Described by their college blog as positively “Highwoman-esque,” singer Sophia Bondi & co.’s banjo-led ode to a familiar North Brooklyn train station feels definitely like the start of something, even if it lands midway through The Victory Seeds, the self-titled and self-released debut from the Victory Seeds, who could have been found throughout the last year playing various “honkey-tonk” nights, at spots like Skinny Dennis and the Bushwick Public House. “On the platform/don’t think the train will ever come,” Bondi sings in “Myrtle-Wyckoff Blues,” an image that rustles with familiarity: another night, headphones cradled, listening to beginner-level Grateful Dead. 

I imagine the whole restless-waiting-around thing won’t feel unfamiliar to Heaven Schmitt, whose group Grumpy put out an EP last year (Wolfed on Bayonet), their first music since transplanting to nearby Ridgewood, and signing to Beach Fossils singer Dustin Payseur’s label. The most immediate of those release so far is “Saltlick,” also about boredom, scraping around in your pockets looking for loose trash and it sounds like Liz Phair blasted through a 100gecs vocal filter, for what it’s worth. I managed to catch the group playing the record at Windjammer as an impressive five-piece, hitting each of those ten-cent bedroom pop sounds like their lives depended on it. Despite the video-game sounds, or perhaps because of them, it turns out that Schmitt has a great voice, professionally-honed-in-Nashville, qualities that land the occasion backing vocal gig for Zach Bryan, when not leading Grumpy through an opening slot with indy rock vetz Real Estate, also known for journeying through Ridgewood in their prime.

Another local act making noise online last year was Starcleaner Reunion, a group that a Stereogum blogger calls calls “a New York quintet who sound a bit like if Stereolab had spent a lot of time hanging out in Ridgewood.” I tried asking the group if their Pentagram folkie workout “Plein Air” was named after the dearly-departed Ridgewood cafe of the same name, from their self-released, and fittingly-titled if so, Cafe Life, and was kindly told “hahah no just a funny coincidence. thanks for listening!.” At any rate, I like the more straightforwardly shoegazey “The Hand That I Put Down” more, from the same EP, a song that’s animated by the kinds of rustling ambient sounds that can be heard creaking out of apartments native to the area. 

There’s at least three or four songs just like this one on the perfectly random and self-released debut from the knickerbocker5, their magisterially-titled effort Disco Princess (Where We Are Now). Like Deerhoof covering “Moving in Stereo” or a never-released demo from a band that used to open for CSS in the early 2000s, “Spangle” kind of glistens familiarly outside of its time, the product of a handful of Japanese musicians who were staying together during the pandemic “at Knickerbocker Ave in Bushwick,” per their bandcamp page, where they say they were “only able to play at [the] rooftop on Knickerbocker Ave.”

I must have seen various permutations of Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz’s group fantasy of a broken heart reenact the titular emotional breakdown of “Ur heart stops” live at least twice already, before the pair committed it to record on Feats of Engineering, their first album on Dots Per Inch Music, a small label that put out early releases by Grace Ives and Model/Actriz. But the song still gets me. All that yelping. Refugees from the scene around the Glove, a DIY club on Broadway that shuttered before the pandemic, the pair find ways to sing about joy without reverting to twee cliche’s, despite Wollowitz’s occasionally uncannily warbling impersonation of Bret McKenzie. 

Just about one degree of musical separation takes you to Nate Amos, fast becoming a major cult figure among people who primarily shop at thrift stores. The Water From Your Eyes guitarist, a recent Ridgewood transplant, records on his own as This Is Lorelei and he put out his most well-liked collection of these songs last year, Box for Buddy, Box for Star over on Double Double Whammy, the indie label that discovered Mitski. “I’m All Fucked Up” is my favorite of those and I’m not alone, it’s his currently his most streamed record on Spotify by a mile. It’s not a surprise; it’s the kind of song Kurt Vile would record if he spent a lot of time hanging out in Ridgewood. 

“Toad Mode” is an early creation from Richard Orofino and Pearl Amanda Dickson, a pair of Brooklyn transplants who make up the duo Sex Week, recently created, signed and given a FADER profile announcing their debut EP, released by Grand Jury Music, the indie label that put out the last few Twin Peaks albums. In the aforementioned FADER spot, Orofino says “Toad Mode” was inspired by a friend’s cat, who “has a real swagger and loves to bite you on the chin as a sign of affection. We called that going toad mode.” Animated by the kind of powerful punk rock energy you might find on a collection of Beach House B-sides, the song has the ridiculous twee quality of those off-brand ‘60s Nuggets compilations, full of forgotten one-hit wonders about tooth brushing that filled the airwaves at the time. 

You might not have noticed it, but longtime scenester Cassie Ramone quietly dropped her self-released solo debut full length last year, a few months after playing a too-short Babies reunion stretch with ex-Brooklyn-ite Kevin Morby, and headlining a local festival. Easily the kind of frustrated letters of yearning, contempt and regret that Ramone would record with her old Vivian Girls crew, “He’s Still On My Mind” simmers with the kinds of gently piercing lo-fi pleasures that don’t sound faked on laptops; that sometimes-crushing sound of guitars. 

Allison Becker’s voice — you could say she howls as she says so herself on her band’s website, as in “Oh one day I’ll live in a city, and I’ll be whoever I like” howls Wetsuit’s Allison Becker… — makes me think of the late Dolores O’Riordan, a resounding influence these days on indie singers channeling personal ick into Trouble-sized angst. “Local Celebrity” is a good one, a scalding take of cross-bar angst, tender with a kind of misplaced 2am sincerity from Wetsuit’s Sugar, I’m Tired, the group’s first major dispatch on Substitute Scene Records, an outfit that calls itself a “Brooklyn record label focused on Queer and Female artists.” 

If the most immediately apparent thing about Geese singer Cameron Winter is his resolutely scary Brooklyn face with its exactly tiny lips, he makes that abundantly clear by putting it right on the cover of Heavy Metal, his much-celebrated album out on Partisan, the Williamsburg label that also puts out his Brooklyn band’s music. Like a lot of people, I like a lot songs from that album — prominent indie music columnist Steven Hyden described another as “something that Robert Altman could have played over the image of Warren Beatty’s frozen corpse at the end of McCabe And Mrs. Miller”  — but “Love Takes Miles” feels like it captures the romantic psudo-beat poetry eccentricity of the spirit well enough.

BODEGA is a band that has been slinking about clubs in Brooklyn for perhaps even longer than both Cameron Winter and Geese; singer Ben Hozie even once shot a cam girl indie in his Ridgewood apartment with Julia Fox in it, though that remains largely underseen. In a way, that makes his band perfect avatars for the larger nothingness of Bushwick culture writ large, a subject they tackle, without even asking, on “Myrtle Parade,” which opens the newish material on Brand On The Run, a re-working of material that had been on the band’s Our Brand Could Be Yr Life debut, initially released on “Capitalist Records” in 2015. The re-record was a concept, as I understand it, that had been come up with when the band was later signed, instead, to Chrysalis, the British indie that once discovered Blondie, yon some decades ago. The new stuff is better. Earnestly, like the Sean Baker of Myrtle Avenue that he is, Hozie uses the song to reimagine the street as the name of a woman — doing what else? — pursued by some bad guys. “She hides her figure in an XL tee/Unknown Pleasures on her back,” Hozie sings. “The laptop men want Myrtle’s bed/they’re gonna have to go Wyckoff instead.” 

Professional artist types like Hozie generally moved to Ridgewood from Bushwick, but newcomers like Katy Kirby moved directly there from Nashville, not unlike the aforementioned Heaven Schmitt. In fact, two of Schmitt’s Grumpy bandmates played on Blue Raspberry, Kirby’s lush, studied first effort on Anti-, the record label that still puts out Tom Waits albums. “Salt Crystal” is an exquisitely beautiful song out of that set; big and quiet and sounding like a church and I think it’s about a pretty cool-sounding baseball cap? I’m sure there’s something else there.   

Slic is also based around Ridgewood — a fact I discovered when I found a poster on Forest Avenue depicting them turning into a guitar, like in those Transformer books —  coincidentally, Slic also makes music that’s cool, smooth and metallic; dance music for the old school H0L0 crowd, maybe if Boy Harsher actually sounded little harsher. The minimal “Can’t Get Enough” is off Unbearable Heat, Slic’s first full-length collection of dance tracks, a venerable who’s who of important-sounding figures in the world of people who play these kinds of shows. A group called OCTOGON  — I think they once played a rooftop show with Slic at Our Wicked Lady once? — appears at one point. This song, though, is just Slic and the creeping, urgent whisper of their voice. 

John Ross’ Wild Pink crew have probably been playing clubs in Brooklyn for just about as long as Hozie’s BODEGA group, but their embrace of big, expressive heartland signifiers (the multi-layered pianos, the dutifully distant embrace of Bruce-style guitar theatrics et.al. ) gets their music slotted more with the Philly heartland rock types on the other side of New Jersey. Nonetheless, how can the nervous, stupid chatter of “Eating The Egg Whole” — a gorgeously vacuous collection of dive bar sport team nostalgia that lines Dulling the Horns, the group’s first album on local indie Fire Talk Records —  not feel as pointedly new Brooklyn as a faded vintage store Mets cap?

Perhaps it is axiomatically dubious to end a column on local music on a blissed out Japanese shoegaze record that the singer Haru Nemuri cut over email with the Frost Children, a midwestern pair of siblings who also moved to Ridgewood after a stint of trying to make it with the industry types in Nashville. Now, the duo are making it here, putting out a series of progressively daffier hyperpop on True Panther Sounds, a trendy indie picked up by Matador some time ago. “Get Well Soon” comes at the end of Soul Kiss, a brief EP the pair got Nemuri to record, part of a series of self-consciously eccentric collaborations. The pair even did a song with Danny Brown last year too, how about that?

---

Top photo taken by Andrew Karpan.