U.S. Highball

Glaswegian indie pop duo U.S. Highball took shape in 2017 once the Pooches had run their course, merging bouncy rhythms with Byrds-derived jangle and the sort of gentle harmonies associated with Peter & Gordon. Their first full-length album, Great Record, arrived in 2019. Still favoring brevity, with most tracks kept under two minutes, the pair returned the following year on Up to High Doh, then upgraded their home-recording setup and allowed song lengths to expand modestly for the 2022 album A Parkhead Cross of the Mind.

James Hindle and Calvin Halliday became close friends after meeting in 2005 and realizing their musical interests overlapped. Hindle started the D.I.Y. indie pop group the Pooches in 2013 as a solo vehicle for his songwriting and released Smoochin' with the Pooches in August 2014. The recording received a limited cassette issue from Gold Mold Records in the U.K. and college-radio exposure in the U.S. The Pooches later signed with Lame-O Records as a four-piece—Hindle on voice and guitar, Halliday on drums, Andy Kelly on guitar, and Gavin Cormack on bass—and issued both the EP Heart Attack and an eponymous album in 2016. Two months afterward they followed with the Harmless Offering EP, a collection of demos and instrumentals. Early in 2017 the Pooches put out a final single, “Rats & Rats,” before disbanding.

Hindle and Halliday found immediate chemistry working as a duo and soon launched U.S. Highball. Their three-song debut, Think Again, appeared on Lame-O in November 2018. Midway through 2019 they followed quickly with fourteen originals on their full-length debut, Great Record. Recorded and mixed by Hindle, the stylistically kindred Up to High Doh surfaced in November 2020. For their third LP the pair chose to improve their equipment and raise the volume. Whittled down from forty songs to twelve, the punchier though still home-recorded A Parkhead Cross of the Mind was released on Lame-O and Yorkshire-based Bingo Records in March 2022. The final track list featured a cover of power pop influence Jimmy Silva’s “Grease the Wheel.”