Another glorious Bandcamp Friday, another opportunity to support artists via a platform that’s doing good by temporarily waiving its cut of sales.

It’s also an opportunity to catch you good people up on some of the folks I’ve had the opportunity of interviewing recently.

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Dazy — OUTOFBODY

I typically pick a song to feature in these posts, but I’m embedding this whole dang album, because Dazy’s brilliance comes into sharpest focus in aggregate. Dazy is the stage name of James Goodson, a Richmond-based power pop songsmith who started reclassifying his meticulously crafted home demos as final products after the pandemic’s onset. His writing is exceptionally tight and unfailingly catchy, and I consider myself wildly lucky to have gotten to chat with him about his full-length debut, OUTOFBODY, just a short time before this glowing Pitchfork review ran. Whether you start with my Style Weekly interview or that review, I bet you’ll rush to give the album a spin — its a rush all its own.

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Spooky Cool — “Net Ignored”

Another reason I count myself wildly lucky: I got to chat over the phone with Zac Hryciak, lead singer and songwriter for Richmond-based rock act Spooky Cool. I was blown away by their new album, Existential Pie, and a big part of that was the masterful opening track, “Net Ignored,” which is a fascinating document of Hryciak’s movement away from overtly challenging listeners and toward a more engaging, pop-facing, Ableton-enabled approach. It was such a pleasure getting to know Hryciak for this Style Weekly piece, and while the full album isn’t on Bandcamp yet, “Net Ignored” is, and it’s well worth a Bandcamp Friday buck.

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Other items I have my eye on today:

Nathan Salsburg — Landwerk No. 3 
Tom Skinner — Voices of Bishara
The Mountain Goats — The Jordan Lake Sessions: Volume 5
GEORGE — Letters To George
Yonatan Gat — American Quartet (featuring Richmond’s own Curt Sydnor!)
Landon Elliott — “aftermath”