Greg Mendez

Greg Mendez has released music in various capacities across 15 years living in Philadelphia and New York, but his self-titled album was what propelled him to a wider attention, a critical breakthrough on best-of lists from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Paste, and more.

Mendez is an intuitive songwriter, indie folk melodies channeled through ether, a storyteller who across his catalog has chronicled vivid violence and instability – a wallet chain to the head, a crack house arrest, the misdeeds from addiction that hang around like a ghost of past lives – but it’s threaded together with love songs, too, with odes to friendship, true dedication, the things that can buoy one through the worst.

Mendez has a habit of noticing those things, of finding the light, exacting poetry from even the bleakest, shit-caked situations.

In his songs there is an innate ability to balance grit with gentleness, cruelties rewritten through preternatural sweetness, a heart thrumming unendingly, confidently, through the dark.