melt exclusive:
VILLAGERRR
“It just can all feel a little bit funny. But that's not really what the whole thing is about, I guess. It also just feels like, with the carousel imagery, it kind of reminds me of a carnival or something. The songs span a pretty wide sonic palette, I feel like. And there's so many different people playing on it, so it just feels like a big, messy thing. But in a good way.”
Read Above: Steeped in the same rawness that earned Mark Scott’s earliest, bedroom-recorded releases their initial admiration, Carousel is, in a way, a realized version of these sounds. With an accompanying band composed of Zayn Dweik (drums), Cam Garshon (bass), Alec Cox (guitar), and Henry Schuellerman (pedal steel), Scott’s trademark premeditation and delicacy is brought to rest in absolute perfection in its live incarnation.
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MELT Exclusive:
True Green
True Green, the brainchild of novelist and songwriter Dan Hornsby, recently released the follow-up to their 2024 debut, My Lost Decade, in the form of a tumbling, character-extracted, 13-track extravaganza: Hail Disaster, out via Spacecase Records in March of this year.
Ahead of True Green’s stop at the intensely intimate Dissonant Works space in St. Louis (with local acts Matt Daisy and Huck on the bill) I spoke with both Hornsby and close collaborator Tailer Ransom about character-building, growing from My Lost Decade, and both of their intentions in working on Hail Disaster.
Featured Review:
Even a Child Can Cover the Sun with a Finger — FORAGER
MELT Curated: best dressed ghost
A dive into the tastes of New Jersey punk band best dressed ghost.
Artist profiles
When Ontario-based songwriter Cam Kahin first started making guitar demos in his bedroom as a teenager, it was the angst and the raw energy of the music of his youth— the Warped Tour sounds of the mid-2000s— that truly appealed to him. And now, after a major label EP and a full album distributed across mainstream channels, Cam feels as though he’s rediscovered the sound and energy that first spurred him into creativity, and his experimentation and musical wanderings have returned to the sonic point he has called home since he first picked up the guitar.
Cam Kahin
Over Floyd Zion’s last two releases, 2023’s full-length Pink By Floyd and his 2025 EP who hurt you?, the Los Angeles-based indie artist has painstakingly carved out an unassailable sound, carefully interlocking the adrenaline-pumping rhythms of his experiences as a producer with a grungier, distinctly lo-fi guitar sound and his trademark distorted vocal approach. But dating back to his earliest days as a musician, it’s difficult to trace a direct path to his current stylistic approach— apart from his constant energy for extending his art beyond its extant constraints, that is.
Floyd zion
That Graduate, the artistic moniker of indie-pop instrumentalist and songwriter Charlie Peacock, found its roots (as the name might indicate) in the strange vocational abyss that followed the artist’s graduation from college and return to his hometown. But since then, through his days performing with Portland outfit Hard Yes and his own trio of solo releases, he’s dialed into a unique, reverberating, guitar-driven pop sound— one that, in its instant recognizability, has given him a chance to truly carve out an identity as an artist.
That Graduate
When Violet Beller and Anakeesta Ironwood first met at the University of Miami, they knew immediately that they would click as friends. Their similar musical and creative affinities ensured it. But what they didn’t know was the coiling twists and turns that their original sapling of an idea would take on, incorporating member after member from their scene until rug, as a sprawling, seven-piece indie band, came to find its complete form.
RUG
Iguana Death Cult came to life as the garage-punk passion project of four teenage friends, and it has seen its fair share of transformations over the roughly 12 years since its inception. But their newest record, Guns Out, represents more than just a sonic evolution for the Rotterdam-based band. After two of the band’s original members made the difficult decision to move on from the project, Guns Out is a triumphant and searing continuation of the psychedelic and funk-rooted influences that defined their earliest efforts.