Thursday July 10 at The Drunken Unicorn

Nobody's Booking & Speakeasy present...

Posture Clinic, Safety Switch, Maggie FM
Doors at 8:00pm / $15 / 21+

POSTURE CLINIC IS THE TRUTH. Posture Clinic is a four-piece indie art rock, electro post-punk outfit from Atlanta. Members Aja Arnold (guitar, vocals), Melissa Chilson (drums, vocals), Danny Dopte (bass, vocals), and Lindsay Thomaston (vocals, drums, synth) together conjure a visceral, lustral, and punchy sound reminiscent of Warpaint, Cherry Glazerr, PJ Harvey, & Sonic Youth. “Cathartic, propulsive, and community-minded post-punk and art rock a la PJ Harvey for the masses. It works. And it is sick.” — said one person. “The four-piece conjures a lustrous, expansive sound that is by turns dreamy and visceral ... What makes ‘Just In’ so compelling is how freely dual states intertwine and play off one another. Overall, it’s a powerful introduction.” — Immersive Atlanta on Posture Clinic’s debut single, “Just In,” released on June 9.

Safety Switch is a new Atlanta-based project comprised of some of the indie scene’s heaviest hitters, featuring Tom Sinclair (Elesa Sparkle, Major) and Tim Holder (Bathe Alone) on guitar, Anna Griffith (Bathe Alone) on bass, and Mason Palanti (Mallbangs) on drums. With all chipping in on vocals, the four-piece brings a nearly exorcising sound that combines the ‘90s DIY post-punk twang of Slint and the incandescent slow rock disco of Dry Cleaning. What started out as a side project between four friends while working on respective projects comes a new indie rock climax the Atlanta scene needs. This is the Safety Switch.

Friday, July 18th at Aisle 5
Speakeasy, VLSC, & Nobody’s Booking present…
Vegyn, Loukeman, amr*
Doors at 9:00pm / $25 - $30 / All Ages

Vegyn’s shape-shifting musical output as a solo artist has so far tended to fall into extremes. The 30-year-old producer – real name Joseph Thornalley – is partly known for his excess, working tirelessly with some of the world’s biggest rap and R&B artists, and unleashing mixtapes of upwards of 70 tracks, letting light into his creative process by sharing reams of creative ideas and scraps from the cutting room floor. By contrast, his ebullient 2019 debut album Only Diamonds Cut Diamonds was an exercise in precision, or as Joe puts it, “trying to cut this thing into a super-sharp point”. But, as he worked towards his sophomore album, Joe found that he needed to break out of his old patterns. He made what he describes as “a couple sub par efforts” – records that will never see the light of day – before arriving at the ease, effortlessness, and song-driven approach that underpins his emotionally rich second LP, The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions. On this album, there are neither endlessly refined sonics, nor sprawling, open-ended ideas. Instead, there are sublimely crafted songs, each allowing for a dose of human imperfection, each wobbling on a tightrope between elation and an eerie melancholia. In contrast to the technical prowess of his debut, Vegyn’s second album emerged from a space of free-flowing experimentation. Often travelling as part of his work as a producer and label boss (of PLZ Make It Ruins), Joe wrote the new songs across studios, living rooms, and hotel rooms worldwide. “Some sessions were a deep dive into new – to me – analogue hardware, from the comfort of my home,” he explains, “and others were back-to-basics, laptop-only sessions in a hotel room in south east Asia.” He also wrote some songs at the piano, which he’s been playing for around five years. “I still don’t really know what a real chord is,” he says, “but by just experimenting consistently, I’ve started to develop my own way of expressing what it is I’m looking for. I just try to look for the emotional resonance.” Likewise, on this record he spent a lot of time playing around on the guitar, which he says makes him “feel like a baby”. Production was less involved this time around, with his trademark flourishes and BPM changes taking a backseat to the melody and song structure. “I’m just trying to make interesting songs. There wasn’t too much thought – feeling was the focus.” Still, there are plenty of the uncanny and darkly funny moments that make a Vegyn record recognisable. Most notably, there are the spoof radio station drops that happen periodically throughout the record, announcing eerie non-sequiturs like “hellbent on compromise” or “same old, same old”. Each one gives the record a distinctly Vegyn feel. “I think the thing that’s pertinent through all my work is a sort of happy melancholia,” Joe reflects. “It’s like, you’ve finally gotten to ‘acceptance’ in the stages of grief.” In his music, while much of it has a bouncy, euphoric rush, Joe rejects toxic positivity: it’s okay to be sad, he emphasises. “In the past, music was perhaps the only time I’d let my guard down and express myself.” The title, like all Vegyn titles, has a ring of ambiguity to it. Joe became intrigued by the common phrase when he started contemplating what it actually means: “Is it like, ‘by doing the right thing, you actually make more problems’? Or is that ‘the idea in your mind of doing good serves no purpose – you have to actually do it’?” Whatever it means, he muses, it’s a phrase that captures the split between intentions and actions. For him, during the period of time in which he was writing these happy-melancholic songs, that theme resonated. The record, Joe says, reflects a kind of “stuck-ness. I felt so lost, and frustrated, and confused about what exactly it was that I was trying to do as an artist.” That lost sensibility comes through in the music, though it’s not all bleak (“there’s some fun to be had in disassociating,” Joe grins). Take “Halo Flip”, a restless, shuffling declaration of unconditional love, with echoes of grunge. “Even when you disappear, you know that you can come right back,” sings Lauren Auder, over a rush of strings and cymbals. It’s a warm hug of a song, looping its offer of solace and comfort – and yet, there’s a ragged, tired edge to its optimism. On its flipside is “In The Front”, a elegiac track that features a monologue from London artist John Glacier over a bed of mournful, occasionally discordant strings. “The tears that I hide still filling up with steam/ Hot head, but they’re never gonna see it,” John intones, deadpan and steadfast about masking her real emotions. The song’s outro draws a parallel between laughing and crying: two extremes that occupy different sides of the same coin. On The Road To Hell…, all emotions have this murky mercuriality, with happiness easily sliding into an underbelly of sadness, and moments of regret bouyed by hope. The record is peppered with the voices of experimental contemporaries, including the British singer-songwriter Ethan P. Flynn, avant-garde producer Loraine James, and grunge duo Double Virgo. “I like working with other people as it’s the best way to let each other’s strengths shine through,” reflects Joe. “You get to sit back and think a little bit more objectively about what someone else might want, and that can greatly help to solidify what it is you want, too.” These collaborations, and rediscovering a sense of freedom and playfulness in music, helped Joe create his most cohesive body of work, and most accomplished songwriting, to date. “I used to think that important songs were the ones you toiled over for months and months, changing nothing,” Joe says. “In reality, it’s always the songs that took like, an hour from start to finish. The ones that are effortless.” He points to the famous quote from David Lynch’s book about transcendental meditation: that “ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper”. For Joe, this meant wading into previously unexplored reserves of emotional honesty, following his instincts, and learning to let go of striving for technical perfection. Next on his list is a live show, something that he’s always been anxious about putting together in the past. “I’m trying to turn to new challenges,” he explains. “What I’ve realised is that you have to put yourself in positions of difficulty, in order to grow.”

RIYL Mount Kimbie, James Blake, Air, George Clanton, James K, Boards of Canada

Loukeman is a Toronto-based producer, DJ, and songwriter. His music pulls from folk, pop, rap, and R&B songs into warped yet familiar forms. His latest album, Sd-2 — the second of a planned trilogy- continues to display his range as one of the most exciting producers in recent years. With a forthcoming album in 2025, he's also caught the attention of several pop acts as a producer and co-writer. He has had recent placements with Apple, Nike, and Burberry.

Saturday, July 19th at The Drunken Unicorn
Nobody’s Booking Presents...
Dustbowlchampion, Casket Cassette, Floats
Doors at 9:00pm / $15 / 21+

Sunday, July 20th at The Drunken Unicorn
Nobody’s Booking Presents...
Future Crib, GREBE, Zoe Bayani
Doors at 7:00pm / $15 / 21+

Future Crib is a non-fiction rock band from Nashville, Tennessee. It’s Johnny, Bryce, Julia, & George atop a horse that won't stop walking. Future Crib plays shows your dad will respect and your little sister will understand. They tell the truth, and they work together. For 6 years, 3 albums, and hundreds of shows, they’ve been a fully collaborative band. After the departure of their original drummer and contributing songwriter Noah Pope in 2022, Future Crib turned inward. Rather than replace him, they rearranged their songs and sound amongst the four of them, establishing a new foundation for their progressive richness. When they took that perspective into the studio, not realizing how much they’d learned, they performed a miracle. Future Crib’s forthcoming record, Impossible Songs, testifies the ethos of the pure-hearted, truth-loving ensemble. The band has always recorded their albums live to tape. This time, they followed their analog intuition to its natural end, using no computers and transporting tapes by hand (in automobile) between each stage of the process. Their intention offers a chance to align with a side: Those who fight the machines that steal our minds by mastering simple machines that can expand them. It's a reminder that you can fight what you hate by following your heart – If you ever need help remembering that something can be real, Future Crib’s earnest pursuit is here to assist you in yours.

-Sam Hearn, with the blessing of the band

Friday, July 25th at The Drunken Unicorn
Nobody’s Booking Presents...
Worlds Worst, Shallowater, Los Gargoyles
Doors at 7:00pm / $15 - $18 / 21+

Born where the dustbowl never died, Shallowater sonically animates the bleak, gritty landscape of West Texas. Their debut album, "There Is A Well," was released last year to high acclaim with its masterful use of slowcore, post-hardcore, and country. Between deeply sad ballads and hard-hitting distortion, Shallowater's music pushes the boundaries of conventional genres to create their own Americana: a dark, barren soundscape of their home, a Cormac McCarthy novel brought to life."

Thursday, July 31st at The Drunken Unicorn
Nobody’s Booking presents..
Made Up, Honey Puppy, Sloping, Orpheus & The Animal
Doors at 8:00pm / $15 / 21+

Atlanta singer-songwriter JJ Posway, the creative force behind Sloping and Seedbed, has an undeniable dedication to the craft of songwriting - one that almost borders on obsession. A clear disciple of some of the most celebrated and methodical indie folk songwriters of the past few decades such as Elliott Smith, Phil Elverum, Stephin Merritt, Bill Callahan; Sloping is Posway’s designated outlet for his most intimate and carefully-constructed work.

Posway’s penchant for fiercely honest and meticulous storytelling was immediately apparent on Sloping’s ephemeral 2021 debut album Completed Songs for sound as language. Completed Songs plays like a water-damaged photo album filled with half-legible snapshots of fleeting sensory details and quiet dissatisfaction. - Autumn James

Thursday, August 14th at Drunken Unicorn
Nobody’s Booking presents…
CHEW, Mold!, Day Tripper, Gage Gilmore Group
Doors at 8:00pm / $15 / 21+

Chew is a band from Atlanta, Georgia whose music defies simple categorization. Comprised of Bresh Reagan who plays sampler and guitar while running strobe lights, Sarah Wilson who plays drums and sample pad and Jamey McDaniel who hypnotizes minds with the low end. The project has toured the US and Canada extensively with four European tours under its belt. Because the outfit’s music is so unorthodox it’s music spans and often in the same song the realms of psychedelic and noise rock, ambient, noise, industrial and electronic dance music. Fans of the likes of fellow travelers of eclectic weirdness like Guerilla Toss, Black Moth Super Rainbow and The Spirit of the Beehive will find an immediate connection with the music Chew has been crafting since its inception. Its 2022 album Horses resonates with recent releases by Jockstrap and Sextile without the inspiration of either to feed into its stream of inspiration and influences. In addition to the music Chew’s surreal album covers and inspired song titles suggest more than a passing familiarity with esoteric knowledge and other obscure and niche realms of knowledge as well as a knack for clever wordplay. It all adds up to an uncommon depth of creative development that rewards anyone taking in the music and its presentation beyond the surface level.

– Queen City Sounds and Art

MOLD! Is a band funded by Peruvian blood Carlo Barbacci who relocated to south Florida in 2018 hoping to bring a new sound to the table. In collaboration with many other local homies, it was possible for the release of NO SILENCE! LP (2020) and MOLD! LP (2022).

Since the release of the debut album, the band has been touring non-stop around Florida and east coast. Being able to play festivals like the fest, III Points, bumble fest, winterlands among others.

The band’s main influences come from american rock, british rock, kraut-rock, south american rock (Peru, Argentina, brazil, Mexico) but we also grab a lot from experimental music, noise ambient, shoegaze, post punk. It’s that plus what each musician brings to the table, the movies we watch, our life’s experiences. It all adds.

MOLD! Is currently about to release a third record and do some touring.

Hailing from somewhere, by way of nowhere at all,Day Tripper (DT for short) is a spiritual healer/ gourmand/ archeologist tasked with digging up the oldest bones from the oldest tombs. Known for his work with The Difference Machine he chooses his words wisely, fully accepting his role as a scribe. Every word is meticulously placed and every beat is meticulously paced. His goal is just to share whatever wisdom he's picked up along the way. Not without a serious funny bone (humorous?), you may have to meet him in person to fully understand where he stands. Doesn't matter to him though... all he can do is reach for the stars until the day comes where he becomes one. 

Wednesday, August 20th, 2025

Speakeasy & Nobody’s Booking present…

Kairos Creature Club, Dinner Time, Johnny Falloon

Drunken Unicorn

8pm/$15/21+

Kairos Creature Club (KCC) is a new project from Lena Simon (La Luz) and Glenn Van Dyke (BOYTOY). After years of playing in bands confined by genre, Van Dyke and Simon founded KCC definitively as an exploration of music. As an ever-evolving project, KCC is fueled by collaboration, the duo seeking out individuals who are moved by the moment, and subsequently capturing the minutiae when different combinations of artistry and creativity collide.

RIYL Frankie and the Witch Fingers, King Gizzard, Crumb, GOAT

Friday, September 26 at The Drunken Unicorn
Speakeasy & Nobody’s Booking present..
Soft As Snow
Doors at 8:00pm / $15 / 21+

Unbound by place or genre, mercurial, experimental pop duo Soft as Snow find freedom to intuitively reflect the disarray of human connection with their intricate, shape-shifting pop production. With each successive release, the duo evolves, unfurling into their own poetic sound, now fully realized on their intimate, third full-length, Metal.wet. Released on genre-agnostic Portland label Beacon Sound, it also features a collaboration with CURL co-founder Brother May. The duo’s deeply immersive live shows combine shapeshifting electronic experimentation and multifaceted vocals, creating a world of glitchy, uneasy metamorphosis. They have toured extensively performing in clubs, festivals and art galleries internationally including Robot Festival, L.E.V. Festival, Roskilde Festival, Lunchmeat Festival, Berghain, Disconnect and Roter Salon, Volksbühne. Their catalogue include, in addition to numerous EPs and tapes, critically acclaimed albums Deep Wave on Houndstooth from 2018, and second album Bit Rot on Mexico City label Infinite Machine from 2022, with features in i-D, The Wire, Clash, DJ Mag, NTS and BBC Radio amongst others.

RIYL: Sneaker Pimps, Bjork, FKA twigs, Eartheater, Kedr Livanskiy, Smerz

Friday, October 3rd at Aisle 5
Nobody’s Booking Presents...
Pile with NNAMDÏ and Monsoon
Doors at 7:00pm / $20 / All Ages

“I want to do what makes me feel like a kid: experimenting, having fun, and trying to discover new things about this work,” says Pile’s Rick Maguire about All Fiction. It’s his band’s eighth record, and one that finds the ambitious group assembling its most texturally complex material yet—despite the fraught inspiration underscoring its restive lyrics. Alongside the blistering drums and scorched-earth riffs that first galvanized Pile’s dedicated fanbase, the band has incorporated elegiac strings, mystifying vocal corrosions, and haunting synths. From the creeping fear of cinematic opener “It Comes Closer” to the euphorically ascending keys on ego-shattering closer “Neon Gray,” All Fiction is an ornate, carefully paced study on the subjectivity of perception, the data-shaping despotism of big tech, and the connections between anxiety and death. In its most vital moments, it’s also a resolute recommitment to the restorative significance of art and imagination.

For fifteen years, Pile’s evolving take on rock has earned the group one oft-repeated superlative: “your favorite band’s favorite band.” Ceaseless touring took its members from Boston’s basement circuit to international festivals, hitting loftier technical apexes with each new record. Maguire—the fastidious composer, evocative guitarist, and potent voice behind the solo-turned-punk project—gives musical body to his interior world in scream-along-able lyrics that skew surreal. Drummer Kris Kuss’s time-defying performances, layered over gnarled basslines, have garnered widespread acclaim. 2019’s Green and Gray took Pile’s thunderous noise to more intricate realms, thanks to new recruit Alex Molini’s work on bass and keyboards, and Chappy Hull’s dextrous interplay on second guitar. That record drew praise for its political directness and instrumental ferocity, but Pile’s seventh album was almost a wholly different endeavor—one on which Maguire would favor piano.

“I’ve been trying to get out of what I think is ‘the rock band format,’ and I was also tired of what I saw as our identity as a band,” explains Maguire, citing the profound impact he’s drawn from Mt. Eerie’s unusual timbres, Kate Bush’s ambitious singularity, and Aphex Twin’s irreplicable soundscapes. “The confusion about identity combined with existential anxiety led to exploring my imagination as a means of escape.” As far back as 2017, Maguire’s songwriting gravitated toward more obtuse influences, with a Prophet X synthesizer eventually replacing guitar as his primary composing tool. But when Pile’s lineup changed after his move to Nashville, Maguire was hesitant to stray far from the band’s established heavy sound, lest his newer bandmates take critical heat. Squirreling away that material for a later record afforded him time to explore deliberately. “I’ve been more drawn to recordings where it’s difficult to identify what’s happening,” offers Maguire of the albums that impacted All Fiction; the list is vast, touching on adventuresome heavy-hitters like Portishead, Broadcast, Penderecki and Tinariwen. “I also wanted to use different instruments and recording techniques to highlight the songs, rather than creating the visual of a band performing them,” he says.

All Fiction—a reference to “the lack of any objective reality,” and the worries that accompany parsing truth from tale—is a record Maguire views in some ways as Pile’s most vulnerable, despite his embrace of symbolic lyricism. In 2019, Maguire and Molini began demoing All Fiction in Nashville; Molini, an established producer, brought appreciated focus to the process. As the pandemic interrupted Pile’s planned touring, Maguire leveled up at production to accommodate his fascination with electronic textures. On 2021’s Songs Known Together, Alone, he rearranged Pile’s back catalog for solo performance. Later that year, improvisational record In the Corners of a Sphere-Filled Room empowered the group to push deeper into orchestrated strangeness. In September 2021, Molini and Maguire were joined by Kuss—who was living eighteen hours away in Boston—for a month-long rehearsal of the twenty songs in contention. Kuss’s versatility gave him insight into synth patterns and atypical percussion choices like rhythmic breathing. The band, now a three-piece after the departure of Hull, recorded at home until they’d gotten All Fiction right, then they headed into the studio proper to try it all again. Recording once more with engineer Kevin McMahon (Real Estate, Titus Andronicus) at Marcata Recording in upstate New York, Pile tracked fifteen songs for over a month—the project’s longest studio stint by far. A “mammoth period” of synths, resonant vocal re-processing, and nightly full band overdubs yielded layers like doubled drums, warped classical guitars, and triggered samples of air ducts. Finally, Pile was joined by a string quartet, adding magical last touches. It marked a triumphant chapter for Maguire: “Part of it felt like pulling out all the stops,” he says. “I never really treated a Pile record that way.”

For a record intended to abdicate rock’s throne, several of the ten tracks finally chosen for All Fiction number among Pile’s rockingest. “Loops” finds Maguire questioning his motives as a songwriter, scrutinizing the border between his lived experiences and the stressors he sings about. Concerns about self-awareness, substance use, and music’s environmental impact infected “Poisons,” which takes cues from the loud-quiet splendor of PJ Harvey. A trip to Big Bend in Texas inspired the Lynchian “Nude with a Suitcase”; “I really like Kris’ breaths, and what Alex did on the Rhodes and Omnichord. It added textures that give this song a lot of life,” Maguire effuses. While global perspectives and personal moments shaped the record’s narrative arc—climate injustice, the addiction crisis, American cultism, and capitalistic overwork, to name a few subjects—Maguire says he’s more confident than ever in letting poignant images speak for themselves: “If this combination of words does it for me, it doesn’t need to make sense to somebody else.”

After completing past records, Pile’s had goals bubbling on the backburner. Maguire poured all of those and then some into All Fiction, and this purity of intention unlocked a refreshed sense of joy and fulfillment in Pile’s music. “I like thinking art has the capacity to change things and the way people function. But the means to get that art out there and get people to connect to it can be draining—and I overcommitted, in a lot of cases, to trying to be an island,” Maguire admits. All Fiction was sparked by a beguiling sonic palette, but it’s also infused with love from the years of trust between Kuss, Molini, and Maguire. Proof’s in the aftermath: though they spent five years as a long distance project, post-All Fiction, all three members of Pile are once again living in the Northeast.

Thursday, October 9th at Aisle 5
Speakeasy, Irrelevant, Nobody’s, and VLSC present…
Marie Davidson
Doors at 8:00pm / $22 - $25 / All Ages

Marie Davidson has always gone against the grain. The French-Canadian producer’s first four albums established her as a transgressive force in dance music, with her 2014 debut Perte d’identité (Loss of identity) laying the foundations of organic electronics and introspective storytelling that she would continue to build upon. Each release probed her “dualistic” relationship to nightlife while becoming increasingly saturated in its abundance of sounds, from Detroit techno to Italo disco, finally reaching a fever pitch on 2018’s Polaris Music Prize-nominated Working Class Woman. Putting the pitfalls of club culture and her own fractured identity under a withering satirical lens, Working Class Woman doesn’t wrestle with the existential as much as fling it around the dancefloor.
 
After that, 2020’s Renegade Breakdown broke the mould entirely. With “a will to explore other styles of music,” Davidson formed a band with her husband and longtime collaborator Pierre Guerineau (also her counterpart in the duo Essaie Pas) and producer Asaël Robitaille. A deeply collaborative project, the trio wrote a slate of experimental pop songs inspired by records they would play at living-room afterparties – jazz classics, French chanson, electronica – on which Davidson sang for the first time.
 
Four years and a pandemic later, Davidson’s sixth studio album, City of Clowns, marks a return to the club – but not as you know it. The techno thump and scathing spoken-word delivery of Working Class Woman resurface at points, but the pop structures and melodic sensibilities of Renegade Breakdown also remain. It’s a “strange” sonic blend even by Davidson’s own standards. “It’s definitely linking back to what I was doing pre-pandemic, but with a bit of an evolution,” she says. “I didn’t want to just repeat myself.” The sound and the spirit of the album are shaped, too, by the fact that Davidson has a new antagonist. This time it’s not club culture that’s coming for her sense of self, it’s Big Tech.

RIYL: Sextile, Boy Harsher, Ela Minus, Pelada, Eartheater

Tuesday, November 4th at Masquerade (Hell)
Speakeasy & Nobody’s Booking Present...
French Police and Social Order
Doors at 7:00pm / $20 - $25 / All Ages

Formed in Chicago, French Police is a darkwave ensemble led by vocalist and guitarist Brian Flores, lead guitarist Manny Herrera, and bassist Rolando Donjuan. Since 2019, their music has encapsulated indie and post-punk audiences with rhythmic guitar & synths, proving to be melancholic dance music for the passionate and romantic.

RIYL: Interpol, Twin Tribes, Blood Club, Forever Grey, The Cure, DIIV