Orlando’s Mike Levin has enough laurels to kick back. Beginning in the 1990s with bands like Shyster and Sunday Morning Revival, to 2000s-2010s band The New Lows, to current band Curtains — his music spans four decades here. Apparently, just luxuriating ceremoniously in the role of scene warhorse isn’t good enough.
Even with Curtains still ongoing, Levin’s already showing creative restlessness. He recently debuted new project Turtleneck Collective in a January show and now he’s about to unveil its debut release. In Turtleneck Collective, the songs are written by Levin but played by a revolving, star-studded cast of Orlando notables. “I see it as less a band and more me recording songs and getting friends to come and record on them,” he says. “The live version could be just me or whatever recording buddies who can make it or depending on the show context.”
If that sounds a little open-ended, it is. And it’s by design.
“Fluidity challenges my inclination to control everything,” says Levin. “There are elements of improvisation and spontaneity of both presence and absence of players and sounds. It allows for more experimentation and genre ambiguity.”
On March 21, the Turtleneck Sessions EP is released on historic Orlando label Figurehead Records. It’s a debut that has more kinship with his turn-of-the-millennium work in Sunday Morning Revival than with the punk-leaning material Levin has done in the quarter-century since. Ambling somewhere between indie and Americana, these four unassuming songs have simple acoustic bones with purposefully minimal flourishes of twang, strings and keys. It’s a record that’s reflective, vulnerable and comfortable in being so.
To launch the record, Levin will present Turtleneck Collective in full force as a septet at Saturday’s release show (9 p.m. March 21, The Imperial, $7). All show proceeds go to Florida Immigrant Coalition. Turtleneck Sessions will be available exclusively on 10-inch vinyl at first. Streaming on Bandcamp will follow soon.
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This article appears in March 18-24, 2026.
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