The year is 2022, and we are not living in the future that I wanted. There’s a seemingly never-ending pandemic still going on, live shows keep getting cancelled, Taylor Swift and Adele are causing vinyl I actually want to be delayed forever….it’s a drag. But, luckily there is one band who just released a debut that I can only sum up as “music for the future I want to be living in”. IXZHILION is that band. So far, the band has released 4 songs- their debut single, “ANKIMILION”, along with “IXZHILION” 1”, “GOATMEALION”, and “SIGNS OF IXZHILION”. Is it kraut rock? Is it post punk? Psych? Perhaps something entirely different?…

Essential Forever’s Al Heaney recently packed up his turtlenecks and Peter Asher glasses and made the big move from the mellow Midwest to the lights of Los Angeles, where the former film student turned crooner just surprise-debuted a new single sparkling with Hollyweird dramatics. Released on Bandcamp “in the wee small hours of the morning” (to quote another beloved crooner), “Knew It Was the First Time” rotates in a candy-colored Roy Orbison orbit through a Milky Way of tape distortion, haunted by the specter of Phil Spector. Heaney croons about the power of love and crunches numbers like a possessed ’60s accountant in what he so poetically calls “the arithmetic…