joan

Beloved Arkansas duo joan have released the catchy second single “don’t say you love me” TODAY from two upcoming EPs set to hit later this year via Photo Finish Records. Following their recent single “so good” released last month, ‘don’t say you love me’ is a song about letting a relationship go when a partner is no longer fully in it, set over an ever-irresistible melody. joan have also announced the titles of their two forthcoming EP’s, which will be hi and bye, each EP weaving the story respectively about the beginnings and endings of a relationship. Of ‘don’t say you love me’, the band say, “this song was in demo land for about 6 months. we loved the chorus that we had a lot, but could not find a verse that felt right for the life of us. one day last month we met and wrote with michelle buzz and hit it off right away. she’s the first person we’ve ever let in as far as writing lyric and melody to a song - she’s an absolute rockstar, and was the perfect partner to make this song what it came to be.” “With this project, we’re shooting a proper music video for each song with our favorite director in the world, brandon waddell. while thinking on the concept for this song, brandon brought up the idea of doing a chatroom type performance from a bedroom. we’ve been thinking of a way to incorporate fans for a video shoot, and this one felt like the perfect opportunity to do so. we put out a casting call on social media, had thousands of fans reach out, and put the quickest responders in the video. this song and video is extremely special and important to us - it feels like a milestone we’ll look back on and remember when we’ve been a band for 50 years :)” joan’s new chapter ‘wave era’ will see new singles from two EPs landing on the first Thursday of each month, soundtracking the rest of 2021 with their trademark alt-pop bops, tinged with the sweetest hint of 90’s R&B influences. Today announced to be titled hi and bye, joan add “after we released “cloudy/partly cloudy”, we got straight to work, writing so many new songs. we found that the songs were naturally falling in two different camps. so, we decided rather than trying to force them to work together, it would be more interesting to release two ep’s over the course of the year. welcome to the wave era - here comes a new joan song each month through the end of the year :)” joan (Alan Benjamin Thomas and Steven Rutherford) have spent the past few years building their musical empire, single by single, tour date by tour date, with the past two years being landmarks for them; their debut EP, 2019’s portra, and last year’s EP cloudy have been streamed well over 90 million times, with over a million listeners a month across streaming platforms. The guys spent much of 2019 on the road with major US and international tours supporting the likes of The Aces, COIN, Bloc Party and Jeremy Zucker, as well as playing to fans across Asia with headline shows and festivals in the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong. Early 2020 saw them playing to sold out crowds across the US on their first headline tour, including having to add additional shows in LA to accommodate ticket demand. Their virtual cloudy release show in August 2020 boasted thousands of ticket sales from fans who tuned into their livestream. 2021 is going to be an incredibly exciting year for joan, they’re only just getting started.

Harriette is a 23-year-old singer-songwriter born in Texas. Now based in Brooklyn, she has created a signature DIY indie pop sound with her single "at least i'm pretty" which has already amassed over 50 million streams. Her debut single's success has paved the way for her upcoming EP "I Heart the Internet," which will be released April 2023.

Music was always an inevitability for the young Toronto singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist AVIV, who pens D.I.Y. pop that feels universally relatable. Growing up, AVIV was surrounded by music, from her parents and siblings and from the city of Toronto itself. She started learning piano at age six and guitar at age twelve, and, after being gifted a keyboard for her 14th birthday, taught herself how to write songs. When the pandemic hit, AVIV found herself trapped at home, bored, quickly realizing that her life-long love of music could become something more than a hobby. “I was trying a million and one things and none of them stuck,” she remembers. “And then I tried writing music and I loved it. Initially, I was just making music for fun and exploring different aspects of it. I grew up listening to Elliott Smith and Radiohead, all of these artists whose music I would pick apart. When I started making my own music, I used a lot of that analysis as inspiration.” AVIV released a few singles on her own, including “Cookie Dough” and “Girls In Red,” which attracted the attention of fans and music industry, earning her a label deal with Photo Finish Records in the US, and Dine Alone Records in her native Canada. Since early 2021, AVIV has been writing and recording her debut EP, an evocative, hook-laden collection of songs called Drowning in the Culture. The title, which shares its name with one of the EP’s standout tracks, came from a feeling AVIV had while in LA last spring. “I was in Los Angeles doing writing sessions and I hated everything I was coming up with,” she says. “I didn’t think any of it was as good as what society would want to hear. I put so much pressure on myself to make things that other people would enjoy and it felt like I was drowning. I went into the studio the next day and wrote that song, as a response to my feelings and as a result, answered a lot of questions for me. The EP as a whole deals with the things that culture comes with, like relationships and predetermined judgements.” To create Drowning in the Culture, AVIV teamed up with several songwriters and producers, including Courtney Ballard (5 Seconds of Summer, Tori Kelly, Waterparks) and Rian Lewis (Doja Cat, DRAM, Chromeo). She collaborated with Kristina Sarro on “Black Coffee,” a soaring pop number that recalls two of AVIV’s favorite musicians, Lorde and Lana Del Rey. Although there is a thematic consistency to the EP, the songs themselves vary in style, particularly “You Feel Like Depression,” a track AVIV loved because it felt so unexpected. Ultimately, the EP sees AVIV coming to terms with issues she’d been grappling with for years. “I had a lot of unanswered questions and somehow every single song answered one of them for me,” she says. “It was like, ‘What’s the thing that’s on my mind today that I need to make sense of?’ And then I would write a song about it. Now, post pandemic, seeing this body of work I created during a time I was feeling so many things, it’s like a breath of fresh air to let go to that go. I’m ready to send it into the world. I answered my questions and I hope that, in some way, the listeners’ questions are a step closer to being answered, as well."