Three hubs tend to surface in my mind when I picture the birth of indie pop in the 1980s: Bristol in England, Dunedin in New Zealand, and Olympia in Washington. In Bristol, the brief-lived imprint Sarah Records amplified lo-fi luminaries like Heavenly and the Field Mice by releasing a string of 7” singles and operating with a fan-first philosophy. In the meantime, groups such as the Clean and the Chills, along with other acts aligned to the esteemed Flying Nun label, captured surprising international fascination with their jangly, rickety guitar-driven sound from Oceania. And just before riot grrrl and grunge reshaped the Pacific Northwest, Calvin Johnson forged a gentler strain of American punk by running K Records from his kitchen, initially to assist his friends in getting their tapes out into the world. The following year, K would become the home for Johnson’s own band, the cult-hero Beat Happening: “Touch girl, apple blossom/ Just a boy playin’ possum,” he crooned on their 1988 classic “Indian Summer.”
Today, down in Austin, Texas, there’s the quartet Touch Girl Apple Blossom, one of the more promising outfits reviving indie pop in the present moment. Yet perhaps “revivalist” is the wrong word; K Records—still very much a force under Johnson—has just released Touch Girl Apple Blossom’s debut LP, Graceful, through the Perennial imprint. (Not quite the same scenario for Sarah Records’ peers across the Atlantic, who famously called it a day in 1995 after hitting a hundred releases.) It might sound almost too good to be true to be signed by the guy whose lyrics became your band’s name more than three decades later. To the more cynical, the path may feel a touch gimmicky. But indie pop was never meant to be glamorous or gimmicky, and Graceful thankfully avoids both charges. “Obviously I sense that Touch Girl carries a dose of nostalgia, but our stance is also about being here and now,” guitarist and vocalist Olivia Garner recently reflected on the band’s guiding spirit. “As much as a veritable guitar-driven group can live in the present moment.”
Touch Girl Apple Blossom—Garner, guitarist John Morales, bassist Dustin Pilkington, and drummer Daniel Charles Powell—coalesced in 2022. The next year brought a four-track EP that perched a touch heavier on the guitar than much of K’s catalog, a balance informed by Garner’s past stint with beloved New York noise-rockers Hotline TNT and Pilkington’s prior chaos-charged tenure with the now-defunct Total Abuse. Graceful leans into this equilibrium with more precision, reimagining classic twee pop with familiar devices—alternating female and male vocals, sunlit melodies, carefree riffs—without succumbing to saccharine sweetness.
That sense of heart-on-sleeve candor remains a through-line for Graceful, but Touch Girl Apple Blossom anchors those tender feelings in tangible moments. Even the album’s bright, dazzle-eyed opener “The Springtime Reminds Me Of…” carries an undercurrent of wistful tension: “I want to stay inside/ But I must go/ I can’t say no/ The world keeps turning,” Garner sings, as if pleading for Morales’ buoyant guitar refrain to carry her outside.
Those moods seem to set the tone for Graceful, an LP that frequently lingers on small skirmishes at the crossroads of romance and livelihood: “You know I hate it when we fight/ All these meaningless distractions/ We’re working all our lives/ One day soon, though, we’ll start living,” Garner declares on “Tell,” just before a blazing guitar outro. “You Made Me Do It” offers a playful lament about early-stage romantic turbulence, while the sugary hooks of “Heart-Go” make the writer’s block confessions roll off with ease: “Where does the heart go/ When the heart’s not in it?/ The pen got tired of writing all these I’ve got to say to you.”
Those intimate moments of friction laced through Graceful— shows that don’t land, lingering resentments toward a whole city, or days that feel over before they begin—make its sweeter, sunlit parts feel that much more earned: “Love is back and it’s in my arms,” Pilkington proclaims on the album’s penultimate standout, “I’m Lucky I Found You.” Lucky is the operative word here, as Graceful never pretends that good fortune is simply handed to you. While the album nods to the past, its real project is navigating a sometimes tangled, often bewildering present. Touch Girl Apple Blossom’s central aim is to figure out how to exist meaningfully in the here and now.
Touch Girl Apple Blossom – Graceful [LP]
Amazon
Graceful is set for release on May 15 via K/Perennial.
Other albums of note this week:
• Drake’s Iceman
• Kevin Morby’s Little Wide Open
• horsegiirL’s Nature Is Healing
• Dua Saleh’s Of Earth & Wires
• Porches’ MASK Mixtape
• Telehealth’s Green World Image
• Prisonnier Du Temps’s Prendre Le Pouvoir Par La Force
• Nara’s Room’s Tearless, thoughtless
• Shaggy’s Lottery
• The All-American Rejects’ Sandbox
• The Karma Effect’s Cruel Intentions
• Held.’s Grey
• Maisie Peters’ Florescence
• New Constellations’ It Comes In Waves
• Khun Narin Electric Phin Band’s III
• Lawrence Kim’s The Hours & The Times
• alt.’s Nevermore
• Maluma’s Loco x Volver
• Ben Alleman’s Underneath The Orange Tree
• Orphan Donor’s Ailments
• Discovery Zone’s Library Copy Do Not Remove
• Speedy J’s Walkman
• 49 Winchester’s Change Of Plans
• David Bird’s Hinterlands
• A Box Of Stars’ Walnut Street
• Haste The Day’s Dissenter
• MC Serch & Apathy’s Millions Of Zeros
• Towa Bird’s Gentleman
• The Bodies Obtained’s Bouncing Off The Curb
• Mr Bruce’s OK
• Hott MT’s Haunted House
• Echo Bloom’s Anabasis
• Lord Sko & Statik Selektah’s Elevator Music
• New Idea Society’s Fire On The Hill
• Yu Su’s Foundry
• Pro-Pain’s Stone Cold Anger
• Gun Outfit’s Process & Reality
• Smug Brothers’ Gravity Is Just A Way To Fall
• The Elovaters’ Shark Belly Motel
• Immanuel Wilkins’ Immanuel Wilkins Quartet: Live At The Village Vanguard Vol. 3
• Nymphlord’s Shedding Velvet
• Trousdale’s Growing Pains (Deluxe)
• S.G. Goodman’s (Re) Planting By The Signs
• I’m Kingfisher’s Give Up Together
• Jeff Parker ETA IVtet’s Happy Today
• Various Artists’ Off Campus Original Soundtrack
• Steve Louw’s Traces Of The Flood
• Alan Braufman’s Anthem For Peace
• EFFIGY’s Burnt Offerings
• PARTYOF2’s AMERIKA’S NEXT TOP PARTY! (EXTENDED CUT)
• Rhododendron’s Ascent Effort
• Suss’s Counting Sunsets
• Phillip Golub’s Partisan Ship
• Shakey Graves’ Fondness, Etc.
• Johnny Dynamite’s Johnny Dynamite
• Holy Sun Opera House’s Holy Sun Opera House
• Super Sometimes’ Show The World What’s Underneath
• Eluvium’s Virga III
• Dylan LeBlanc’s Cautionary Tale (Deluxe Edition)
• Tank And The Bangas’ The Last Balloon
• Hunter Morris / Mountain Of Youth’s Nowhere, NW
• Genesis Owusu’s REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE
• Carl Gari’s Carl Gari
• Jack Johnson’s SURFILMUSIC (Soundtrack & 4-Tracks)
• Ryan Bingham’s They Call Us The Lucky Ones
• Peter Frampton’s Carry The Light
• Self Deception’s One Of Us
• IAMEVE’s Legacy
• Sam Hoyek’s demonstration_01: anomalous
• William Hooker’s Convergence: Live In China
• Primitive Ring’s Primitive Ring
• Kreidler’s Schemes
• Jobi Riccio’s Face The Feeling
• Arturo Sandoval’s Sangú
• Spencer Krug’s Same Fangs
• Mad Honey’s Bridge Over Cumberland
• Jethro Tull’s Under Wraps: The Unwrapped Edition Box Set
• Mrs. Magician’s Spiritual Hangover
• Russell Jamie Johnson’s Russell Jamie Johnson
• Active Child’s Active Child
• U.S.Highball’s God Save The Kelvin Wheelies
• GIVĒON’s Beloved: Act II
• Ibrahim Alfa Jnr.’s Infinite Black Inside
• Mia Joy’s Spirit Tamer (Deluxe Edition)
• Trinty Ace’s Learning To Be A Cowboy On The Horse That Broke My Arm
• Kolb’s No One Has To Lose EP
• Trinity Ace’s Learning To Be A Cowboy On The Horse That Broke My Arm EP
• The Field’s Now You Exist EP
• Eel Men’s Glass Hammers EP
• Various Artists’ Served Hot EP
• Mirador’s The Gathering At Badon Hill EP
• Kid Sistr’s American Teenage Prophecy EP
• Vines’ Covers I EP
• Daisy Grenade’s So Much To Say EP
• Function & Nastia Reigel’s Devocion EP
• STINGRAY’s Enemy EP
• Bicurious’ Afterthoughts EP
• Sofia And The Antoinettes’ Leaving The House Is A Performance EP
• Smerz’s Easy EP
