Lonnie Walker, Pope and Thomas Dollbaum

Lonnie Walker is a rock band formed in 2006 in Greenville, North Carolina. After relocating to Raleigh, the band recorded its ethereal, Americana debut These Times Old Times in 2010, and after years of touring, followed it up with the more visceral Earth Canals in 2015. Its third album, the raucous and intensely personal album titled TK which draws on Corum’s experience of being swept up in the national opioid epidemic and subsequent crawl back towards normalcy, is set to be released on TKDATE.

Pope is a snapshot of the melodic, melancholic alternative rock landscape that many of those older siblings ushered us through growing up in the ‘90s. Alternating songwriters Alejandro Skalany (also of New Holland and Donovan Wolfington) and Matt Seferian (Matt Surfin' and Donovan Wolfington) have worked together on different projects since adolescence in Houston, TX. Upon arriving / reuniting in New Orleans with their longtime friend Atticus Lopez, they founded Pope. Skalany and Seferian’s alternation as frontman offers a sort of cat’s cradle – two friends forming a picture together in yarn. Each song, an earworm ode to a feeling, or experience, and an integral shared love of iconic late ‘80s and early ‘90s bands like Dinosaur Jr., Pavement, and Guided By Voices. While their lyrics can arrive as poetically abstract, Lopez’s drumming keeps Pope focused on the alt rock craft at hand and unintrusively frames every croon, shout, hook, rise, and fall with room for the occasional touch of grunge, indie pop, and country.

Thomas Dollbaum makes thoughtful indie folk songs, with lyrics that paint scenes that can be bleak, funny, or heart-rending. Dollbaum worked with old friend and collaborator Matthew Seferian on his debut album, recording in a New Orleans hotel turned studio. That album, Wellswood, arrived in May 2022 on the Big Legal Mess label. With his debut, Wellswood, singer-songwriter Thomas Dollbaum revels in wistful melodies and thorny atmospherics, his compelling lyricism drawing as much from the dark caricatures of Harry Crews and Denis Johnson as Springsteen’s realism, The Killers’ gritty portraiture, and the alt-Americana of Neutral Milk Hotel.