The latest album from Australian singer/songwriter Grace Cummings, Ramona is a work of raw truth rendered in its most beautiful form. In a departure from the self-produced approach of her 2019 debut Refuge Cove and its 2022 follow- up Storm Queen—the Melbourne-based artist worked with producer Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty, Margo Price) and dreamed up a lavishly orchestrated sound that fully accommodates the depth and scope of her vocal prowess. With its visceral reflection on grief and self-destruction and emotional violence, Ramona brings a stunning new grandeur to Cummings’ music while refusing to soften or temper its humanity.

TRACK LISTING

1. Something Going 'Round
2. On And On
3. I’m Getting Married To The War
4. Love And The Canyon
5. Work Today (and Tomorrow)
6. Everybody’s Somebody
7. Common Man
8. Without You
9. Ramona
10. A Precious Thing
11. Help Is On Its Way

Since forming in 2008, Chicano Batman have followed their own visionary impulses to tremendous heights—a journey that began at local dive bars and recently saw them co-headlining the legendary Hollywood Bowl. In the making of Notebook Fantasy, Chicano Batman worked with producer John Congleton (Erykah Badu, Death Cab For Cutie, St. Vincent) to double down on their hyper-creative tendencies, discovering new dimensions of their prismatic music while infusing the lyrics with an unflinching honesty.

Emily King has a near-magical gift for digging into life’s deepest sorrows and uncovering unexpected beauty and illuminating truth with a mesmerizing blend of soul and R&B.

‘Special Occasion’ is King’s first album in four years and the follow up to her multiple GRAMMY nominated release, ‘Scenery.’

On the new album, King shares a realtime exploration of the endless dimensions of heartbreak, with a look at the ways we love, grieve, and eventually stumble toward a greater sense of self-understanding.

TRACK LISTING

This Year
Special Occasion
Medal
False Start
The Way That You Love
Me
Home Now
Bad Memory
Waterfalls
Who Wants My Love
Easy
Closer To The Morning

Out via ATO Records, The Waterfall II was massively inspired by the band’s idyllic surroundings in Stinson Beach, CA — and a sense of charmed isolation that frontman Jim James likened to “living on our own little moon.” There, the Kentucky-bred five-piece ended up creating over two dozen songs at the mountaintop studio known as Panoramic House. Though they flirted with the idea of putting out what would have been a triple album, the band ultimately decided that less would be more at the time and divided the project into two halves, releasing the first segment as The Waterfall: a 2015 full-length that earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Alternative Music Album. 

As James reveals, the decision to unearth The Waterfall II was sparked from a bit of serendipity in the early days of self-quarantine. While out on a walk, he placed his music library on shuffle and soon stumbled upon “Spinning My Wheels,” a tender rumination on the struggle for presence, its lyrics confessing to feeling “hypnotized from doing the same old thing.” Struck by the song’s enduring relevance, James revisited the other tracks reserved from the Panoramic House sessions and found that they invited a welcome moment of self-reflection—an outcome perhaps even more perfectly suited to the chaos of the current day than the circumstances of their recording. Like its predecessor, The Waterfall II mines its mood of dreamy contemplation from certain heartbreak James had recently experienced, including the demise of a monumental relationship. Unfolding in a loosely threaded narrative of loss and recovery, the album conjures an indelible pain but never drifts into despair, gracefully conveying James’s message that “there is hope beyond the pain and loss, if you learn to flow with life like water.” Even in its most heavy-hearted moments, The Waterfall II radiates an undeniable sense of wonder, a testament to the wild-mindedness that’s long imbued the music of My Morning Jacket.

With their unabashed curiosity infinitely stirred by their time at Stinson Beach, the band hopes that the album might lead others to look beyond what’s human-made in the search for solace and renewal. “As so many of us feel out of tune and long for the world to be a better place, we have to look to nature and the animals and learn from them: learn to love, accept, move on, and respect each other,” says James. “We gotta work for it and change our ways before it’s too late, and get in harmony with love and equality for all of humanity and for nature too.” My Morning Jacket will perform two songs on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday July 15, one for broadcast and one exclusive online only.

TRACK LISTING

1. Spinning My Wheels
2. Still Thinkin
3. Climbing The Ladder
4. Feel You
5. Beautiful Love (Wasn't Enough)
6. Magic Bullet
7. Run It
8. Wasted
9. Welcome Home
10. The First Time

Love Record Stores Edition available from 9am on Saturday June 20th.
Limited to one per person.

Clear vinyl.

Born William Fussell in 1989 in Adel, Georgia (a small town near the Okefenokee Swamp) Harper’s family quickly relocated to Hollywood, Florida where he immersed himself in the arts more readily available in southern Florida: disco and country music. His father was an Elvis impersonator who introduced him to Waylon Jennings, Patsy Cline and Hank Williams and his mother watched ‘Grease’ with him every month introducing him to his lifelong style icon, Olivia Newton John. At the age of 10, Harper’s family returned to Georgia, this time to the suburbs of Atlanta, where he would spend his teenage years performing in both church choirs and punk bands. On the day of his eighteenth birthday, Harper left home, beginning his journey to become the Starmaker celebrated in his album’s title.

The name ‘Starmaker’ is inspired by the Joni Mitchell classic ‘Free Man in Paris’, which is an ode to the stresses of having to play the game of the music industry. Co- written with his wife, Alana Pagnutti, the album is not a commentary on Mitchell’s words but it explores similar ideas about fame, fortune and failure. “I'm the starmaker,” he offers. “These songs are primarily about my journey to create them. The album as a whole, is about my relationship with my wife and loved ones in the search of this success and fame.”

The majority of songs on ‘Starmaker’ embrace contradictions and dichotomies in both subject matter and style. Love and sadness, melancholia and happiness, success and failure, come in and out of focus. ‘Something Relative’ is an elegantly simple ballad about a friend of Harper’s that died of an overdose. The sparse picked guitar contrasts the flowing, melodic strings as Harper hopefully sings about his lost friend. ‘Tomorrow Never Comes’, a Big Star meets The Eagles turned Krautrock instant classic, speaks to the early days of Harper and his wife’s long-distance relationship; the happiness of finding someone you love tarnished by the eventuality of having to say goodbye. In Dido Building Carthage, a tragic story of love and suicide is contrasted with the hope of building a new empire. The juxtaposition is mirrored in the surface of Tuner’s painting where classically-painted figures appear and simultaneously fade into a looser, more abstract handling of the landscape.

TRACK LISTING

Green Shadows
In Light Of Us
The Day It Rained Forever
Something Relative
Tired Tower
Suzuki Dreams
Vaguely Satisfied
Someone Else’s Dream
Tomorrow Never Comes
Strawberry Lite
Starmaker

New single featuring ‘What It Means’ recorded live at Newport Folk Festival in the Summer of 2017, backed with a brand-new Patterson Hood-penned track called ‘The Perilous Night’.

Hood says, “It may be the darkest song I’ve ever written, but it’s also a Tracklisting dance song. Turn it up.”

‘Sorry Is Gone’, the highly anticipated new full length album from Jessica Lea Mayfield, is released on ATO Records.

The 11-track record was recorded at Water Music and Electric Lady studios with producer John Agnello (Kurt Vile, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Phosphorescent).

Of the record, Mayfield comments, “The whole record is about me taking my life back, without really realizing it. I realized I’m the only person that is going to look out for me. I have to be my main person. No one else.” She continues, “I have to sing about things and write about things that have happened to me as therapy. That’s what connects me to other music I listen to. I want music to make me feel things. This is my inner dialogue, and my chance to get the last word.”

‘Sorry Is Gone’ is Mayfield’s first solo album since 2014’s ‘Make My Head Sing…’, which was released to widespread acclaim. Of the album, Rolling Stone asserted, “…Mayfield’s echo-laden bluegrass vocals mesh with scorching electric guitar lines to render remarkable results,” while Pitchfork praised, “There’s something certainly compelling about this raw, minimalist sound.”

TRACK LISTING

Wish You Could See Me Now
Sorry Is Gone
Meadow
Maybe Whatever
Soaked Through
Safe 2 Connect 2
Burn Me Out
WTF
Offa My Hands
World Won’t Stop
Too Much Terrible