UK band NERVUS are excited to share their new single, ‘Between The Lines’, featuring Erik Garlington (Proper.). The track appears on the collaborative album ‘Sunday, Someday’ out March 26th through Get Better Records. Song written, performed and engineered by Nervus and Erik Garlington. Produced by Em Foster at home.
The idea for ‘Sunday, Someday‘ was conceived by a group of like-minded friends and musicians from the UK, Pennsylvania, and Los Angeles who began meeting virtually every Sunday from April 2020 onward after the tour they were supposed to go on together was canceled due to the pandemic.
The group is comprised of the alt/punk band Nervus (UK), the pop/rock trio Potty Mouth (LA), the indie/folk/punk songwriter KOJI (PA), the singer/songwriter Solstice Rey (PA), the multimedia artist Full on Mone’t (PA), as well as crew members who would have been on the tour.
They decided to put together a record to fund top surgery and aftercare for a member of the group while raising awareness about the systemic oppression of QTPOC community members.
The group wants to acknowledge the history of organizing and social movements, and how creative communities can go about the work of community care and mutual aid. In order to manifest liberated futures, they must be imagined—and this group has provided space for their collective imagination, with this record as a result.
“This is not a record of and for the music industry,” says KOJI. “This record is a celebration of living in community and a project that asks what world is possible when everyone’s needs are met?”
“It’s exciting to work on something with people I feel so connected to and understood by,” says Abby Weems (Potty Mouth). “This release is an opportunity for all of us to use our collective passions, skills, and resources to support each other as artists and as people with our own personal needs.”
“We’re in a space where we gather on a regular basis, even though we’re separated geographically,” says Koji of the group. “But our relationality isn’t institutional. It’s loving and reciprocal. And we’re able to inhabit ourselves more fully than we are in other music spaces that we’ve experienced.”
The group recently launched the “Maybe Monday Podcast” and you can stream the first episode, featuring Solstice Rey here.
Since forming in 2014, the U.K.–based group Nervus have never shied away from exploring complex issues within their unique breed of alt-punk music. Themes of identity and queerness run through their records, along with environmental, social, and political challenges.
During 2020—in the absence of live music—Nervus have been writing and recording in isolation from one another, with mixing and mastering happening in Em Foster’s home studio.
The band’s latest songs examine community, anti-gentrification, and the rejection of individualism—an idea of place, time, and liminal space.
Nervus want to give a huge thanks and massive shout out to touring pal and great friend Erik Garlington of the band Proper.—who features on Sunday Someday’s “Between the Lines.”
Nervus from Watford via Margate, Northumberland, Leeds, and Watford.
Nervus are: Em Foster (she/her), Jack Kenny (he/him), Paul Etienne (any/all), Lucinda Livingstone (they/them).
Virginia-born and Pennsylvania-raised singer/songwriter Solstice Rey was born Sabrina Williams on December 20, 1992. Growing up within a family where every member inherited a musical talent, it’s no surprise that this fiery young singer is taking her own jab at the music industry. While she’s fortunate enough to not only be an accomplished singer with years of training under her belt in church and school choirs, she’s also a self-taught guitar and piano player.
After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Temple University, Solstice Rey began to focus heavily on her love for creating music, thus dropping her singles “Distraction” and “Dawn” in 2017, followed by “Monster” in 2018.
Fast forward to 2019, she switched up her sound and is allowing her listeners to enter the mind that is Solstice Rey with the release of her debut EP, Rebirth.
Fair warning: Don’t invite Potty Mouth to your house party unless you’re ready for a night of spontaneous karaoke and outrageous prank phone calls.
The high-energy pop/rock trio originally formed in 2011 in a Northampton, MA basement after growing tired of watching the dudes have all the fun onstage.
The group, which consists of Abby Weems (lead vocals/guitar), Ally Einbinder (bass), and Victoria Mandanas (drums/vocals), now calls Los Angeles their home. And since their formation, they’ve released two LPs and two EPs, all of which are heavily influenced by ‘90s rock and early 2000s movies such as Josie and the Pussycats.
Weems loves donuts and makes a lot of silly faces. Einbinder is obsessed with cats and hops around onstage in platform shoes. Mandanas doesn’t say much at first—but when she does, you bet your ass she means it.
The group’s latest LP, SNAFU, was released in 2019 on Get Better Records.
Full On Mone’t—also known as Gabe Darling (they/them)—is a multimedia artist from Central PA. They’ve been writing lyrics from a young age but have never attempted their hand at writing music until 2013.
“I was listening to a lot of Twenty One Pilots and reading about how the lead singer taught himself how to play the keyboard,” Darling says. “That was the final push that I needed to start writing songs for myself. I was just at a point in my life where nothing that I was listening to really felt like it applied to what I was going through. And the main reason I’ve always made art was because there was a vision or thought that I had in my head that I wanted to see come alive. If no one else was making it, I figured I might as well try.”
Along with music, Darling loves to explore different types of art including making jewelry, zines, and drag.
Darling ended up joining the Sunday Someday project through Koji after the artist invited them to join in on a weekly Zoom call with other musicians. “It honestly felt really wild to be included,” Darling says. “But I’ve been so grateful for it.”
“My most important goal for this project would be to inspire anyone who may have had even a passing thought at giving music a try and for them to feel that final push to just do it,” Darling says. “I feel weird calling myself a musician or an artist because most of the time I have no clue what I’m doing. But at the end of the day, it feels good. That’s my goal for myself.”
Indie/folk/punk singer-songwriter KOJI was born in Peixtin (Susquehannock land), or so-called Harrisburg, PA. They’ve been writing and recording music since childhood—all the while holding true to a collective and collaborative spirit throughout each of their projects.
Their early releases include the split EPs IIOI/KOJI with Into It. Over It. and Never Come Undone with La Dispute (No Sleep Records). During the same period, they released their debut EP Some Small Way (Run for Cover Records) in 2010, which was their first collaboration with drummer Willie Rose and guitarist Chris Sigda.
In 2013, KOJI released Crooked in My Mind, which was produced by multi-genre studio wiz Will Yip. KOJI and Yip collaborated again in 2015 for the Fury EP, which also reunited them with Rose and Sigda. KOJI went on to tour the world in support of Fury while raising awareness of several social justice causes along the way.
After a long hiatus, KOJI’s contribution to 2020’s Someday Sunday is the artist’s first new music since Fury and represents the deepest reflection of the artist’s community-first ethos—collaborating during pandemic with friends across multiple time zones in an effort to create space for joy and resistance while raising funds for community members’ gender-affirming surgeries.
“This isn’t so much picking up where I left off,” KOJI says of Sunday Someday. “It’s a deepening of community and creative practice.”
