Ohio’s Smug Brothers share their video for “Extra All The Time” from the forthcoming Pinhole to Vortex album. Watch it here.
Most bands spend their careers trying to make important records. Smug Brothers have always kept busy making records that become important to you when you least expect it.
That’s been Kyle Melton’s secret weapon all along. While everyone else is chasing reinvention, fashion, or the Next Big Statement, Smug Brothers keep uncovering another impossible melody, another sideways guitar figure, another chorus that sneaks into your bloodstream and refuses to leave. Each album feels like finding a battered notebook filled with perfect pop songs someone accidentally left behind.
Pinhole to Vortex is that notebook exploding into a universe.
This isn’t simply another collection of irresistible Midwestern indie rock. It’s the sound of a band that have been quietly perfecting their own private language for decades and suddenly speaking it louder, wider, stranger, and with more confidence than ever before. Every song feels connected by invisible threads—garage rock rubbing shoulders with psychedelia, power pop shaking hands with dream logic, acoustic confessionals giving way to electric storms.
They’ve never relied on volume to command attention. They don’t announce themselves with bombast or spectacle. Instead, they pile melody upon melody, hook upon hook, until resistance becomes impossible. Before you know it, you’ve played the record five times, found yourself humming a chorus while buying groceries, and started wondering why everyone else isn’t talking about this band.
That’s because Smug Brothers have spent decades making albums for people who still believe rock ‘n’ roll can surprise them.
Pinhole to Vortex doesn’t just continue that tradition. It may very well be the moment when one of America’s most criminally overlooked bands finally reveals the full size of its universe.
Preorder Pinhole to Vortex here.
Photo courtesy of Glenna Jennings
