Stream: Great Northern, ‘Champ,’ ‘Run Baby Run’ and more

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Great Northern (Photo by Dana Patrick)

Great Northern sprang from the Silver Lake scene in the mid-’00s with one foot in indie-rock and the other in dream-pop. The duo, Rachel Stolte and Solon Bixler, released two albums of moody popgazing in 2007 (“Trading Twilight for Daylight”) and ’09 (“Remind Me Where the Light Is”) before hitting a bump in the road for their third. Much of the “Tremors” album sat on the shelf for a couple of years before it was finally released in 2015.

Stolte and Bixler put Great Northern on hiatus and recalibrated. But, they say, “the mad call of music haunted” them. And so the songs for their fourth full-length, “Spooky Season,” began to take shape, and they began their ongoing crowdfunding efforts.

In January, they released four singles (available en masse via Bandcamp), their first new batch of music since “Tremors.” The songs lean more toward experimental pop, with dense production making the synth-heavy, beat-driven material suitable for brooding and moving. Stolte’s breath gravitas only adds to the drama.

Great Northern is scheduled to play Bottlerock in Napa in May; expect their next release(s) prior to that festival appearance.

||| Stream: “Champ,” “Run Baby Run,” “Repeat After Me” and “Caught Again”

||| Previously: “Tremors,” “Holes,” “New Tricks,” “Remind Me Where the Light Is,” 2009 interview, “Houses”