Three years in the making, Total Peace’s self-titled debut album comes out of the gate strong with volume and urgency. What began as a neighborly chat between Michelle Williams and Matt Cherry during the peak of COVID isolation turned into a full-fledged band grounded in old school human interaction and no-frills songwriting.
Cherry is best known for slinging layered and complex guitar parts in the psychedelic post rock outfit Maserati. Here, he trades his effects pedals for a bass and a microphone. His voice is heavy, tuneful, and raw in songs such as “Taped Up,” “Trance,” and “Slipped.” It’s a bold pivot that calls to mind the ramped up energy of Gang of Four’s Entertainment! and the introspective back-and-forth between Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd throughout Television’s Marquee Moon—all driven by the sheer exuberance of the Stooges’Self-titled LP. The riffs are bold and the rhythms are undeniable, reveling in the power of repetition.
Guitarists Williams and Craig Gates and drummer Greg Stevens round out the lineup with a compelling synergy. Stevens and Williams share roots in Atlanta’s early aughts indie rock band Red Level 11. Their chemistry grounds the record’s driving pulse, as they thrive on stripped-down dynamics—no synths and no nonsense.
There is no concept at work here per se, but Cherry says, “Michelle and I are neighbors in Inman Park. She has a bunch of historical documents about people and events on our street in the 1910s and 1920s that we thought were interesting. Several of the songs are loosely about those things. Other songs,” he goes on to says,” “are about different topics ranging from fictional characters to various midlife crises and dark thoughts.”
Recorded live at Maze Studios in Reynoldstown with engineer Ben Etter (Erasure, Washed Out, Nikki and the Phantom Callers) and mastered by Joel Hatstat (Bambara, We Vs. the Shark, Liz Durrett), this self-titled debut leans into its compact and hook-laden energy. “Tom Talbot,” “Mold Blue” and “Be Free” dance on a tightrope between post-punk tension and anthemic release. There’s a visceral joy in cranking it up for the sake of catharsis, and Total Peace hits like a welcome jolt of electricity.
David J—co-founder of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets—returns to Avondale Estates for a solo appearance supporting his new poetry collection, titled Rhapsody, Threnody, and Prayer, while playing music from his elegiac new LP, The Mother Tree.
It’s a seated, BYOB affair taking place in a small studio setting, that finds the legendary bass player marking a new and vulnerable chapter in his career. Both David J’s new book and album are tributes to his late mother, Joan Nancy Haskins, each one reflecting on decades of introspection, artistry, and grief processed through the lenses of music and verse. Over five atmospheric tracks, The Mother Tree conjures soundscapes for his poetry to drift through—at once dramatic and meditative, full of memory and emotional ballast.
Mike Lynn (left), Lisa King, and Jeff Calder. Photo courtesy The Hot Place
The Hot Place opens the show. The long-running psychedelic darkwave group led by vocalist and bass player Lisa King and Swimming Pool Q’s guitarist Jeff Calder. Rounded out by Mike Lynn (Betty’s Not a Vitamin), the trio will offer stripped-down interpretations of songs from their 2023 self-titled album. Expect acoustic arrangements that lean into the band’s more ethereal inflections, with King also sharing selections from her own poetry collection Dark Queens and Their Quarry.
David J
The connection between David J and the Hot Place runs deep. The two have toured together playing living room gigs throughout the Southeast, and their creative paths have intersected on multiple projects over the years. This performance promises to continue that synergy in a setting designed for careful listening and thoughtful reflection.
Advance tickets are $50, and are required. There will be no tickets sold at the door, and seating is limited. Doors open at 7 p.m. All-ages are welcomed with accompaniment. Respect the neighbors and don’t park in the adjacent driveway.
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There is quiet power that comes from embracing the subtle nuances, the unheard dimensions of sound that arise when crafting analog textures and drones that fall in the gray areas between musical improvisation and composition. Kelsey Wilson, Alexander, and Hot Trash will dive headlong into this kind of delicate intensity at Railroad Earth on Thursday, May 29.
Hot Trash, finds longtime friends and collaborators Bill Taft and Brian Halloran of W8ing4UFOs, pushing further into realms of abstraction. Using heavy effects to draw out the natural tones of cello and guitar, the duo lets the ghosts of Smoke and Hubcap City echo through a loose and highly personal framework that allows for breath and spontaneous combustion. Some songs have lyrics, some do not.
Alexander. Photo courtesy David Shapiro.
Alexander is the stage name used by New Haven, Connecticut guitar player David Shapiro—an understated yet technically dazzling presence whose work bridges the line between American Primitive guitar and a broader, more introspective drone-folk sensibility. Shapiro’s fingerstyle technique is steeped in the traditions of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, yet his voice is his own—attuned to the spectral edges of memory and movement. Shapiro’s performances unfold like meditations with gravity and grace, each note a stone dropped in still water.
Kelsey Wilson
Bringing the evening to a close, Kelsey Wilson crafts immersive, slow-burning soundscapes built from cassette loops, field recordings, and improvisation. Drawing a throughline from William Basinski’s decaying ambiance to the lo-fi texture worship of early Belong and Concern, Wilson’s set promises to be thick with atmosphere—disintegrating, reassembling, and hovering just out of reach.
$10. Thurs., May 29. Music starts at 8 p.m. Railroad Earth, 1467 Old Oxford Rd. N.E.
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Nicholas and Peter Furgiuele are men of few words. For 23 years the closely-knit Atlanta-born brothers and songwriters have let their music do the talking for them. They first recorded together under the name A Fir-Ju Well in 2002. Years later, in 2007, they rebranded as Gringo Star and have carried on ever since, navigating shifting cultural tides, changing musical trends, and seemingly endless lineup shuffles with the kind of determination that comes from shared musical instincts, experiences, and D.N.A.—call it brotherly love.
Gringo Star’s latest album, Sweethearts, trades indie-rock grit for a 1950’s pop shimmer, weaving together soft-focus textures that imbue their signature blend of garage rock and psychedelia with a new and introspective depth. The album’s first two singles, “Blood Moon” and “I Sleep to Dream,” highlight a musical evolution in progress, each one floating in reverb, harmonies, and instantly familiar melodies wrapped around love stories. The songs shapeshift with dreamlike grace, expanding upon elements of both nostalgia and innovation, carrying the band into new terrain.
“We didn’t set out to make a record with any kind of underlying theme, but all the songs told these love stories, and the sound evolved as we went along,” says singer and guitar player Nicholas Furgiuele. “There is an underlying theme to it all, but I wouldn’t know how to explain it,” he goes on to say while offering that if anyone does hear a coherent concept at work throughout the album, it’s something that wrote itself.
“I have always been into the idea that music is open to interpretation, and what it means to me might mean something completely different to anyone else who’s hearing it and putting it all together in their head,” he adds.
Sweethearts is Gringo Star’s eighth full-length album, and their first with the Grand Rapids-based dizzybird Records. It’s also their second post-pandemic offering, recorded between 2023 and 2024, expanding upon the murky sound and vision of 2023’s On And One And Gone. Its songs take shape as surreal nods to simpler times in American life, channeling equal parts dreamy reverie and swirling self-reflection, filtered through a lens of vintage melancholy.
“We wanted to make a record that felt good, you know? Something that felt like remembering love,” Furgiuele says. “But at the same time, there’s a sadness in that memory. It’s not all sunny.”
Familial tendencies are also behind Nick and Peter’s penchant for a 1950s sound as well. From the 1940s-1975, their maternal grandfather, Ed “Dr. Jive” Mendel, was a DJ for WGBA-AM in Columbus, GA. He was also a chitlin’ circuit promoter, and record label owner who earned a couple of gold records for a duo he managed, Peggy Scott & Jo Jo Benson. Sam Cooke, Soul Stirrers, Otis Redding, James Brown, Martha and the Vandellas, the Shirelles, Little Stevie wonder, and Jackie Wilson were also among his associates.
“He died before my parents got together so we never knew him,” Nick says. “But my grandma’s photo albums were all filled with pictures of them with James Brown, Jackie Wilson, being around all of this music and all of these images of our grandparents was for sure an influence on what we do with Gringo Star.”
But an aura of peaceful optimism is the album’s guiding light. “Blood Moon” takes shape as a waltzing lullaby where layered vocal harmonies and languid guitars remain suspended in sensual ether.
One song, “Some Things Don’t Change,” was originally written for Nick and Peter’s first band, the King Street Blues Band, circa 1995 when they were in 9th and 7th grades respectively, while living for several years in Boone, N.C.
The band was named after downtown Boone’s main thoroughfare. “Some Things Don’t Change” was originally penned by their bandmate John Fulkerson, but it had never been properly recorded. For Sweethearts, Nick and Peter took what they remembered of the song, retooled it and wrote some new lyrics here and there.
“I kind of don’t remember what the original song sounded like, and it never really had any kind of arrangements,” Nick says.
The idea to revisit the song came when Nick realized he was unconsciously noodling the bass lines between other songs when the group was on stage. “I don’t know why it got stuck in my head, but it did, and so we gave it a whole new treatment—a whole new life.”
“Some Things Don’t Change,” as it appears on Sweethearts, is now one of the more sophisticated numbers that takes shape amid the tracklist. Still, the album remains deceptively simple, unraveling to reveal miniature worlds thriving inside lush turns of phrases, baroque instrumentation, and emotionally intense shading.
Gringo Star. Photo by Francis Furgiuele.
Since recording Gringo Star’s 2008 debut album, All Y’all, produced by Ben H. Allen III (Animal Collective, Deerhunter, Gnarls Barkley), the group’s body of work has existed outside of easy classification. But they have always been interested in stirring hot-blooded emotional meditation into their work. Nick, working alongside his brother Peter on bass, guitar player and vocalist Josh Longino, and drummer Mario Colangelo the group has carved out a one-of-a-kind cosmic rock sound. Surf-inflected riffs and distant rhythms in the instrumental song “Girl,” and a traipsing cover of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ 1966 hit “Li’l Red Riding Hood” underscore the album’s surreal, dream-like essence.
On stage, instruments get swapped. Roles shift. There’s an elastic energy to the way the group performs—egalitarian and impulsive—and this live dynamic carries over into Sweethearts, careening movements from the janggling exuberance of “Count the Ways” to the wall-of-sound that binds “A Lonely One.” Each number offers a distinct postcard from a dream-world version of the past. A sense of longing underpins the whole affair—an ache for connection in a time when disconnection is the norm.
“In a world where division has become a rallying cry, we wanted to make something that reminds people of what connects us,” Peter says. “We wanted to get back to that raw emotion—love, heartbreak, joy, sadness. All of it.”
It’s easy to forget, in the churn of modern music, how rare it is for a band to last this long, all the while continuing to evolve. Gringo Star is one of those rare groups that has never stopped pushing forward, even when the rest of the world shut down, and even when doing so meant carving their own path outside of whatever music scene was in vogue at the time.
They’ve toured relentlessly over the years, sharing stages with the Zombies, Cat Power, Weezer guitarist Brian Bell’s band the Relationship, Best Coast, and Shannon and the Clams. Their sound has zigzagged across records like a living document of who they were at a given moment.
But what is, perhaps, most remarkable is the way the band has retained its identity while allowing each record to bloom in its own way, bringing their songs to life, and turning raw ideas into something that is quite cinematic.
Sweethearts sits comfortably out of time, reverent of the past but not beholden to it. The songs invite listeners to slow down, and to feel things deeply.
Nick and Peter may not be chasing any zeitgeist, but they are staying true to a vision that’s lasted nearly three decades without growing stale. With Sweethearts, they’ve added a rich new chapter to an already impressive catalog—one that lingers long after the needle lifts. And maybe that’s the real trick to Gringo Star’s longevity. The group doesn’t just survive. It resonates beyond words.
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A version of this story originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Record Plug Magazine.
On Saturday, May 17, Italian composer Fabio Frizzi brings his Zombie: Composer’s Cut live score to The Garden Club at Wild Heaven West End—a rare and visceral encounter with the music of one of horror cinema’s most revered partnerships.
Known for his haunting melodies and baroque-tinged arrangements, Frizzi’s work with director Lucio Fulci defined the aesthetic of Italian giallo films throughout the late ’70s and ’80s, most famously in The Beyond, City of the Living Dead, and Zombie.
This performance pairs Fulci’s 1979 film—a grim, gore-soaked masterpiece of undead terror—with a live rendition of Frizzi’s reimagined score. Originally composed with collaborators Franco Bixio and Vince Tempera, Zombie’s music blends prog, synth, and eerie atmospherics into something that feels both grandiose and uncomfortably intimate. With the Composer’s Cut, Frizzi revisits and reworks the material, building a dynamic new soundtrack performed live by his band.
Frizzi’s legacy spans decades of cinema and television, but it’s his work with Fulci that cemented his cult status. The Frizzi 2 Fulci project has taken his soundtracks to stages around the world. Now in its third iteration, the show brings Zombie to life in ways that are both faithful and revelatory.
Presented with a 4K restoration of the film, this immersive experience folds sight and sound into a ritual of dread and beauty. Whether you’re a horror fan or simply looking to be unnerved in the best way possible, Zombie: Composer’s Cut delivers pure, pulpy magic—and the most epic showdown between a shark and a zombie ever committed to film.
Zombie vs. Shark: A Scene from Lucio Fulci’s ‘Zombie’
This Saturday, May 10, NoWordsATL 4.0 takes over the Garden Club at Wild Heaven West End on Sat., May 10, from 3:30-11 p.m.
This day-long festival is a celebration of instrumental, ambient, and experimental sound exploration—sans words—delivered in an environment that thrives on thick ambiance and both visceral and cerebral responses to the music.
Catch sets from an eclectic mix of forward-thinking artists, unfolding in a space that invites immersive listening. Think synth meditations, modular abstractions, steel strings, and guitar loops stretched into infinity amid light installations and projections turning the room into an ever-shifting canvas where sound and light mingle in real time.
The Harmonic Continuum is an afro-futurist, multi-instrumentalist foursome featuring Doc Calico, Billy Fields, Kenito Murray, and Kenny Web playing jazz, punk, psychedelic, and experimental rock.
Rasheeda Ali is a Grammy nominated flautist who recently stepped out from the shadow of performing alongside greats like Jeff Mills and Kebbi Williams expressing next level cosmic explorations of sound using flute, synth, and drum machines.
Shane Parish is a guitarist, composer, improviser, and leader of the avant-rock band Ahleuchatistas. He’s also ¼ of Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, and a renowned acoustic soloist.
Melodic Monster, featuring Ben Garden, is a psychedelic rock band that blends theatrics and effects in an unforgettable live show.
Alexandria Smith is an improviser/multimedia artist, trumpeter, and a professor of music at Georgia Tech, who has performed residencies at the Stone NYC, had feature recitals on the Future of New Trumpet (FONT) Festival West, Dartmouth’s Vaughan Recital Series, the VI Semana Internacional de Improvisación in Ensenada, Baja California, and Tulane University.
Spacers blend Kraut Rock and African rhythms to psychedelic effect.
Jeffrey Bützer is a multi-instrumentalist who plays accordion, toy piano, guitar, electric piano, chord organs, glockenspiel, melodica, banjo, and other noise makers to create a cinematic world of sound.
The Atlanta Improvisers Orchestrais a collective of experimental artists who use classical instruments, movement, and sound in spontaneous improvised compositions. Featuring Majid Ariam, Al-Yasha Ilhaam Williams, Ben Shirley, Priscilla Smith, and an evolving cast of various other artists.
If you ever caught an earful of “Destroy All Music” on WREK-FM in the 1980s, flipped through the dog-eared pages of LowLife Magazine, or caught Glen Thrasher behind the counter at A Cappella Books, you already know: Glen didn’t just participate in Atlanta’s underground—he defined a large part of it, for a long time.
Thrasher passed away Saturday morning, May 3, leaving behind a secret legacy that pulses through every DIY show, noise set, and scribbled flyer that still dares to push Atlanta’s arts scene off the rails and into uncharted territory.
He was 66 years old.
In the early 1980s, Glen and co-host Ellen McGrail transformed “Destroy All Music” into a beacon of chaos and possibility over Georgia Tech’s 91.1 FM airwaves. No wave, free jazz, tape hiss, post-punk, and basement weirdness—nothing was too far out. The show carved space for unclassifiable sounds and stood as a lifeline for seekers and soundheads. McGrail and her partner Tony Gordon still co-host the show every Wednesday from 9-10 p.m., proliferating a testament to Thrasher’s curatorial nerve.
The Destroy All Music festivals that Glen and Ellen created gave a stage to the likes of Dirt, Lisa Suckdog, Freedom Puff, Col. Bruce Hampton, Tom Smith’s Peach of Immortality, Cake (Tracy Terrill), and Chattanooga’s Shaking Ray Levis—local and regional acts who existed outside the realm of mainstream music and culture.
LowLife Magazine issue no. 17.
From 1984 to 1992, Thrasher published LowLife, a Xeroxed, cut-and-paste document of Atlanta’s disreputable brilliance. It was more than a zine—it was a transmission from the city’s cultural underbelly. Fiction, comics, mail art, anti-authoritarian rants, interviews with skronk warriors and tape-traders—LowLife captured the friction and fire of a city in flux. Issue # 17 featured Magic Bone’s Debbey Richardson’s quiet smile on the cover, which is forever etched into the collective memory of anyone who ever scoured a punk distro table at any record show or zine fest.
Thrasher also played a role in the creation of Cat Power, playing drums behind Chan Marshall in the earliest iterations of the project. Glen once relayed that while playing music with Chan, they booked their first show, but did not yet have a name for the band. He called Chan who was working the cash register at Felini’s Pizza in Little 5 Points. Glen said, “We need to have a name, tell me something now or I’ll just make it up.” The customer waiting in line to order a slice of pizza was wearing a Cat Power Diesel trucker cap. She said to Glen, “Cat Power,” and the name stuck.
Thrasher later drifted north to New York in the ’90s before returning to Atlanta where he continued writing and working at A Cappella Books. Through it all, his compass never strayed from the outside path, and his critical wit never waivered.
I worked at A Cappella Books with Glen for years, where we spent long hours behind the counter, talking about politics, books, the music of Pere Ubu, Sonic Youth, the Dog Faced Hermans, Cecil Taylor, Mary Timony, and too many others to recall. He had an encyclopedic knowledge. He could be an intellectual antagonist in one moment, and a warm and engaging companion in the next. It was all in the interest of honest debate and raging against a cultural slide into right-wing politics and modern technology dulling our collective senses. “Why be any other way,” he once laughed, and it made him a true friend and mentor.
He didn’t just know where to find the good stuff—he was the good stuff. His year-end lists were impenetrably comprehensive: a treasure map for the eternally curious. I can’t count how many records, zines, or strange new ideas I encountered because Glen had the foresight—or the infectious enthusiasm—to share them.
Glen Thrasher was a beacon, a connector, a beautiful noise in a world that too often chooses silence. Atlanta’s underground has lost one of its true architects, but his work, his spirit, and his sonic fingerprints remain etched in the grooves of every misfit creation that follows.
Rest in power, Glen. The signal carries on.
Details regarding funeral arrangements are forthcoming.
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Atlanta expat Adron is returning to play her first hometown show since losing her home and nearly everything she owned to the the Eaton Fire in Los Angeles in January.
The singer-songwriter is, perhaps, best known for blending Brazilian Tropicália with otherworldly melodies and a voice that is playfully dreamlike and sophisticated on albums such as 2011’s Organismo and 2018’s Water Music.
Since the fire, picking up the pieces of her life has been “insane and somewhat horrifying,” Adron says. Along with her home in Altadena, she lost a lifetime’s worth of art, letters, her beloved aquariums, and relics from her years growing up in Atlanta. It’s the kind of loss that would scramble anyone’s sense of identity. “It’s like losing my whole story,” she offers.
Adron in the home studio that was lost in the fire. Photo by Robin MacMillan
Adron also lost a home studio (pictured above) that she’d spent long hours building out and fine tuning to perfection with her partner Robin MacMillan.
In the wake of so much wreckage, Atlanta was there for her. Countless friends and fans helped her get back on her feet. Now, she’s stepping back on stage—not just to perform, but to say thank you and to reconnect with the city where she will forever be linked.
Experiencing such great loss has sharpened her connection to Atlanta and to the songs she’s written. “This show will be kind of a big deal for me,” she says. “It’s a test of faith, performing for this audience that’s done so much for me when I feel so diminished. But my music is good as hell—better than ever, even—and it’s crucial that I prove it to all of us, especially myself.”
MELVINS (left to right): Steven McDonald, Buzz Osborne, Dale Crover, and Coady Willis. Photo by Toshi Kasai
The Savage Imperial Death March thunders into Georgia when Melvins and Napalm Death co-headline a double dose of doom, noise, and grinding intensity.
On Sunday, April 27, Melvins and Napalm Death come together for a massive display of sound and fury on the Masquerade’s Heaven stage. On Tuesday, April 29, the same bill rolls into Athens’ 40 Watt Club, bringing chaos to the Classic City.
The tour falls on the heels of the February 2025 release of Savage Imperial Death March, a six-song collaborative LP released via Amphetimine Reptile Records. The six-song release is a crushing, howling monster of an album that finds both bands playing together, seamlessly merging Melvins’ sludge-soaked throb and Napalm Death’s relentless grind.
Melvins are also touring behind their latest release, titled Thunderball (Ipecac Recordings). It’s also the group’s most recent full-length released under the Melvins 1983 moniker, featuring Buzz Osborne, Mike Dillard, Ni Maitres, and Atlanta-based abstract electronic project Void Manes.
For this tour, King Buzzo’s riffs steer the ship, backed by the dual-drum assault of Dale Crover and Coady Willis and Steven McDonald’s fuzzed-out basslines. This incarnation of the band reignites the early Melvins aesthetic with renewed purpose and fire.
Meanwhile, Napalm Death continues its decades-long campaign of sonic obliteration, riding high on the aftershocks of 2022’s Resentment is Always Seismic–A Final Throw of Throes. Vocalist Barney Greenway remains a force of nature, while the band’s grindcore assault remains both savage and surgical.
North Carolina sludge lords Dark Sky Burial—a bleak, ambient-industrial project helmed by Napalm Death’s bass player Shane Embury—and Weedeater set the tone for each night’s proceedings.
Why write a book about Atlanta record stores? The truth is that you get a singularly unique perspective on a city’s history, its culture, and its personality when viewed through the lens of a record store’s front window. I have often said that if you want to understand a society or a culture, just take a look at its pop culture, and music has always remained right there on the frontlines.
Atlanta is world-renowned as a hip-hop mecca, but a rich underground rock scene has been thriving here for decades. The hub of that world is the city’s record stores. Featuring decades-old institutions to shops that existed just long enough to leave an impact, Atlanta Record Stores is a rock-centric take on a hip-hop town, unfurling the secret history of music underdogs—outliers living among outliers—telling their stories in their native tongue. From Jarboe of SWANS to William DuVall of Alice in Chains and Neon Christ to Kelly Hogan, Gentleman Jesse Smith, Atlanta Braves organist Matthew Kaminski, and those surly characters behind the counter at Wuxtry, Wax ‘n’ Facts, Criminal, Ella Guru, Fantasyland, and more, all were drawn by the irresistible lure of vinyl records—all found their communities and their own identities, leaving an indelible mark on the culture of Atlanta.
Click below to purchase a signed copy of Atlanta Record Stores: An Oral History. $25 (postage paid).
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