Music

Lockett James Pundt IV is an American musician, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist of Atlanta-based indie rock group Deerhunter. Pundt joined Deerhunter in 2005 as a guitarist. He releases solo material under the name Lotus Plaza. His debut album as Lotus Plaza, The Floodlight Collective, was released March 23, 2009 on CD and vinyl. Pundt has cited his greatest musical influences as being Stereolab, My Bloody Valentine, and Roxy Music, "on a subliminal level."

Claire Elise Boucher, known professionally as Grimes, is a Canadian musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. Her early work has been described as extending from "lo-fi R&B" to futuristic dance-pop, and has incorporated influences from electronic music, hip hop, and rock. Her lyrics often touch on science fiction and feminist themes. She has released five studio albums.

The Jasmine Minks are a British indie pop band, whose early singles were amongst the first releases by Creation Records.

Dum Dum Girls was an American rock band, formed in 2008. It began as the bedroom recording project of singer and songwriter Dee Dee. She is currently based in Los Angeles. The name is a double homage to the Vaselines' album Dum Dum and the Iggy Pop song "Dum Dum Boys".

No Joy are a Canadian shoegaze band from Montreal formed in late 2009 by Jasamine White-Gluz and former member Laura Lloyd.

No Joy's first show was with Grant Hart of Husker Du on December 15, 2009. The band continued to play locally, including a show with then-up-and-coming indie band Best Coast. The latter's lead singer, Bethany Cosentino, took a liking to the band and tweeted, "Dude, No Joy is the best band ever. Two hot blonde girls just shredding away. Sooooo amazing".

The band soon signed to Mexican Summer and released their first 7-inch single, "No Summer" b/w "No Joy". Its release enabled No Joy to book their own national U.S. tour, bringing along La Sera (a Vivian Girls side project) for a three-week stint of mostly West Coast shows. Around this time, London-based label Sexbeat reissued the debut 7-inch for a UK/European release. No Joy toured later that fall with Mexican Summer labelmates Dungen.

Michael Alden Hadreas (born September 25, 1981), better known by his stage name Perfume Genius, is an American singer, songwriter, and musician. Hadreas's music explores topics including sexuality, his personal struggle with Crohn's disease, domestic abuse, and the dangers faced by gay men in contemporary society.

Hadreas is of Greek descent and was born in Des Moines, Iowa, moving to the suburbs of Seattle, Washington at age 6 or 7. Hadreas studied painting in school and took piano lessons as a child. His mother was a special education teacher, and is now an assistant principal at a middle school. His parents divorced when he was a teenager.

Growing up, Hadreas was the only openly gay student at his school, and he received death threats that were ignored by the school administration. He dropped out of high school during his senior year. Two years after dropping out, he was attacked by several young men in his neighborhood. He moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and worked as a doorman for a club in the East Village. In 2005, Hadreas returned home to Seattle and began recording music. In 2008, Hadreas set up a MySpace page under the name Perfume Genius, beginning his music career. The moniker comes from the genius perfume-maker in Tom Tykwer's 2006 movie Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Beach House is an American musical duo formed in Baltimore, Maryland in 2004. The band consists of vocalist and keyboardist Victoria Legrand and guitarist, keyboardist, and backup vocalist Alex Scally.

Their self-titled debut album was released in 2006 to critical acclaim and has been followed by Devotion (2008), Teen Dream (2010), Bloom (2012), Depression Cherry (2015), Thank Your Lucky Stars (2015), B-sides and Rarities (2017), 7 (2018), and Once Twice Melody (2022).

Vocalist and organist Victoria Legrand, who graduated from Vassar College in 2003, and guitarist Alex Scally, who graduated from Oberlin College in 2004, formed the band in 2004 after meeting in Baltimore's indie rock scene, producing music composed largely of organ, programmed drums, and steel guitar. Of the origins of the band name Scally said: "We’d been writing music, and we had all these songs, and then there was that moment where you say ‘what do we call ourselves?’ We tried to intellectualize it, and it didn’t work. There were different plant-names, Wisteria, that kind of thing. Stupid stuff. But, once we stopped trying, it just came out, it just happened. And it just seemed perfect." In an interview with Pitchfork, Legrand addressed their being a two-member status thus: "[I]t's a way to challenge ourselves: What do you do when it's just the two of you? ... [O]ne of the reasons this has been such a fulfilling experience for me is that with two people, it's so much easier to achieve things that feel exciting and new."

Jem, also known as Jem and the Holograms, is an American animated musical television series that ran from 1985 to 1988. The series is about record company owner Jerrica Benton, her singer alter-ego Jem, and the adventures of Jem and her band the Holograms.

The series was a joint collaboration by Hasbro, Sunbow Productions and Marvel Productions, the same team responsible for G.I. Joe and Transformers. The creator of the series, Christy Marx, had also been a staff writer for the aforementioned programs. The animation for most of the episodes was provided by Japanese animation studio Toei Animation with some provided by South Korean studio AKOM.

The series revolves around Jerrica Benton, the owner and manager of Starlight Music, and her alter-ego Jem, lead singer of the rock group the Holograms. Jerrica adopts the persona of Jem with the help of a holographic computer, known as Synergy, which was built by Jerrica's father to be "the ultimate audio-visual entertainment synthesizer" and is bequeathed to her after his death. Jerrica is able to command Synergy to project the hologram of Jem over herself by means of the remote micro-projectors in her earrings, thus disguising her features and clothing, enabling her to assume the Jem persona. Jem, through the use of her earrings, is also able to project holograms around her and uses this ability throughout the series to avoid danger and provide special effects for the performances of her group.

Chromatics were an American electronic music band from Portland, Oregon, who formed in 2001. The band's final line-up consisted of Ruth Radelet (vocals, guitar, synthesizer), Adam Miller (guitar, vocoder), Nat Walker (drums, synthesizer), and Johnny Jewel (producer, multi-instrumentalist). The band originally featured a trademark sound indebted to punk and lo-fi that was described as "noisy" and "chaotic". After numerous lineup changes, which left guitarist Adam Miller as the sole original member, the band began releasing material on the Italians Do It Better record label in 2007, with their style streamlined into an Italo disco-influenced sound.

Their third album Night Drive (2007) was met with critical acclaim, as was their fourth album, Kill for Love, which was released on March 26, 2012. Several of the band's songs have been featured in television series such as Bates Motel, Gossip Girl, Mr. Robot, The Mindy Project, Parenthood, Revenge, Riverdale, 13 Reasons Why, The 100, Baby and Twin Peaks, as well as being featured in the films Drive (2011), Taken 2 (2012), Only You (2018), and The Perfection (2019). In December 2014, the band announced what would have been their fifth studio album, titled Dear Tommy. While Chromatics have released a number of singles from it, Dear Tommy had yet to be released when they instead issued the album Closer to Grey in October 2019. The band announced its break-up in August 2021.

DIIV is an American rock band from Brooklyn, New York City, formed in 2011. The band consists of Zachary Cole Smith (vocals, guitar), Andrew Bailey (guitar), Colin Caulfield (bass, keyboards, guitar, vocals) and Ben Newman (drums).

Initially called Dive, the band started as Smith's solo recording project. After releasing three singles—"Sometime", "Human" and "Geist"—on Captured Tracks, DIIV released its debut studio album, Oshin, on June 26, 2012.

In 2016, the band released its second studio album, Is the Is Are, after a lengthy and troubled gestation period. On October 4, 2019, DIIV's third album, Deceiver, was released on Captured Tracks.

After a few years playing guitar with the psych-rock band Soft Black and playing drums for Beach Fossils, Zachary Cole Smith formed DIIV in 2011 as a forum for his own songs. He enlisted childhood friend Andrew Bailey (like Smith, from Connecticut) on guitar, bassist Devin Ruben Perez (from New York City), and ex-Smith Westerns drummer Colby Hewitt (from California) as his live band. Smith, who originally named the project "Dive" after the Nirvana song of the same name, explained to Pitchfork that "everybody in the band is a water sign, that's kind of why the name Dive really spoke to us all." Smith would eventually change the spelling of the band's name after learning of the early 1990s Belgian industrial act by that name.

Cold Cave is the moniker for the music of Wesley Eisold based in Los Angeles and New York City whose music is described as a "collage of darkwave, noise, and synthpop". A number of reviewers note the affinity with early 1980s post-punk and early synthpop, in particular Joy Division.

Cold Cave was founded in 2007 by Wesley Eisold, former vocalist of hardcore groups Give Up the Ghost (previously known as American Nightmare), Some Girls. and Heartworm Press founder. Cold Cave represents Eisold's first venture into instrumentation. Eisold was born with one hand which led him to electronic music.

After initial releases on Dais Records, Hospital Productions, What's Your Rupture?, and Eisold's own Heartworm Press, he signed to Matador Records, who re-released his self-released debut album, Love Comes Close, on November 3, 2009.

"Part-Time Lover" is a single by American R&B singer and songwriter Stevie Wonder, from his 1985 album In Square Circle. The song reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, R&B, dance, and adult contemporary charts. The song's simultaneous chart successes made Wonder the first artist to score a number-one hit on four different Billboard charts. The song was also released as a special 12" version. Lyrically, it tells the story of a man who is cheating on his wife with a mistress, only to find out in the end that his wife is cheating on him as well.

"Part-Time Lover" also reached number three on the UK Singles Chart thanks in large part to a performance by Wonder on Top of the Pops in late 1985.

Wild Nothing is an American indie rock/dream pop band from Blacksburg, Virginia, formed in late 2009 by Jack Tatum. During live performances, Tatum is joined by additional musicians, currently Nic Hessler (guitar), Jeff Haley (bass), Joshua Sushman (keyboards, saxophone) and Cameron Allen (drums).

To date, Wild Nothing has released four studio albums, Gemini (2010), Nocturne (2012), Life of Pause (2016) and Indigo (2018), and three EPs, Golden Haze (2010), Empty Estate (2013) and Laughing Gas (2020).

John Alexander Tatum (born June 10, 1988) previously played in bands Jack and the Whale and FACEPAINT in the college town of Blacksburg. He began recording under the name Wild Nothing in the summer of 2009. Emerging at a time when a handful of C86-esque groups were in vogue, Tatum's demos garnered attention in indie music circles with a cover of Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting". Tatum signed with the Captured Tracks record label after the success of these demos, and began touring with Haley, Goodman and drummer Max Brooks.

Joy Division were an English rock band formed in Salford in 1976. The group consisted of vocalist Ian Curtis, guitarist/keyboardist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris.

Beach Fossils is an American indie rock band from Brooklyn, New York, formed in 2009. They are currently signed to Bayonet Records, having previously been signed to indie label Captured Tracks. The group's live band currently includes founder Dustin Payseur, Jack Doyle Smith (bass), Tommy Davidson (guitar), and Anton Hochheim (drums). They are known for their lo-fi, atmospheric sound, confessional and nostalgic lyrics, and Payseur's laid back vocal style.

Luis Vasquez, better known by his stage name The Soft Moon, is an American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, and composer. Vasquez serves as the lead vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and sole official member of The Soft Moon, which he founded in 2009.

Iceage is a Danish punk rock band from Copenhagen. The band was formed in 2008 and has released the albums New Brigade (2011), You're Nothing (2013), Plowing Into the Field of Love (2014), Beyondless (2018), and Seek Shelter (2021).