I don’t care what Punxsutawney Phil says, it’s freaking springtime in Portland RIGHT NOW! To celebrate the handful of sunny days we’ve had this past month (my standard for declaring a season change is pretty damn low), I put this mix together while boxing up my SAD lamp and dusting off my sunglasses. Ah spring: summer’s warm-up act.

You can download the hour-long mix here (92.5Mb). As for the tracklist, it’s mostly new(er) stuff with some sprinklings of old favorites here and there:

• RxRy // Baulkn Slihts
• Ducktails // Oh, Magnolia Tree
• Sonny and The Sunsets // Too Young to Burn
• King Tuff // Sun Medallion
• Memoryhouse // Foreground (Grizzly Bear Cover)
• Cibelle // Lightworks
• Javelin // Mossy Woodland
• El Rego et ses Commandose // E Nan Mian Nuku
• Dominant Legs // Clawing Out at the Walls
• Efterklang // Modern Drift
• The Sandwitches // Grey Wizard
• Julian Lynch // Banana Jam Pt. 1
• Primary 1 // Foaming (Memory Tapes Remix)
• El Guicho // Prez Lagarto
• Tamaryn // Light Shadows

Also, if you like this mix, you might also enjoy some of the other ones I put together in the past.

I’m going to go ahead and give the band Happy Birthday my recommendation based more on a hunch than on any built up reputation they may or may not have. Why is this? You see, this Vermont based garage pop band has only one track to their credit: the wildly infectious (and widely publicized) “Girls FM”. It’s true — scour the internets far and wide, and all that you’ll come up with is this lone mp3 that’s made a hit everywhere from Sub Pop loving it enough to sign them and put it on their Cybersex V2.0 mix as the opener to Pitchfork throwing it up on their forkcast.

So you know the track has to be pretty damn good in order for everyone to make such a fuss about it. Take the poppiness of a typical Girls track and square it while still not sounding to incredible cheesy due to the lo-fi quality of the recording, add in some witty lyrics (“see them play like the internet band / try to hear them but you couldn’t understand”) and voila!: the perfect recipe for a summertime hit. Sub Pop is going to make millions…

Happy Birthday’s debut album is dropping March 16, which coincides with the band’s SXSW debut (how convenient!). So if you’re just as excited about the potential of the group as I am, be sure to check the band out at the festival and see what they are all about! Here’s the hit single as well as an older track from frontman Kyle Thomas’s past band King Tuff:

Happy Birthday // Girls FM

King Tuff // Sun Medallion [Via: GvB]