The Mary Veils

Formed toward the end of the 2010s, the Mary Veils emerged in Philadelphia as a quartet whose sound blended psychedelic textures with garage fuzz. Vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and principal songwriter Brian von Uff assembled the project. He issued Slacker Paint on his own in 2017, a collection of thirteen tracks that he wrote and played completely alone. Jesse Gimbel captured the quirky yet tuneful performances at his Upper Darby facility, The Basement. Without adequate marketing or wider availability, the album drew little attention until PNKSLM Recordings of Stockholm reissued it in December 2020. That first pressing, however, had already drawn in local drummer Evan Wall along with guitarist Andrew Mann and bassist Justin Mansor, both formerly of the psych-grunge Philadelphia outfit Hot Lunch. Reconfigured as a four-piece, the Mary Veils revisited The Basement and, by March 2020, had stockpiled material sufficient for a pair of additional albums. The worldwide spread of COVID-19 postponed any prompt unveiling of those recordings. The visibility gained from PNKSLM’s reissue of Slacker Paint nonetheless opened a path for the label, which introduced “Home Video”—the first number the group performed in quartet form—in October 2021. The rowdy single “Rowhome” appeared weeks later, followed in November by the Somewhere Over the Rowhome EP. Mixed by Cory Hanson and Jeff Zeilger, the EP favored raw garage-rock drive and urgency rather than the measured melodic lines that had marked von Uff’s earlier lo-fi work. “Bone Blossom Green,” a riff-driven cut, surfaced in January 2022, and February brought “Eyes,” whose Graham Coxon-style guitar lines and warped vocals nodded to Blur’s post-Brit-pop era. Both songs featured on that year’s Esoteric Hex, another Hanson–Zeilger collaboration whose heavier sonic footprint reflected Philadelphia’s arcane history.