Strange Ranger

Strange Ranger, the Philadelphia indie outfit, began its first six years split between Montana and Oregon while still performing as Sioux Falls. A run of self-released D.I.Y. EPs culminated in the 2016 debut double album Rot Forever, a dramatic post-punk statement. After adopting their present name and relocating eastward, the band eased into a gentler approach on the atmospheric Daymoon in 2017, then broadened both personnel and sonic range for Remembering the Rockets in 2019. As the new decade opened, their music grew still more exploratory on the thrilling 2021 mixtape No Light in Heaven and its full-length follow-up Pure Music in 2023.

The project started as a high-school endeavor between guitarist Isaac Eiger and bassist Fred Nixon. Drawing on Modest Mouse and Pixies, the pair forged a melodic post-punk style and began playing shows in their hometown of Bozeman, Montana. By 2012 Sioux Falls had issued a self-released EP and moved to Portland, Oregon, where drummer Ben Scott joined. From there the group produced the EPs Big Krackel in 2013 and Lights Off for Danger in 2014 before linking with Pittsburgh-based Broken World Media. With label support in place, they finished their expansive and edgy debut long-player Rot Forever, which appeared in early 2016.

At the close of that year they became Strange Ranger, trimmed back to the Eiger-Nixon duo, and pursued a milder course with the lusher and more textural bedroom-pop album Daymoon in 2017. It was their first release on the Tiny Engines label, which also issued the 2019 follow-up Remembering the Rockets. By then the band had settled in Philadelphia and expanded to a quartet with singer Fiona Woodman and drummer Nathan Tucker. Their most ambitious and surprising project arrived in 2021 as the mixtape No Light in Heaven, threading melancholic synth-driven pop through experimental interludes and other divergent directions. Fire Talk picked it up and reissued an expanded edition in October 2022. Pulled from the same sessions, the group’s fourth album Pure Music appeared in 2023 after being tracked in a cabin in upstate New York. The record largely discards earlier vestiges to settle into a liminal space between dream pop, shoegaze, and sonic pastiche.