August 2021’s Top 10 DIY Indie Songs is a compilation of tracks that we received over the summer and listened to in order to create this Top 10 playlist featuring the following indie artists and bands from across the U.S., with the exception of an entry from Canada and Sweden.
Places represented include Phoenix; LA; Denver; NYC; Whitley City; Nashville and Chicago. Enjoy and please like and share.
Wild Giants – Phoenix, Arizona (“Souvenir”)
Fake Parents – Los Angeles, California (“Birthday Party”)
The Mananas – Denver, Colorado (“Back At U”)
Jeremy Newall – Toronto, Ontario (“Come On”)
Scotch Mist – New York, New York (“Operator”)
The Stupors Arizona – Phoenix, Arizona (“Simple Company”)
Milano Sun – Stockholm, Sweden (“Tough Sailors”)
Surviving Fate – Whitley City, Kentucky (“You”)
Sam McLeod – Nashville, Tennessee (“Sam McLeod”)
The Brand New Shoes – Chicago, Illinois (“With Airplanes”)
#1: Since its founding by recording artist Austin Walashek in 2018, the indie rock outfit Wild Giants has been dropping singles and playing live music all over Arizona. The band’s latest single, “Souvenir,” won over to take the No. 1 spot for DIY submissions in the month of August.
#2: Fake Parents, formerly ‘Parents’, is a Los Angeles-based indie rock band featuring members Garrett Hazen, Ryan Calaunan, and Blake Vallotton. The band records at Hazen’s home studio in La Mirada, California, and Vallotton directs the visual storytelling.
#3: “Back At U” is a recent 2021 single release from Denver indie rock band The Mañanas. The Ecuadorian indie pioneers "Nockah" originally composed the song in 2018. According to the band: “The song felt too "gringo" and out of place with their current discography. Fast forward two years, lead singer and composer Danny Pauta moves to Denver and meets with Brandon Unpingco to create The Mañanas where this song resurges. Watch the song video here.
#4: Jeremy Newall is a Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist (guitar, bass, piano, drums, synth) with influences ranging from Boy Pablo, Day Glow, Tom Misch, phum viphurit, and The Strokes. The Toronto musician’s new single, “Come On,” celebrates indie bedroom pop bliss. He writes the track is “light-hearted song about getting turned down.” To make this song much more entertaining he included samples from some iconic childhood cartoons. Last year, Newall lost his job as a touring musician in Nice, France due to covid leading to a total work-mode that resulted in various tracks that made up the EP Sheesh.
#5: The single, “Operator”, from the New York City indie rock outfit Scotch Mist bumbles along with all of the ingredients of indie pop-rock. The music project is the work of musician Eduardo Zighelboim.
#6: While no longer ‘active,’ the Phoenix indie rock band, The Stupors Arizona (formerly The Stupors), originally formed in 2005 and retired in 2011, still drops an occasional single and plays a few show or festival. This new track, “Done,” seems to have had time to simmer since 2011. Band member ‘Dibbs’ says it’s “an in-your-face-from-a-she/her-perspective on a bad breakup.”
#7: Based out of Stockholm, Sweden, indie rock/pop band, Milano Sun‘s new single, “Tough Sailors,” is what the band calls a “Storm kissed, salt-sprayed indie smash” that was “rescued from the once missing ship. Drenched with in-your-face guitar licks, psychedelic sound effects and 90’s clothing – it’s reusing sprinkles from all your favorite pop/rock decades from the 20th century.
The band is comprised of Johan Jonasson (Guitar, Vocals), Love Sivik (Bass), Zackarias Ekelund (Drums), and David Wikberg (Keys, Guitar, Vocals) with influences that include The Beta Band Beach House, Tame Impala, and Blood Orange.
#8: The brand new band Surviving Fate is a Kentucky-based duo of musical couple of Denny (all instruments,vocals) and Lyndsey Kidd (vocals) from Whitley. Denny Kidd has toured around the country in a previous band. That’s pretty much all we know about them, but if you dig the track, look them up. https://youtu.be/N40esh0xxXo
#9: “Baby Love” is the sweet new single from Nashville lo-fi/bedroom pop recording artist Sam McLeod. The single, he says, was written for the happiness he felt after the birth of the couple’s baby. “It started as a melody I started humming in Jan 2019 when I came home from the hospital with my newborn daughter” and felt a sense that as a couple he and his wife ‘made it.’ “with this amazing little girl to raise together.”
A Nashville native, McLeod’s style has matured from rock into an indie-folk sound that “creates a graceful fusion of influences like Ethan Gruska, Leelanhd, James Vincent McMorrow, and Jarryd James.”
#10: Based in the rock and roll city of Cleveland, Ohio, the Brand New Shoes is a DIY indie rock band featuring four friends and musicians who met in high school. They dropped a self-titled album in 2019, were sidelined for much of 2020, and have now released the album Still Love, featuring the single, “With Airplanes.”