The Young Sinclairs

The Roanoke, Virginia-based band the Young Sinclairs spent a decade between 2005 and 2015 writing and recording a slew of songs, singles, EPs, and albums with a sound derived from their love of jangling folk-rock guitars, melancholy psychedelia, and the kind of garage rock made by sensitive souls. Their prolific output was corralled by Kindercore in 2009 on The Sound of the Young Sinclairs and by Ample Play on 2014's This Is the Young Sinclairs. After taking a short break, they returned with an album, Out of the Box, that took a more liberal sonic approach that accounted for '90s neo-psych, soul music, and peppy sunshine pop. The Young Sinclairs emerged from the Magic Twig Community, an aggregation of like-minded musicians working in their area who operate their own recording studio, the Mystic Fortress, where members of the Young Sinclairs have produced and engineered all their own recordings. The group began working together in 2005; Sam Lunsford sings lead and writes the majority of their material, accompanied by multi-instrumentalists Daniel Cundiff, Sean Michael Poff, John Thompson, and Jonathan Woods. Not long after forming, the Young Sinclairs began recording prolifically, releasing a steady stream of limited-edition CD-Rs while building a devoted fan following with their fine live shows. In 2007, they released their debut album, Feel Bad, and the next year Indian Winter, a record that featured Lunsford sharing lead vocal duty with Cundiff and Poff, and Thompson using a reel-to-reel tape machine to capture the band's retro sound. Later that year, the band issued Tough Face, a collection of songs recorded at the same time as Feel Bad, and a collection titled Oh Bummer. In 2009, Kindercore Records released The Songs of the Young Sinclairs, an LP-only collection of 18 songs from their out of print CD-R releases, and in 2010, the group returned with new recordings. Their second album, Chimneys, was issued by Chimney Sweep Records and later in the year, the "We Spoke Our Minds" single came out on Planting Seeds. Both recordings saw the band digging deeply into Byrds-ian folk-rock. They took a short break from flooding the market with various forms of plastic before coming back in 2013 with four singles, two on the French Requiem for a Twister label, one for Planting Seeds, and one for Market Square Records. The sheer number of their recordings over the years gave the Ample Play label many possibilities to choose from on their career-spanning 2014 collection This Is the Young Sinclairs. After one more single, 2015's "Change Your Mind" on 13 'O Clock Records, they basically vanished from sight. Lunsford resurfaced under the name Stimulator Jones, making music influenced by '70s funk and '80s electro. He released an album under that name, Exotic Worlds and Masterful Treasures, for Stones Throw in 2018. When the Young Sinclairs returned in 2019, their sound had changed. Their third official album, Out of the Box, took inspiration from folk-rock and psych as usual, but also folded in retro soul, baggy dance tracks, and a more modern overall sound. It was released by Requiem for a Twister in late 2019.
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