As legend has it, Olivia Osby and Avsha Weinberg met in high school math class, where Weinberg would sneak glances at Osby’s laptop to see what music she was bumping. After bonding over indie acts like the Microphones and Alex G, the duo formed Lowertown in Atlanta in 2018. They soon relocated to New York and quickly became a staple of the indie rock scene. Last year I caught a surprise rooftop set they did on the Fourth of July, enmeshed in a mosh of sweat and vape smoke under a sky of sporadic fireworks before the event was shut down by cops.
As teenagers, Lowertown signed to Dirty Hit — home to the 1975, beabadoobee, and Rina Sawayama. But the stress of a real-deal label almost broke up the band. This week's Ugly Duckling Union is their first record on Run For Cover imprint Summer Shade. It’s a gnarled, heady concept album that shows that, despite having the talent and appeal to be superstars, they’re meant to thrive in the DIY shadows.
Ugly Duckling Union commences with immediate, cumbersome moral conundrum: “Maybe I’m good, maybe I’m bad/ Maybe I don’t know what I am,” Osby exhales on the acoustic confession “Mice Protection,” whose title is an homage to the rats crawling around Weinberg’s basement, where the LP was recorded.
Scrappiness has always worked to Lowertown’s advantage; in this band and her solo catalog under the name Olivia O., Osby’s tremulous vocals come across as unnervingly raw, like she’s on the brink of a breakdown. But Weinberg’s baritone possesses a similar fragility that, when entangled in a duet or a back-and-forth with Osby’s, is absolutely unbeatable. Naturally, the guitars echo their captivating clumsiness, flitting between folk flirtation on “Big Thumb” to eerie post-punk on “(I Like To Play With) Mutts.” Strings are most often strummed lackadaisically or recklessly, but then there’s random moments of masterful control, like on “Cover You.”
Per the promo materials, the record's concept focuses on duckling Dale and his friends banding together to defeat a tyrannical media corporation called LBH. The lyrics provide a tactile setting, littered with burnt rubber, rats, dry kibble, cigarettes, mirages, and lots of blood. But if you’re still unconvinced that it’s a true concept album, it comes with a playable Minecraft world, a handbook, plush dolls, and drawn comics by Doctor Nowhere.
The sonic range of the record, though, is something to pay attention to. The ditzy beauty of “I Like You A Lot” radiates Elephant 6 charm. The weirdo anthem “DIPSHIT” sounds like a Black Eyes b-side. “Cover You” is blast-from-the-past twee magic imbued with dreamy flute. “Worst Friend” is a timeless rock song through and through, warbly and nonchalant in its own self-destruction: “Oh I’m my worst friend/ It’s too difficult to see/ But it’s not my responsibility,” Osby and Weinberg belt in unison. That track perfects the art of a power ballad, and they do it against on the gritty “Forgive Yourself,” which is anchored by the simple, cathartic refrain: “It’s hard to forgive yourself.”
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Weinberg aptly described Lowertown as “eccentric, eclectic music.” The pair also clarified that they left Dirty Hit in 2023, finding that the involvement of money made it "easy to slip out of the pureness of it." What really makes Ugly Duckling Union stick is its lingering feeling of misplacement and its pure commitment to becoming even more misplaced, to venture as deep into weirdness as possible. It’s an album that only could’ve been crafted in a rat-infested basement studio, and that’s a huge compliment.
Ugly Duckling Union is out 5/22 via Summer Shade.
Other albums of note out this week:
• JPEGMAFIA's Experimental Rap
• fakemink's Terrified
• Bladee's Sulfur Surfer
• Bill Orcutt & Mabe Fratti's Almost Waking
• Ed O'Brien's Blue Morpho
• Balming Tiger's Gongbu
• My Precious Bunny's A Moment In My Eyes
• Bleachers' everyone for ten minutes
• Crash Of Rhinos' Logbook
• Hammock's The Second Coming Was A Moonrise
• Tim Kasher's home phone's Sponges Of Experience
• Thomas Dollbaum's Birds Of Paradise
• Magic Tuber Stringband's Heavy Water
• School Fair's Unexpected Violence
• Jungstötter's Sustained
• Xavi's Dosis
• Michael Angelo's A Sorcerer's Dream
• Ivo Perelman & Damon Smith's Duologue: Core Of Existence
• Rodeo Mouth's Terrestrial Thrills
• Visible Cloaks' Paradessence
• Marisa Anderson's The Anthology Of UnAmerican Folk Music
• VARG's Live At Wolfszeit Festival 2024
• Will Samson's Sings Again
• Aho Ssan's The Sun Turned Black
• Tommy Lee's Tommyland Rides Again
• Nora Kelly Band's So Wrong For So Long
• The Deslondes' Don't Let It Die Vol. 1
• Duval Timothy & Carlos Niño's Rain Music
• Arc Iris' iTMRW
• Colonel Claypool's Fearless Flying Frog Brigade's Return Of The Live Frogs: Volume 1
• The Band CAMINO'S NeverAlways Vol. 2
• TAEYANG's QUINTESSENCE
• Alela Diane's Who's Keeping Time?
• Criteria's SEIZE!
• Little Barrie's Gravity Freeze
• Hannah Peel & Beibei Wang's The Endless Dance
• Kyle Morgan's Ghost Of A Problem
• Dimmu Borgir's Grand Serpent Rising
• Hyd's Hold Onto Me Infinity
• it foot, it ears' Tip Toe Loops
• TAEYONG's WYLD
• Skylar Grey's Wasted Potential
• Fugue State's After Nothing Comes
• FILM's Permanence
• A Good Year's Play
• Radhika's Cine-Pop
• Jenn Johnson's Happy
• Devlin And The Harm's Devlin And The Harm
• Ecca Vandal's LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW
• Ali Sethi & Gregory Rogove's Room Jhoom
• BLINDEAD 23's Deuterium
• Tegh & Adel Poursamadi's Bayal J
• Chris Lippincott's Angel In A Jetstream
• Joel Futterman & William Parker's Transcendent Universe
• aja monet's the color of rain
• 6LACK's Love Is The New Gangsta
• Beck Zegan's Engraving Of Armor
• Ben Chapman's Feet On Fire
• If It Kills You's Arrow Eye
• Orbit 17's Betrayer
• Brook Fox's Everybody's In Love
• Jacob Augustine's I Love You Forever
• David Eugene Edwards' Mercurial Silence
• KOGG's Mechanista
• XCOMM's Time To Burn
• LE SSERAFIM's 'PUREFLOW' pt.1
• The Laughing Chimes' Behind Your Blue Fields
• Future Islands' From A Hole In The Floor To A Fountain Of Youth
• Jesse Draxler's Tongue Of Angels
• Dua Lipa's Dua Lipa (Live From Mexico)
• Ava Mendoza's Alive Alone, Alive Together Live Album
• Cabaret Voltaire's But What Time Is It Really? Live Album
• Ted Lucas' Images Of Life Box Set
• Ain't's How They Faked The Moon Landing EP
• Clark's Opponent Stims EP
• Errol Eats Everything's Stagga Back Remix EP
• Gremlin's You're The Man Now Dog EP
• Marbled Eye's Forever EP
• Gently Tender's This Was Once Fields EP
• Kevian Kraemer's only if it matters EP
• Carly Hann's Alone EP
• DBA!'s I was dead EP
