According to lore, Olivia Osby and Avsha Weinberg first crossed paths in a high school math class, where Weinberg would steal glances at Osby’s laptop to glimpse the music she was streaming. Bonding over lo‑fi acts like the Microphones and Alex G, the pair formed Lowertown in Atlanta in 2018. They soon relocated to New York, becoming a mainstay of the city’s indie rock circuit. Last year I witnessed an unannounced rooftop performance they gave on the Fourth of July, surrounded by a sweaty, vape‑smoked mosh pit under a sky lit with intermittent fireworks before police halted the gathering.
As teenagers, Lowertown signed with Dirty Hit — the label that houses the 1975, beabadoobee, and Rina Sawayama. But the pressure of a bona fide label nearly fractured the band. This week’s Ugly Duckling Union is their inaugural release on the Summer Shade imprint of Run For Cover. It’s a gritty, ambitious concept album that demonstrates that, while they possess the talent and charisma to become megastars, their best work flourishes within the DIY shadows.
Ugly Duckling Union opens with a blunt, morally tangled question: “Maybe I’m good, maybe I’m bad/ Maybe I don’t know what I am,” Osby sighs in the acoustic confession “Mice Protection,” a track whose title nods to the rats lurking in Weinberg’s basement where the record was tracked.
Scrappiness has long aided Lowertown’s narrative; in this band and in Osby’s solo work under the name Olivia O., her tremulous voice lands with a surprisingly raw edge, as if momentarily teetering on collapse. Weinberg’s baritone carries a parallel vulnerability that, when woven with Osby’s voice in a cooperative dialogue or back‑and‑forth, becomes irresistibly effective. The guitars mirror their endearingly awkward chemistry, skittering between folkly flirtation on “Big Thumb” and a haunting post‑punk mood on “(I Like To Play With) Mutts.” The strings, often strummed with a casual nonchalance or a reckless abandon, are occasionally harnessed with momentary, precise control, such as on “Cover You.”
According to the promo materials, the album’s conceit centers on duckling Dale and his crew as they unite to topple a ruling media conglomerate called LBH. The lyrics conjure a tactile world—soaked with burnt rubber, rats, dry kibble, cigarettes, illusions, and a fair share of blood. And if you doubt it’s a fully realized concept album, you’ll find a playable Minecraft world, a handbook, plush dolls, and illustrated comics by Doctor Nowhere included with the release.
Yet the sonic span of the record is what demands your attention. The airy, goofy sweetness of “I Like You A Lot” carries an Elephant 6 id‑vibe. The oddball anthem “DIPSHIT” could fit as a B‑side for Black Eyes. “Cover You” injects a twee, vintage magic with a dreamy flute. “Worst Friend” is a timeless rock tune—trembly and casually self‑destructive: “Oh I’m my worst friend/ It’s too difficult to see/ But it’s not my responsibility,” Osby and Weinberg harmonize. That track crystallizes the power‑ballad craft, set against the harsher energy of the more abrasive “Forgive Yourself,” anchored by the simple, cathartic refrain: “It’s hard to forgive yourself.”
In a recent chat with Rolling Stone, Weinberg aptly described Lowertown as “eccentric, eclectic music.” The duo also explained that they left Dirty Hit in 2023, discovering that the commercial side of things made it “easy to drift away from the purity of it.” What makes Ugly Duckling Union linger is its persistent sense of dislocation and its dedicated drive to become even more out of place, to push further into the strange. It’s an album that could only have been born in a rat‑infested basement studio, and that’s high praise.
Ugly Duckling Union is releasing 5/22 via Summer Shade.
Other albums of note released this week:
• JPEGMAFIA’s Experimental Rap
• fakemink’s Terrified
• Bladee’s Sulfur Surfer
• Bill Orcutt & Mabe Fratti’s Almost Waking
• Ed O’Brien’s Blue Morpho
• Balming Tiger’s Gongbu
• My Precious Bunny’s A Moment In My Eyes
• Bleachers’ everyone for ten minutes
• Crash Of Rhinos’ Logbook
• Hammock’s The Second Coming Was A Moonrise
• Tim Kasher’s home phone’s Sponges Of Experience
• Thomas Dollbaum’s Birds Of Paradise
• Magic Tuber Stringband’s Heavy Water
• School Fair’s Unexpected Violence
• Jungstötter’s Sustained
• Xavi’s Dosis
• Michael Angelo’s A Sorcerer’s Dream
• Ivo Perelman & Damon Smith’s Duologue: Core Of Existence
• Rodeo Mouth’s Terrestrial Thrills
• Visible Cloaks’ Paradessence
• Marisa Anderson’s The Anthology Of UnAmerican Folk Music
• VARG’s Live At Wolfszeit Festival 2024
• Will Samson’s Sings Again
• Aho Ssan’s The Sun Turned Black
• Tommy Lee’s Tommyland Rides Again
• Nora Kelly Band’s So Wrong For So Long
• The Deslondes’ Don’t Let It Die Vol. 1
• Duval Timothy & Carlos Niño’s Rain Music
• Arc Iris’ iTMRW
• Colonel Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade’s Return Of The Live Frogs: Volume 1
• The Band CAMINO’S NeverAlways Vol. 2
• TAEYANG’s QUINTESSENCE
• Alela Diane’s Who’s Keeping Time?
• Criteria’s SEIZE!
• Little Barrie’s Gravity Freeze
• Hannah Peel & Beibei Wang’s The Endless Dance
• Kyle Morgan’s Ghost Of A Problem
• Dimmu Borgir’s Grand Serpent Rising
• Hyd’s Hold Onto Me Infinity
• it foot, it ears’ Tip Toe Loops
• TAEYONG’s WYLD
• Skylar Grey’s Wasted Potential
• Fugue State’s After Nothing Comes
• FILM’s Permanence
• A Good Year’s Play
• Radhika’s Cine-Pop
• Jenn Johnson’s Happy
• Devlin And The Harm’s Devlin And The Harm
• Ecca Vandal’s LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW
• Ali Sethi & Gregory Rogove’s Room Jhoom
• BLINDEAD 23’s Deuterium
• Tegh & Adel Poursamadi’s Bayal J
• Chris Lippincott’s Angel In A Jetstream
• Joel Futterman & William Parker’s Transcendent Universe
• aja monet’s the color of rain
• 6LACK’s Love Is The New Gangsta
• Beck Zegan’s Engraving Of Armor
• Ben Chapman’s Feet On Fire
• If It Kills You’s Arrow Eye
• Orbit 17’s Betrayer
• Brook Fox’s Everybody’s In Love
• Jacob Augustine’s I Love You Forever
• David Eugene Edwards’ Mercurial Silence
• KOGG’s Mechanista
• XCOMM’s Time To Burn
• LE SSERAFIM’s ‘PUREFLOW’ pt.1
• The Laughing Chimes’ Behind Your Blue Fields
• Future Islands’ From A Hole In The Floor To A Fountain Of Youth
• Jesse Draxler’s Tongue Of Angels
• Dua Lipa’s Dua Lipa (Live From Mexico)
• Ava Mendoza’s Alive Alone, Alive Together Live Album
• Cabaret Voltaire’s But What Time Is It Really? Live Album
• Ted Lucas’ Images Of Life Box Set
• Ain’t’s How They Faked The Moon Landing EP
• Clark’s Opponent Stims EP
• Errol Eats Everything’s Stagga Back Remix EP
• Gremlin’s You’re The Man Now Dog EP
• Marbled Eye’s Forever EP
• Gently Tender’s This Was Once Fields EP
• Kevian Kraemer’s only if it matters EP
• Carly Hann’s Alone EP
• DBA!’s I was dead EP
