Sweet Petunia have released ‘Foggy Mountain Mental Breakdown,’ their debut album on Righteous Babe Records, and it arrives with the kind of energy that makes an immediate impression. The Boston indie-folk duo, Mairead Guy and Maddy Simpson, open the record with “I Wanna Run,” a lightning-fast banjo-driven track that Simpson wrote after dislocating her knee moshing to a punk band in an Allston basement. “It’s frantic and fast, and I’m spitting out words faster than you can comprehend,” she says. “Every time we play this song it’s cathartic knowing that with time and hard work, I’ve been able to regain the ability to do most of these things again.” No Depression called the album “raw, real, memorable and unsettling.” Boston’s NPR station WBUR named them one of the city’s “most arresting acoustic outfits.”
Guy and Simpson met at Berklee College of Music in 2018, shaped equally by punk basements in Allston and centuries-old Appalachian ballads. The album tips its hat to Flatt & Scruggs while running that lineage through a restless, modern filter, double-banjo fire and cutting harmonies built for rooms that don’t have stages. This spring, Sweet Petunia take these songs on the road as openers for Ani DiFranco’s Spirit of Love tour.
Sweet Petunia on Tour with Ani DiFranco:
April 22 – Jackson, MS @ Duling Hall
April 25 – Pensacola, FL @ Vinyl Music Hall
April 26 – Gainesville, FL @ Heartwood Soundstage
April 28 – Savannah, GA @ Victory North
April 29 – Birmingham, AL @ Lyric Theatre