High Tea w/s/g Mary-Elaine Jenkins
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.
“The band’s music has an “Alice in Wonderland”-like quality to it, and not just because it was named after a tea party. DeHerdt and Eliot’s songs delve into the intimacies and intricacies of growing up, and all that adulthood entails: love, loss, isolation, frustration. But through it all, they maintain a childlike reverence for stories and storytelling, deftly weaving plot lines, narrative, and dialogue into their music.” – Maya Homan, The Boston Globe, on “Old Cowboy”
Mary-Elaine Jenkins is a Brooklyn-based songwriter, singer, and guitarist. A native of the South Carolina Lowcountry, her sound combines manifold influences with a distinctly southern sensibility. MEJ has been named among “5 Up-And-Coming Women Musicians You Should Know About” (Bust Magazine), described as “standing righteously above other young pretenders” (Glide Magazine), and her voice has been called “a mix of cloves, sage, ash, thorns, and honey” (The Deli NYC). She is a fixture in the New York music scene, has toured Europe, and has supported artists such as Martha Wainwright and John Craigie. She released “Hold Still,” her full-length debut, in 2018. She is currently working on a new record.
