Ches Smith’s Clone Row

Ches Smith’s Clone Row was released on June 6, 2025 on Otherly Love Records. The album debuts an adventurous new quartet featuring guitarists Mary Halvorson and Liberty Ellman and bassist Nick Dunston. Smith finds endless possibilities in this instrumentation of dueling guitars, bass, percussion and electronics, weaving together varied threads from his divergent earlier projects in ways that sound not quite like any of them. “This definitely ain’t your father’s guitar band,” writes no less an expert on six-string subversion than Marc Ribot, who penned the album’s liner notes. “It’s as if I’m hearing a Jim Hall concert in which one of us did a lot of mushrooms, or… some post-punk post-Dave Brubeck post-trip-hop experiment with classical form.”