The Young Sinclairs

The Roanoke, Virginia-based band the Young Sinclairs devoted a decade from 2005 to 2015 to composing and tracking numerous songs, singles, EPs, and albums whose style sprang from an affection for ringing folk-rock guitars, downcast psychedelia, and garage rock shaped by introspective temperaments. Kindercore gathered much of that early work on The Sound of the Young Sinclairs in 2009, and Ample Play followed with This Is the Young Sinclairs in 2014. After a brief pause the group resurfaced with Out of the Box, an album whose wider sonic range embraced '90s neo-psych, soul music, and bright sunshine pop.

The Young Sinclairs arose within the Magic Twig Community, a circle of regional musicians who run their own facility, the Mystic Fortress, where the band’s members have always produced and engineered their recordings. The musicians first joined forces in 2005; Sam Lunsford sings lead and authors most of the material, backed by multi-instrumentalists Daniel Cundiff, Sean Michael Poff, John Thompson, and Jonathan Woods. Soon after forming, they began releasing limited-edition CD-Rs at a rapid pace and built a steady following through their live performances.

Feel Bad, their debut album, appeared in 2007. The next year brought Indian Winter, on which Lunsford shared lead vocals with Cundiff and Poff while Thompson used a reel-to-reel machine to capture the band’s vintage tone; Tough Face, drawn from sessions contemporaneous with Feel Bad, and the collection Oh Bummer also surfaced in 2008. Kindercore Records issued The Songs of the Young Sinclairs in 2009, an LP-only set of eighteen tracks taken from the out-of-print CD-Rs. New recordings returned in 2010 with the album Chimneys on Chimney Sweep Records and the single “We Spoke Our Minds” on Planting Seeds, both of which explored Byrds-ian folk-rock in depth. Following a short lull, 2013 yielded four singles—two on the French label Requiem for a Twister, one on Planting Seeds, and one on Market Square Records. Ample Play mined that accumulated catalog for the career overview This Is the Young Sinclairs in 2014.

One further single, “Change Your Mind,” arrived on 13 'O Clock Records in 2015 before the band withdrew from view. Lunsford reappeared as Stimulator Jones, creating music shaped by '70s funk and '80s electro, and released the album Exotic Worlds and Masterful Treasures on Stones Throw in 2018. When the Young Sinclairs reconvened in 2019, their third proper album, Out of the Box, retained folk-rock and psych foundations yet added retro soul, baggy dance tracks, and a more contemporary overall production; Requiem for a Twister released it in late 2019.