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Punctuating wistful, daydreamy indie rock with surfy guitar hooks, Boyscott took shape in college dorm rooms and grew into a fully formed band. The loose collective that made up the project completed their whimsically drawn 2015 debut Goose Bumps before ever playing live.

Boyscott began in 2015 as an outlet for singer/songwriter Scott Hermo’s recording experiments while he was attending college in Nashville, TN. Hermo recorded in his dorm room and sometimes enlisted friends to help flesh out his light and breezy indie tunes. Fellow schoolmates and musicians Emma Willer, Tiger Adams, John Lewandowski, Ellen Ivy McGuirk, and Noah Miller joined him to bring a live energy to Hermo’s recordings and together, the group completed debut album Goose Bumps and self-released it in late 2015. When Boyscott began playing live, school commitments kept a solid lineup from forming, but Hermo enlisted a rotating cast of friends and musicians, including Davey Alaimo of Bunny Boy and Noah Dardaris of Another Michael, to play shows and go on tours. The band’s acclaim grew organically through consistent touring and their album, which caught on in a grassroots fashion. A physical release of Goose Bumps arrived in 2019 as a joint release from Top Shelf Records and Babe City Records.

Since their debut in 2018 via a six-track EP titled secret princess, released through Community Records, Providence’s own NOVA ONE has continued to create lush, nostalgic soundscapes complemented by the movingly honest performance and, at times, anthem-like quality we find in the songwriting of Roz Raskin. Building on the 60s-inspired pop of their 2020 release (debut album, loveable) NOVA ONE’s newest project, create myself, is a continuation of a deeply human conversation around self-acceptance through a prismatic and complex lens, befitting of an experienced musician like Raskin. The album is co-produced and performed by Raskin, Bradford Krieger, and Chaimes Parker at Big Nice Studio in Rhode Island, and is bolstered by supporting musicians Casey Belisle, Emily Dix Thomas, with vocals from Anjimile Chithambo.

If secret princess was in many ways an homage to the power and impact of 60’s girl groups (femme-drag beehive wigs and all) here we find a record filled with the cathartic angst and washed sonic quality of 90s indie-rock, with dabbled inspiration from Studio Ghibli films, the sounds and influences of planets, and DIY zines and comic book culture (a self-reference to Raskin’s own hand-drawn comics that serve as the origin of the futuristic, gender-fluid stage presentation of NOVA ONE). With emotional and sweeping synth and crunchy high-energy guitar licks, create myself masterfully moves between the tension of forgiveness and regret in the wake of intimacy–through queer confessions, reflections on the impact of over-drinking, the wonder of young love. Raskin holds us there in a question without forcing a conclusion, wrestling with the ideal of acceptance—for ourselves, even in our shame, and for our complicated others. On the track “dangerous”, the vulnerable and succinct lyric writing keeps the song from being devoted to finding a silver lining in the sea of painful memories. “I thought you were dangerous / but I’m still dangerous by myself”.

The acceptance Raskin is speaking towards exists not in spite of the lasting, often painful effects we carry from our more complicated relationships, but because of them and what they’ve taught us throughout our lives. The concept of self-love is a sweeping theme throughout the catalog of NOVA ONE, and this newest effort moves with stunning empathy–at once not holding back (a sometimes scathing) disappointment, but also taking responsibility for the role we ourselves can play in our own unhappiness. The last line on the album repeats back to us a simple truth, “You deserve to be loved”, and NOVA ONE seems to be asking us to sing this to ourselves, but also for the people who have shaped us.

Monsoon is a three-piece indie rock band from Athens, Georgia who weave together unorthodox styles to create music that dips between the conscious and subconscious. Their upcoming album”Ghost Party” is set to release early 2022.
It was only a couple months after the release of Monsoon’s debut album “Ride A’Rolla” that the band garnered the attention of Toyota and were contacted about using the title track for a commercial. From there, the placement landed a spot just after the 2016 Super Bowl half-time show and the band was invited to participate in the world’s first “360 multi-cam music video” launched by Google. Between the reach of the placements and touring, Monsoon gained a small cult-like following along the East Coast. “I had no idea something of this magnitude could happen at such an early stage in our career. It’s the kind of thing you hope for, but don’t ordinarily see from a band that’s just starting out.” 

Post Super Bowl, both members of Monsoon [Sienna Chandler and Joey Kegel] went their separate ways before reuniting to create Ghost Party. “I think we were the youngest group ever to say ‘we’re gettin’ the band back together.” 

Joey took some time for himself, traveled to Canada, became an expert in cars, and explored things outside of music. I continued Monsoon, then dipped out for a bit, played a supporting role in the upcoming film Ragged Heart, and worked as an extra on Walking Dead. I attended a few semesters of college, and even received a certificate in recording engineering in Chillicothe, OH where I lived for several months.

Towards the end of my time in Ohio, I had an overwhelming need to reconnect with Joey and return back to the foundation that we’d built with Monsoon. We’d never officially had a falling out, there were simply too many cooks in the kitchen after the release of Ride A’Rolla that were pushing their own agenda and it inevitably led to our split. We stopped playing and stopped talking for two years. I held off from reaching out. I wrote the feelings off as delayed blues from the initial parting, but over time, it became apparent that it was more than that. I felt intense grief over the lost friendship, mourning for someone who was still alive, anger at people for injecting themselves into our relationship, anxiety that we’d die before we spoke again, and overall, the overwhelming fear that there was no way to fix any of it. I felt so many emotions. At one point I remember writing music pretending that we were still in a band together as a tactic to trick myself into creating decent material, instead all of my misery fell out. That’s when I started writing Ghost Party. It became a way for me to make sense of why I felt this intense sadness, sort out where it came from, process it, and figure out how I was going to fix it. I was inside my head 100% of the time, living and breathing memories of my own subconscious. Finally, in October 2017, I called Joey and we haven’t spent a day apart since. 

Ghost Party is the soul creation of Joey and myself. We are every voice and every instrument on the album. Joey mixed the songs, co-produced the harmonies, and engineered many of the sections on the record. I wrote and arranged the songs, produced harmony sections, and am in charge of creating our music videos- writing, directing, editing footage, SFX makeup, everything except holding the actual camera. We’ve become incredibly selective about who we involve in our lives both personally and professionally. Ride A’Rolla caught us off guard because we were young and unable to see red flags as they arose. It was an incredibly difficult lesson, but ultimately, an invaluable one that needed to be learned so that moving forward we would become the unbreakable extension of one another that we are now. We’re so fortunate to have found our bassist Roan O’Reilly. Before his addition to the band we were certain we’d be a two piece, but his quick wit and talent won our hearts. He immediately fell in and was ready to work, and has proven to be an irreplaceable member to our team.

Ghost Party is a standalone album entirely different from its predecessor. It stemmed from raw heartfelt emotion-every sadness I felt, every hurt I carried, and all the anger I repressed. It’s the haunt that kept me up at night, and the noise that lives on the border between madness and reality, conscious and subconscious, nothingness and hope. It’s unconventional but seems to work in its chaos. It’s the world I created to comfort myself. Ghost Party is every fiber of me. We hope you enjoy it.