drag city

Sir Richard Bishop shares “Back Forty Lashes”, the ferocious, trance-inducing second single and self-directed video from “Hillbilly Erotica”, out July 31st on Drag City. A sequel of sorts to 2025’s “Hillbilly Ragas”, it carries Bishop’s argument with the “American Primitive” tag deeper into rural Tennessee. He’s on his US tour now through the summer, but stops in the UK for the Green Man Festival in August.

“Stash,” the second album from BCMC — the Chicago guitar-and-keys duo of Bill MacKay and Cooper Crain — pulls a range of styles from their minimalist set-up. More excitable than 2023’s “Foreign Smokes,” the musicians are happy to explore dynamically within a song. This is a generous, joyous album, brimming with life, energy and a real love of music.

Prison pull up with their third album, “Big Rigs on the BQE”, out July 31st, a long way from last year’s “Downstate”. They’ve shared lead cut “Sunrise Highway” with a scorching single edit video from Johnny Celentano and Cliff Elor — a fast, garage-bred psych charge built live from guitars, bass, drums, fuzz organ and vocals. Two side-long trips, tracked overlooking the highway.

BCMC — Bill MacKay and Cooper Crain — return with “Tête-à-Tête”, the second single from their forthcoming Drag City album “Stash”, out June 26th. Where lead single “Kaleidosmoke” unfurled in patient, accumulative psychedelia, this one rotates skyward — Crain’s organ tearing through prog, gospel, psych and funk, MacKay’s twin guitars tracing intricate, Krautrock-leaning patterns. A new visualiser arrives alongside the single.

A final album from Ed Askew is on the way. “The Final Painting,” a posthumous album from the late outsider songwriter, painter and poet, arrives July 31st — assembled in his last years with producer Jerry David DeCicca. Lead single “Gray Air-o-Plane,” featuring Sharon Van Etten, is out today with a music video framed by Ed’s own paintings.

Sir Richard Bishop returns to Drag City on July 31st with “Hillbilly Erotica”, a sequel of sorts to 2025’s “Hillbilly Ragas”. Eight tracks, one acoustic guitar, no overdubs — and save for the closing piece, entirely improvised. Bishop again wrangles with John Fahey’s “American Primitive” tag, finding clearings, hills and valleys glimpsed in the distance… Watch his video for the lead single “Finger, Tennessee”.

White Fence’s Orange, out now via Drag City, is Tim Presley’s first album in seven years — and it sounds freer and more expansive than ever. With Ty Segall again in the producer’s chair, these songs are built for electricity, celebrating melody whilst unafraid to show hurt, fear, and despair. There is an audible joy in the playing.

Cole Berliner shares ‘Bongo Syndicate’, the second single and video from his Drag City debut The Black Door, out May 29th. Guitar and bass push and pull through interlocking lines at a glacial pace — fingerstyle weave evoking an ’80s Leo Kottke session at ECM. Brian Bartus’s accompanying video patches in mystic grasslands, with Berliner’s silhouette glitching from biome to biome.

Mixed and mastered by Jim O’Rourke, Tommy Peltier’s “Echo Park (The 70’s Sessions)” catches the moment a jazz lifer reinvented himself as a songwriter in 1970s Los Angeles. Recorded in a hillside house near Echo Park Lane, these eleven tracks brim with melodic invention — each could be convincingly sold as a long-forgotten seventies hit. Out now via Drag City.

Joshua Abrams’ Music For Pulse Meridian Foliation is a single, thirty-five-minute swathe of all-enveloping, slow-moving minimalism. Originally a score for Lisa Alvarado’s multidisciplinary installation at REDCAT, CalArts, the album tracks a semi-fluid path, advancing like cooling lava — a matrix of abundant and not always predictable intersections, there to be explored, to inspire fierce thought, but also to luxuriate in or meditate on.

Cole Berliner has signed to Drag City for his debut solo album, The Black Door. The title track is out now with a music video by Fred Joseph. He says, “The inspiration was drawn from the mystical sounds of American (and proto-American!) folk music and swing, filtered through the lens of heart-string pullers like Bert Jansch and Jim O’Rourke, and carved into something both personal and simultaneously universal.”

Glyders have shared a new video for Super Glyde, the electrifying opener from their latest album “Forever,” and announced European and UK tour dates for April and May. Directed by Eon Mora, the clip channels Jarmusch and Coppola into a tense, almost-Jungian visual trip — a fitting companion for a band firing on all cylinders.