Pool music. Midnight music. Road trip music. Summer’s sultry activities need a soundtrack, and these Atlanta acts are ready for courting.
Sealions
Their 2010 full-length debut Strange Veins was a complex journey through a pop-synth-rock genre. Four years (and one scrapped album) later, bandmates Jason Travis, Joey Patino, Keith Edmiston, and John Craig joined forces with producer Jason Kingsland (Band of Horses) to hone the advanced sounds of the EP Number One Lover. The five Cure-meets-MGMT tracks offer gratifying, danceable hooks; fuzzy power; blissful synths; and outlying vocals to romance your sweatiest nights.
Marian Mereba
Like all of us, Mereba is a product of her upbringing. Hers just happens to include Montgomery, Alabama; Greensboro, North Carolina; Pittsburgh and Philly; and—oh yeah—Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, her father’s home. “I want to sell out the only arena [in Addis Ababa],” says the Spelman grad. “Moving around a lot as a kid, music became my homie I could take everywhere.” The influences are evident on her EP Room for Living and her new full-length album The Radio Flyer (dropping July 29). Mereba sings and raps like a hybrid of Dylan, Sade, Joni Mitchell, and Lauryn Hill.
Adron
Every summer needs a rainbow. In Atlanta’s scene, Adron is just that. On her sophomore album Organismo—chosen best of 2011 by Creative Loafing—guitars softly chunked and rose up into Brazilian Tropicalia, while Adron songbirded with slightly explicit faux earnestness. This summer she’s touring and readying the release of her follow-up, Water Music. She says it’s “a little less Brazil” and a much more squarely “1975 soul.”
This article originally appeared in our July 2014 issue under the headline, “Take a Listen.”
