Ones To Watch: Band Of Horses | Moose Blood

TMN’s charts team predict the hottest new music breaking over the next quarter.From emerging acts to established artists, we’ll give you our industry tips, based onforthcoming album releases, past performance, inside info and a myriad of charts data.

Band Of Horses
Why Are You OK
Out June 10viaUMA

Indie and folk rock genre mainstays Band Of Horses have changed things up this time around. Usually prone to throwing caution to the wind and abandoning suburbia for a more remote place to write, frontman Ben Bridwell done it all at home this time.

Band of Horses are no strangers to success with #21 and #19 ARIA Charting albums on top of a fair amount of overseas chart appearances, a Grammy nomination for 2010’s Infinite Arms, stream counts sitting in the tens of millions and a monthly listener count of 3 million on Spotify alone. Needless to saythey’vebuilt a solid following in their twelve years of existence as a band.

New album Why Are You Okis shaping up to be a head turner. Lead single Casual Party is best sounding work thus far production-wise, a steady paced fresh serving of their own brand of American rock and currently sits at #2 on the TMN Contemporary Rock chart.

Jason Lytle holds the production reins this time around, howeverduring the recording period for the album something rather random happened. The band received a call from Rick Rubin who’d just pulled to the side of the road after being moved by one of their songs on the radio and was compelled to call. That definitely provides some insight on his Executive Producer title on the album and may very well be why everything sounds so polished this time around.

Why Are You Ok is out next week.

Moose Blood
Blush
Out August 5 via HOPELESS/UNFD

Blush is the forthcoming new album from UK sad boys Moose Blood.The English emo band have thus far put out an EP, 2013’s Moving Home and the 2014 debut full-length I’ll Keep You In Mind, From Time To Time, which charted at #45 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart. New album Blush looks to be a big step up for the group, both in regards to production and songwriting sensibilities.

So far we’ve been treated to two singles from the album, Honey and as of today, Knuckles. Honey saw a premiere on Dan Carter’s BBC1 Radio 1 program The Rock Show. An upbeat riff-tastic track that sounds more like triumphant pop-punk than a nuanced emo heart pounder, it’s helped score them a nomination for Best Underground Band for Alternative Press’ music awards.

Knuckles retains much more of the previously mentioned nuance but is still up-beat and pummeling. In a year when pop-punk vets Blink-182 are sledged to release an album, releases like Blush don’t seem out of place whatsoever, and in Australia even more so with the amount of heavier and alternative acts seeing impressive chart debuts and peaks.