Alli Dempsey

Isolated on the lone stretch of land that is Sonic Ranch Studios, surrounded by nothing but 2,000 acres of dunes and pecan trees near the Texas-Mexico border, Hippo Campus realized that there was no looking back. It’s hard to get off track when recording an album in the middle of the desert, which is exactly what the Minnesota-bred indie group needed in order to bang out their fourth LP, Flood.The band gave themselves an ultimatum: a strict lather-rinse-and-repeat process, with no room to edit o...

Sitting on TV Eye’s graffitied wooden patio in Ridgewood, Queens, Victoria Winter recalls how her sister always used to tell her, “All you need is one show.” Growing up in Curitiba, the vocalist began uploading music to SoundCloud under the name Shower Curtain as a teenager. The self-produced bedroom pop tracks she made then have all been scrubbed from the internet, but after moving to Los Angeles and, later, New York City to pursue a degree at Parsons School of Design, Winter frankensteined the...

Neil Smith couldn’t articulate what drew him to the magpies right away, but as black and blue feathers surged over the Australian sky—where his project Peach Pit was completing a leg of their 2023 tour—he felt struck with inspiration. “I just wrote ‘magpie’ in my phone and thought, ‘That would be a cool song title,’” the vocalist explains. “That’s usually how it works for me.” Smith didn’t learn the folkloric significance of the bird until he returned home to Vancouver and stumbled upon an old n...