Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s and 2000s (and crusty mp3 files from the 2010s) to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars and the occasional classic-rock icon.
This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).
This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!
THE OPENERS
Like the Halley’s Comet of music criticism, I tend to review a new Foo Fighters album for Pitchfork once per decade, and last weekend the stars aligned to bring you my write-up of the fun-but-flawed Your Favorite Toy.
Speaking of rare occurrences: San Fran psychedelicist Tim Presley just released the first White Fence album in seven years, and it’s the pure jangle-pop gem we always knew he had in him. Check out my review of the Ty Segall-produced Orange at Pitchfork.
Speaking of excellent power-pop albums out now: over at Bandcamp Daily, I wrote about the second release from ex-Metz singer/guitarist Alex Edkins’ current main gig Weird Nightmare, which ushers in the Copper Blue phase of his career. (For more quality Weird Nightmare content, scroll down to The Headliner section below.)
Speaking of Bandcamp: This week, I contributed to the site’s newsletter advice column, The Helpline, where I direct a reader stuck in a mid-2000s blog-rock rut to recent releases from Friko, Cootie Catcher, and Hiroki Tanaka.
This week on Commotion, I produced this discussion on Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s new anti-scalper legislation and what it will (and won’t) do to concert-ticket prices, with commentary from Billboard Canada editor Richard Trapunski and public-policy analyst Vass Bednar:
A TV Freaks show used to be much more common ritual around Hamilton, but the local garage-punk perennials have been keeping such a low profile of late, it took them six months to play a proper local release show for their late-2025 release, Blue Genie (which, in turn, came a good five years after its pandemic-era predecessor, People). But last Saturday’s circle-pit soiree at the Corktown proved that, even if the new record sees the Freaks raging more gracefully, they’re still in perpetual beast mode as a live act, and Blue Genie’s psych-tinged knockout “Dark Places” has already become a crucial fuse in their powder-kegged canon:
Notes on this week’s new additions to the stübermania 2026 jukebox:
G̱a̱mksimoon, “Huk Aat”: This is the rebranded project of Prince Rupert, B.C. musician Jeremy Pahl, who released a couple of records as Saltwater Hank that filtered his blues, country, and early rock ‘n’ roll influences through his traditional Sm’algya̱x tongue. But in this raucous new iteration, he’s channelling the most mythical proto-metal pioneers in their most primal form—Zeppelin in ‘69, Sabbath in ‘70, The Groundhogs in ‘71—and unloading his stoner-rock riffage with punk-rock abandon. There’ll be a lot more fuzz in the forecast when G̱a̱mksimoon drops its righteous debut album, Gyiin Na̱xnox, via You’ve Changed Records on July 10.
Lip Critic, “Legs in a Snare”: What Brainiac were to the ‘90s, Liars to the 2000s, and Death Grips to the 2010s, Lip Critic are to this decade—fearlessly freaky, totally wired, yet absurdly fun practitioners of electro-shocked post-punk futurism.
Smarm, “Lick the Fist”: This Cincinnati crew has earned the endorsement of no less a midwest punk guru than Eric Davidson of the New Bomb Turks (who penned their press bio), and I’m fully onboard with their debut three-song EP (out today), which answers the question: what if KISS never went disco in 1979 because they got really into Black Flag instead?
Glissandro 70 (ft. Peter Zummo), “Lucky Cloud”: The duo of Sandro Perri and Craig Dunsmuir—a.k.a. recent stübermania headliners Glissandro 70—finally release their second album today after a 20-year pause, and this meditative, subliminally funky cover of an early-‘80s Arthur Russell new-wave curio is the perfect reintroduction to their post-everything sound world, with Zummo’s tremulous trombone serving as the foghorn ensuring your safe passage. (G70 will be playing an extremely rare live show as part of the TONE festival at Standard Time in Toronto on June 4.)
Metric, “Tremolo”: The recently released Romanticize the Dive is perfectly timed to solidify Metric’s status as indie-sleaze icons, but this mid-album oddity speaks to a less-heralded aspect of the band’s legacy: as precursors to the 2010s Lana Del Lorde wave of ultraviolet alt-pop. But just when it seems like the song is going to recede into the shadows, a psychedelic guitar line swoops in like a magic carpet ride transporting us to late-‘80s Manchester.
Listen to the complete stübermania 2026 playlist here:
THE HEADLINER:
Conversations about Guided By Voices with Weird Nightmare’s Alex Edkins, Kiwi Jr.’s Jeremy Gaudet, and Ratboys’ Marcus Nuccio
The date: January-February 2026
Publication: Bandcamp Daily
The context: As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I recently wrote up a guide to Guided by Voices for Bandcamp Daily, featuring commentary from a variety of contemporary artists who’ve been heavily influenced by Robert Pollard’s bite-sized-Beatles songcraft and mad-scientist methodology. All of these artists were too young to experience GBV’s breakthrough ‘90s era—back when impressionable college kids like myself went out and bought Bee Thousand because every music mag was telling you to—so it was fascinating to hear these younger musicians’ different experiences of discovering the band. Alas, like a classic Guided by Voices album loaded with 60-second snippets, the finished article could only feature the choicest quotes from our interviews, so I’m presenting the complete transcripts of our interactions, some of which took place over the phone, some over email (so you’ll see the same set of questions pitched to each subject). Consider this the King Shit and the Golden Boys complement to the Bandcamp piece. (You can read Part 2 of this series here.)
Alex Edkins of Weird Nightmare (ex-Metz)
How did you first get turned onto Guided by Voices, and what was your initial reaction?
When I was in my twenties, I shared an apartment with a bunch of friends. We were all very much into bands like Lungfish, Hoover, Rodan, Codeine, Ida, and June of 44. Basically, Touch and Go and Dischord-adjacent stuff was my bag. One of my roommates, who was in a phenomenal Ottawa band called Kepler, had a flawless record collection. I could trust that everything on his shelves was good or great. His Hero is Gone, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Drive Like Jehu—he had seen all of these bands and had the first presses to prove it. So, I would often blindly pull records from his collection and check them out.
That’s how I first heard Alien Lanes. I thought the album cover was intriguing (it’s still one of my all-time favorite album covers) and I was familiar with some Matador bands like Chavez and knew them to be a trusty arbiter of good taste. Anyway, on first listen, I was downright disgusted. Everything about it was “alien.” The recording quality was diabolical, the songs were too short, the lyrics impenetrable, the fake British accent baffling. “What the hell is this shit!?” was my very honest and immediate reaction. I couldn’t believe these hissing, de-tuned basement anthems had been released into the world.
However, I didn’t turn it off, and by the time “As We Go Up, We Go Down” had hooked its sugary-sweet talons in my impressionable skin, I was starting to buy in, and when the masterful “Game of Pricks” followed soon after, I was sold. It all felt incredibly intimate and off the cuff (laughably so), while simultaneously clearly being conceptual art. Until that moment, I don’t recall hearing a band purposely leave in obvious errors, missed notes, erratic tempos, and changes in fidelity. I thought you were supposed to “fix” that stuff—or practice the songs? Nope, Alien Lanes was an intentional and unabashed deconstruction of rock’s conventions and norms. Being contrarian is all well and good, but without the songs, no amount of experimentation is going to keep me interested. So, it really comes down to the absolute embarrassment of riches that is the Alien Lanes tracklist: “Motor Away,” “My Valuable Hunting Knife,” “Blimps Go 90,” “Game of Pricks,” “As We Go Up, We Go Down,” “A Salty Salute,” “Strawdogs,” “Little Whirl”… I’ve been a GBV (and all related projects) fan from that day onward.
What aspects of GBV do you find most inspiring as a songwriter?
Bob’s unflinchingly consistent output is very inspiring. The fact that he clearly makes time every single day to write and record is a great reminder that songwriting/producing/recording is a craft that you chip away at. For the most part, songwriters are not imparted with special skills at birth—they work and learn as they move through life. I love that.
What’s your favourite Guided by Voices album, and why?
As much as the 90’s records (Alien Lanes, Bee Thousand, Propeller, Under the Bushes Under the Stars) made a lasting impression on my psyche and are undeniable classics, my favorite GBV record is probably a tie between Isolation Drills and Universal Truths and Cycles. Full on power pop with most of the abstraction peeled back to highlight Pollard and Doug Gillard’s finely tuned hook writing prowess and guitar riffage. It’s just super fun.
Jeremy Gaudet of Kiwi Jr.
What was your entry point into the wide world of GBV?
I wonder if anyone else my age had this experience where I first saw them in the music video for The Strokes’ “Someday,” and they’re playing Family Feud against each other. I loved The Strokes. So I immediately was on Limewire downloading whatever Guided by Voices songs were there. The first few songs that I would have heard would have been like “Glad Girls” and “Teenage FBI” and some of that stuff. This would’ve been 2002; I was, like, 13, so I got into that stuff pretty young. And then it wasn’t until high school where I had older friends who were like, “You like that band Guided by Voices?” And was like, “yeah, ‘Teenage FBI’ and the Isolation Drills stuff.” And they’re like, “no, no, no—you gotta get Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes.” And so I got totally obsessed with those two records, and Under the Bushes as well. There was a long time where the band I was playing in at the time had a van, and the CD that was in the player constantly was this mix I made of my own cut of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes combined. I listened to that so much that, later on, when streaming came out and I was forced to listen to the actual records and not the mixed CD, I was kind of like, “oh, this doesn’t go here!” I was so used to my own little edits.
What was it that appealed to you most about Guided by Voices? Was it just the hooks? Or was it the mythology around them?
I just liked the songs. And that was probably my first real foray into self-recorded music, and really listening to the kind of records where you could hear the tape hiss and stuff like that. Do you remember that 33 ⅓ book about Bee Thousand? I remember my friend was telling me all the stories that are relayed in that—and in the book, they’re playing with the idea of how mythologized the band is, right? Like, it’s talking about somebody who jumps off the Eiffel Tower because of “Demons Are Real.” And so my friend was telling me all of these anecdotes as if they were real, so I had the super-super-mythologized version of Guided by Voices in my head when I was like 14 or 15. So I liked that stuff, and it probably wasn’t until later that I got into probably more of the… I don’t want to say deeper cuts, but, you know, the less-appreciated records. We did probably three or four shows with Tobin Sprout, and it was so fun to watch. He played a ton of his solo hits, he played a lot of his GBV songs. It was such a cool experience seeing the other side of that band, you know?
And you’ve opened a few shows for GBV, right? How did their crowd treat you?
Yeah, I had seen Guided by Voices a handful of times, so I knew what to expect. Like, I was telling the other guys in the band, “the crowd might not love us.” But when we played with them the first time, it was awesome, and then we played with them the second time, and it was great. Like, I had always heard stories about bands getting Hipped. [Ed note: Jeremy is referring to a long-standing Canadian tradition where bands opening for The Tragically Hip would get verbally assaulted with shouts of “Hip! Hip! Hip!” throughout their entire sets.] And I had heard similar things about opening for GBV, but that wasn’t our experience at all.
It’s funny: on the one hand, you think of GBV as this whimsical lo-fi pop group that makes these cute little psychedelic songs. But then I saw them see them once in Detroit around Do the Collapse, and the crowd was full of drunk bros and it felt like a fight was going to break out.
When we played that GBV 40th anniversary show in Dayton, I remember telling other guys in the band that it was like a cross between going to see a college-football game and Comic-Con. It’s like the perfect cross-section of Star Trek fans and college-football fans.
So if you were to pick one under-appreciated GBV record to celebrate, what would it be?
Good question. I will rep for some of the post-2010 stuff that gets overlooked. The thing with that stuff is there’s always two really good songs on each record at least. I like Space Gun. But there’s one GBV song that I think is their best song from the new era, or, like, the last 20 years: “Flunky Minnows” on English Little League.
Which doesn’t actually include the song “Littlest League Possible.”
No, and I love that song too. That’s off Motivational Jumpsuit. “Littlest League Possible” opens that record. They’ve been doing a good job of putting the hits first or, like, early on in the record. Like, that song “Volcano” off of Surrender Your Poppy Fields—that’s kind of a different vibe for them too, which is pretty cool. It’s more of a ballad, but it’s still kind of heavy and has some muscle behind it. You know what would be a good project? If I made another mixed CD of the post-reunion years.
So you’re more of a compilation guy when it comes to the later stuff, rather than stumping for a specific album.
On the later stuff, yeah. But from the ‘90s to 2004, I love all of those albums. Under the Bushes was a big one for me in college. That one’s got a really great sound to it, where it’s kind of like a mid-fi record for them. The funny thing with streaming is, you know, I was a big fan for years and years, and now, like, with Spotify, I’ll get suggested GBV songs I’ve never heard before. It’s like, “where was this hiding?” Are you doing strictly GBV albums for this article, or are you talking about side projects?
I think we’re going to stick to GBV, because the side projects open up a whole ‘nother can of worms. But is there a side project or solo record you want to rep for?
I’m going to shoot my shot here: I think probably the best non-GBV GBV album is Moonflower Plastic by Tobin Sprout. It’s his second solo record. And it’s not like one of those GBV records where there’s, like, 28 songs—I think there’s like 13-14 tracks. It’s like a half-hour. And every song is smoking. It’s awesome. It’s super-underrated, as is Tobin’s whole discography, and I think some of the Tobin stuff gets a bit lost now, you know?
Another thing worth mentioning that I find important about GBV is Bob’s artwork as well. You can always tell when a band is really going for a GBV sound when they have the fake Pollard collage cover. It’s super-cool how he just kind of stumbled into and created that whole aesthetic kind of out of nothing—the pairing of the collage stuff with the lo-fi with the mod kind of stuff.
Marcus Nuccio of Ratboys
What was your introduction to GBV fandom?
You know, they were a band that I was aware of early on, just getting into indie rock, because they’re just always so referenced when you’re learning about bands. I was getting into Superchunk and Archers of Loaf, and then you learn about Matador Records, and then you learn about Guided by Voices. So I think early on in high school, I definitely checked out Alien Lanes and Bee Thousand, but it never really clicked with me until a little later. I had a buddy who made me a playlist, and he’s a super fan, so he was like, “dude, just check this out. It’s got stuff from across their whole discography.” And I was like, “okay, I understand this band now.”
So initially at least, the hype didn’t measure up to your initial experience.
Yeah, maybe. I mean, I guess I didn’t even know what the hype was. They were just kind of this odd band… I understood they were super lo-fi, and it was kind of similar to those other bands I was getting into, but it didn’t sink its claws into me until I heard a swath across their records.
Do you remember which songs really GBV-pilled you?
For sure, dude. “Teenage FBI” hit me early, and then “Glad Girls.” I was really drawn to the power-pop sensibilities of those tunes. When I heard those, I was like, “okay!”
So you like the slick GBV. Lo-fi is just posturning—put them in the studio with Ric Ocasek, post-haste!
Well, I think that got me in the door. But then I fell in love with the lo-fi early stuff because I was hearing that power-pop sensibility come through that layer of tape hiss. And I was like, “oh my god, they’ve been brilliant all along.”
So what is the one record that you go to when you need your GBV fix?
Well, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this and tell me if I’m breaking the rules, but when I listen to Guided by Voices, I put on the Best of Guided By Voices—Human Amusements at Hourly Rates from 2003. It’s a great assembly of really good, listenable songs. I do adore the parts of their records, like on Bee Thousand, where there’s just kind of nonsense happening. I think that rules. But I’m just putting on the greatest hits and jamming out so hard.
So have you kept up at all with the recent records? And by recent, I mean, even in the past 15 years since they reunited?
I always listen to the singles they put out. I’ve seen GBV a couple times, and when they whip out the new shit, I’m like, “yes, dude—this sounds awesome!” Homie is, like, 68! I saw something where he said he writes a song every morning or something. At this point, it’s just an incredibly beautiful project that’s been around his almost entire adult life.
ENCORES
If you’re in Toronto, Kiwi Jr.’s Jeremy Gaudet will be among the large cast of indie all-stars performing Big Star and Alex Chilton covers May 9 at The Garrison for the third-annual benefit concert in honour of the late CFNY DJ legend (and card-carrying Chiltonite) Dave Bookman.
A few weeks back, Guided by Voices released the second single from the upcoming Crawlspace of the Pantheon (out May 29), the hard-charging “Advance Without Dropping”:
The GBV chatter continues in next week’s edition of stübermania, where I’ll be featuring my complete conversations with Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz/sad13, Peter Gill of 2nd Grade, and Kellen Baker of Good Flying Birds.
This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!
"the standard Foo Fighters game plan of sounding like a Hüsker Dü that can play Super Bowl halftime shows" is a great line.