationships. It’s about the feelings of excitement and guilt that overwhelmed us.”

WATCH / SHARE “LIE WITH ME” HERE
BUY / STREAM “LIE WITH ME” HERE

“Lie With Me” Single Art // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

In The Valley Below will mark the arrival of “Lie With Me” with a major North American tour supporting legendary electronic pop pioneers Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, set to get underway April 22. For complete details and ticket availability, please visit inthevalleybelow.com/shows. 

MORE ABOUT IN THE VALLEY BELOW
Founded in 2011, In The Valley Below made their full-length debut with 2014’s critically acclaimed The Belt, highlighted by the worldwide hit single, “Peaches”. The track reached the Top 20 on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart, prompting high profile TV performances on CBS’ The Late Show With David Letterman and TBS’ Conan. After three years on the road – including headline tours, festival sets at such global events as Reading/Leeds, Austin City Limits Music Festival, Pukkelpop, and Rock En Seine, and support runs alongside Cold War Kids, Tricky, and The Airborne Toxic Event, to name but a few – Mendel and Mattson relocated from Los Angeles to Grand Rapids, MI, where they built a full studio in a 100-year-old house. There they crafted their groundbreaking sophomore LP, The Pink Chateau, released on Arts & Crafts in 2019 joined by a feature length erotique film hailed by Brooklyn Vegan as “a dreamlike diorama of interconnected musical vignettes inspired by vintage French erotica and the faded colors of 1970s films.” A multimedia tour followed which saw In The Valley Below presenting The Pink Chateau in cinemas across America, accompanying their film by performing its score live over wireless headphones. 


IN THE VALLEY BELOW TOUR 2022
All Dates Supporting Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

Apr 22 – Orlando, FL – The Plaza Live 
Apr 23 – St Petersburg, FL – Jannus Live
Apr 24 – Atlanta, GA – Buckhead Theatre
Apr 26 – Washington, DC – Lincoln Theatre
Apr 27 – Glenside, PA – Keswick Theatre
Apr 29 – Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Steel
Apr 30 – Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Steel
May 01 – Boston, MA – House of Blues
May 03 – Toronto, ON – History
May 04 – Royal Oak, MI – Royal Oak Music Theatre
May 06 – Chicago, IL – Riviera Theatre
May 07 – Minneapolis, MN – The Fillmore Minneapolis
May 08 – Kansas City, MO – The Truman
May 10 – Dallas, TX – South Side Ballroom
May 11– Houston, TX – Bayou Music Center
May 12 – Austin, TX – Austin City Limits Live at The Moody Theater
May 15 – Denver, CO – Paramount Theatre
May 16 – Salt Lake City, UT – The Union
May 20 – Vancouver, BC – Malkin Bowl
May 21 – Seattle, WA – Moore Theatre
May 22 – Portland, OR – Roseland Theater
May 24 – Oakland, CA – Fox Theater
May 25 – El Cajon, CA – The Magnolia
May 26 – Los Angeles, CA – The Greek Theatre

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COLA SHARES “WATER TABLE” FROM UPCOMING LP

WATCH / SHARE “WATER TABLE” HERE
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DEEP IN VIEW OUT MAY 20, 2022 VIA NEXT DOOR RECORDS

PRE-ORDER DEEP IN VIEW HERE

"A gorgeously obsessive guitar groove...'Blank Curtain' is more than just a beautiful tune — it’s a graceful way to mark the transition from one stage of life to the next." - Rolling Stone

“'Blank Curtain,' a song that seemingly alludes to the myriad of possibilities the band now faces, stacked with oblique imagery and tethered to a driving groove." - FADER

"A hypnotic debut outing, leveraging minimalist instrumentation into propulsive, droning post-punk." - Paste

Photo Credit : Colin Medley // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

In February, Cola, the new project from former Ought members Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworthy and US Girls/The Weather Station drummer Evan Cartwright, announced their debut LP. Entitled Deep In View, the album is due out May 20 on Next Door Records and has generated a great deal of excitement already, earning praise from outlets like Pitchfork, NPR, FADER, Stereogum, Uproxx, Paste, BrooklynVegan, Consequence, Clash, and NME. 

Today, the band have given their first interview as a band, speaking to Rolling Stone about their new LP in an Artist You Need To Know feature, and are sharing a new single from the LP, a track called "Water Table".

"Water Table” came from “some experiments with bass chords," Stidworthy explains. "The guitar parts of the verse was an attempt to write something Tim would come up with and basically wrote itself. The guitar in the chorus was originally a harp sample played on a keyboard, which is why the working title was Dark Harp. It was the last song I wrote for the record at a moment when we were pretty sure what would end up on the record. I felt like the record needed the emotional note of a song like Water Table and the track flowed out of me. Tim sent it back to me with lyrics the next day so I knew it was gonna work."

WATCH / SHARE “WATER TABLE” HERE
BUY / STREAM “WATER TABLE” HERE

MORE ABOUT DEEP IN VIEW
Deep in View is the debut album from former Ought members Tim Darcy (vocals, guitar) and Ben Stidworthy (bass) alongside Evan Cartwright (drums). Titled after philosopher Alan Watts’ anthology of the same name, the record is built on a foundation of elegant guitar grooves and knotty rhythms, offering commentary on modern life and technology through curious lyrical vignettes, where quotidian objects and scenes are never just as they seem. Deep In View is equally a product of introspective songwriting as it is a consideration of the abstract landmarks of an increasingly media-mediated society. It also presents the most concise and melodic songs Darcy and Stidworthy have written to date.

“I love when I find a record that has many different angles from which it can be approached,” Darcy explains. The band’s affinity for polysemy is first-and-foremost a chord struck in the name Cola, which most obviously is the fizzy beverage that Darcy deadpans is ”bound by laws older than man to poison most ordinary life on earth” in closing track “Landers”, but also can be traced back to a term in poetics as well as an acronym about social security that refers to “Cost of Living Adjustment”. Cola is also about drinking in the endless crispness of a streamlined (and streamed) world, and the often unsettling sense of satisfaction and emptiness that subsequently sets in. Fundamentally, this record is about passion and what happens to a person when they find themselves increasingly encountering a passionless landscape of consumption. This peeling back of layers is integral to both Cola’s mindset as well as their worldview, which despite a claustrophobic time in the making sees them joyfully exploring new realms as musicians.

Cola started collaborating in fall 2019 when Darcy and Stidworthy, both formerly of Ought, reached out to their friend Cartwright, who they had frequently met on the road while he was drumming with various other projects. “It wasn’t the post-Ought band right off the bat,” Darcy says, “we really just took time to enjoy the process of collaborating and writing songs together.” The band’s organic chemistry solidified quickly after a few sessions of jamming in-person.  Then, as the pandemic began, they were forced to decamp and write songs separately. Working in solitude ended up becoming a “defining color as well as a barrier” to the album, says Darcy. He notes that he wrote the lyrics to “Fulton Park” as a “dream landscape”, a sort of alternative to the frustration and depression he was experiencing at the time.

WATCH / SHARE “SO EXCITED” HERE
BUY / STREAM “SO EXCITED” HERE

The imposed isolation of writing at home led Stidworthy (who helped compose the album’s guitar parts and plays the piano on “Landers”) to “create little worlds with the songs”. The keen brushstrokes of all three members combined feels languidly tactile, replete with profound meaning that is almost archeological in its sense of economy and personal touch. This sense of relaxed exploration could only occur because of the mutual trust between the trio: Stidworthy adds, “I could go really far in cultivating a mood for a demo and send it to them and know that it could only improve.” Meanwhile, Cartwright (who also plays guitar on the project and coded Supercollider synth parts in the studio), found that he was subliminally incorporating drum ideas and patterns from when he first started playing as a teen, embedded deep in his muscle memory.

The resulting record delights in its aversion to superficiality. Although Darcy’s characteristically wry voice remains front-and-center, shifting from decisive to distressed and detached, his lyrical invocations remain only the first key to a much more intricate universe of sound and longing. Individual tracks often feel like small revelations, and each element contributes to a streamlined and yet poetically expansive set of meanings, as the rhythms of the punchy and exuberant guitar parts, urgent basslines, and unexpected drum patterns all tangle with each other in an elegant dance. Much greater than the sum of its parts, Deep in View is an album of artful and energetic post-punk that sparks novel interpretations with every listen, like an object that takes on new shape with each angle from which you hold it.

LISTEN AND SHARE “BLANK CURTAIN” HERE
BUY / STREAM “BLANK CURTAIN” HERE

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DEEP IN VIEW TRACKLIST
1. Blank Curtain
2. So Excited
3. At Pace
4. Met Resistance
5. Degree
6. Water Table
7. Gossamer
8. Mint
9. Fulton Park
10. Landers

TOUR DATES
06.20 - Winooski, VT @ Monkey House

06.21 - Boston, MA @ Sonia's

06.22 - Kingston, NY @ Tubby's

06.23 - Brooklyn, NY @ Baby's All Right

06.24 - Philadelphia, PA @ Kung Fu Necktie

06.25 - Washington, DC @ DC9

06.27 - Carrboro, NC @ Cat's Cradle (Back Room)

06.28 - Atlanta, GA @ The Earl

06.29 - Nashville, TN @ DRKMTTR

07.01 - Dallas, TX @ Ruins

07.02 - Austin, TX @ The Parish

07.05 - Phoenix, AZ @ The Rebel Lounge

07.06 - San Diego, CA @ Soda Bar

07.07 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo

07.08 - San Francisco, CA @ Rickshaw Stop

07.10 - Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios

07.11 - Vancouver, BC @ The Biltmore 

07.12 - Seattle, WA @ Tractor Tavern

07.14 - Boise, ID @ Neurolux

07.16 - Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive

07.18 - Omaha, NE @ Slowdown

07.19 - Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St. Entry

07.20 - Milwaukee, WI @ Cactus Club

07.22 - Detroit, MI @ Magic Bag


08.20 - Crickhowell, UK @ Green Man Festival
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8.23 - Brighton, UK @ Prince Albert

08.24 - London, UK @ Moth Club 

08.25 - Birmingham, UK @ Hare & Hounds

08.26 - Bristol, UK @ Rough Trade Bristol

08.27 - Birkenhead, UK @ Future Yard

08.28 - Sunderland, UK @ Pop Recs Ltd. 

08.30 - Edinburgh, UK @ Sneaky Pete's
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8.31 - Glasgow, UK @ Broadcast

09.1 - Leeds, UK @ Brudenell Social Club
0
9.2 - Nottingham, UK @ Rough Trade

09.3 - Manchester, UK @ Manchester Psych Fest (Yes)

09.4 - Salisbury, UK @ End of the Road Festival

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GHOSTKEEPER SHARES NEW VIDEO / SINGLE, A PRAYER FOR MMIWG

Photo Credit : Heather Saitz // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Today, the Calgary-based band Ghostkeeper are sharing another new track from their upcoming LP, Multidimensional Culture, out May 27 via Victory Pool. “This Is How I Know You” is a “prayer for our missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls…and a prayer for Truth and Reconciliation," says Shane Ghostkeeper. 

The single arrives with a video from the band’s Sarah Houle who says of the visuals, "The two protagonists are seeking new eyes in an attempt to understand the reality of MMIWG. With the help of four Spirit Creatures, they witness what was broken become whole again."

WATCH / SHARE “THIS IS HOW I KNOW YOU” HERE

BUY / STREAM “THIS IS HOW I KNOW YOU” HERE

MORE ABOUT MULTIDIMENSIONAL CULTURE

‘Let these bodies know / that they exist for one another,’ beckons Ghostkeeper above an angularly shifting progression. ‘This is a reckoning of truth and perception / a smooth redemption. Each phrase is echoed by a response from a ghostly choir, which blurs the line between the spirit world and the world of flesh and bone. These are the opening lines from Ghostkeeper's latest offering, Multidimensional Culture, an album which contains no shortage of dimensions, both sonically, and spiritually.

The duo of Ghostkeeper and Houle (originally from the Paddle Prairie Metis Settlement in Alberta) met in their early twenties, and began artistically collaborating soon after. Sarah, already a visual artist and musician, was integral to determining the imagery for the project from early on. She utilized her talents to design their album artwork, t-shirts, and masks, while Shane, who had only recently embarked on his musical journey, began laying the ground work for what would become their shared musical voice. Once their vision for the project had presented itself, the duo's trajectory and purpose became clear.

WATCH / SHARE “THE TREES” HERE

BUY / STREAM “THE TREES” HERE

Their early recordings were released through Calgary-based record labels Saved By Vinyl and Flemish Eye (home to acclaimed artists Chad Vangaalen, Yves Jarvis, and Preoccupations). The band have long collaborated with Calgary heavy-hitter musicians Ryan Bourne and Eric Hamelin, who are integral in forging the melodic complexity of the bands’ sonically expansive catalog. Multidimensional Culture is at once unpredictable, and easily digestible. 

The album blends the avant-garde instincts of Ghostkeeper's previous releases with a new found peacefulness that has presented itself since the couple became parents. Thematically, Multidimensional Culture tackles many of life’s big questions, from the fragility of human existence, to the innocence of love. Even the pain of their ancestral discrimination is approached with a tenderness and understanding that only a narrator with true empathy and wisdom could provide. The sonic range of this record traverses a wide spectrum of influences, including African psychedelia, traditional Metis music, 70’s freak-folk traditions, and proto-punk guitar based bands like Television. All of these influences blend seamlessly into a sound that is unique, yet familiar. 

WATCH AND SHARE “GRASSY PLAINS” HERE

BUY / STREAM “GRASSY PLAINS” HERE

Each song holds its own weight as a pillar to which the greater sonic structure rests upon. Each story has been lived, and there is a penetrating honesty in both Shane and Sarah's delivery that is palpable. Ghostkeeper channels the spirit world in all of its pain, beauty and wonderment, and gifts it to anyone willing to accept.

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MULTIDIMENSIONAL CULTURE TRACKLIST
01 Doo Wop
02 Finn
03 Grassy Plains
04 Rolly
05 Summer Child
06 This Is How I Know You
07 Ancestral
08 The Trees
09 Ghost On A Rope
10 Tropical Metis

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