In making their third record, Hex Key, Mamalarky spent entire seasons hunched over guitars and obscure synthesizers, their long hair sweeping over strings or covering concentrated eyes. The band recorded takes in between the sounds of passing ice cream trucks and yowling stray cats in their LA home studio, a tight but prolific living room. Hex Key is a document of perseverance, of going for the gold while somehow remaining totally aware of one’s own vulnerabilities. These effervescent, swirling songs chronicle vivid desires crashing against real-life limitations but finding a way to keep burning anyway. That tension between anguish and resilience, between performed aloofness and brutal honesty, drives the music, imbues it with a compelling intensity. Over the last 8 years, the quartet’s members have lived in Austin, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and have established a bond that they acknowledge is rare. “We have an unmatched level of trust in each other,” drummer Dylan Hill says. “There is no air of professionalism. It's literally just four friends hanging out and getting to the bottom of something.” Given their closeness, Mamalarky are able to fight like family, not necessarily with each other, but for the music, to make it the best it can be. Whereas their last album, Pocket Fantasy, was exploratory and free-flowing, the songs on Hex Key are the result of absolute devotion and fine tuning. It’s the kind of attention to detail that can only happen when the four bandmates are working alone together, uninterrupted by producers, engineers, or any outside influences. “It’s never ‘kick your feet up, let’s see what happens,” guitarist and singer Livvy Bennett says. “We’re always staring each other deeply in the eyes saying ‘Let’s make this next take incredible.’ We never settle.” The band is so committed to their craft that Hill even recorded the drums for “#1 Best of All Time” amidst an intense bout of poison ivy. The determination he felt in the moment manifested itself in the song’s frantic-but-focused percussion, he says.
Teenage Wrist are a difficult band to define. Over the past eight years the act have continually evolved their sound, a process that’s peaking with their third full-length Still Love. Reaching new heights in both scope and execution, the album sees the duo—Marshall Gallagher (vocalist, guitarist, bassist) and Anthony Salazar (drums, vocalist, percussion)—producing the album themselves to handcraft their most expansive collection of songs to date from the ground up. The result is a self-realized collection of songs that saw the band borrowing vintage gear, bringing in friends in the form of members from 311 and Softcult and incorporating tasteful pop sensibilities to craft a collection of songs that redefines the band’s sound while staying true to their guitar-driven roots. “With this album we were just trying to get ourselves out of the safety zone and into the danger zone,” Gallagher explains. “We took a lot of risks and it was a really fun record to make.”