Every once in a while, you hear a band that feels both new and lived-in at the same time, and it stops you in your tracks. TV Star is that kind of band. Over the last few years, the Seattle–Tacoma, WA five-piece has been quietly gathering force—EP by EP, show by show—until Music For Heads, their long-awaited debut album, arrives and makes it plain: they've grown into something rare. A quilt of jangly-psych, garage grit, and soft-focus depth; these songs glow from the inside with a commanding originality. In an era when so much music dissolves into algorithmic sameness, TV Star sounds defiantly human.
Across the LPs ten tracks, the band sharpens the instincts they've been honing – folding together timeless pop sensibilities, psych-leaning jangle in the lineage of The Brian Jonestown Massacre, punk-economy rhythm sections, and vocals that drift with Mojave 3–level warmth, to create something distinctly their own. With Music For Heads, they're not just tapping into music of the past, they're pushing a new wave of it forward.
Forming in 2020 over a shared admiration of '90s psych, classic shoegaze and alt-country underdogs, their inception occurred when someone pulled the Butthole Surfers' 1996 Electriclarryland tape off the wall and pointed to the track "TV Star." What followed was less a band forging than a small ecosystem taking shape. Ashlyn Nagel (Vocals, Keys), Bryan Coats (Guitar), Che Hise-Gattone (Guitar), Mark Palm (Bass), and Tucker Devault (Drums) brought their own instincts, idiosyncrasies, and musical histories into the room until the songs began to sound like all of them, at once. Recorded in a constellation of cozy Northwest spaces – The Unknown in Anacortes, plus a handful of Seattle hideaways – Music For Heads sits at the intersection of jangly guitar music, psych-pop haze, and lived-in indie rock without leaning fully into any one lane.
