Embarking upon what might just be their most ambitious initiative yet, Superior Viaduct's sub-imprint, W.25th - dedicated to stunning expression from the contemporary landscape of sound - returns with five astounding vinyl reissues from Cindy Lee: ‘Malenkost’ (2015), ‘Act Of Tenderness’ (2015), ‘Model Express’ (2018), ‘What's Tonight To Eternity’ (2020), and the first ever widely available vinyl pressing of ‘Cat O’ Nine Tails’ (2020). Comprising almost the entire output of the deeply conceptual project of Patrick Flegel, leading up to their critically acclaimed 2024 full-length, 'Diamond Jubilee', these stand as some of the greatest expressions of left-field bedroom pop ever laid to tape.

Since they launched in 2011, we’ve consistently sung the praises of the San Francisco based imprint Superior Viaduct. While their primary efforts - working as one of the most ambitious labels working in the field of archival releases and reissues of ambitious underground and experimental music - are second to none, their longstanding dedication to the contemporary landscape of adventurous music, via their sub imprint W.25th, deserves equal attention. Beginning in 2016, W.25th has delivered incredible LPs by Laraaji & Sun Araw, Exek, Cube, Cover of Secret Passage, Gavilán Rayna Russom, Ellen Arkbro, Cuneiform Tabs, and a number of others. Last year, the label hit a new high with their release of Cindy Lee’s critically beloved magnum opus ‘Diamond Jubilee’. The most recent expression of the performance and songwriting vehicle of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, for many that album - one of the greatest expressions of left-field pop of the decade - came out of nowhere, provoking deep dives into their nearly unobtainable back catalog, tracing back to 2012. A suite of intoxicating marvels that unlock the subtle progressions of the project over the years - moving from focused experimental irreverence to calculated interventions with popular culture, present and past - it’s a rare chance for a total immersion into the world of one of the most fascinating musical expressions of the present tense.

Like so much great art, Cindy Lee - the wry and fiercely independent creative vehicle of Patrick Flegel - was born from both tragedy and a sense of knowing. Flegel first emerged into the public consciousness as the lead vocalist and guitarist of the widely celebrated post-punk project, Women, a band that rapidly soared to industry acclaim during the late 2000s and early 2010s, with their intoxicating blend of noise and 60s styled indie rock. Following the tragic circumstances that led to the dissolution of the band that he had formed with three childhood friends, Flegel embarked upon the short-lived Androgynous Mind project in 2012, before fully dedicating himself to Cindy Lee: primarily a solo vehicle with a rotating cast of contributors, that has produced a remarkable run of seven full lengths and a handful of EPs that steadily picked up critical acclaim, hitting new heights with 2024’s ‘Diamond Jubilee’, threading the pure pleasures of DIY indie-pop with a rare sense of artistry, honesty, and ease. Perhaps most strikingly, while the sounds of Cindy Lee speak for themselves and stand on their own, Flegel’s approach to the project elevates it to far more intriguing, curious, and engaging realms. Playing in drag and pursuing a deep cultural consciousness, the project embodies a critical form of conceptualism that draws upon his years as one of independent music’s leading lights: an awareness of history; the power, emotive, and cultural importance of music in our lives; its social and political potential, and a pointed distaste for its corruption under the influence of money and fame. Not only is Cindy Lee’s music stripped to an elemental and poetic essence - feeling raw, heartfelt, and direct in the way that classic 1960s recordings and early DIY releases of Daniel Johnston and Sebadoh do - but the project has equally served as a prescient and charged challenge to perceptions connected to gender through Flegel’s cross-dressing performances, stating: “[…] combining 'cross dressing' with live performance, over time [...] became a way to reinforce me doing something that I love doing that I often withhold from myself. I have been perplexed by the novelty in peoples eyes of what I see as a very basic and very traditional performance on my part.”

While Cindy Lee’s first recorded full-length is technically the long-out of print, 2012 cassette ‘Tatlashea’, the first to fully begin to draw attention toward it was 2015’s ‘Malenkost’, originally released as a tape edition by ‘Isolated Now Waves’, before being picked up by W.25th and issued on vinyl for the first time two years later. Comprising twelve sublime gestures in bedroom, left-fieldism that internalize equal parts the golden age of 60s pop, punk, and 80s and 90s DIY 4-track recording, the album represents the earliest, widely available window into the germination of Cindy Lee’s singular musical vision and everything that makes the project so compelling and vital: “romantic pleas, rough shards of noise and twilit ballads”, wrapped in a conceptualism that makes you question what you hear.

Sublime and timeless, bringing together the joys of emotive musicality and pure experimentation - jangly, free, and filled with openness and space - ‘Malenkost’ is arguably the first definitive statement by Cindy Lee, laying the groundwork for all that has come since: a heart-wrenching, rigorous, and multilayered body of sound that pushes left-field song craft onto another plane. Out of print on vinyl since W.25th’s original edition in 2017, this much needed new pressing, viewed through the lens of ‘Diamond Jubilee’, feels that much more vital and needed than when it first appeared.

Originally released in a tiny edition in 2015, before being offered its first widely available release by W.25th in 2018, ‘Act Of Tenderness’ stands among the most explicitly experimental efforts in Cindy Lee’s catalog of releases. While not entirely divergent from Flegel’s other efforts under the project’s guise - the haunting nods to 60s pop and its lush vocals run throughout like a binding thread - the broader palette of sound that carves its way across the album’s two sides is far more unruly and atmospheric, creating “a living sound: static with grace, distortion and sugar, all masterfully arranged with crooked nods toward pop classicism”.

Sprawling in their collective scope, the tracks that comprise ‘Act Of Tenderness’ are rooted in a marked sense of space, utilizing ambience, texture, and the strong presence of abstraction within their forms. Almost as though lost Phil Spector “wall of sound” recordings of some unacknowledged girl group had been processed by a shadowy electroacoustic great from roughly the same era, the album carves an unexpected hybrid of indie-pop and outright noise, producing an ethereal, concept rich artifact of pop culture that is neither simulation nor simulacra. Almost cinematic in its scope, at each step and turn, whether when reaching choir-esque heights or subsumed in bubbling, pointillistic sheets of sonority, Flegel makes what is possibly Cindy Lee’s most creatively ambitious and revealing statement to date, unveiling the pointedly experimental temperaments that underscore its drive.

Masterful and intoxicating, as well as being one of the most striking gestures of DIY bedroom art-rock of the 2010s, even after a decade since it first came into the world, Cindy Lee’s ‘Act Of Tenderness’ remains a deeply affecting body of work that feels as fresh today as it did then.

Easily read as a pointed response to the rock & roll circus that Flegel traversed while a member of Women, like its predecessors, ‘Tatlashea’ and ‘Malenkost’, 2018’s ‘Model Express’ was originally issued in a tiny cassette edition before quickly falling out of print. Answering the call for it to become more widely accessible, W.25th delivered the album’s first vinyl edition in 2020, which has become nearly as scarce in the years since.

Across the album’s thirteen tracks, we further encounter Cindy Lee, Flegel’s conceptual alter-ego, weaving a deeply intimate sense of narrative that dances - like a film heroine from a bygone age - around the dangers of existing in the public eye, passing through a diverse range of emotional and sonic terrain. Blanketed within the project’s now almost signature lo-fi production, a rich, expanded palette of keyboards, guitars, vocals and sound-collage techniques place the album as second only to ‘Act of Tenderness’ in its embracing of abstraction and explicit expressions of experimentalism.

With roughly the first half of ‘Model Express’ driven by the forward use of synthesizers, in its earliest utterances we encounter Flegel producing something far closer to the rawest, underground reaches of 1970s krautrock and kosmische - at times calling to mind those mysterious Psi-Fi releases, rumored to have been made by Genesis P-Orridge, that appeared during the 1990s. Still very much a product of Flegel’s drag persona that draws upon suburban closet queens and mid-century divas - furthering their interest in the faultlines of identity, gender expression, performance and media - the album slowly builds in momentum, weaving abstracted keyboard lines with layers of sonic interventions that almost entirely subsume the vocals in their densities. Filled with surprising passages that recall free-form, late night jams born in some politically fraught hippie commune - at times becoming outright explosive - as the album progresses, Flegel slowly eases back toward the realms of sonority for which the project is most well known, opening the sense of space with gentle guitar melodies and emotive vocals, building bridges across time with the bends of each intersecting sound.

Moving beyond the realms of song, while never fully severing the threads, ‘Model Express’ remains one of Cindy Lee’s most engaging and creatively engrossing releases to date. It’s absolutely killer, and like everything the project seems to produce, works on more levels than we can count.

2020’s ‘What's Tonight To Eternity’ is Cindy Lee’s fifth full-length and the first to debut on W.25th, furthering the momentum and support that the label had been offering the project since its 2017 reissue of ‘Malenkost’. In many ways, the album is a bridge between the experimental temperaments that were encountered across its two predecessors, ‘Act of Tenderness’ and ‘Model Express’, and the glorious pop highs that culminated with ‘Diamond Jubilee’, while fluidly continuing Patrick Flegel’s deployment of the project as a vehicle for their lifelong exploration of art, queer identity and gender expression, nodding toward, as they explain, "singers like Patsy Cline and The Supremes [who] carried me through the hardest times of my life, and also provided the soundtrack to the best times."

Finding Flegel delving further into the project’s sublime, song oriented pop sensibilities - delivering moments of sheer beauty, expressed through somber reflections on longing and loneliness - without fully leaving behind a heady brew of experimentation, in this case the artist points specifically toward Karen Carpenter, drawing upon the singer / drummer's early recordings as well as her look and style, explaining "I found a deep interest and comfort in Karen's story, which is a cautionary tale about the monstrosity of show business, stardom at a young age and being a misfit looking for connection. The darkness and victimizing tabloid sensationalism she suffered is easily tempered and overwhelmed by her earnest output, her artistry, her tireless work ethic. Something utterly unique and magical takes shape in the negative space, out of exclusion. What I relate to in her has to do with what is hidden, what is unknown."

From these subtle nods and points of inspiration, ‘What's Tonight To Eternity’ unfolds as a fascinating form of auditory conceptualism, interweaving some of the purest expressions of Cindy Lee’s singular vision of pop - gloriously seductive vocals and instrumental sounds - with flashes of textural and tonal abstraction; the latter taking on greater potency in context by offering a fascinating emotional counterpoint within the narrative arc: an emotional undercurrent revealed, or a cautionary tale rendered in sound.

Stunningly beautiful and creatively brilliant - mixing themes of “pop culture indoctrination, pain and suffering, hopes and dreams, fierce confrontations and wide-open confessional blurs” - with stunning melodies and rigorous experimentation, ‘What's Tonight To Eternity’ is an absolutely masterful piece of work that deftly foreshadows what was (then) yet to come. Perfectly complemented by Andrea Lukic's Journal of Smack artwork, it’s easy to understand why it remains one of the most beloved and celebrated releases by Cindy Lee to date.

Appearing within this stunning suite of LPs is one that will surely excite Cindy Lee fans more than the rest: the first widely available vinyl pressing of the project’s 2020 full-length ‘Cat O’ Nine Tails’. Originally released in an extremely limited edition of 50 lathe-cut LPs, housed in silk-screened sleeves, that now command eye-watering prices on the secondary market, this absolute gem has captivated fans since its release with a perfect synthesis of classic songwriting and classical composition. Immediately following upon the release of ‘What's Tonight To Eternity’, it is notably the last full-length to appear before Flegel embarked upon the extended process of recording their magnum opus ‘Diamond Jubilee’.

Stunning in its scope and balance, ‘Cat O’ Nine Tails’ somehow feels more balanced and focused than the project’s previous releases, building up a slow outcome or experience and understanding that sits in understated ways in the mix. Feeling almost cinematic, like a forgotten sixties soundtrack, the album features a number of notable, fully instrumental tracks that sculpt a stunning sense of mood through the use of wonky synths, frenetic electronic pulses, dense drones, and dreamy western style electric guitar work, only occasionally breaking the tone with the project’s signature 60’s infused pop styling (which are stunning!) before concluding with the ethereal soul shuffle stomp of ‘Bondage Of The Mind’, parts of which could sit comfortably within the great canon of 1970s Italian soundtrack work.

An absolute stunner from start to finish, this first ever wide vinyl release of Cindy Lee’s ‘Cat O’ Nine Tails’ is the perfect cherry on the cake of W.25th’s astounding reissue initiative dedicated to the project. Traversing the near full output of one of the most striking projects working in the contemporary landscape is nothing short of an amazing journey through the conceptual possibilities of organised sound, taking forms that few others have considered.