New month, new music!
Check out our 30-song Cleveland Current playlist on Spotify, and be sure to follow along: It’s updated every month with a new mix.
For September, the playlist includes a variety of hip-hop, soul, indie, metal, rock and more. Hear from a few featured local musicians below:
AngeOnymous, Glow
Ange Padin, the neo-soul artist behind the moniker “AngeOnymous,” put out her debut full-length record Glow in early August — an exploration of love and heartbreak, packaged in a textured group of 12 lushly produced R&B songs. The project arrived after the end of a bad 12-year relationship, Padin says.
“When I wrote the album, it was kind of like my glow-up. It was me breaking free from some things, and kind of like a therapy session for me,” she says. “It was a lot of fun to put together.”
The Cleveland native, who lived in Texas for 12 years before returning to the city in late 2022, first learned to sing at church, and later wrote her own music as a teenager, finding inspiration from artists like Amy Winehouse, Jill Scott and Lauryn Hill.
When she returned to Cleveland, she was inspired to release her own music after performing at local open mic nights. Glow was largely recorded at Padin’s home, incorporating features from other producers. “I have a space in my room that I like to record in, because it’s really private and no one comes in there, so I can really just say or do whatever I want in there,” she says.
Padin is working to get a full band together to perform live this fall in Northeast Ohio. You can follow her music work on her Instagram page, @_angeonymous_.
Maxwell Stern, In The Good Light
Philadelphia-based musician Maxwell Stern, the frontman of Cleveland indie-punk band Signals Midwest, remains tethered to his hometown. “Everything I do is still connected back to Cleveland somehow,” Stern says. (You can see that, right away, in his new album In The Good Light, which sports cover art by Clevelander Daniel Bortz of Time Change Generator.)
The album shows a gentler, folkier side to Stern’s releases, building off of his 2020 album Impossible Sum. “I would say a majority of the music I listen to outside of Signals Midwest is more folk or acoustic or pop-related; who wants to listen to the exact same style of music that they play all the time?” Stern says. “This is the record that my parents like. This is the more palatable, family-friendly version of my songwriting.”
Various collaborators pop up in the 12-track project, including Ratboys singer Julia Steiner and famed pedal-steel player Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner, who performed with Lorain native Jason Molina’s Magnolia Electric Company and Song:Ohia projects.
RELATED: Jason Molina’s Ohio: Remembering the Lorain-Native Singer-Songwriter
The album focuses on themes of love — ”not just romantic love,” Stern says, “but, you know, what it looks like to be a good friend. Or familial, or even self-examination and love of self, and how challenging that can be. Once I started using that as a fulcrum, it got me to some new places that I was pretty surprised by.”
Having come off of an intensive world tour supporting Signals Midwest’s last album Dent, which included an early 2024 leg in Japan, Stern is focused on collecting the band’s odds and ends — B-sides, out-of-print seven-inch releases, songs from split releases and more — for a future release that Stern is thinking to title Layovers.
RELATED: Signals Midwest Celebrates Decade Of DIY Punk
Stern says Signals Midwest plans to bring back its annual charity holiday show in Cleveland at the end of the year, and he may perform a full-band solo show in the next couple of months.
Trav Hen and The Monday Program, “Back in the Daze”
Cleveland’s hip-hop scene will take the focus in The Monday Program’s upcoming album Homeroom — and in the meantime, the collective has released the first single from the project, “Back in the Daze,” featuring hip-hop artist Trav Hen, the moniker of Travis Henderson.
Like many of the group’s other releases, “Back in the Daze” was largely written and produced at a Monday songwriting session. Henderson says he was inspired by a developing drum beat and bass line at the meetup and penned verses on the spot. “I feel like it just pushed me in the direction of telling the story of what I was going through at the time, trying to bring myself through it, but in a more positive and encouraging and uplifting way,” Henderson says.
“It was really special. It was definitely one of those moments that I would think we’ll look back on in our career and just remember how special not only that day and session felt, but just how the song was made,” says Corey Grand, a co-producer and co-founder of The Monday Program. “Everybody walked out of there, like, ‘Man, I don't know what we made, but I think we made something.’”
RELATED: The Monday Program Brings New Collaborations to Cleveland Hip-Hop
You can expect more singles from The Monday Program through the end of the year, leading up to the release of Homeroom in 2025. The album will feature numerous collaborations, including The Monday Program producers Grand and Cassius G, along with fellow local hip-hop artists Will Cherry, Nuke Franklin and Sted Lee. Most of the new songs were crafted during the free-spirited music-writing and producing sessions that have taken weekly place since 2019.
“We were just recording so much music. We looked up and we might have had almost, like, 40 to 50 songs recorded. We started to narrow that down a little bit. The range of artists and the range of the creativity for the songs that we picked, we all felt were very cohesive.”
The Monday Program is also working to host a showcase concert in the future, similar to a previous performance the group headlined at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last summer.
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