Jonathan Tyler / The Dove and the Wolf

Jonathan Tyler did the rock star thing. He played Austin City Limits, Bonnaroo, Hangout Fest, and the Voodoo Experience. He performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and toured alongside AC/DC, ZZ Top, the Black Crowes, and Kid Rock. His 2010 LP Pardon Me for Atlantic Records with backing band the Northern Lights reached no. 8 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart. These days, Tyler is more introspective, more focused. Holy Smokes, his forthcoming third proper LP and first solo release, finds Tyler shed of major-label constraints, removed from the guard of his Northern Lights backing band, and bearing his soul as songwriter filled less with flash and more with substance. The album’s an open look into who Tyler is at this very moment—and, most of all, who he feels he’s always really been.

The Dove and the Wolf is Paloma and Lou, two girls raised on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, one in Paris and the other on the French Caribbean island of Martinique. They started playing together in 2004, and formed their duo in 2012. Six months after creating the band, they released their first EP, which was self-produced and self-distributed. It caught the attention of the New York Times, earning them a full page in T Magazine that praised "a four-song collection of spare but soaring harmonies."