Welcome back to Top8. The horrors persist and so do we.

This past weekend I was lucky enough to go to The Athens Community Arts and Music Festival with dear friends from the station. I got to see a lot of bands that I have been playing over the last few years on Attention Please, including Pal, Dana, & Gustaf. All of these acts exceeded my expectations – I have been listening to Gustaf for a while, but I was totally unprepared for the madness and brilliance of their live set. Pal was just as weird and fun as I hoped. Dana played the kind of nervous, bouncy/twitchy post-punk that I love.

A real standout for me was the band The Laughing Chimes. These are Appalachian kids from over in Ohio who are playing a kind of post-punk/darkwave so pure and perfect that you'd swear you were at an Echo and the Bunnymen show. I added in one of their tracks and one from Dana this week, so check those out below.

I also saw my pals The Local Honeys, and the amazing Combo Chimbita. The headliners were The Gories who were excellent, although to be honest, I was completely out of gas by the time they came on, so I just kinda sat around and waited to go home. Too many great bands is a good problem to have. This festival is no joke. I am going to go again next year, and so should you. As I always say, one of the great things about Charleston is that you're allowed to leave. We're obviously never going to have an event as cool as the ACAMF here – that ship has sailed. But 90 minutes in the car might get you to somewhere that has cool things like this. Send your summer destinations to wtsq.org/contact

Dana - One Weird Trick

Out of the Columbus area, Dana are a post-punk act with intensely driving drums and bass. "One Weird Trick" throws volley after volley of machine gun drums at you while breaking into guitar freakouts. The vocals are twisty and sly. The whole thing will get you dancing your entire face off at a festival. Maybe that's just me.

The Laughing Chimes - Cats Go Car Watching

My new favorite band. The Laughing Chimes blew me away. "Cats go Car Watching" is off the excellent "Whispers in the Speech Machine" which came out in January. So, yeah, I am 8 months late to this. But it's so good that you won't care.

"Cats Go Car Watching" will make you think of bands like Echo and the Bunnymen or The Jesus and Mary Chain. There's a darkwave quality but mostly I'd call this 80s neo-psychodelica – except it's 2025 and this doesn't really need to be put in any specific box. It's just glorious and dark and melancholic and extremely dancy. I could not love this more.

Nathan Evans Fox - Hillbilly Hymn (Okra and Cigarettes)

Sometimes it's hard to tell if someone means it. It's hard to even know how you know when you know. However that is, I am pretty sure that Nathan Evans Fox means it. "Hillbilly Hymn (Okra and Cigarettes)" is country as fuck but in a way that seems to have its arms open for anyone who might want to join in. "Hillbilly Hymn (Okra and Cigarettes)" is open-heartedly optimistic and resolutely rural. Fox says he'll share his okra and cigarettes. I don't smoke but I do like okra. Save some for me.

Mei Semones - My Ideal

"My Ideal" is a jazz classic. Mei Semones is a modern wizard fusing jazz with elements from indie/grunge to bossa nova to math rock and chamber pop. She's a brilliant guitarist and, even at the start of a young career, can be considered one of the most interesting musicians of the generation. Semones taking on a classic like this could end up with something flat and boring and lacking her usual sparkling brilliance. Instead of that, what we get is a lush and intimate reading of the classic. This performance is from a full album of songs in tribute to the great Chet Baker. Semone's performance owes a little to Baker, but it's really its own beautiful thing.

Heatmiser - See You Later

I am not going to get into the whole story of Heatmiser. If you don't know, here's the short version – before Elliott Smith was a massive global sadboi superstar with a tragic end, he was in an excellent 90's alternative band called Heatmiser. That band's third and final album was the also excellent "Mic City Sons" which has just had a lovely reissue from Third Man Records (so, yeah, this isn't exactly new). Smith split up songwriting credits with Neil Gust and all the songs are honestly great. Heatmiser should have been a bigger deal than they were. As it is, they are sometimes retrospectively seen as a transitional curiosity in the development of Smith's career. I think that if you listen to the album, you'll agree they were more than that. "See You Later" is a song Smith revisited later in his solo career, so I have selected it here so you can contrast the two versions.

Golomb - The Beat Goes On

Thanks go out to WTSQ's Rob for the head's up on this one. Golumb are a band from somewhere on the earth. I mean, probably, their bio doesn't really say. Anyway, "The Beat Goes On" is a track that hits with a noisy rush and insistent beat that makes me think of the best Brian Jonestown Massacre tracks. I have had this on repeat.

Dark Thoughts - Groundhog Day

It's a truism that punk isn't a music style, it's an ideology. And, fair enough, I'll endorse that as fundamentally true. That said, there is an aesthetic, both aural and visual that is associated with punk (even though a ton of classic punk bands like the Clash didn't really adhere to it all the time). When you think of old school, class of '77 punk rock, the sound you're thinking of is the one that Philly band Dark Thoughts produces. They have a new album called "Highway to the End" and it's a fantastic example of the genre. Most of the songs are around a minute long, most of them sound kinda the same, the whole thing will make you think of The Ramones or The Misfits. "Groundhog Day" is a relatively long track for the band, and it's also the one that comes the closest to diverging from the boilerplate sound. If you've read this far, you already know what this sounds like. I fucking love this band and I love this song and I love this album. And I'll love you if you give it a spin. I mean, a little. Let's not get carried away.

Witch Fever - Fevereaten

Witch Fever are a dark post-punk act out of Manchester. When I first heard them I thought of the late, great Savages, one of my very favorite bands of the WTSQ era. This does kinda hit in the same way. I started to write ""Fevereaten" is a thickly nocturnal track" but halfway into the sentence I realized that, 1.) it made no sense, and 2.) that sounds really dirty. Anyway, this track rages and screams before receding into an atmospheric echo before crashing back into you. I bet this is amazing to hear live. Keep an ear open for Witch Fever, I think they are a band to follow.

And this week's extra innings, just a few older tracks that I have been spending time with.

Phoebe Bridgers - Moon Song

Leith Ross - We'll Never Have Sex

Sinéad O'Connor - Last Day of Our Acquaintance

And a playlist with everything.



Thank you for reading and listening,

-emily