High Tea - Album Release w/ Jessye DeSilva at The Iron Horse on Thursday, October 30 2025
High Tea, the folk-punk “story-yelling” duo hailing from Massachusetts, is what happens when a yarn-spinning blues guitarist meets a harmony-obsessed punk. Isabella DeHerdt and Isaac Eliot have come together to fill spaces with homegrown tales and booming vocals. Their songs are ripe with existential angst, weaving narratives of growing up, going wild, and always coming back to the ones you love.
Their previous releases, Scuba Diving, Old Cowboy, and The Wick And The Flame were featured on playlists, radio shows, and publications like The Boston Globe, The Greenfield Recorder (among others). The title track of Old Cowboy led them to be chosen as one of WBUR’s top 4 Massachusetts Tiny Desk entries of 2022. They toured The Wick And The Flame on the West Coast, in New England, and throughout other US States and received write ups from Atwood’s Magazine, The Boston Herald, and more. They were nominated for the New England Music Awards Best Americana Act in 2023, and were selected to perform in the Grassy Hill Emerging Artist Showcase at Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in 2025.
Despite its name, there’s nothing little about High Tea’s upcoming album, A Small Notion. Listeners are led through an inspiringly personal journey, from the disoriented yearning of loss, to an appreciation of the brutal realities of rough living, to tender reflections on past mistakes, to an ultimate acceptance of the all-too-human need for community and care. As ever, the Massachusetts duo is heavily committed to marrying intensely beautiful lyrical storytelling with congruent and energetically contagious instrumental arrangements. Without a doubt, A Small Notion is some of High Tea’s most honest, eye-opening, and cathartic work yet.
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Jessye DeSilva seamlessly blends theatrical pop elements with traditional folk and roots music to form her piano-driven alt-americana sound. She infuses hope into songs about religious alienation, mental health struggles, and societal injustice to create a uniquely queer and unholy ruckus. Jessye’s forthcoming album Glitter Up the Dark was produced by Aaron Lee Tasjan and incorporates Eighties pop and Nineties alternative flourishes to the stately Americana and country-rock sounds of 2023’s Renovations and 2022 debut Landscapes, which earned them a nomination for Americana Artist of the Year at the 2022 Boston Music Awards. No Depression says “Comparisons to Elton John and Brandi Carlile are easy — DeSilva clearly takes a page from these idols, anchoring [her] songs in pop melody juggernauts, gauzy textures, and vocal bravado.” Nashville Scene named her a 2023 Artist To Watch, saying “DeSilva could inject new life into a genre that could definitely use a little more pretzel logic.”
