🚛 - Pre-Order expected to ship May 20th 2026
New York duo Lowertown have announced their signing to Summer Shade and their highly anticipated new album Ugly Duckling Union, due out May 22nd. Lead single “I Like You A Lot” is a rare love song from the pair, detailing the physical sensations of infatuation over a spry drumbeat and lo-fi, twangy guitars. The track “was written about the hope of a new crush, and the intoxicating feelings of admiring and fantasizing about someone from afar,” shared the band. “Loving someone without yet knowing them, and being filled with the idea of the potential time spent together. This thinking can become obsessive and compulsive, almost like a sickness taking over the body, but maybe not in a particularly bad way. It is also about the insecurity and the uncertainty about these feelings being reciprocated or un-reciprocated."
The songwriting partnership of Olivia Osby and Avsha Weinberg, the last few years saw the prolific pair teetering on the brink. From constant touring and a separation from their label to creative frustrations and an unhealthy attachment to one another, their artistic partnership and, more importantly, their friendship were on shaky ground—especially since these experiences were colored by the disorienting intensity of their late teens and early 20s. It became clear that the two had to revisit their roots.
Those roots trace back to Atlanta, Georgia: in the forests, the soon-to-be abandoned venues, the makeshift punk communities, to Weinberg’s family basement, but those roots also formed somewhere else entirely: the internet. The band grew up on Tumblr fanpages, Reddit forums, digital spaces that had not yet been corporatized. Places whose fandoms eventually leapt from the virtual to the physical, bringing people together to meet at concerts, coffee shops, and conventions to discuss their obsessions and connect over shared interests.
During the pandemic, they watched these places change, become commodified, and disappear; people no longer had these physical spaces to be solely amongst friends with shared interests where communities and fandoms could strengthen. Out of this vacuum, the Ugly Duckling Union was born.
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