If you recall your 7th grade science glass, “mitosis” is the name for the process by which cells divide and produce an identical pair. It is how plants and animals grow, creating roots, sprouts, leaves and limbs. This process happens with all life on the planet and, interestingly enough, there’s even a version of it that is shaped like a star. Elements of the universe reflected back in micro-biological versions.
Infinite Limb’s new album Seeds for Cosmic Radio touches on these ideas conceptually. The microcellular and the interstellar are connected; in proverbial form and in literal atomic formations.
The new video for “Mitosis Bloom” explores this visually with handmade textures; evoking the unseen world of plants and cells, as well as the intergalactic swirl that contains us all.
The single is streaming everywhere; serving as a beacon to draw you to the full album. You can hear the entire journey on Ampwall and Bandcamp. You can even pick up a packet of flower seeds – tended from Infinite Limb’s own garden – to harvest your own mitosis.
Bleary have unveiled their fourth (and final) pre-release single ahead of their full-length debut, Little Brain. The new track, “925,” is the anti-work anthem we all need right now.
Steeped in the same distinctive guitar tone as the prior three singles – “sugar splint”, “bug” and “foyer” – but more bombastic and immediate than we’ve heard before, “925” is the rallying cry to remind you that work can make you sick, get out there and wake up, smelling those flowers in the morning sun.
First and foremost, Infinite Limb (Kyle Numann) has joined the yk roster. The Nashville based artist and musician has an impressively varietal body of work – from his early solo performances with looping pedals, to multiple albums and videos with his art-folk band Cloudmouth, to three prior albums as Infinite Limb; his creations have run the gamut of ideas and always proven to be compelling endeavors.
He’s also curated a monthly series of collaborations called Ambient Sundays. These early evening performances are curated by Numann to help cultivate a community of like-minded creatives in Nashville. It is a damn fine way to spend a Sunday night.
We are excited to work with Infinite Limb on his fourth album, Seeds for Cosmic Radio – an album inspired the unfathomable connection of your home garden, the atom smashing nuclear furnace of our sun and the interconnectedness of each and every one of us in the outlandishly large universe.
Which brings us directly to the second note of good news, Infinite Limb’s fourth album (and debut on yk Records), is available today on Bandcamp and Ampwall.
Watching his front yard become a living ecosystem each summer, Kyle Numann reflected on the intertwining of the plant-cosmos connection – every leaf on the planet powered by star energy, the entire web of life feeding on cosmically produced plant energy. The colliding scales between the minutiae of plant cells and the incomprehensible magnitude of a star’s nuclear furnace inspired Seeds for Cosmic Radio.
The album came together through weeks of listening through archives of multitrack recordings from the previous several years — compositions built on hardware sequencers, performed live, captured in the moment. These were curated and given fresh attention with renovated arrangements. The sequence of pieces was arranged alongside a field recording of ocean waves at night, ebbing and flowing continuously.
Numann’s final 17-track exploration functions as an aural journey from the confines of the garden to the expanses of outer space, a reminder of the constant conversation between the natural world and the human landscape. He notes a second inspiring force, “I find the theme of interconnectedness to be a powerful tool. In an age of environmental uncertainty I find connecting to the natural world helps to keep me grounded. We live in romantic times, where truth flies on a feeling. Maybe one way to progress is to encourage the kinds of feelings we need to float us into a better future… or at least give us the peace of mind to keep trying.”
To commemorate the release, Seeds for Cosmic Radio is paired with a package of Zinnia seeds cultivated and hand-harvested from Numann’s home garden. These are hardy bloomers that pollinators love, each flower capable of producing dozens more seeds. The journey to growth starts in the dirt and yearns for a remnant of smashed atoms from 93 million miles away.
Looking at the bootleg archive site TheFeatures.live, there are recordings of the song “God Save Rock n’ Roll” going back as far as the year 2000 and, yet, the song has never been officially released. Listening to that recording now, you can hear the crowd singing along – a live favorite that may go back even further than the start of this century.
By 2003, The Features had polished the song and 16 others as they headed to Sweet Tea Studios in Oxford, MS. Along with producers Mike McCarthy and Craig Krampf, they recorded their major label debut – aptly titled Exhibit A. The band and McCarthy mixed the songs to their liking and submitted the album to their label.
As any large label is want to do, changes and tweaks were requested to ensure the bands success in reaching the widest audience. Overdub recordings were done, an additional mix was performed by David Thoener and a new final master from George Marino at Sterling Sound buttoned it up. The Exhibit A that was released in 2004 was the result of a collaborative process between the producers, the band and the mechanisms of Universal Records. “God Save Rock n’ Roll” didn’t make the final tracklist.
The Features career launched in 2004 with the release of Exhibit A; bringing in loads of new fans, tours around the world and many more albums to follow. But the original version of Exhibit A was never heard.
Now, twenty-two years later, we are proud to present the Sweet Tea Recordings in full as thank you to everyone that supported Exhibit A and The Features over the years.
The brand new deluxe 2xLP contains all 17 songs recorded in Oxford, MS. along with a bounty of b-sides and demos, including “God Save Rock n’ Roll” for the first time ever.
The recordings were sourced directly from Mike McCarthy’s archive and The Features vault of demos from Brian Carter, Craig Krampf and Mike Poole. The entire batch of songs was mastered by John Baldwin at Infrasonic Sound for maximum sonic fidelity. Photos and ephemera were sourced from friends and family to be included in the artwork. Matt Pelham himself created collages of keepsakes on top of The Features own flight cases for the innersleeves.
The album is available for pre-order today but ships immediately. If you purchase from the YK Shop, you will get an immediate download of the entire record. If you purchase on Bandcamp or Ampwall, we’ll release the songs next Wednesday, April 8th. If you’re waiting for streaming, you’ll find it there on April 11th.
New episode of YK WORLD just dropped. It’s a short one but comes with the announcement of a new YK related endeavor – YewTube. No, I’m not launching a new streaming music video service, this is a tool to make YouTube Music Playlist Embeds look nicer. Let me show you an example.
You can see the same sampler over on YouTube Music but if you tried to embed it on another site, it would look godawful. Granted, this project is solving a very niche problem but it’s a niche problem I had that needed to be solved.
In the latest episode of YK WORLD I talk a bit more about the project and share some more specifics on why I built it in the first place.
I am hoping that these prettier embeds will show up over on the YK Records Playlists page and make it easier to enjoy the compilations that are already available there.
There’s plenty more treats inside that YK WORLD episode, exclusives! You just gotta press play. Enjoy.
Bleary will release their full-length debut album, Little Brain, on May 15th, 2026. Along with that good news, the band released “foyer” today – the third song from that very album.
The album is eleven tracks of dense, harmony-drenched shoegaze that was composed slowly over six years of demos, detours, and obsessive layering. Little Brain explores memory, loss, and belonging – a heart-heavy wall of sound that is full of memorable hooks.
If you’ve not heard Bleary’s 2019 EP, Gates, make sure to get that into your ears soon as well. The work on Little Brain is a major evolution of that sound.
Speaking personally, I’ve been obsessively listening to Little Brain ever since the band shared it with me. The new track out today, “foyer,” is a great example of the heart heavy songwriting that they are able to channel through a big wall of sound… finding a perfect balance of shoegaze tendencies mixed with delightful harmonies and Bleary’s own special approach to it all.
There’s no single genre classification at work here – it’s truly a unique creation.
The LP and digital are available for preorder today. We’ll be releasing one more single next month before the album drops. Get this into your rotation and I am confident you’ll never take them out.
Less than a month after the release of “sugar splint,” Bleary announces the release of “bug” – now available everywhere. The track is the second single from Little Brain, the band’s debut album available in May (details soon).
The Major Label Debut podcast started out as a conversation with artists who had traversed the tricky, and often difficult, journey of releasing an album with a major label. Their first episode is with Rob Schnapf – producer of Elliott Smith’s XO, his Dreamworks debut. They also speak with Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum, Mark Arm and Steve Turner of Mudhoney and so many more.
As the show progressed, they opened their conversations to a slightly wider variety of people but always kept the chat squarely at the intersection of art and commerce. There’s an episode with Brendan Bourke of PR firm The Syndicate, Lisa Fancher of Frontier Records, and music lawyer Randy Ojeda – all of which are equally as fascinating chats as musicians you recognize!
All that to say, I was quite flattered when they invited me to come on the show and chat about Independent Label Life. We cover the history of YK, the importance of community and remembering that The Internet and Social Media are not synonyms.
“A Duchenne Smile” began with an unexpected collaboration – a melody kicked out on a Fisher Price piano by Jill Townsend’s own four-month-old daughter. The unconventional chord progression inspired an equally uncharacteristically upbeat composition for Fetching Pails, one that is undeniably bright and happy (and ended up as a sample in the final recording). The title refers to a neurological distinction in smiling; a Duchenne smile is a genuine one, signaling authentic positive emotion. Fitting for the new direction.
Here’s Jill Townsend revealing a bit of insight about the track:
This demo is the first I shared with Andrew to see if he’d like to be my drummer. It has a more overt 80s sensibility to it than my previous stuff at the time. This is me starting to put down the guitar (or pass it along to guitarist Dillon, rather) and write more songs on a synthesizer. During mixing, I added some samples of dialogue from old horror/sci-fi films, a theme I’ve been threading through many of our newer songs.
The paper mache heads in the artwork and accompanying videos were created by my friend (and former member of Peachy), Leah Miller. I wanted to make a stop animation video teaser for the song and at the last minute I decided to put my 4 year old daughter in it, which made it a sort of full circle moment, since it was her keyboard kicks that inspired the song.
The track also happens to be a real standout when you see Fetching Pails live. All and all, an excellent addition to the new era of songs emerging from the trio.
Oh! And just what IS a “Duchenne Smile“? A Duchenne smile, named after the 19th-century French neurologist, is a smile signaling authentic positive emotion, a genuine smile. Unlike a fake smile that only uses the mouth, the Duchenne smile also uses muscles around the eyes, lighting up the whole face. The smiles we have as newborns are often reflexive. Duchenne smiling happens with frequency around 4 months old.
Way back in 2019, Nashville band Bleary released an EP entitled Gates. I listened to it in heavy rotation; it had just the right balances of familiar influences, striking arrangements and harmonies.
Today, I’m happy to announce that Bleary is joining the YK Records roster and will be releasing their debut full-length record in May. We won’t give away all the details of it yet but, rest assured, everything that I loved about Gates has evolved into a creation somehow greater than its predecessor.
This is “sugar splint,” the first single from that forthcoming album. It’s an excellent example of the kind of infectious harmonies mixed with optimistic melancholy you can look forward to.
