Summer Salt

The last few years have found SUMMER SALT straddling the line between past and present tense. In 2024, the Austin, TX-formed breeze-pop group celebrated the 10-year anniversary of their debut EP, Driving To Hawaii, with a special remaster and nationwide tour – alongside a brand-new release, Electrolytes, that further solidified them as one of the most consistently blissful, eclectic forces in the indie world. 

Now, on their fourth LP, RESIDE, the group (founded by childhood friends vocalist/guitarist Matthew Terry and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Eugene Chung in 2012 and rounded out by Winston Triolo and Anthony Barnett) continue the push and pull between where they’ve been and where they’re going, honoring the sun-soaked charm that won them their devoted fanbase while exploring new creative terrain.

“We always want to make sure we're bridging the gap between celebrating what we’ve done and veering into the places that interest us now,” Chung says. “It feels like there’s always more to explore with our music.”

While the 13-track Reside carries the same effortlessly beautiful melodies, delicate introspection and hazy instrumentation that have colored the band’s catalog – like 2021’s Sequoia Moon and 2023’s Campanita – the process of constructing the songs was quite literally flipped on its head this time around, with Chung handling the bulk of the songwriting duties, later leaning on his bandmates to bring his initial ideas to life. 

“It was exciting to interpret Eugene’s personal experiences and try to put ourselves inside his head and see where he was coming from,” Terry explains. “Writing with Winston and Anthony has been awesome, and we all really wanted to make sure we were honoring Eugene’s songs and doing everything we could to add our own elements to them.”

Self-produced by the band alongside longtime collaborator Chris Beeble (Gregory Alan Isakov, Rise Against), Reside carries Summer Salt’s hallmark aesthetic, a swirl of surf pop, bossa nova and retro indie that evokes long coastal drives and the slow exposure of Polaroid photos on scorching summer afternoons while offering new emotional textures and lyrical depth: The album-opening “Better” is a quietly defiant anthem of self-belief in the face of abandonment, turning pain into a declaration of independence – a sentiment balanced by the whole-hearted, string-backed adulation of “Tell Me.” 

Elsewhere, the circular “Julian” (one of two songs, along with “Spells,” that features all four members singing together) slow-dances its way skyward with a hypnotic refrain; “Mr. Lonely Wings” finds lo-fi synths battling with fuzz guitar squalls; the delicate, Korean-sung “Smile” is drenched in harmony stacks; and “Strawberry Sunrise,” conceptualized during Terry’s bachelor party, features a guest appearance from Ruru.

“It feels like this album encompasses a lot of themes that are pretty raw,” Terry says. “In some ways, it reminds me of albums prior to Campanita, but in a way that feels new and fresh.” Adds Chung: “The songs might be personal to me, but I hope people will be able to relate to them with their own situations and lives.”

Ultimately, Reside is an album that lives between stations – comfort and curiosity, ease and experimentation – and reflects a band not just willing to reimagine their identity without losing their essence, but feeling profoundly moved to do so. In many ways, the process of creating the record mirrors the themes Chung found himself unearthing. Take the album-closing title track, an emotionally heavy rumination on distance: the physical kind, yes – Chung now calls San Francisco home, while Terry has remained in the band’s home state – but also the kind measured in years, when who we are takes stock of who we were and attempts to connect lines between the two. Under a psychedelic guitar line and plodding drums, “Reside” reads like a love letter to a past self, a reminder of how profoundly things can, and do, change, but also the unshakable elements of life that remain unaltered in the midst of uncertainty.

Even after its final notes fade, Reside lingers, the sort of feelings that stick with you after the sun has set, the summer has slipped away, and the golden haze of memory begins to clear. In those quiet, reflective moments, Summer Salt’s music hums: familiar and full of feeling. It’s a gentle reminder of the past and a nudge toward the future, but also the stillness of the now. You’ll get where you’re going eventually. Until then, be where you are.

The Rare Occasions are an LA-based, New England-bred indie rock band known for their explosive garage rock anthems with catchy vocal harmonies.

Brian McLaughlin (singer) and Luke Imbusch (drummer) have been making music together since their early teenage years. They formed The Rare Occasions while attending college in Boston where they met Jeremy Cohen (bassist). Since then, the band have toured nationally, won the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, and released a vast catalog of music online.

In 2021 the band released their first album as a trio, Big Whoop, which received significant press and radio play. Around the same time, their 2016 track “Notion” went viral on TikTok and continues to make waves, topping Spotify’s viral chart in the US and several other countries, and later landing on Billboard’s alternative charts and top 100 singles charts in the UK, Ireland, and Canada. 

The Rare Occasions released their new EP, Attaboy, on November 4th, 2022. The first single off the EP “Seasick” has already garnered the attention of radio DJs across the country including SiriusXM’s Alt Nation with the second single “Not Afraid” being an explosive follow up. After sharing Attaboy’s hard-hitting riffs, danceable grooves, and ear-catching melodies with audiences across the nation on their Fall 2022 headline tour, the band has shifted its efforts towards new music in 2023.

Addison Grace has fast proven a phenomenon with their one-of-a-kind brand of intimate songcraft, a seemingly irresistible melding of mesmerizing bedroom pop, sharp humor, and an utterly individual online persona. The 21-year-old UT-based singer, songwriter, and social media star – who is non-binary and uses he/they pronouns – drew immediate attention with their breakthrough debut EP, IMMATURING, earning acclaim for their character-driven tales of unrequited love and teenage uncertainty, all etched with candor, wit, and originality. Songs like “I Wanna Be A Boy,” “Sugar Rush,” and “Makes Me Sick” proved Grace’s pop breakthroughs, affirming the gifted young artist’s own human and artistic identity while offering a distinctively anthemic voice to the voiceless. The latter track earned praise from Billboard as “a heartbreaking anthem dedicated to self-sabotage, where Grace details their exploits in navigating the lovesick feeling they’re caught in.” “Grace makes queer indie pop anyone can appreciate,” raved Shondaland, “rooted in deep emotion and powered by his gloriously evocative voice.” Things have moved at lightspeed for Grace since the spring 2022 release of IMMATURING, from the snowballing popularity of their social media platform to an ongoing string of live runs that has included treks alongside such like-minded artists as cavetown and Ricky Montgomery as well as their first ever US headline tour – a sell out at nearly every stop. Each new adventure has seen Grace’s music reaching more and more people, their seemingly private songs now ringing out in increasingly larger venues. “In my head, I still see myself as this 21-year-old that played at coffee shops and just kind of wrote music for themselves,” Grace says. “But now, rather than just being another face in the crowd, I’m the person on stage. That’s still so jarring to me, but also really exciting, and I can’t help but be so grateful to have gotten there relatively fast.” Grace demonstrates the many lessons learned over the past year with their ambitious sophomore EP, THINGS THAT ARE BAD FOR ME. Songs like “If Nobody Likes U” and the unorthodox first single, “Pretty Girl,” exult in Grace’s own journey of personal growth and self-evolution while also pushing the boundaries of how that story can be told. Grace has spent considerable time working with rising producers and co-writers, including Andy Seltzer, Cameron Hale, Alex Wilke, Jake Aron, and songwriter Charli Adams, but the often provocative results are unquestionably all their own. “I like to test the waters of typical things that you don’t talk about,” Grace says. “I think I’ve tested it before with ‘I Wanna Be a Boy,” but that was still leaning into a very stereotypical queer story. And now, as I’ve gotten more comfortable with my identity and just being who I am without apology, I’m really lucky to have an audience that lets me talk about these intricacies of queerness.” Indeed, Grace’s songs touch upon themes previously unheard in modern pop. “Pretty Girl” in particular stands out, its irresistible energy and powerhouse hooks carrying one of Grace’s most candid lyrics thus far, stirred by “the grief that happens after you come out.” “Usually you get these really happy or dramatic stories of coming out,” Grace says, “where people are finally living as themselves and so happy. And that’s true. For me, personally, I was happy to finally exist as someone who was trans masculine. But I was also sort of grieving that some people that I loved, and were very close to me, still wanted me to be the girl that they knew. There was one really prominent person I had been in love with, a person who still to this day I consider a soulmate, but the thing was, they weren’t attracted to men, they were only attracted to women and I kind of almost blamed myself for them not being able to be attracted to me anymore. It’s this weird feeling of wanting to be a guy for me, but also wanting to be a girl for them. It was so thoroughly confusing. The whole point of ‘Pretty Girl’ is to emphasize that I know, to them, I’m always going to be that pretty girl but I’m not going to get back into that closet of self-hatred just to be with them. It’s like a weird conflict of, I miss you but I don’t want to change myself.” As their unconventional journey to approach new terrain, Addison Grace admits time feels both condensed and moving faster than they had ever previously imagined, their sense of self constantly colliding with their perpetual motion as a artist. Having come so far so fast, Grace is more eager than ever to test their adventurous spirit as they growing into their own skin like all of us, expressing it through what is already a truly inimitable personal chronicle told through glorious song after song. “From when I was 19 to 21, those two years are such a drastic difference,” says Addison Grace. “The first music that I released and how my style was then, it’s completely different to how it is now. And it’s going to keep doing that. When I’m 23, I’m going to look at my 21-year-old self and be like, it’s the same person but drastically different.”