Watch Peel Dream Magazine cover The Beta Band as part of The A.V. Club’s A.V. Undercover Series

From the A.V. Club:

Before the holiday season becomes impossible to avoid and Mariah Carey assumes control of the airwaves, we still have a couple installments left of A.V. Undercover season nine. In the wake of garage duo Skegss comes Peel Dream Magazine, the Los Angeles indie rockers who have already genre-hopped across four albums, including 2024’s Rose Main Reading Room. When he brought his bandmates Olivia Babuka Black and Ian Gibbs to Marquez Clásico this fall, Joseph Stevens quickly plucked a Beta Band tune from the list: “Dry The Rain,” that anthem of abiding which was originally released in 1997 before joining The Three EPs compilation.

About Peel Dream Magazine & their recent album, Rose Main Reading Room:

Rose Main Reading Room, the fourth full length by Peel Dream Magazine, is a lush, inviting headphone record; the kind of album made to accompany city bus rides and rainy-day solo trips to accidental destinations. The band, whose name nods to the BBC Radio 1 legend John Peel — arbiter of all things underground, quality, and (it must be said) “cool” — has since its inception been a genre-hopping experiment, jumping from motorik krautrock to shoegaze and space ago pop, and their newest work is a perfect starting point for the uninitiated, beckoning toward a newfound romance and nostalgia with their catchiest collection of songs to date.

Set to the backdrop of New York City and its towering landmarks — The American Museum of Natural History, Grand Central Station, and the like — songwriter Joseph Stevens weaves personal stories into the wider fabric of the natural world, touching on themes of instinct, animality, and evolution. On tracks such as “Central Park West” and “Migratory Patterns” Stevens and his principal contributors, vocalist Olivia Babuka Black and multi-instrumentalist Ian Gibbs, evoke a woodland sound palette juxtaposed against drones and various electronics, like on side one closer “Gems and Minerals”.

Pre-release singles “Wish You Well” and “Lie in the Gutter” conjure the driving feel of the band’s earlier output, which often draws comparison to Stereolab and Yo La Tengo, while songs like “Dawn” revel in arpeggiating woodwinds and mallets, recalling the wide-eyed contemporary classical of Steve Reich and Sufjan Stevens. Rose Main Reading Room also touches on Y2K indie pop nostalgia by incorporating breakbeats and acoustic guitar-driven ear candy, as heard on tracks like “Counting Sheep” and “Four Leaf Clover.”

Across its fifteen songs, Rose Main Reading Room ultimately proposes a world of marvels and compelling complexity: “Oblast” cheekily prods at mutually assured destruction; “Ocean Life” explores the infiniteness within ourselves; while “R.I.P (Running in Place)” unpacks an all too familiar stagnation. It’s all part of and crucial to, Rose Main Reading Room’s transportive power, ever reaching for the wonder and magic of the world we live in.

TOUR DATES:

Feb 08 – Los Angeles, CA – Teragram *
Feb 25 – St. Louis, MO – Atomic #
Feb. 26 – Louisville, KY – Zanzibar #
Feb. 27 – Nashville, TN – The Basement East #
Feb. 28 – Atlanta, GA – Smith’s Olde Bar #
Mar. 01 – Raleigh, NC – King’s #
Mar. 03 – Washington DC – Union Stage #
Mar. 04 – Philadelphia, PA – The Foundry #
Mar. 05  – Kingston, NY – Tubby’s
Mar. 07 – Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg #

* = w/ Sour Widows
# = w/ Friko

Press Inquiries: Tyler Andere / tyler@topshelfrecords.com
MGMT: Daniel Gill / daniel@forcefieldpr.com

Photo credit: Derrick Alexander | download high-res photo
Download Hi-Res Album Cover Art HERE