The Friday Dispatch
The Weather Station, Mabe Fratti, Spacey Jane, Renny Conti, and more
The Weather Station: Being a person
Canadian singer/songwriter Tamara Lindeman opens up about the mental health crisis that inspired The Weather Station's new record Humanhood, released today – and how she found a path back – for this week’s cover feature on thelineofbestfit.com.
While cast on the wave of success that followed 2021’s pop-folk climate-crisis concept album, Ignorance, Lindeman was struggling privately with chronic depersonalisation, a condition in which the mind cuts the cord with the part of the psyche controlling self-identity, effectively disassociating you from yourself. In her case, it served to fracture the world into unreconcilable pieces.
"I was going through a really hard time," she says. "And I would say this was the hardest creative experience I’ve had. To write a record from that space was so difficult, and sometimes I wished I had waited until I was feeling like myself.But I do feel like… because it came out of that space, it’s more honest than it would have been if I’d started writing it now.”
The result is a dense, initially fragmented record: a chronicle of resilience that moves stealthily from chaos to cohesion.
Lindeman says that while the climate movement in which she’s immersed has "a very humanistic worldview." There is an "anti-people sentiment" that shows up on its fringes. "And if you talk to regular people about climate, most of them will pretty quickly get to a place of ‘well, wouldn’t it be better if we just weren’t here. I find it fascinating how often people say that to me, casually. I keep returning to this question of: ‘Why can’t we face ourselves? Why don’t we like ourselves?’ I mean… what is going on? I’ve had this perspective my whole life: I feel like an alien that has come down to Earth and is looking around, going, ‘This doesn’t make any sense.’"
When she came across the word humanhood, she knew it fitted the moment. "I thought, ‘That must be the title of the next album, whatever the next album is.’ I wanted it to be this grand statement of all these things" – she smiles, slips into self-deprecation – "but, of course, it’s just my own personal record."
Read the full profile by Rick Burin
What a week for new music! Releasing her debut album, You Are The Morning, is Saddest Factory-signed jasmine.4.t; serving up a fresh batch of 2025 poptimism we have Rose Gray with Louder, Please; Mac Miller’s Balloonerism was released posthumously; and Brooklyn indie-folk phenom Renny Conti dropped his self-titled LP.
Mabe Fratti on Charly García
I was hanging out with a band I knew in Guatemala one day, and one of them was playing something by Charly García. I remember hearing it and thinking, ‘Wow, this guy is crazy good at his lyrics.’
For me, the idea of using Spanish language in music that isn’t necessarily associated with Spanish is so good because it opens up so many spaces for the imagination. I mean, there are hegemonic songs in Spanish. I don’t know how to express it, really, but there’s a lot of Spanish music that is quite traditional stuff. But then this guy, Charly García, comes along and he’s like, ‘I’m going to make rock music in Spanish’ and that became a thing.
For me, that was very inspirational, and I feel the same way about some of the Argentinian rock musicans from the ‘70s, like Luis Alberto Spinetta, who was in a band called Pescada Rabioso. Their album with the green cover [1973’s Artaud] is amazing. The lyrics are pretty surrealist.
With Charly, I love that he can be extremely political and so good at telling it like it is. The lyrics can be really in your face, you know? He has these songs made with synthesisers and drum machines, and it’s almost like he’s screaming at you but somehow it’s cool. He has one of my favourite voices in Spanish music. He’s also had these crazy rock and roll moments, really reckless. Like, there’s this famous video of him jumping out of a hotel room into a pool [from the ninth floor] in front of a load of TV journalists. Everyone rushes into the hotel thinking he’s dead but they come into the back yard and he’s just, like, swimming in the pool and asking for a Coca-Cola.
There’s actually a corner of a street in New York named after him now [where the cover image for his second album Clics modernos was shot]. He recorded that album at Jimi Hendrix’s studio, Electric Lady, and it’s amazing. Just super cool, if you like the ‘80s vibe.
The introduction…
This week, we’re welcoming Caleb Harper of Aussie four-piece Spacey Jane to the Dispatch.
Hometown… Perth, Australia.
Describe your sound… Lyrically devastating music that sounds like sunshine.
How you started making music… I started playing in church when I was 13 or 14. As band we first started rehearsing in tinnyyy box of a band room at Kieran’s college. First song we ever covered was “Easy, Easy” by King Krule!
How you got your band name… There’s not exactly a consensus on this… The simplest explanation is that we were all drunk and 19 years old with our friend Jane. After that things are a little blurry!
Best gas station snack… Beef Jerky, duh.
Your 2025 in / out… Not releasing music is OUT. Touring until your legs fall off is IN.
Listen to Spacey Jane’s latest single, “All the Noise,” and watch its accompanying video now.
From the archive…
As the world mourns the loss of one of the most iconic filmmakers of all time, watch David Lynch talk about his love of his craft, the desire to just keep doing, and the dangers of running towards a career instead of towards passion.
Something Old, Something New
Every week, we share recommendations from the Best Fit community on two iconic records — one from the past, one from the present. This week, Substack editor Laura David offers her thoughts on The Clash’s Combat Rock (1982) and Renny Conti’s self-titled (2024).
I returned to Combat Rock by The Clash as a piece of required listening for an upcoming project. But when I did, it was like a shot of adrenaline straight through my eyeballs and up into my brain. There’s something about the infectiously jangly guitars, the guttural roars, the positively cantankerous attitude of the thing. It’s one of the only records I’ve wanted to listen to for weeks, and I don’t see the plague — if I can call it that — coming to an end anytime soon. But the more I think about this record, the more I feel that the renaissance of “older music discovery” brought on by digital platforms has wrongly passed this one by. It’s certainly a complicated body of work with a complicated legacy, but it’s also in many ways a masterclass of its era, a fusion of sounds that is entirely unique and irreplaceable. Of course, I know there’s nothing really niche about this record at all, and I’m just being crotchety on my high horse. I suppose, then, this is simply a public service announcement from me to you, a reminder that your old friend Joe Strummer is there to soundtrack your madness and main character syndrome, ready to bring you back (or push you off, depending how you look at it) from the ledge anytime you worry you might be too far gone.
So much music comes out these days that I find it rare to hear something that truly stops me in my tracks. But Renny Conti’s latest album did. Perhaps its his heartbreakingly nonchalant delivery, his guitars that whisper across a mix like a crisp autumn wind, or the weird and endearing and witty turns of phrase he churns out song after song. For so long, if I might say, there has been an entrenched “sound” in indie and indie-rock, one that’s been replicated and copied a variety of which ways. But Renny Conti, to me, finally brings a breath of fresh air to the genre. It pays homage to greats like Conor Oberst and Elliott Smith, giving the record timeless roots while still feeling inventive enough to arrive somewhere sonically that is, somehow, entirely new. Spending time pouring over songs like “Looking at the Geese” and “Formspring” gave me that emotional rush that I’ve found, of late, is harder and harder to come by. Finding this record for me was like falling back in love with music again.
Listen to the week in new music by following our Discovery playlist
Dropping at midnight every Thursday, follow our playlist for a taste of the best new music from the most exciting breaking artists – 20 new tracks, top-loaded from the last five days in music and on repeat in the Best Fit office right now.
Leading the selection this week are new tracks from Scrounge, Saya Gray, Willow Avalon, Maliika, and coverstar Dead Gowns.
“Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd. But I don’t just find humor in unhappiness – I find it extremely heroic the way people forge on despite the despair they often feel.”
David Lynch