Sounds of the Summits

The Hypos — The Hypos

While hipsters mourn the breakup of Dr. Dog—one of the indie rock greats of the aughties—Ashevillians have something to celebrate with The Hypos. Dr. Dog’s Scott McMicken (who recently relocated to WNC) joins Asheville’s garage rock icon Greg Cartwright (of the Reigning Sound and Compulsive Gamblers) to form a band that merges the sepia-toned brilliance of McMicken and Cartwright’s retro-pop penchants into an album that might be the best thing to come out of North Carolina all year. Passing through tropicalia-tinged Dylan-esque blues (“Past Life Woman”), Beatle-sque bops (“Badway”), and horn drenched Stax riffs (“Tore My Whole World Down”), it’s hard to believe that The Hypos is their debut record, as it sounds like a band that has always—or at least should have always been around. 

Fancy and the Gentlemen — Separate as We Seem 

In her follow up to her 2023 live collaboration with the Blue Ridge Orchestra, Fancy Marie’s debut studio album lays her lilting country vocals and sassy lyrics over lush string arrangements and swaying Americana rhythms. The Gentlemen of the band’s name are made up of upright bassist and the record’s arranger Craig Kellberg as well as fiddle maven Alex Travers, who are joined by a host of Asheville’s finest pickers and players. It’s a bold and unusually symphonic approach to a down-home sound—singing about trailer parks as orchestral strings swoon—but it works in a cabaret-country kind of way. As Fancy Marie describes herself in “That Ain’t Your Ex,” “I’m a tipsy, renegade, innercity, lower class, vagabond, trailer park, hippie with a sweet sass.”

Hannah Kaminer — Heavy On the Vine

Hannah Kaminer is a masterful writer—something she’s proved over the course of two full-length records in the past eight years, and doubles down on for her latest release. She effortlessly delivers gut punch lyrics on love, loss, religious trauma and the gentrification of her hometown. “Have I been talking to an echo in my mind?” she asks before noting, “I was leaning on the everlasting arms. But I don’t know where they went, can’t seem to find my way back to them.” The litheness of her words slide deftly around the curves of pedal steel and twinkling pianos from her rock-solid Americana band, making Heavy On the Vine her most ripe and bittersweet work to date. 

Meg Mulhearn — Let It Burn Through the Night

Asheville is a synthesizer city. Home to both Moog and Make Noise, some of the world’s most elite electronic instruments are born in these mountains, it should be no surprise to also find some of the best experimental electronic music hiding in the hills. The seventh release from Burial Beer Co.’s hybrid wine-club-record-label Ceremony of the Seasons—in which VISUALS wines are paired with a record once per quarter—comes from Asheville’s veteran genre bending mastermind Meg Mulhearn. Mulhearn’s icy violin accompanies other worldly soundscapes from her modular synths that seamlessly span from ambient and drone to modern classical compositions. Capturing everything from the chill of winter to the first buds of a beautiful spring.