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A five-piece band of creatives based in Nashville, TN, Future Crib delivers dynamic
performances that bounce between poppy make-you-wanna-dance tunes and
experimental yet engaging tracks that prod at life’s shared realities. There’s a clear
preference for good songs and exciting sounds over genre bounds and expectations,
and this is evident on their upcoming album, Full Time Smile, set for release in
September 2021. Over all, Future Crib creates music for everyone, inviting all to a fun,
welcoming show where you can feel free to get down.

Shane Perry, who plays guitar, sings, and writes songs for the Nashville rock band The Medium, says the group’s new album, For Horses, “is about leaving home.” As such, the record moves deftly among in-between spaces: between vintage sounds and modern ones, humor and sincerity, old stomping grounds and whatever lies down the road. “I’m having trouble adjusting to the world,” singer-bassist and songwriter Sam Silva admits on “Same Boat,” a woozy cut that encapsulates the band’s knack for channeling classic pop and psych-rock. “Nightmares, daydreams — what does it mean?”

The Medium’s first album, 2019’s Get It While It’s Hot, was bright and breezy and showed how well the band — Perry, Silva, guitarist-vocalist Michael Brudi and percussionist Jared Hicks — knew their way around a pop song. For Horses is recognizably the work of the same band, but one that’s now more confident, more ambitious, and more comfortable in the studio (Jake Davis, who produced Get It While It’s Hot, returns here). Opening track “Don’t Stay Out” wastes no time signaling the shift, as a dazzling four-part a capella verse gives way to a piano-rock tune punctuated by filigrees of saxophone. Midway through the album, “Let’s Get Together” and “Space Force” form a sort of two-song suite, mirroring each others’ lyrics while showcasing the band’s stylistic breadth: lo-fi southern soul and a serrated, Motown-inspired rave-up.

These songs can be irreverent and heartfelt, sometimes within the span of a single lyric, a tension that’s crucial even as Perry and Silva say it’s not necessarily thought out in advance. “Goodbye Afternoon,” which could scan as either a look back at disappearing youth or an almost deadpan accounting of a day’s end, is one of several songs that seemed to flow out fully formed. “It’s like you’re an archeologist and you dust it off, and there’s a dinosaur,” Perry says. “Still the Best” chronicles the bittersweet feeling of watching friends come and go from your life, not for any conflict but just because that’s how things go sometimes. Silva emerged with “No Highway Cowboys,” on the other hand, from a Wikipedia rabbit-hole on diphthongs. In The Medium’s world, the stirring piano ballad that makes you want to happy-cry can absolutely be called “Space Horse.”

The songs on For Horses “just come to you, and then you kind of derive the meaning from it much later,” Perry explains. “We’ve been sitting with these for a long time.” Though some were written as recently as 2020, others date to well before Get It While It’s Hot; the set’s tightness and consistency is a testament to years of sharpening songs in live settings, and the fact that it’s their first album of songs all written after the band’s formation — it is, as Perry and Brudi both emphasize, “our record.”

This album about leaving home ends with the four members leaving home together. Games of HORSE played outside the home the bandmates shared while writing many of these songs inspired “Four Horses,” a reminder to revel in the moment: “Everybody’s looking for an answer, but they should be splashing in the rain.” They’ve since moved out and into separate places, but the record stands as a monument to their two years in that house. It was a big old white stone thing, Silva remembers, an “ugly building next to a Walgreens.” His smile is audible as he describes it. “It looked great inside.”

Elijah Johnston started making bedroom indie rock in 10th grade, with three albums worth of material released between 2016-2018. Inspired by 2010’s lo-fi rock icons such as (Sandy) Alex G and Mac Demarco, Elijah worked mostly in secret and in silence. In January of 2018, he played his first show, and began playing seriously in his second home of Athens later in the year.
Working with friend and esteemed Athens producer Andrew Blooms, Elijah and his band crafted his first studio EP, Wonderful, in January 2019, released March 29, 2019. His first studio full length, Strangers, was recorded in summer 2019 with Tommy Trautwein (Jester, Well Kept), to be released in January 2020.