Label Spotlight: Lemon Throne Records
INTERVIEWS
The upcoming Portland indie record label talks to the Paperblog Writers about their efforts to maintain in-person musical spaces and keeping physical independent releases alive
6/3/26
By Serenna Zingg
Collage by Indi Tejeda
“Like a lot of other DIY labels before me, you just give it a name and a logo, and then it’s a thing” said Philip Holmes, founder of Lemon Throne Records in a recent interview with me, probably assuming that I knew how starting a DIY label works (or ever worked in the past, for that matter). Don’t ever ask a music journalist what defines the words “indie” or “DIY,” and definitely don’t ask them if they play any instruments.
Much like how “indie” is a broadly respected yet ever-morphing moniker, “DIY label” isn’t a bracketed term, and while its mention may garner immediate respect of cool-by-association (music industry, artist entrepreneurship in a shark tank, anti-media control), what a DIY label accomplishes is somewhat of a patchwork effort.
Holmes used this ambiguity to his advantage and what began as a way to ship his own music out to the public is slowly accumulating into a broader testament to entrepreneurial opportunism for self-starting musicians.
“I started the label towards the end of 2020, at the beginning of 2021.” he said. “At that point, everything was a little bit weird. I had been kind of a hired-gun guitar player for a long time, playing in other people’s projects and doing a lot of touring. I was playing bass for somebody in LA who was really good, but I didn’t have any releases out. I was like, ‘If I want it to happen, then I just kind of need to make it happen.’”
After producing the sessions, building a studio, putting the recordings together, Holmes was ready to put it out. “It basically started because I just needed a vessel under which to release music; this label was a means to an end for me. I just want to have this mechanism for releasing the music that I wanted to make anyway.”
The label is small and according to Holmes, serves as a “chronicle of my output for material that doesn’t have a bigger home.”
“It usually feels like my energy is being stretched in every direction.” he tells me. “I come from a project management background, so I’m just a kind of kooky, vibe-based, woo-woo little artist that doesn't always want to follow a list. Those two are frequently at war with each other. More money would make that easier; like being able to have a bigger promotional budget, hire PR people, do bigger physical runs, and have physical distribution. Selling physical records can be tough unless you have a specific loyal army of vinyl nerds.”
Nonetheless, scarcity turns into innovation when in the right hands. “For the new Tradie record, for instance, the physical release is essentially going to be a book with lyrics, drawings, and interstitial poems that bring the songs together.” he elaborated. “It has the physical footprint of a record, but it’s another way of appreciating the music.”
“It definitely troubles me how much is focused online,” Holmes lamented of the decaying infrastructure around physical independent releases. “You still want to be able to create in-person spaces, and it seems like people are starting to take into account what we’ve lost by moving completely towards social media. It’d also be nice if more people went to shows. Historically, music has been more communal than it is now. It’s really only the last half-century that it became a more isolated listening experience.”
Despite all these challenges, Holmes views running an independent record label as a labor of love. “There are just so many people trying to compete for attention right now.” he mused. “I still think the best way to market is to just have really good music – that’s what’s going to hold people. Then it’s just finding interesting ways to present it or package it. That’s always the challenge…I’m aiming to be a label that grows alongside the artists I’m working with, and hopefully we can lift each other. Thankfully, we’ve got dozens of dollars to work with.”
While the tangible offerings from small DIY labels such as Lemon Throne may be limited beyond marketing, PR, and shared spaces may be limited, the artist representation and scene-sculpting perhaps can exist at its purest form on the scrappier level. Even independent labels, when scaled and monetized, can be self-defeating by definition as an established company. If an artist has to fulfill a list of criteria to be absorbed into an “independent scene,” they will self-monitor before application rather than being actively resculpted post-acceptance; meaning that while the industry ‘bad guy’ stories don’t abound as rampantly in independent labels, the machinery produces the same semi-policed outputs.
Grassroots labels with restraint inherent to their business model not only recuperate the loss of more deliberate forms of creation, but also embody the reclamation of totalized autonomy – two essential fixtures of the creative process that struggle to exist in the long run under the industry’s brutal calculus. When regenerative, the determined spirit of DIY will always muscle new scenes forward more honestly than larger labels can: and even if the tidepools they exist within are far smaller, it’s better to create a new ecosystem entirely rather than swim against the industry tide and inevitably be flushed toward the brackish.
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