Meet Me at the Bottom of the Bottle
The Hot Sardines
From the new album C'EST LA VIE and featured in the Miramax release CONFESS, FLETCH
BANNED JAZZ
How America’s Music Changed the World
Nearly 100 years ago, jazz—that most American art form, with its joyous message of cultural, racial, and sexual freedom—was viewed by many as the devil’s music, a force that would bring down civilization.
The new show from powerhouse jazz revivalists and storytellers the Hot Sardines recounts how forces in the U.S. and Europe tried (and failed) to suppress the music of Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Benny Goodman and more, weaving vivid historical vignettes—of dancehall raids, black-market recordings, and, in Nazi Germany, laws that made playing (or even hearing) jazz a punishable offense—into an electrifying live-music experience.
Banned Jazz—created for Carnegie Hall's Fall of the Weimar Republic Festival in spring 2024, selling out within hours—celebrates the unifying power of music and joy as an act of resistance, and will resonate with anyone reading the headlines today. THS co-founder and frontwoman Elizabeth Bougerol’s rallying cry “These are times that need live music” has never felt truer.
SHOWS: ELIZABETH BOUGEROL
About
THE HOT SARDINES ANNOUNCE SEVENTH ALBUM GOOD NEWS, OUT JUNE 19, 2026
Brooklyn's beloved jazz revivalists deliver their most buoyant record yet
NEW YORK, NY — Nearly two decades after emerging from the underground parties of Brooklyn to sell out Carnegie Hall, The Hot Sardines are back with Good News, their seventh studio album and – in a time that needs music more than ever – perhaps their most exuberantly alive. The record arrives June 19 2026, with its first single, “Love Me or Leave Me,” landing on streaming services June 5.
Led by Parisian vocalist Elizabeth Bougerol and New York pianist-bandleader Evan Palazzo, The Hot Sardines have spent nearly twenty years making the case that jazz from the 1920s, '30s, and '40s never stopped being relevant — it just needed the right band. Good News is the sound of a group that has fully grown into that mission.
The album's ten tracks read like a love letter to the American songbook and the rowdy, cosmopolitan world that produced it. There are Tin Pan Alley chestnuts — George and Ira Gershwin's "Oh, Lady Be Good," Isham Jones and Gus Kahn's "It Had to Be You," and Walter Donaldson and Kahn's "Love Me or Leave Me" — alongside New Orleans firepower in Earl King's "Big Chief" and the Fats Waller co-write "Ain't Misbehavin'." The band reaches back to Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II's "Lover Come Back to Me" and Cole Porter and Robert Fletcher's "Don't Fence Me In," and tips a hat to the pop songwriting of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller with a take on "Love Potion No. 9." Fabian Andre, Wilbur Schwandt, and Gus Kahn's "Dream a Little Dream of Me" offers one of the record's most tender moments with Bougerol in a duet with Bob Parins — and then there's the wildcard: Paolo Nutini's "Pencil Full of Lead," which in the Sardines' hands sounds like it was always meant to be played by a brass section in 1938.
Recorded in-between residencies at NYC’s intimate Birdland and touring that takes them across the world, from the Seattle Symphony to Tokyo’s Blue Note, Good News captures the electricity of a band that has logged hundreds of nights in front of audiences who won't sit down. "We live on stage," says Bougerol. "This album had to sound like that."
Good News follows the Sardines' acclaimed Banned Jazz project, which debuted at Carnegie Hall in 2024 and celebrated joy as an act of resistance. Where Banned Jazz was a history lesson delivered as a party, Good News is something simpler and more necessary: the thing itself. Hot jazz. Stride piano. Brass. A voice from another era landing squarely in this one.
The Hot Sardines have accumulated more than 70 million Spotify streams and earned praise from The New York Times ("potent and assured") and The Times of London ("simply phenomenal"). Good News is their bid to bring that hard-earned momentum into living rooms, record collections, and — inevitably — onto another dance floor somewhere.
Good News is available June 19 wherever you listen to music, with vinyl being pressed to land on your turntable in August ’26.
About The Hot Sardines
The Hot Sardines are co-founded by Elizabeth Bougerol (vocals) and Evan Palazzo (piano), with an ensemble that includes some of New York's finest players in jazz, brass, and tap. Their music draws from the hot jazz of Louis Armstrong, the stride piano of Fats Waller, the smoky glamour of Parisian cabarets, and the rollicking energy of New Orleans — reanimated for a contemporary audience that, it turns out, has been waiting for exactly this.
www.hotsardines.com
Worldwide Booking
International Music Network (IMN)
Eastern US – Jeanna Disney, jeanna@imnworld.com
Midwest US – Rory Trainor, rory@imnworld.com
Western US & Canada – Alycia Mack, alycia@imnworld.com
International – Matt McCluskey, m.mccluskey@
General inquiries
Gwen Eyster, gwen@hotsardines.com
Photo: Shervin Lainez
Contact
Worldwide Booking
International Music Network (IMN)
Eastern US – Jeanna Disney, jeanna@imnworld.com
Midwest US – Rory Trainor, rory@imnworld.com
Western US & Canada – Alycia Mack, alycia@imnworld.com
International – Matt McCluskey, m.mccluskey@
General & Publicity Inquiries
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