Ava Mirzadegan 

Accompanied most often by spacious silence and a finger-picked nylon string guitar, Ava Mirzadegan writes quiet songs about longing, letting go, and befriending night skies. Written as a pivotal relationship came to an ending, her debut album, Dark Dark Blue, begs the question: If someone falls apart in their room, and no one is around to hear it, do they still make a sound?

The album is the work of a recorder of memories, of conversations (or parts of them anyway)—internal and external exchanges invoked over a pile of chord clusters and heartbreak, as the artist reckons with patterns of codependency and irregular attachment. Inspired by diarists Julie Doiron, Yowler, and The Innocence Mission, Ava’s work is deeply concerned with the pangs of human connection.  Throughout the album, written largely from the confines of her childhood bedroom, she unearths ways to understand how we share our hurt, placing it in the hands of others as we seek to heal intergenerational wounds. Writing as a form of mudlarking; with every hum she comes to terms with the jagged parts of existence that comprise humanity, picking up and inspecting the marks left on us by time and neglect.

Adult Mom began as the solo project of Stevie Knipe in a Purchase College dorm room in 2012. Adult Mom now falls between the playful spectrum of solo project and collaborative band with beloved friends and musicians Olivia Battell and Allegra Eidinger. Through reflections and explorations of the personal and hidden, the crux of the writing produced by Knipe is focused on excavation. The dredging out of the secrets, putting it all in a pan, waiting for the gold to rise. Honesty and intimacy form as Knipe writes clever pop songs that offer a glimpse into the journey of a gender-weird queer navigating through heartache, trauma and subsequent growth.

Ultimately, Driver is a meditation on the pitfalls of interiority, and what it takes to finally make the leap into full, fearless participation as we all grope around for the illusion of certainty.

In Driver, Adult Mom’s third studio release, Stevie Knipe delves into the emotional space just beyond a coming-of-age, where the bills start to pile up and memories of college dorms are closer than those of high school parking lots. Like so many other twenty-somethings, Adult Mom’s third LP seeks to answer the age old question: what now?

With an actualized sound, Adult Mom has arrived to soundtrack the queer rom-com they’ve been dreaming of since 2015. Driver incorporates an expert weaving of sonic textures ranging from synths and shakers to ‘00s-inspired guitar tones which convey a loving attention to detail. Songs like “Checking Up” act as 2020’s answer to “Linger” by the Cranberries with scintillating guitar tones and laments over lost loves stored in I-phone notes.

Gary’s Dream are a Catskills band circling themes of love and nostalgia with shoegaze and grunge-flecked dream pop, woven together by glittery vocals.