The follow up to the well received debut album ‘Apples’ sees Nurses’ unmistakable elastic melodies, heady pop hooks and knack for catchy songwriting get right under your skin.

It’s a bolder, heavier, groovier, record. Mixed with Scott Colburn (whose production credits include Arcade Fire’s ‘Funeral’ and Animal Collective’s ‘Feels’) this is a three dimensional being, solidifying the band’s evolution from a bedroom recording experiment to a fully fleshed dynamic ensemble.

TRACK LISTING

1. Fever Dreams
2. You Lookin’ Twice
3. Extra Fast
4. Through The Window
5. So Sweet
6. Trying To Reach You
7. New Feelings
8. Wouldn’t Tell
9. Dancing Grass
10. Gold Jordan
11. Eternal Thrills

Greg Mendez has always been an economical songwriter – he wields restraint and simplicity as tools, the core of his songs sharpened into simple, cutting truths. On 'Beauty Land', his new album and debut LP for Dead Oceans, we’re guided by a wry but forgiving narrator, an underdog who has learned to balance cynicism and faith. These songs are self-effacing without self-pity, carefully constructed altars of imperfection channeled through pop melodies, shimmering but urgent guitars, and a voice that reaches for choir boy innocence.

The bulk of 'Beauty Land' was recorded directly to tape, almost entirely alone in Mendez’s makeshift home studio in Philadelphia - a small room with no natural light. It’s his first full length since his unexpected self-titled breakthrough in 2023, which was a slow burn success following 15 years of writing and recording music in relative obscurity between Philly and New York. 'Beauty Land' picks up where we left off three years ago – plumbing the depths of grief, love, and addiction – but its intense, quiet clarity shows Mendez at his songwriting best.

Parts of 'Beauty Land' feel like a lucid dream, dented characters carve their way through a world that’s cartoonish and warped – the broken-clock march of 'I Wanna Feel Pretty', the chiming toy piano on 'Gentle Love'. 'Mary / Dreaming' begins as a sparse, finger-picked lament before cutting abruptly to a deflated, Beach-Boys-but-make-it-fucked-up resolution that brings both melancholy and joy; a sense that all things can be true at once. None of the 14 tracks here break three minutes, but they tell stories that span lifetimes.

Death floats through the record, whether it appears as a memory or a threat. Everything feels precarious. There’s a fragility to how these songs are built: the way the funeral organ hits alongside the morphine on 'Looking Out Your Window', the devastating simplicity of 'Frog', with its slowed-down keyboard and bare refrain: “Please forgive me for my faults.” 'Beauty Land' feels, at times, impossibly lonely. Which makes it really count when it doesn’t – like when Mendez sings in harmony with his wife and bandmate, Veronica near the end of 'So Mean' and it feels like a cherished reunion, a fleeting moment of redemption, a temporary parting of the seas.

TRACK LISTING

1. I Wanna Feel Pretty
2. Looking Out Your Window
3. Mary / Dreaming
4. Everybody Wants To Be Your Friend (Except Me)
5. Gentle Love
6. Frog
7. It Breaks My Heart
8. Sunsick
9. No Evil
10. Geranium
11. Interlude In D Minor
12. Serving Drinks
13. So Mean
14. Concussion

For Kevin Morby, the “little wide open” is the big sky, the small lives, it’s his origins in the Midwest, and every duty and modesty and familiarity and isolation: the land, the people, and the parts of that inside him. “There’s something unintentionally musical about the Midwest; cicadas chirping in the trees, a train passing, a tornado siren going off,” explains Morby. “If you listen, there are these almost ominous sounds taking place beneath the wide-open sky—its ugliness and its beauty and how the two are often working together simultaneously. And while the Midwest isn’t technically the badlands, it’s my badlands.”

'Little Wide Open' is the title of Kevin Morby’s eighth studio album, produced by Aaron Dessner. In the summer of 2024, Dessner had asked Morby to support The National at their London show in Crystal Palace Park. Shortly after, Dessner—who was on a hot streak, having produced albums for Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and Gracie Abrams—reached out to Morby to say he’d love to produce his next album. They began recording at Aaron’s Long Pond Studio in Stuyvesant, NY, early in 2025 and finished in September of that year.

The album, which features a host of contributors such as Dessner—who plays multiple instruments across it—Amelia Meath, Andrew Barr, Justin Vernon, Katie Gavin, Lucinda Williams, Meg Duffy, and more, has been described by Morby as the third in a trilogy of releases, following 2020’s 'Sundowner' and 2022’s 'This Is a Photograph', which catalogued his time in the Midwest after moving back to Kansas City. This time out, Dessner’s production elevates Morby’s recordings while never losing focus of the songs themselves. There’s a newfound confidence and clarity in both Morby’s writing and Dessner’s production that recalls Tom Petty’s 1994 classic 'Wildflowers'.

Now primarily living in LA, the atmosphere that runs through 'Little Wide Open' has changed somewhat from its predecessors. As Rachel Kushner writes of Morby in the album’s accompanying essay: “It’s about time, about feeling like he has shifted from nostalgia and the losing game, losing but beautiful, of holding onto the past. He has accepted that time is ceaselessly flowing, and you can’t stop it. Instead, he feels like he’s riding it. He’s riding passenger with time.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Even before I read anything about the new Morby LP, it sounded like it had a bit of Dessner's free-wheeling Long Pond looseness, typified on The National's music or indeed the brilliant Long Pond sessions from Taylor Swift. Turns out that Morby's brand of uplifting country-adjacent swing is perfectly suited to Dessner's style and results in the most absorbing album of his career. A gorgeously evocative, melodic wonder.

TRACK LISTING

1. Badlands
2. Die Young
3. Javelin
4. All Sinners
5. Natural Disaster
6. 100,000
7. Little Wide Open
8. Cowtown
9. Bible Belt
10. I Ride Passenger
11. Junebug
12. Dandelion
13. Field Guide For The Butterflies

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2026 EXCLUSIVE LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.

On Nov. 6th, 2025 Khruangbin released The Universe Smiles Upon You ii, the reimagined version of their debut album The Universe Smiles Upon You, on its 10-year anniversary. The new album features a new sequencing with every song re-recorded, all with various degrees of subtlety and musical reinterpretation.

The original album had a secret bonus track that was featured on a JCD, and they’re replicating this approach by holding “M. Blanc” (entitled “Mr. White” on the original album) as the bonus track specifically for the JCD and RSD exclusive products.

Change, they say, is the only constant in life. Fittingly, multi‑hyphenate musician Avalon Emerson sounds at home harnessing the steady flux of her existence on 'Written into Changes', the memoiristic second album released under her Avalon Emerson & the Charm moniker. A work of rigorous invention and revision, the album’s themes of personal and relationship evolution “came into clarity after they were all done,” according to Emerson.

The making of 'Written into Changes' was, appropriately enough, very different from that of '& the Charm'. While that album was, in Emerson’s words, “soft and bedroomy,” the energy was upped this time around, as Emerson carefully considered how this material would work in a live context. The resulting body of work is band‑driven but groove‑heavy and dance‑adjacent. The break‑beat‑assisted 'Eden' has a “baggy” sound that’s reminiscent of dance‑rock hybrids of the late ’80s and early ’90s. The witty 'How Dare This Beer' was written in loving tribute to the Magnetic Fields. “’87 to ’94 is my idea of the best era of music,” says Emerson. “And with Nathan, our musical taste overlaps quite a bit.”

Nathan is Nathan Jenkins, aka Bullion, who co‑produced '& the Charm' and returned to handle the bulk of its follow‑up. Much of the recording took place in Braintree, England, in the winter into spring of 2024. The two tracks co‑produced with Rostam Batmanglij ('Jupiter & Mars' and 'Earth Alive') were cut in Los Angeles. Synth touches were added at the Synth Cabin at Rosen Sound in Glendale, California. While the collaborative creation of 'Written into Changes' diverged considerably from Emerson’s dancefloor‑tailored solo productions, the influence of dance music is splashed all over it. Emerson was fixated on her music’s low end as she crafted it. “Bass was definitely a priority,” she says.

Emerson wrote the melodies and lyrics on 'Written into Changes', and the majority of the latter were sourced from her personal life. “It was a goal with my lyrics this time around to be a little bit more direct,” she says. The title track, one of the artist’s favorites, is about her move from Berlin to Los Angeles in 2020. The frenetic 'Happy Birthday' has a sunny spirit anchored by gently devastating lyrics like those of the refrain: “Too young to die / Too old to break through.” That track arrives having been club‑tested—Emerson has already dropped it into her sets at clubs like Panorama Bar at Berlin’s Berghain and Brooklyn’s Nowadays. Both 'Eden' and 'Country Mouse' are odes to Emerson’s relationship with her wife, Hunter, while 'I Don’t Want to Fight' and 'Earth Alive' are “about realizing you can't change people and trying to take them for who they are, and sometimes that means loving them from afar,” she says.

'Written into Changes' is an album about not just accepting change, but embracing it with a full wingspan. Progression is a theme both on record and behind the scenes, so that “written into changes” describes a conscious approach to expression and life itself.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A huge departure from the subtle bedroom pop of Avalon Emerson's '& The Charm', 'Written Into Changes' is a widescreen soar of synths and cavernous percussion, tastefully blipping arpeggios underpinning Emerson's dreamy, powerful vocals. Stunningly uplifting, beautifully written synth-pop.

TRACK LISTING

1. Eden
2. Jupiter And Mars
3. Happy Birthday
4. Written Into Changes
5. Wooden Star
6. God Damn (Finito)
7. How Dare This Beer
8. Country Mouse
9. I Don’t Want To Fight
10. Earth Alive

'Nothing’s About to Happen to Me' is the eighth studio album by Mitski. All songs and vocals are by Mitski. The album was produced and engineered by Patrick Hyland and mastered by Bob Weston, with assistance on drums and logistics from Kris Bulakowski. Continuing the musical through line established with 'The Land Is Inhospitable' and 'So Are We', the album features live instrumentation by The Land touring band and ensemble arrangements. The orchestra was recorded at Sunset Sound and TTG Studios, arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, engineered by Michael Harris, with additional engineering by Isaac Diskin and assistance from Alex Miller. Standout singles include 'Where’s My Phone?', 'I’ll Change for You', and 'If I Leave'.

TRACK LISTING

1. In A Lake
2. Where’s My Phone?
3. Cats
4. If I Leave
5. Dead Women
6. Instead Of Here
7. I’ll Change For You
8. Rules
9. That White Cat
10. Charon’s Obol
11. Lightning

If you could go back in time ten years, what would you want to tell yourself? This was a question Khruangbin posed to themselves when approaching the ten-year anniversary of their debut album, the once cult classic, now genre-defining work 'The Universe Smiles Upon You'. “If we could go back and tell ourselves how much was going to happen to us after that record, what would we want to celebrate?” asked Laura Lee, bassist, vocalist, and founding member of the band. Instead, they thought: “Let’s do it again.”

'The Universe Smiles Upon You II' was recorded on January 4-6, 2025, in the same family barn of guitarist Mark Speer, across the same dates where 'TUSUY' was first conceived ten years earlier. Though the conditions were the same–dirt floor, brutally cold, minimal sound isolation, all takes live–the songs aren’t. They’re re-approached, some changed more than others, harnessing the lightning-in-a-bottle energy of 'TUSUY' while discovering what would be unique this time around, in this stage of the band’s life.

The result moves like ripples on the water across ten hypnotizing tracks, the barn creating a sense of spaciousness, serenity and creative freedom, nearby wildlife (listen out for the birds on 'August Twelve II'), rattles and creaks of the barn and all. It’s a tapestry of small movements in nuanced arrangements, slowly revealing the new life, stories and character of someone you’ve met again for the first time in ten years.

TRACK LISTING

1. Little Joe And Mary II
2. Balls And Pins II
3. White Gloves II
4. The Man Who Took My Sunglasses II
5. People Everywhere II
6. Bin Bin II
7. August Twelve II
8. Dern Kala II
9. Two Fish And An Elephant II
10. Zionsville II

Inspired by live albums such as Bob Dylan’s Hard Rain, Houck envisioned an album that, rather than play like a greatest hits collection, would present songs from throughout his catalog in new ways, representative of how the songs have grown and transformed over the years in the live setting. Phosphorescent were coming to the end of almost a year of hard touring behind 2013’s Muchacho before the four Brooklyn Music Hall shows, (one of which was a solo performance by Houck), and the ability of Houck’s songs to morph and expand is showcased here through these revelatory performances.

Live At the Music Hall spans nearly 10 years and four Phosphorescent albums total, including 2005’s Aw Come Aw Wry, 2007’s Dead Oceans debut Pride, breakout 2010 album Here’s To Taking It Easy, and ultimately, 2013’s transformative Muchacho. The Phosphorescent live line-up here features Ricky Ray Jackson on guitar and pedal steel, pianist Scott Stapleton, drummer Christopher Marine, bassist Rustine Bragaw, percussionist David Torch and organ / keyboards player Jo Schornikow.

“Playing those four shows, it was clear something special was going on,” says Houck. “After eight months of touring, we’d gotten to a really good point where we weren’t quite exhausted yet with the material, but we’d had enough time to really grow with the songs. So we were in that sweet spot where we were pulling something great out of the songs every night.” Without a doubt, Live At The Music Hall is an inspiring document of a band at the peak of their powers.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sun Arise! (An Invocation/An Introduction) (Live)
2. A New Anhedonia (Live) 
3. Terror In The Canyons (The Wounded Master) (Live) 
4. The Quotidian Beasts (Live) 
5. Tell Me Baby (Have You Had Enough) (Live) 
6. Nothing Was Stolen (Love Me Foolishly) (Live)
7. Dead Heart (Live) 
8. Down To Go (Live) 
9. Song For Zula (Live) 
10. Ride On / Right On (Live) 
11. A Picture Of Our Torn Up Praise (Solo, Live) 
12. Muchacho's Tune (Solo, Live) 
13. Wolves (Solo, Live) 
14. Joe Tex, These Taming Blues (Live) 
15. Los Angeles (Live) 
16. A Picture Of Our Torn Up Praise (Live) 
17. South (Of America) (Live) 
18. Wolves (Live) 
19. At Death, A Proclamation (Live)

City Music is the new album by Kevin Morby. Full of listless wanderlust, it’s a collection inspired by and devoted to the metropolitan experience across America and beyond by a songwriter cast from his own mold. As he puts it: “It is a mix-tape, a fever dream, a love letter dedicated to those cities that I cannot get rid of, to those cities that are all inside of me.”

His fourth album, City Music works as a counterpart to Morby’s acclaimed 2016 release Singing Saw, an autobiographical set that reflected the solitude and landscape in which it was recorded. Saw was imagined as “an old bookshelf with a young Bob and Joni staring back at me, blank and timeless. They live here, in this left side of my brain, smoking cigarettes and playing acoustic guitars while lying on an unmade bed.”

And now follows City Music, the yang to its yin, the heads to its tails. It is a collection crafted using the other side of its creator’s brain, the jumping off point perhaps best once again encapsulated by an image. “Here, Lou Reed and Patti Smith stare out at the listener,” explains Morby. “Stretched out on a living room floor they are somewhere in mid-70s Manhattan, also smoking cigarettes.” It finds Morby exploring similar themes of solitude, but this time framed by a window of an uptown apartment that looks down upon an international urban landscape “exposed like a giant bleeding wound.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Come To Me Now
2. Crybaby
3. 1234
4. Aboard My Train
5. Dry Your Eyes
6. Flannery
7. City Music
8. Tin Can
9. Caught In My Eye
10. Night Time
11. Pearly Gates
12. Downtown's Lights

The story begins with Kevin Morby absentmindedly flipping through a box of old family photos in the basement of his childhood home in Kansas City. Just hours before, at a family dinner, his father had collapsed in front of him and had to be rushed to the hospital. That night Morby still felt the shock and fear lodged in his bones. So he gazed at the images until one of the pictures jumped out at him: his father as a young man, proud and strong and filled with confidence, posing on a lawn with his shirt off. This was in January of 2020. As the months went on and the world dramatically changed around him, Morby felt an eerie similarity between his feelings of that night and the atmosphere of those spring days. Fear, anxiety, hope and resilience all churning together. The themes began twisting in his mind. History, trauma and the grand fight against time. Having the courage to dream, even while knowing the tragedy that often awaits those who dare to dream.

While his father regained his strength, Morby meditated on these ideas. And then, he headed to Memphis. He moved into the Peabody Hotel and spent his days paying tribute and genuflecting to the dreamers he admired. In the evening, he would return to his room and document his ideas on a makeshift recording set-up, with just his guitar and a microphone. The songs, elegiac in nature, befitting all he had seen, poured out of him.

Produced by Sam Cohen (who also worked on Morby’s Singing Saw and Oh My God), This Is A Photograph features musical contributions from longtime staples of Morby’s live band, as well as old friends and new collaborators alike. If Oh My God saw Morby getting celestial and in constant motion and Sundowner was a study in localized intent, This Is A Photograph finds Morby making an Americana paean, a visceral life and death, blood on the canvas outpouring. As Morby reminds us early on, time is undefeated. So what do we do while we’re still here? This is a photograph of that sense of yearning.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Morby's latest may have come from a place of heavy introspection, but results in nothing less than a joyful reaffirmation of life through a selection of typically beautiful progressions and evocative vocals. Definitely his most stylistically focused and accomplished work to date, and a most importantly, a hugely enjoyable listen.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. This Is A Photograph
2. A Random Act Of Kindness
3. Bittersweet, TN
4. Disappearing
5. A Coat Of Butterflies

SIDE B:
6. Rock Bottom
7. Five Easy Pieces
8. Stop Before I Cry
9. It’s Over
10. Goodbye To Good Times

Originally only available DTC. Durand Jones & The Indications share a new version of the sweet soul anthem Cruisin' To The Park with a Mexican twist from Y La Bamba. The song is a bside of ‘Too Many Tears’ taken from their second album American Love Call, heavily inspired by Jackie Wilson, Curtis Mayfield, and The Impressions..

TRACK LISTING

A. Too Many Tears
B. Cruisin' To The Parque

"Vampire Again" is a theatrical track inspired by Williams' experience dressing as a vampire for a screening of Nosferatu while no one else did!

TRACK LISTING

1.Vampire Again
2.Down In The Garden

“‘Gift Horse’ was written completely on the spot,” Morby said “I started hammering out a few chords and suddenly was humming a melody and told Sam I thought I was writing a new song and that maybe we should record it instead. An hour later we had ‘Gift Horse,’ lyrics and all, like it had been floating around the studio and we just nabbed it out of the air. We re-cut it with the band a few weeks later, which is what you’re hearing now.”

TRACK LISTING

A. Gift Horse
B. I Was On Time

Sit at the Kids Table. Go to prom. Try a new SSRI. Deface a mural. Flip the mattress. Help a bird. Dissociate. Last vacation.

These landmark occasions are inscribed on the board-game-inspired cover of the new Bright Eyes EP, 'Kids Table'. And there in lies the chiaroscuro of Bright Eyes’ music, perpetually teetering between rogue optimism and pragmatic despair. Following the band’s 2024 visceral and hook-filled 'Five Dice, All Threes', the new EP exists as both a partner-in-crime to that album and a self-contained world all of its own.

While many of these new songs emerged from the same recording sessions at Omaha’s ARC Studios as Five Dice, they didn’t all quite fit the concise cohesion of that album. So it was always the plan of Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis, and Nate Walcott to find another seat for these outliers at the proverbial kids table, “eaten off the ironing board like we did at our big family holidays,” jokes Oberst, in a nod to the EP’s cover art.

'Kids Table' and 'Dyslexic Palindrome' both feature Hurray For The Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra, a continued creative partnership following the two bands’ recent tours together and viral live version of Bright Eyes fan-favorite, 'Lua'. And while a Bright Eyes ska song was likely not on this year’s bingo card (or game board), '1st World Blues', cowritten with Alex Orange Drink (So So Glos), makes a case for a third wave of the genre, with its biting takedown of contemporary American civilization decline, propelled by gang vocals and an infectious off-beat rhythm.

Cultural references both high and low-brow pepper the EP—name checking everyone from Salman Rushdie, Joe Strummer, and Candace Bergen in 'Victory City' and Shakespeare, Guy Fawkes, and Mrs. Peacock from the classic board game Clue in 'Shakespeare In A Nutshell'.

But it's the cover of Lucinda Williams’ 1980 track 'Sharp Cutting Wings (Song For A Poet)' that is really the heart of this collection. Oberst and Williams share a clear musical commonality, both experts at weaving together melancholy and hope. And in fact, following a medical emergency in 2024 when Oberst was battling vocal problems—it was the first thing he wanted to sing after his illness, once he was able to use his voice again. “This was the song I felt like singing,” says Oberst, “I’ve just always loved it.” It was a last-minute addition to the EP that ultimately ties it all together, its cautious optimism offering a glimmer of light in the shadows of the collection, the shadows of a fraying American dream, and the shadows cast across a family dinner at the kids table.

TRACK LISTING

1. Kids Table
2. Cairns (When Your Heart Belongs To Everyone)
3. 1st World Blues
4. Sharp Cutting Wings (Song To A Poet)
5. It Always Feels Good And It Never Hurts
6. Dyslexic Palindrome (feat. Hurray For The Riff Raff)
7. Shakespeare In A Nutshell
8. Victory City

Can a self-portrait be a collage? Can empathy be autobiographical? What’s the point of living if we’re not trying to understand all the horror and humor that surrounds everything? These are a few of the questions lurking under the bleachers of Wednesday’s new album 'Bleeds', an intoxicating collection of narrative-heavy Southern rock that—like many of the most arresting passages from the North Carolina band’s highlight reel so far—thoughtfully explores the vivid link between curiosity and confession.

'Bleeds' is not only the best Wednesday record—it’s also the most Wednesday record, a patchwork-style triumph of literary allusions and outlaw grit, of place-based poetry and hair-raising noise. Karly Hartzman—founder, frontwoman, and primary lyricist—credits Wednesday’s tightened grasp on their own identity to time spent collaborating on previous albums, plus a tour schedule that’s been both rewarding and relentless. “'Bleeds' is the spiritual successor to 'Rat Saw God', and I think the quintessential ‘Wednesday Creek Rock’ album,” Hartzman said, articulating satisfaction with the ways her band has sharpened its trademark sound, how they’ve refined the formula that makes them one of the most interesting rock bands of their generation. “This is what Wednesday songs are supposed to sound like,” she said. “We’ve devoted a lot of our lives to figuring this out—and I feel like we did.”

Just like 'Rat Saw God', one of the defining rock & roll records of the 2020s so far, 'Bleeds' came together at Drop of Sun in Asheville and was produced by Alex Farrar, who’s been recording the band since 'Twin Plagues'. Hartzman again brought demos to the studio, where she and her bandmates—Xandy Chelmis (lap steel, pedal steel), Alan Miller (drums), Ethan Baechtold (bass, piano), and Jake “M.J.” Lenderman (guitar)—worked as a team to bulk-up the compositions with the exact right amounts of country truth-telling, indie-pop hooks, and noisy sludge. More than ever, the precise proportions were steered by the lyricism—not only its tone or subject matter, but also the actual sound of the words, as well as Hartzman’s masterfully subjective approach to detail selection. Every image or scene is filtered through Hartzman’s agile, writerly brain. The particulars deemed essential all contain revelations about Hartzman’s specific obsessions and vulnerabilities, about the fragmented way she processes the world. Maybe sometimes the best way to locate truth or pain or dignity within your own life story, Bleeds suggests, is by crawling into someone else’s.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: To me, while Wednesday's music has all of the evocative charm and quiet thoughtfulness of a country record, there is little to tie Wednesday's southern American roots to their sound, an incendiary mix of snarling grunge rock and sweeping stadium grandiosity. 'Bleeds' is another superb record from Wednesday and a perfect fit for Dead Oceans' off-piste aesthetic.

TRACK LISTING

1. Reality TV Argument
2. Bleeds
3. Townies
4. Wound Up Here (By
Holdin On)
5. Elderberry Wine
6. Phish Pepsi
7. Candy Breath
8. The Way Love Goes
9. Pick Up That Knife
10. Wasp
11. Bitter Everyday
12. Carolina Murder Suicide
13. Gary’s II

We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit.

Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Valentine, Texas
2. Working For The Knife
3. Stay Soft
4. Everyone
5. Heat Lightning
SIDE B:
6. The Only Heartbreaker
7. Love Me More
8. There’s Nothing Left For You
9. Should’ve Been Me
10. I Guess
11. That’s Our Lamp

Cutthroat is shame at their blistering best. An unapologetic new album with Grammy winning producer John Congleton at the helm; it’s souped up and supercharged. It’s exactly where you want shame to be. Still in their twenties, the five childhood friends - Charlie Steen, guitarists Sean Coyle-Smith and Eddie Green, bassist Josh Finerty and drummer Charlie Forbes - have grown Shame exponentially, with ambitious sonic ideas and the technical chops to execute them. Having proved themselves several times over with legendary live shows and three critically-acclaimed albums under their belts, Shame went into Cutthroat ready to create a new Ground Zero. “This is about who we are,” says Steen. “Our live shows aren’t performance art - they’re direct, confrontational and raw. That’s always been the root of us. We live in crazy times. But it’s not about ‘Poor me.’ It’s about ‘Fuck you’.” Crucial to this incendiary new outlook was producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Angel Olsen). From their initial meeting, Congleton’s no-bullshit approach became a guiding force to streamline the band’s ideas.

Stamped throughout with Shame’s trademark sense of humour, the album takes on the big issues of today and gleefully toys with them. Casting a merciless eye on themes of conflict and corruption; hunger and desire; lust, envy and the omnipresent shadow of cowardice. Musically, too, the record plays with visceral new ideas. Making electronic music on tour for fun, Coyle-Smith had previously seen the loops he was crafting as a separate entity to the things he wrote for Shame. Then, he realised, maybe they didn’t have to be. “This time, anything could go if it sounded good and you got it right,” he says. The result is an album that revels in the idiosyncrasies of life, raising an eyebrow and asking the ugly questions that so often get tactfully brushed over. “I’m not here to answer the questions, I’m a 27-year-old idiot…” Steen caveats with a self-effacing chuckle. But the one answer that Cutthroat gives with a resounding flourish is that, right now, Shame have never sounded better.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A raucous selection of riotously melodic indie stormers from Shame here, taking everything they've established on their previous three LP's and turning the volume up even more. Brighter, more carefree and with years of experience on the live circuit to bolster their energetic blast of melody. A band entirely at ease with their sound.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Cutthroat
2. Cowards Around
3. Quiet Life
4. Nothing Better
5. Plaster
6. Spartak

SIDE B
7. To And Fro
8. Lampião
9. After Party
10. Screwdriver
11. Packshot
12. Axis Of Evil

After more than a decade of music-making, Durand Jones & The Indications have blossomed as a unit and are basking in their successes. On their aptly titled new album, 'Flowers', The Indications unfurl their true colors — embracing all their roots and influences, maturation and confidence, and share them with the world.

Since forming in 2012, the road has taken The Indications from those origins at Indiana University, Bloomington to the global stage, selling out shows across Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand to the West Coast— where DJI has a strong following among the lowrider and vintage soul enthusiasts.

For as far as Durand Jones & The Indications have come, 'Flowers' grew from the desire to return to their roots in a Bloomington basement, a space where they first found camaraderie in gritty funk and Southern soul that would inspire their self-titled debut. Pulling sonically and spiritually from each of the group's previous releases and solo work, Flowers is the next stage of DJI's inspired soulful discography. DJI are not only accepting their flowers, but indulging in their sweet and sexy fragrance.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Jones returns for another of his super-smooth soul time capsules that ooze modernity while paying obvious tribute to the roots of the sound (There's more than a little Gaye here). 'Flowers' is full of beautifully sanguine melodies and perfectly produced instrumentals, all topped by Jones saying 'Love' and 'Baby' loads. What more could you want.

TRACK LISTING

1. Flowers
2. Paradise
3. Lovers' Holiday
4. I Need The Answer
5. Flower Moon
6. Really Wanna Be With You
7. Been So Long
8. Everythin
9. Rust And Steel
10. If Not For Love
11. Without You

“From the moment she began writing her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee. After all, a jubilee is a celebration of the passage of time—a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor. Zauner’s first two albums garnered acclaim for the way they grappled with anguish; Psychopomp was written as her mother underwent cancer treatment, while Soft Sounds From Another Planet took the grief she held from her mother‘s death and used it as a conduit to explore the cosmos. Now, at the start of a new decade, Japanese Breakfast is ready to fight for happiness, an all-too-scarce resource in our seemingly crumbling world.

Jubilee finds Michelle Zauner embracing ambition and, with it, her boldest ideas and songs yet. Inspired by records like Bjork’s Homogenic, Zauner delivers bigness throughout - big ideas, big textures, colours, sounds and feelings. At a time when virtually everything feels extreme, Jubilee sets its sights on maximal joy, imagination, and exhilaration. It is, in Michelle Zauner’s words, “a record about fighting to feel. I wanted to re-experience the pure, unadulterated joy of creation...The songs are about recalling the optimism of youth and applying it to adulthood. They’re about making difficult choices, fighting ignominious impulses and honouring commitments, confronting the constant struggle we have with ourselves to be better people.”Throughout Jubilee, Zauner pours her own life into the universe of each song to tell real stories, and allowing those universes, in turn, to fill in the details. Joy, change, evolution - these things take real time, and real effort. And Japanese Breakfast is here for it.”

TRACK LISTING

1.Pay Your Way In Pain
2.Down And Out Downtown
3.Daddy’s Home
4.Live In The Dream
5.The Melting Of The Sun
6.Humming Interlude 1
7.The Laughing Man
8.Down
9.Humming Interlude 2
10.Somebody Like Me
11.My Baby Wants A Baby
12.…At The Holiday Party
13.Candy Darling
14.Humming Interlude 3

In dark and difficult times, the music of Barney Lister and Kojo Degraft-Johnson lifts us up. As MRCY, the production and vocal duo are confronting the many crises of modern life with a fresh sound full of punchy instrumentation, enveloping orchestration and lyrical honesty. On their latest project, 'VOLUME 2', Barney and Kojo deliver emotive music that surprises as much as it comforts, referencing timeless sounds as much as a sense of the cutting edge. Channeling soulful vocal melody alongside afrobeat polyrhythms, jazz soloing and driving, distorted grooves, tracks like 'Man' address the challenges of modern masculinity, while standout number 'Fear' drives a message that encourages us to fight the terror we might feel about the state of the world with optimism.

Following the acclaimed release of their 2024 debut project 'VOLUME 1', which saw the duo nominated as Rising Stars at the Rolling Stone Awards and named as one of DIY’s Class of 2025, MRCY returns with vital music that addresses the complexities of being alive today. “We’re trying to extinguish fear with optimism and worry with love,” Barney says. “'VOLUME 2' breaks the mould to present a bigger picture of who we are – something with angst, surprises and more guts. The main feeling of the project is that the world is fucked but let’s dance through it.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Angels
2. Wanna Know (Ontario)
3. Man
4. Sierra
5. Flicker
6. Wandering Attention
7. Fear
8. More Than You Are Now

From the very beginning, fans have fallen in love with Jensen McRae for the sharp, evocative and clear-eyed songwriting. McRae songwriting is vulnerable, yes, but it’s also powerful for not holding back. Now, 'I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!' delivers McRae’s evolution from a promising young artist to a bona fide songwriter and star. "The most profound choices of my life,” says McRae, “have often felt like things I did before I was ready to do, and I had to grow into them.” 'I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!' is about what follows when you have withstood what you thought might crush you. It’s about meeting your limits and learning what you’re capable of. “I connected with the idea that I could've easily collapsed beneath the weight of what happened to me, but I didn't. I didn't even know it,” she says, “but I was bulletproof the whole time."

Born and raised in LA, Jensen McRae has studied and made music for most of her life. She attended Grammy Camp in high school and graduated from USC’s Thornton School of Music with a degree in Popular Music. McRae’s debut album, 'Are You Happy Now?', was written mostly when she was just 21, and was the first step in developing her now-devoted fanbase. 'Are You Happy Now?' navigates identity from its deepest foundations – life as a young, bi-racial Black and Jewish woman – to its most personal musings – do I trust you, do I trust myself. McRae’s trust in herself has borne out on multiple occasions, most recently and maybe most famously in the form of 'Massachusetts'. McRae posted a solo verse and chorus, little more than a piece of a demo, and it caught fire online. Covers, duets, and an avalanche of new fans followed, and McRae capped the moment with a finished version and a summerlong tour supporting Noah Kahan.

'I Don’t Know How but They Found Me!' takes McRae’s now-considerable powers and hardwires them for mass appeal. Stealth single 'Savannah' is one for the yearners. The pulsing, country-adjacent song immediately brings the best of Phoebe Bridgers to mind, with McRae singing in an acrobatic whisper over a feather light acoustic guitar. By the time 'Savannah' hits its crescendo, it’s crystal clear McRae is an artist with her own singular power, as piano layers with guitar and McRae delivers a series of scathing indictments with grit and conviction: "You swore you'd raise our kids to end up just like you / well you're a false prophet / and that's a goddamn promise." Meanwhile 'Let Me Be Wrong' is a bona fide anthem, a “buoyant ode to rejecting perfectionism.” Built once again on a simple vocal and acoustic guitar, 'Let Me Be Wrong' builds step over step in its defiance; guitars layer, drums pick up the pace, and McRae makes space for everyone’s mistakes. When McRae growls “fuck those girls got everything” it’s a punch of both power and vulnerability, begging to be shouted in unison the biggest possible crowd.

The unusual title of her second album is taken from a line in McRae's favorite film, Back to the Future. A key protagonist survives a hail of bullets, and the image resonated with McRae because, she said, she often feels a connection to some future self guiding her decisions, especially in times of crisis. It also inspired the album’s cover, as McRae stands in a custom fireman’s coat with the job’s official marks and symbols stitched alongside abundant ones of herown. The effect caught her off-guard; “I was surprised how emotional it made me to be in the fire coat,” she says, “forced to stand still, stand powerfully. I could feel myself becoming a symbol of my own hero’s journey." If Are You Happy Now? was her coming of age, 'I Don't Know How But They Found Me!' is Jensen McRae all grown up.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Rearranger
2. I Can Change Him
3. Savannah
4. Daffodils
5. Let Me Be Wrong
6. Novelty
7. I Don't Do Drugs
8. Tuesday
9. Mother Wound
10. Praying For Your Downfall
11. Massachusetts

Scowl is a band that sounds exactly like their name implies. Venomous, fierce, antagonistic. A sneer not to be crossed. Over the last five years, the Santa Cruz, California, band has firmly planted their flag in the hardcore scene with their vicious sound and ripping live show, sharing stages around the world with Circle Jerks, Touché Amoré, and Limp Bizkit, and filling slots at prominent festivals like Coachella, Sick New World, and Reading and Leeds. But with their new album, 'Are We All Angels' (Dead Oceans), Scowl is aiming to funnel all that aggression through a more expansive version of themselves. Much of 'Are We All Angels' grapples with Scowl’s newfound place in the hardcore scene, a community which has both embraced the band and made them something of a lightning rod over the past few years. Standout single 'Not Hell, Not Heaven' outright rejects the narratives cast onto them by outsiders. “It’s about feeling victimized and being a victim, but not wanting to identify with being a victim,” explains vocalist Kat Moss. “It’s trying to find grace in the fact that I have my power. I live in my reality. You have to deal with whatever you're dealing with, and it ain’t working for me.” The band breaks from a sense of disassociation to seek deeper connections on 'Fantasy'. “It’s incredibly challenging to try to balance my love for the scene while also feeling, in some spaces, extremely alienated and hated,” Moss says. “‘Fantasy’ is about feeling like I don't know how to connect with these people anymore, because I have shelled myself away so hard.” The album ends in a philosophical place on the closing, titular track, 'Are We All Angels', asking questions like, “Is this all there is?” and ultimately putting it on the listener to decide. “It’s about the personal struggle between good and evil. It doesn’t matter how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ you are, there are systems that will try to rewrite your narrative no matter what you actually do,” explains Moss, noting that punctuation on 'Are We All Angels' has been deliberately omitted in an attempt to leave the statement open-ended.

'Are We All Angels' is the highly anticipated follow-up to Scowl’s debut, 2021’s 'How Flowers Grow', a 16-minute primal scream over punishing riffs. But amidst the pounding chaos, it was the record’s sonic outlier, a cleaner interlude called 'Seeds to Sow', that, true to its name, planted the seed for what was to come for the band. “It kind of laid out this destiny for us, and I feel like now we’re fulfilling that,” says drummer Cole Gilbert. The band continued to expand their sound on 2023’s widely acclaimed 'Psychic Dance Routine' EP, incorporating more pop hooks and favoring gentler singing over heavy screaming, paving the way for what would come next. Scowl’s growth got a huge boost from producer Will Yip (Turnstile, Title Fight, Code Orange, Balance and Composure), who broadened the band’s scope. “Will would say, ‘Everything you have here is correct, but it’s in the wrong place,’” says Gilbert. Moss adds: “Will really helped restructure a lot of the material. Some songs he tore apart to make more space for the really good hooks and choruses.” But even through this more eclectic approach, Scowl loses none of their edge, and still manages to convey the anger and frustration that lies underneath. They are deeply committed to carrying the ethos of punk and its sense of community. “Hardcore and punk have sculpted how we operate, what we want to do as a band, and how we participate,” says guitarist Malachi Greene. “At our core, we are a punk and a hardcore band, regardless of how the song shifts and changes.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Special
2. B.A.B.E.
3. Fantasy
4. Not Hell, Not Heaven
5. Tonight (I’m Afraid)
6. Fleshed Out
7. Let You Down
8. Cellophane
9. Suffer The Fool (How High Are You?)
10. Haunted
11. Are We All Angels

Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills, the record sees front-woman and songwriter Michelle Zauner pull back from the bright extroversion that defined its predecessor 'Jubilee' to examine the darker waves that roil within, the moody, fecund field of melancholy, long held to be the psychic state of poets on the verge of inspiration. The result is an artistic statement of purpose: a mature, intricate, contemplative work that conjures the romantic thrill of a gothic novel.

'For Melancholy Brunettes' follows a transformative period in Zauner’s life during which her 2x GRAMMY nominated breakthrough album 'Jubilee' and her bestselling memoir Crying In H Mart catapulted her into the cultural mainstream, delivering on her deepest artistic ambitions. Reflecting on that success, Zauner came to appreciate the irony of desire, which so often commingles bliss and doom. “I felt seduced by getting what I always wanted,” she says. “I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I kept going I was going to die.” The plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends 'For Melancholy Brunettes' its most persistent theme, the perils of desire. Like light dispersed, its spectral parts take the album’s characters through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution. On 'Orlando in Love' — a riff on John Cheever’s riff on Orlando Innamorato, an unfinished epic made up of 68 ½ cantos by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo — the hero is a well meaning poet who parks his Winnebago by the sea and falls victim to a siren’s call, his 69th canto (even in the lofty realm of classical myth Zauner has a soft spot for innuendo). 'Honey Water' plumbs the quiet rage of a woman married to an unfaithful man, watching him cede again and again to lust like a base insect perpetuating its own demise.

Sadness is indeed the dominant emotional key of this record, but it is sadness of a rarified form: the pensive, prescient sadness of melancholy, in which the recognition of life’s essentially tragic character occurs with sensitivity to its fleeting beauty. Zauner finds space enough inside it for glimmers of hope. They are the consolations of mortals that poets before her have called out to and that poets after will continue to rediscover: love and labor, and though they run like tonic resolutions through the record’s many episodes, they sound most saliently on its final song, 'Magic Mountain', an engagement with Thomas Mann’s famous novel of the same name. For her, making any work feels like scaling a mountain, but from the perch of 'For Melancholy Brunettes', she surveys the future.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's a wonderfully satisfying thing to hear Michelle Zauner's songwriting in a more hi-fi recording, with her effortless mastery of melody and tension coming through even more beautifully. That's not to say her previous outings haven't been astounding, but to have such a talented songwriter so wonderfully presented in widescreen is something to behold.

TRACK LISTING

1. Here Is Someone
2. Orlando In Love
3. Honey Water
4. Mega Circuit
5. Little Girl
6. Leda
7. Picture Window
8. Men In Bars
9. Winter In LA
10. Magic Mountain

For Greg Mendez, reflection doesn’t mean a static image in a mirror, or even a face he recognizes. It’s more a kaleidoscopic mirage, where paths taken shapeshift with the prospect of paths untread, and the subconscious merges with the intentional. On his self-titled new album, the Philadelphia-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist investigates the shaky camera of memory, striving to carve out a collage that points to a truth. But there isn’t a regimented actuality here; instead, Mendez highlights the merit in many truths, and many lives, and how even the hardest truths can still contain some humor.

While this is technically Mendez’s third full-length album, his back catalog boasts an extensive range of EPs and live recordings. He’s a prolific and thoughtful songwriter, understanding the joy in impulse, and shying away from the clinical sheen of overproduction. 2017’s  ̄\ _(ツ)_ / ̄' and 2020’s 'Cherry Hell' garnered acclaim for their quiet, lo-fi urgency, exploring themes of addiction and heartbreak with an intentional, authentic haze, and it’s this approach that has solidified Mendez as a staple in the DIY community for years.

Greg Mendez was written in fragments, some stretching across more than a decade, with Mendez reworking old ideas and arrangements, and others blossoming much more recently. The weight of time––and perhaps the
anxiety in running out of it––clouds the album, as Mendez prods at some painful experiences from his childhood and early adulthood. The common thread connecting the characters is their evident imperfections, and the various degrees of damage they cause, both knowingly and unknowingly. But where do we draw the line between a good person and a bad person? For Mendez, it’s never been that easy.

Greg Mendez is an intimate dialogue between the chapters we’ve experienced, and how they can inform the reality we perceive. It’s a reminder that we are constantly shifting, ever-changing selves and that if we ruminate too long, we may find ourselves stuck in the seriousness of it all. Here, Mendez allows us to take the time to notice what happens outside of the framework we may have built for ourselves, and the beauty that can occur when we finally do.

TRACK LISTING

1. Rev. John / Friend
2. Shark's Mouth
3. Cop Caller
4. Maria
5. Goodbye / Trouble
6. Sweetie
7. Clearer Picture (Of You)
8. Best Behavior
9. Hoping You're Doing Okay

Five Dice, All Threes is a record of uncommon intensity and tenderness, communal exorcism and personal excavation. These are, of course, qualities that fans have come to expect from Bright Eyes, nearly three decades into their career. The tight-knit band of Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis, and Nate Walcott tends to operate in distinct sweeping movements: each unique in its sound and story but unified by a sense of ambition and ever-growing emotional stakes.

Even with this rich history behind them, these new songs exude a visceral thrill like nothing they have attempted before. Oberst has always sung in a voice that conveys a sense of life-or-death gravity. At times throughout Five Dice, All Threes, you may feel worried for him; other times, he may seem like the only one with the clarity to get us out of this mess.

On the self-produced album, Bright Eyes embrace the elusive quality that has made them so enduring and influential across generations and genres, bringing their homespun sound from an Omaha bedroom to devoted audiences around the world. In Oberst’s songwriting lies a promise that our loneliest thoughts and feelings can take on grander shapes when passed between friends, blasted through speakers, or shouted among crowds. This time around, the band invites such like-minded voices onto the record with them, with notable guest appearances from Cat Power (“All Threes”), The National’s Matt Berninger (“The Time I Have Left”), and Alex Orange Drink, the frontman of the New York punk band The So So Glos, who co-wrote several songs and shares a climactic verse in the surging “Rainbow Overpass.”

When they hit the studio with Oberst’s longtime bandmates—the multiinstrumentalist and producer Mike Mogis, the keyboardist and arranger Nate Walcott—they opted for a fast-paced approach that drew inspiration from formative influences like The Replacements and Frank Black. They sought textures that burst from the mix like gnarly splashes of paint on a blank canvas; they opted for first takes and spontaneous decisions. Five Dice, All Threes thrashes and squirms and resists classification. In the brilliant expanse of “El Capitan,” they blend a galloping rhythm you might find in a Johnny Cash standard with a swell of funereal horns, shouted vocals, and lyrics that read like a sobering farewell between twin souls. “So they’re burning you an effigy,” Oberst sings. “Well, that happens to me all the time!”

For every striking turn in his lyrics, the band knows just how to complement him. On one level, Five Dice, All Threes may be the most fun album in the Bright Eyes catalog, filled with singalong hooks and buzzing performances.

And yet, sitting alongside these adrenalized rockers that sound beamed in directly from the garage, you will find contemplative, psychedelic material like the heartbreaking “Tiny Suicides” and “All Threes,” a song whose jazzy piano solo and free-associative lyrics feel totally unprecedented in the Bright Eyes catalog.

As per usual, the music comes loaded with subtext that invites deep listening—the signature touch of a band who has always honored the album as its own exalted work of art. In the game of threes, the titular move would indicate a perfect roll. Perfection, however, means something different in the world of Bright Eyes, where our flaws are what grants us authority and finding meaning is only possible if we bear witness to the dark, winding journey to get there. On Five Dice, All Threes, Bright Eyes embrace these beliefs with music that feels thrillingly alive, as if we were all in the room with them, shouting along and gaining the strength to move forward together. It doesn’t just sound like classic Bright Eyes. It sounds like their future, too.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Conor Oberst's voice is as distinctive as his compositions, so there would really be no point pretending to anyone that there is something radically different going on here, but the distinctive folky swing of Bright Eyes' work, collectively is as on point here as it's ever been. Broad strokes of clashing guitar and frantic perucssion tempered with a basecoat of reflective minimalism.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Five Dice
2. Bells And Whistles
3. El Capitan
4. Bas Jan Ader
5. Tiny Suicides

SIDE B
6. All Threes
7. Rainbow Overpass
8. Hate
9. Real Feel 105°

SIDE C
10. Spun Out
11. Trains Still Run On Time
12. The Time I Have Left
13. Tin Soldier Boy

'Hole Erth', Chaz Bear’s eighth full-length studio record as Toro y Moi, is the genre shapeshifter’s most unexpected and bold vmove to date, with Bear diving headlong into rap-rock, Soundcloud rap and Y2K emo. The album blitzes anthemic pop-punk next to autotuned, melancholic rap – two genres that inform one another now more than ever before - and packs in the most features ever on a Toro y Moi album.

A sense of nostalgia sneaks its way into almost every Toro y Moi release, but angst is an emotion that Bear has never intentionally explored the way he does here. Tracks like 'Tuesday' channel a specific, yet forever-relatable sense of adolescent unease. A distorted guitar riff leads into a repeating chorus that conjures misunderstood teenagers singing aloud, maybe too loud, while riding bikes through American suburbs. This foreboding can also be heard on 'HOV', though not without poking some fun with lines like “Romance is so cold / My advice? To bring a coat.”

Bear has the energy, but is acutely aware that his energy isn’t forever. At a time when the internet is blending multiple genres into one at an increasingly rapid pace, Bear accomplishes the rare feat of keeping up with the contemporary alternative listener. Constantly changing, evolving and experimenting is the heart of Toro y Moi, and on 'Hole Erth' Bear challenges but also reclaims himself, embracing the myriad sounds and eras that formed him, while crashing new worlds together

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There's always been an unknown element to Toro Y Moi's music, with his diverse sound palette always beautifully fluid, but on 'Hole Erth' we get a move into directions previously unvisited. It's got an echo of Princess Nokia's about-turn into emo-rap on the non-sequiteur 'A girl In Red' but with a more languid, euphoric remnant of Toro Y Moi's core sound. Lovely stuff.

TRACK LISTING

1. Walking In The Rain
2. CD-R
3. HOV
4. Tuesday
5. Hollywood (feat. Benjamin Gibbard)
6. Reseda (feat. Duckwrth And Elijah Kessler)
7. Babydaddy
8. Madonna (feat. Don Toliver)
9. Undercurrent (feat. Don Toliver And Porches)
10. Off Road
11. Smoke (feat. Kenny Mason)
12. Heaven (feat. Kevin Abstract & Lev)
13. Starlink (feat. Glaive)

Cassandra Jenkins is quite simply one of the best songwriter-storytellers currently making music. Hers is a specific and singular corner of the Great American Songwriters, artists like David Berman, Adrianne Lenker, Jeff Tweedy and Sufjan Stevens. They’re artists connected by a sense of immediacy, not just in the writing – which is precise, evocative, brutal at times, pitch-back funny right when you need it – but by their delivery, by the way they sing with an immersive, total belief that carries you through their songs. These are the artists and songs that sneak up and really live with us forever, and on My Light, My Destroyer, Jenkins joins their ranks.

What’s most remarkable about My Light, My Destroyer is it captures an artist at an exciting leap in her evolution. So much about the album feels of-a-kind with its predecessors; field recordings and found sound permeate, narrative songwriting crashes into heady, swirling compositions. Jenkins sings with what can only be described as a powerwhisper (think Sufjan Stevens, Annie Lennox, Margo Timmins or YHF-era Tweedy), her vocals up close and intimate but subtly confrontational. But it all feels bigger here, more finely honed, bolder and richer than her previous work and than her peers. Born and raised in New York City, Jenkins has been touring and performing since she was a child, self-releasing her early recordings before releasing breakthrough An Overview on Phenomenal Nature in 2021. On My Light, My Destroyer, many of the songs are devoted to specific feelings, and to really getting inside those feelings as opposed to getting inside a narrative arc. Lead single “Only one” is one example, as Jenkins’s asserts that a moment, or a song, can be wholly myopic; it can embody a singular feeling, and provides no answers.

Songs like Devotion, Delphinium Blue, Clams Casino, Echo, and Only One, speak to the liberating quality of focused observation, even to the point of disillusionment. “There’s this idea about disillusionment that I’ve held onto,” she says. “I really appreciate disillusionment as a process to discover new, unexpected outcomes. We let go of expectations this way. Expectations hold us back. It’s easy to focus on jadedness or disappointment but I actually see it more as freedom.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There is definitely something otherworldly about Cassandra Jenkins' newest LP, with her airy melodies and deep instrumentation bringing to mind jazzy downbeat classics like Air's Moon Safari or Massive Attack's Mezzanine. With Jenkins' indescribable ability to segue seamlessly between genres however, it ends up far away from either of those two. A beautiful, whimsical ode to life in the city, and a great listen to boot.

TRACK LISTING

1. Devotion
2. Clams Casino
3. Delphinium Blue
4. Shatner’s Theme
5. Aurora, IL
6. Betelgeuse

“Into The Blue is the clearest portrait of who I am as an artist. It’s me through and through,” says multi-instrumentalist Aaron Frazer. A daring blend of soul, psychedelia, spaghetti western, disco, gospel and hip-hop, Into the Blue represents the impressive range of Frazer’s sonic talents. Frazer maintains the unmistakable falsetto and classic songwriting he’s known for, but plants Into the Blue firmly in the now with a hip-hop mentality at its core, weaving together genres and production techniques to form something new.

Into The Blue was conceived, like so many classic records, out of actual heartbreak. Frazer moved cross-country from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and embarked on a journey that’s reflected in the album’s themes of grief, loneliness, and searching for healing. “Into The Blue really means heading into the unknown. That has been the last year of my life and I’m still in the blue,” Frazer explains. “But there are also songs here that celebrate love and the giddiness of a new relationship and all that. That’s part of a breakup to me, processing the whole thing, remembering the things that were right as much as the things that were wrong.”

Frazer wrote on every track and played several live instruments on the album. The title track, “Into The Blue”, is a haunting, resolute anthem, combining cinematic strings and tough-as-nails breakbeats as Frazer heads west. “Here I go, to a place where the broken heart knows,” he sings. “It’s all I can do. Back into the blue.” “Payback” is an explosive dancefloor heater, featuring shimmering tambourines and driving bass lines. Northern soul drums meet snarling fuzz guitar, hurdling towards its epic conclusion.

The album features moments of towering arrangements, recalling David Axelrod and Ennio Merricone, balanced by rawness, incorporating iPhone recordings and one-take vocals. For Into the Blue, Frazer enlisted Grammy-winner Alex Goose as coproducer, known for his crate-digging samples and collaborations with hip-hop artists like Freddie Gibbs, Madlib and Brockhampton. Frazer also experimented with samples for the first time on a record, drawing from unexpected sources like 90s R&B group Hi-Five. Though Into the Blue is born out of heartbreak, Frazer hopes it leaves listeners with a sense of optimism. “You know, you can still laugh on a day when you’re grieving,” he says, “there’s no peaks without valleys,” he says, but Into The Blue sees Aaron Frazer at new heights.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A beautiful, swinging selection of psychedelic ballads and shimmering poppy numbers. The title track is a particular delight, bringing to mind Morricone as much as it does Morcheeba or Khruangbin. A perfectly produced melting pot.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1) Thinking Of You
2) Into The Blue
3) Fly Away
4) Payback
5) Dime Feat. Cancamusa
6) Perfect Strangers

Side B
7) Time Will Tell
8) I Don’t Wanna Stay
9) Play On
10) Easy To Love
11) The Fool

Khruangbin’s fourth studio album, A La Sala (“To the Room” in Spanish), is an exercise in returning in order to go further, and doing so on your own terms. It continues the mystery and sanctity that is the key to how bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson, Jr. and guitarist Mark “Marko” Speer approach music. If 2020’s Mordechai, the last studio LP Khruangbin made without collaborators, was a party record that enhanced the band’s musical reputation far and wide, then A La Sala is the measured morning after. It’s a gorgeously airy record completed only in the company of the group’s longtime engineer Steve Christensen, with minimal overdubs. It’s a window onto the bounties powering Khruangbin’s vision, a reimagining and refueling for the long haul ahead. A La Sala scales Khruangbin down to scale up, a creative strategy with the future in mind.

The trio’s collective musical DNA, the years spent constructing it in Houston’s local-meets-global cultural stew, ensures the band continues to sound like no one but itself. A cascade of crisp melodies emanates from Marko’s reverb-heavy electric, dancing gently around Laura Lee’s minimalist almost-dub bass triangles, while DJ’s drums serve as the tightened-up pocket and unwavering dance-floor on which all this movement takes place. Yet there’s a freshness to A La Sala’s instrumental interactivity, less concerned with getting further out than going deeper in, a profound desire to celebrate the world’s external wonders. Where prior albums strived towards music’s polyglot edges, such inquiries now sound like beloved intimacies. Here, Khruangbin’s sonic touch-points — whether spaghetti-western film scores (on “Fifteen Fifty-Three”), West African discos (on “Pon Pón”), G-funk fantasias (“Todavía Viva”), living room dancing moments (the first single, “A Love International”), or even ambient found-sounds (on “Farolim de Felgueiras and throughout the album”) — are ingrained characteristics. This is who they are! Unique and huge (and growing), ambitious and driven.

Khruangbin’s aspirations and commitment to playful creativity even extends to A La Sala’s vinyl packages, of which there will be seven distinctive covers and color-sets. Designed by the band using Marko’s multitude of travelog photos, the images are windows from the band’s living room onto a set of daydreams, scenes of impossible skies, external glances that illuminate what is going on inside. Each cover image comes with a matching color vinyl. These too are all about looking out and looking back, in order to better look ahead.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The inimitable Khruangbin bring us another slice of beautifully rendered, loungey ambient jazz. Swimming with atmosphere and as perfectly performed as you'd expect from the Texan trio. Beautifully evocative and warmly hazy instrumental business.

TRACK LISTING

1.Fifteen Fifty-Three
2.May Ninth
3.Ada Jean
4.Farolim De Felgueiras
5.Pon Pón
6.Todavía Viva
7.Juegos Y Nubes
8.Hold Me Up (Thank You)
9.Caja De La Sala
10.Three From Two
11.A Love International
12.Les Petits Gris

The temptation to mythologize Bill Fay can be overwhelming; Fay was, for decades, as prolific as he was under-appreciated. Fay’s unsung-hero status has changed slowly, steadily, on the order of almost twenty-five years. With each new album comes new hosannas and evangelizers — Jeff Tweedy, Kevin Morby, Adam Granduciel and Julia Jacklin, to name just a few.

The Bill Fay Group, in particular, is Fay’s most significant collaborative work; he records as a member of a larger group here, and the result summons a grander sonic scale, an elegent counterweight to Fay’s instincts for the understated. Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow brings to bear the galactic qualities of early rock, the intricacy of jazz improv, and Fay’s earthy folk magic.

Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow has a patchy release history: recorded between 1978 and 1981, it was not released until 2005, when it appeared on CD with limited streaming and no vinyl companion. A 2006 reissue brought the album onto vinyl but with a truncated sequence and nine song missing. Now, finally, Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow arrives in full worldwide. Available on streaming services worldwide and pressed to a double-album vinyl edition, it features the album’s original 22 songs and includes rare and previously unseen photographs from Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow’s original recording session.

In the words of Gary Smith and Rauf Galip, missing Bill Stratton, and abbreviated from the forthcoming album notes:

We chose five songs to record as finished pieces: Life, Spiritual Mansions, Cosmic Boxer, Strange Stairway, Isles of Sleep, all recorded in two studio sessions. We sent them out to try and get a record deal. There were few really independent labels back then and Punk was in the record labels’ ears. No deal.

And now, Dead Oceans who have a lot of faith in Bill’s music wants to re- release the ‘Tomorrow’ album. A double vinyl package. Is there any more unreleased music for the fourth side? Of course. So, we’ve been opening old boxes, finding CDRs, cassettes, a musical archaeological dig. This is our choice from all the music we found.

TRACK LISTING

DISC 1 SIDE A:
1. Strange Stairway
2. Spiritual Mansions
3. Planet Earth Daytime
4. Goodnight Stan
5. Tomorrow Tomorrow And Tomorrow
DISC 1 SIDE B:
1. Just A Moon
2. To Be A Part
3. Sam
4. Lamp Shining
5. Turning The Pages
6. Love Is The Tune
7. After The Revolution
8. Jericho Road
9. Strange Stairway (Demo)
10. Birdman (Bonus Track)

DISC 2 SIDE A:
1. Life
2. Hypocrite
3. Man
4. Cosmic Boxer
5. We Are Raised
6. Isle Of Sleep
DISC 3 SIDE B:
1. Coming Down
2. Hypocrite (Demo)
3. Spiritual Mansions (Demo)
4. Cosmic Boxer (Alternate Version)
5. The Coast No Man Can Tell (Bonus Track)
6. Man (Take 1)
7. When We Set Sail (Bonus Track)

Khruangbin’s series of live LPs traces just one small slice of the band’s flight plan through the years: it’s a taste of some of their most beloved cities, stages and nights. Each release comes with a limited-edition unique album cover exclusive for the recording’s home turf, just a little something extra for the fans that bring a little something extra. Across five releases, this series ignites both sides of Khruangbin’s magic: the warm, prismatic feeling of their albums and the bewitching energy of their performances. Closing out this collection, Live at Sydney Opera House is a double LP of front-toback Khruangbin. Here, career-spanning songs like “A Calf Born in Winter”, “Maria También”, “So We Won’t Forget”, “Shida” and “Friday Morning” arrive in their full interplanetary glory, recorded at one of the most celebrated venues on earth, the Sydney Opera House.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Continuing on from the striking visual aesthetic of the rest of the Khrangbin Live series, 'The Pink One' sees K-Bin performing a set of songs, perfectly at the legendary Sydney Opera House and here you too can feel like you were there. Lovely stuff.

THE PICCADILLY RECORDS ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2023.

Everything Is Alive, Slowdive’s 5th record, is exactly what the title suggests: an exploration into the shimmering nature of life and the universal touch points within it.

While there are parts of this record that could sit neatly next to the atmospheric quality of 1995’s Pygmalion; everything is alive also manages to break down the boundaries of what’s come before it. Spanning psychedelic soundscapes, pulsating 80’s electronic elements and John Cale inspired journeys, the album lands immediately as something made for 2023 and beyond.

For a genre that is often thought of as divisive, and often warrants introspection, here Slowdive show their craft as the masters of it by pushing it outwards, beyond the singular; the end result being a record which feels as emotional and cathartic as it is hopeful.

STAFF COMMENTS

Liam says: When Slowdive returned in 2014, there was a real sense of jubilation and satisfaction that the shoegaze legends were finally getting their well deserved dues and plaudits. However in the years following their return, the world's landscape changed significantly. Not just on a global scale, but also on a personal level for members of the band. 'everything is alive' was born during a heavy period of grief, which can be felt on the closer “The Slab” - a visceral and overwhelming wall of sound that you just want to crawl into for solace and to escape the troubles of the world.
Despite these moments of sadness, there is real artistry in the way Slowdive manages to reflect on the human experience and how we navigate it throughout our lives. This in turn results in an absolute marvel of a record, with some of Slowdive's best work to date. Opener “Shanty” is an all-consuming shoegaze epic of colossal proportions, whilst the gorgeous “Prayer Remembered” is an atmospheric slice of ambient perfection that harks back to Slowdive's 1990 debut EP. The dreamy ”Alife” swirls amongst Rachel Goswell's ethereal vocals, which is then followed by the stripped back and vulnerable delivery of Neil Halstead on the exquisite and delicate “Andalucia Plays”. Then there's “Kisses”, the album's most 'pop' moment but also one of its best. Finally, we have the woozy headiness of “Skin In The Game” and the synth led and almost post-rock “Chained To A Cloud”, both of which just further emphasise the greatness of 'everything is alive'.
With 'everything is alive', Slowdive are well and truly full of life. Whilst their 2017 self-titled felt like a celebration of their legacy, the poignancy and beauty of 'everything is alive' feels like Slowdive never left and we hope they stay with us forever.

TRACK LISTING

1. Shanty
2. Prayer Remembered
3. Alife
4. Andalucia Plays
5. Kisses
6. Skin In The Game
7. Chained To A Cloud
8.. The Slab

Kevin Morby writes (and records, and imagines) at an almost incomparable clip, and his most recent album, This Is A Photograph, studies life, time and mortality through myriad lenses. It’s a dynamic, buoyant record on big, heavy themes, so it only makes sense that Morby found he wasn’t quite done with it on its completion. More Photographs (A Continuum) finds new nooks, corners and vantage points. “If This Is A Photograph is a house that you have been living inside of,” says Morby, “then More Photographs is, perhaps, the same home just experienced differently. As if you, its inhabitant, have taken a tab of something psychedelic and now, suddenly, you’ve replaced your eyeglasses with kaleidoscopes.”

Here, Morby returns to his landmark album’s bottomless themes with new wisdom, new imagination, and the winking, looping callbacks that tie his full body of work together in uniquely special ways. “Everything you once thought was familiar,” he continues, “suddenly appears differently, shifting shapes, color and sonic landscapes.” “Five Easy Pieces Revisited” captures the same moment from Bobby’s point of view; “This Is A Photograph II” takes a similar tact, revisiting its predecessor from a different angle. “Triumph” explores more of the myths and deaths that surround Memphis, TN, this time inspired by Big Star’s Chris Bell. And “Kingdom Of Hearts” arrives as an origin story to both This Is A Photograph and its new companion.

“With every collection of songs,” says Morby, “I feel I must cast them out of me before moving onto the next project, and here I knew that what I had begun with This Is A Photograph was not finished. Releasing this collection is my tying a bow on that time and place in my creative life.” With a luxurious nine tracks – three re-imaginings and six brand new songs – More Photographs (A Continuum) is prequel, sequel and primer to an already rich and generous record from one of our most luminous modern songwriters.

STAFF COMMENTS

Martin says: I'm a big fan of Kevin Morby, so when I saw that he was continuing to create music in the same sound world as last years' 'This Is A Photograph', I was delighted. More washes of blissful guitar, euphoric harmonies and rich slide swells. More gold from Kevin Morby.

TRACK LISTING

1) This Is A Photograph II
2) Triumph
3) Bittersweet, Tennessee
4) Going To Prom
5) Lion Tamer

SIDE B
6) A Song For Katie
7) Five Easy Pieces Revisited
8) Mickey Mantle’s Autograph
9) Kingdom Of Broken Hearts

Bright Eyes’ Christmas Album begins with a piano, flute, ambient noise, and musical saw-driven version of “Away in a Manger,” helping weed out casual Christmas music enjoyers, but all too tempting for the most devout of Conor Oberst’s disciples, who originally learned that the warmth of the holiday season is trumped only by its potential for melancholy back in 2002 with the original Saddle Creek release. Oberst and a small army of friends at his house proceed to jamboree through Christmas classics like “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem,” Holiday cheer, when delivered with Oberst’s trademark tremble, sounds more like a lament than it does hymns of ecclesiastical joy. But the spirited listener will find that the fragile, homespun, and somewhat blinkered vibe that permeates the album sets itself apart from the bog-standard, less sonically humble offerings of the holidays, and, both strangely and satisfyingly, is probably more aligned with the true spirit of the season.

TRACK LISTING

1) Away In A Manger
2) Blue Christmas
3) Oh Little Town Of Bethlehem
4) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
5) The First Noel
6) Little Drummer Boy
7) White Christmas
8) Silent Night
9) Silver Bells
10) Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
11) The Night Before Christmas

Toro y Moi’s ‘Sandhills’ is both a tender love letter to Chaz Bear’s hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, and a poignant, bittersweet acceptance that one can never really go back home. Recalling Sufjan’s ‘Seven Swans’ or Karen O’s soundtrack work for ‘Where The Wild Things Are,’ these loping folk-pop songs are themselves a sort of Saturn return, reminiscent of Bear’s first handmade CD-Rs as Toro y Moi. Bear gave them out to friends in the earliest days of the moniker, the releases stuffed in the Case Logic visor of their cars, and each listen brings a little more of that detail to life: the mall after which ‘Sandhills’ is named; the teenaged friends spending aimless hours there, full of big ennui and bigger dreams; the late-capitalist decline and empty big box stores of Sandhills today. Chaz Bear, Toro y Moi, is now a globally beloved indie[1]pop icon. But ‘Sandhills’, with its banjo and lap steel flourishes and its wide-eyes wonder, concedes that you never quite totally rid yourself of those adolescent blues. You might just, if you’re lucky, develop better mechanisms (or delusions!) with which to handle them. ‘Sidelines’ tells the tale of aesthete putting himself through the high school football gauntlet. And the title track has subtle allusions to growing up a Black art kid in the American South: “saved again by calamine/ another bite/ this happens time to time/ i’m spotted white/ maybe it’s just where i’m from/ i always had my guard up/ but hypocrites keep strollin in/ and rubbin on my shoulder”. Even the closing novelty track “Said Goodbye To Rock n Roll” has all the makings of a Chris Stapleton hit if you just to squint a little. Clear eyes, full hearts, sweet jams, can’t lose. Lyrically deft and deceptively heartbreaking, ‘Sandhills’ may be a brief pit stop between grand statements from Bear, but it’s brimming with rust, guts, big moods and love.

TRACK LISTING

1) Back Then
2) Sidelines
3) Sandhills
4) The View
5) Said Goodbye To Rock N Roll

It's only fitting that Khruangbin’s first-ever official live releases would be double albums paired with their tourmates: artists whose music they love and admire, friends who’ve become family along the way. Khruangbin’s ‘Live At’ series of live LPs traces just one small slice of the band’s flight plan through the years: it’s a taste of some of their most beloved cities, stages and nights. Each release comes with a limited-edition unique album cover exclusive for the recording’s home turf, just a little something extra for the fans that bring a little something extra. Most of all, Khruangbin’s ‘Live at’ series ignites both sides of the band’s magic: the warm, prismatic feeling of their albums and the bewitching energy of their performances.

‘Live at The Fillmore Miami’ features performances by Toro Y Moi and Khruangbin.

Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what’s truly hers, what can’t be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. “The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” Mitski says. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she’s gone. Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land.

“This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. In this album, which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star.

The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Mitski turns her considerable talents away from the confessional intensity and jagged production of 2018's 'Be The Cowboy' and brings us her own unique version of country music. Full of wry confessionals, intimate diarising and her unmistakable, beautiful vocals.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
01 Bug Like An Angel
02 Buffalo Replaced
03 Heaven
04 I Don’t Like My Mind
05 The Deal

SIDE B:
06 When Memories Snow
07 My Love Mine All Mine
08 The Frost
09 Star
10 I’m Your Man
11 I Love Me After You

Everything Is Alive, Slowdive’s 5th record, is exactly what the title suggests: an exploration into the shimmering nature of life and the universal touch points within it.

While there are parts of this record that could sit neatly next to the atmospheric quality of 1995’s Pygmalion; everything is alive also manages to break down the boundaries of what’s come before it. Spanning psychedelic soundscapes, pulsating 80’s electronic elements and John Cale inspired journeys, the album lands immediately as something made for 2023 and beyond.

For a genre that is often thought of as divisive, and often warrants introspection, here Slowdive show their craft as the masters of it by pushing it outwards, beyond the singular; the end result being a record which feels as emotional and cathartic as it is hopeful.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Hallelujah! The Kings and Queens of Shoegaze return with a beautiful record which feels like everything you'd want from a new Slowdive LP. It ticks all the boxes. Everything they've done rolled into one blissed-out dream. It's brilliant!

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Shanty
2. Prayer Remembered
3. Alife
4. Andalucia Plays
SIDE B:
5. Kisses
6. Skin In The Game
7. Chained To A Cloud
8.. The Slab

It's only fitting that Khruangbin’s first-ever official live releases would be double albums paired with their tourmates: artists whose music they love and admire, friends who’ve become family along the way. Khruangbin’s ‘Live At’ series of live LPs traces just one small slice of the band’s flight plan through the years: it’s a taste of some of their most beloved cities, stages and nights. Each release comes with a limited-edition unique album cover exclusive for the recording’s home turf, just a little something extra for the fans that bring a little something extra. Most of all, Khruangbin’s ‘Live at’ series ignites both sides of the band’s magic: the warm, prismatic feeling of their albums and the bewitching energy of their performances.

‘Live at RBC Echo Beach’ features performances by Men I Trust and Khruangbin.

STAFF COMMENTS

Liam says: Next up in the Khruangbin 'Live At' series and it's a banger. Side A is a lovely slice a dreamy indie pop from shop faves Men I Trust, whilst the flip side has Khruangbin heading for the stratosphere in a funk fueled dub rocket - mega stuff!!

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Men I Trust: Sugar
2. Men I Trust: All Night
3. Men I Trust: Seven
4. Men I Trust: Show Me How
5. Men I Trust: Say Can You Hear

SIDE B:
1. Khruangbin: Dern Kala
2. Khruangbin: Lady And Man
3. Khruangbin: Evan Finds The Third Room
4. Khruangbin: White Gloves

It's only fitting that Khruangbin’s first ever official live releases would be double albums paired with their tourmates: artists whose music they love and admire, friends who’ve become family along the way. Khruangbin’s ‘Live At’ series of live LPs traces just one small slice of the band’s flight plan through the years: it’s a taste of some of their most beloved cities, stages and nights. Each release comes with a limited- edition unique album cover exclusive for the recording’s home turf, just a little something extra for the fans that bring a little something extra. Most of all, Khruangbin’s ‘Live at’ series ignites both sides of the band’s magic: the warm, prismatic feeling of their albums and the bewitching energy of their performances.

‘Live at Radio City Music Hall’ features performances by Nubya Garcia and Khruangbin.

One of the things that struck Oberst as he and the band went through twenty-plus years of music is that he may in fact have been writing the same song this whole time. Not sonically, of course, but conceptually. This last wave contains, in Noise Floor, early Bright Eyes songs so raw Oberst never even released them back in the day, as well as, in Cassadaga and The People’s Key, the band’s most polished and sophisticated albums. When Bright Eyes toured Cassadega they performed an epic 7 sold-out nights at NYC’s Town Hall. What’s more grown-up rock- star than that? And yet ...“Thematically those early songs are not that different than the songs I make now,” Oberst says, shaking his head. “There’s something affirming and disheartening about it. It’s like, have I really changed or grown? But maybe it’s just that I knew what I wanted to write about from the beginning.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Mirrors And Fevers
2. I Will Be Grateful For This Day
3. Trees Get Wheeled Away
4. Drunk Kid Catholic
5. Spent On Rainy Days
6. The Vanishing Act
7. Soon You Will Be Leaving Your Man
8. Blue Angels Air Show
9. Weather Reports
10. Seashell Tale
11. Bad Blood
12. Amy In The White Coat
13. Devil Town
14. I’ve Been Eating (For You)
15. Happy Birthday To Me (February 15)
16. Motion Sickness
17. Act Of Contrition
18. Hungry For A Holiday
19. When The Curious Girl Realizes She Is Under Glass Again
20. Entry Way Song
21. It’s Cool, We Can Still Be Friends

One of the things that struck Oberst as he and the band went through twenty-plus years of music is that he may in fact have been writing the same song this whole time. Not sonically, of course, but conceptually. This last wave contains, in Noise Floor, early Bright Eyes songs so raw Oberst never even released them back in the day, as well as, in Cassadaga and The People’s Key, the band’s most polished and sophisticated albums. When Bright Eyes toured Cassadega they performed an epic 7 sold-out nights at NYC’s Town Hall. What’s more grown-up rock- star than that? And yet ...“Thematically those early songs are not that different than the songs I make now,” Oberst says, shaking his head. “There’s something affirming and disheartening about it. It’s like, have I really changed or grown? But maybe it’s just that I knew what I wanted to write about from the beginning.

TRACK LISTING

1. Firewall
2. Shell Games
3. Jejune Stars
4. Approximate Sunlight
5. Haile Sellassie
6. A Machine Spiritual (In The People’s Key)
7. Triple Spiral
8. Beginner’s Mind
9. Ladder Song
10. One For You, One For Me

One of the things that struck Oberst as he and the band went through twenty-plus years of music is that he may in fact have been writing the same song this whole time. Not sonically, of course, but conceptually. This last wave contains, in Noise Floor, early Bright Eyes songs so raw Oberst never even released them back in the day, as well as, in Cassadaga and The People’s Key, the band’s most polished and sophisticated albums. When Bright Eyes toured Cassadega they performed an epic 7 sold-out nights at NYC’s Town Hall. What’s more grown-up rock- star than that? And yet ...“Thematically those early songs are not that different than the songs I make now,” Oberst says, shaking his head. “There’s something affirming and disheartening about it. It’s like, have I really changed or grown? But maybe it’s just that I knew what I wanted to write about from the beginning.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Clairaudients (Kill Or Be Killed)
2. Four Winds
3. If The Brakeman Turns My Way
4. Hot Knives
5. Make A Plan To Love Me
6. Soul Singer In A Session Band
7. Classic Cars
8. Middleman
9. Cleanse Song
10. No One Would Riot For Less
11. Coat Check Dream Song
12. I Must Belong Somewhere
13. Lime Tree

One of the things that struck Oberst as he and the band went through twenty-plus years of music is that he may in fact have been writing the same song this whole time. Not sonically, of course, but conceptually. This last wave contains, in Noise Floor, early Bright Eyes songs so raw Oberst never even released them back in the day, as well as, in Cassadaga and The People’s Key, the band’s most polished and sophisticated albums. When Bright Eyes toured Cassadega they performed an epic 7 sold-out nights at NYC’s Town Hall. What’s more grown-up rock- star than that? And yet ...“Thematically those early songs are not that different than the songs I make now,” Oberst says, shaking his head. “There’s something affirming and disheartening about it. It’s like, have I really changed or grown? But maybe it’s just that I knew what I wanted to write about from the beginning.

TRACK LISTING

1. Jejune Stars (Companion Version)
2. Firewall (Companion Version)
3. When You Were Mine
4. Approximate Sunlight (Companion Version)
5. A Machine Spiritual (The People’s Key) (Companion Version)
6. Beginner’s Mind (Companion Version)

One of the things that struck Oberst as he and the band went through twenty-plus years of music is that he may in fact have been writing the same song this whole time. Not sonically, of course, but conceptually. This last wave contains, in Noise Floor, early Bright Eyes songs so raw Oberst never even released them back in the day, as well as, in Cassadaga and The People’s Key, the band’s most polished and sophisticated albums. When Bright Eyes toured Cassadega they performed an epic 7 sold-out nights at NYC’s Town Hall. What’s more grown-up rock- star than that? And yet ...“Thematically those early songs are not that different than the songs I make now,” Oberst says, shaking his head. “There’s something affirming and disheartening about it. It’s like, have I really changed or grown? But maybe it’s just that I knew what I wanted to write about from the beginning.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Nunca Seré Feliz Otra Vez (Companion Version)
2. The Vanishing Act (Companion Version)
3. Soon You Will Be Leaving Your Man (Companion Version)
4. Blue Angels Air Show (Companion Version)
5. I Will Be Grateful For This Day (Companion Version)
6. Motion Sickness (Companion Version)
7. I Won’t Ever Be Happy Again (Companion Version)

One of the things that struck Oberst as he and the band went through twenty-plus years of music is that he may in fact have been writing the same song this whole time. Not sonically, of course, but conceptually. This last wave contains, in Noise Floor, early Bright Eyes songs so raw Oberst never even released them back in the day, as well as, in Cassadaga and The People’s Key, the band’s most polished and sophisticated albums. When Bright Eyes toured Cassadega they performed an epic 7 sold-out nights at NYC’s Town Hall. What’s more grown-up rock- star than that? And yet ...“Thematically those early songs are not that different than the songs I make now,” Oberst says, shaking his head. “There’s something affirming and disheartening about it. It’s like, have I really changed or grown? But maybe it’s just that I knew what I wanted to write about from the beginning.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Clairaudients (Kill Or Be Killed) (Companion Version)
2. Middleman (Companion Version)
3. Coat Check Dream Song (Companion Version)
4. (Companion Version)
5. I Must Belong Somewhere (Companion Version)
6. Napoleon’s Hat (Companion Version)
7. Wrecking Bal

It’s only fitting that Khruangbin’s first ever official live releases would be double albums paired with their tourmates: artists whose music they love and admire, friends who’ve become family along the way. Khruangbin’s ‘Live At’ series of live LPs traces just one small slice of the band’s flight plan through the years: it’s a taste of some of their most beloved cities, stages and nights. Each release comes with a limited edition unique album cover exclusive for the recording’s home turf, just a little something extra for the fans that bring a little something extra. Most of all, Khruangbin’s ‘Live at’ series ignites both sides of the band’s magic: the warm, prismatic feeling of their albums and the bewitching energy of their performances.

‘Live at Stubbs’ features performances by Kelly Doyle, Ruben Moreno, The Suffers and Robert Ellis and Khruangbin.

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
1. Kelly Doyle: Woman Trouble
2. Ruben Moreno: At The Trailride
3. The Suffers: Don’t Bother Me
4. Robert Ellis: Nobody Smokes Anymore
5. Khruangbin: Blind Man Can See It / (It’s Not The Express) It’s The Monaurail
6. Khruangbin: Bin Bin
Side B:
1. Khruangbin: Friday Morning
2. Khruangbin: Number 4
3. Khruangbin: People Everywhere (Still Alive

Durand Jones’s Wait ‘Til I Get Over is a memoir and a love letter. It is the story of Jones’s life, his growth and revelations, the wisdom of his hometown and the wisdom he could only gain once he left. In it, he writes through Hillaryville’s contradictions: the pristine beauty and the ragged roads; his teenage desire to leave and his adult desire to honor his tangled roots; the plantation history and the ups and downs of the Black community that made homes of this reparation town. “Hometowns have a way of keeping a part of you,” says Jones, “and if I’m making something young-me would be proud of, Hillaryville is a big part of that.” Jones finds something transformative in his memories there and the life he has led since, ultimately claiming and embracing his whole self.

The result is vulnerable, personal, touching on Jones’s relationship to church life, to his mother, to his queerness, to his worth. “I wish I could tell my younger self ‘you don’t have to stick to the dreams people have for you,’” says Jones, “’you can dream bigger. You are more than capable, you are more than able. I think about some nerdy punk kid in the rural south who needs to hear that now.’” Wait ‘Til I Get Over does exactly that.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Jones' solo endeavour here shows echoes of the deep American Soul his 'Durand Jones & The Indications' project is rich with, but filled with a warm, excited, and mildly chaotic jubilance. There are uplifting moments of gospel euphoria and brittle, soulful minimalism but always with Jones's impeccable songwriting style and unmistakeable voice.

TRACK LISTING

1. Gerri Marie
2. The Place You’d Most Want
To Live (Interlude)
3. Lord Have Mercy
4. Sadie
5. I Want You
6. Wait Til I Get Over
7. That Feeling
8. See It Through (Interlude)
9. See It Through
10. Someday We’ll All Be
Free (feat. Skypp)
11. Letter To My 17 Year Old Self
12. Secrets

A gorgeous and gripping portrait of Fenne’s last two years, Big Picture was pieced together in an effort to self-soothe. Tracked live in co-producer Brad Cook’s North Carolina studio, the album delineates the phases of love and becomes a map of comfort vs claustrophobia. Though its creation took place amid personal and global turmoil, the ruminative yet candid Big Picture is Fenne’s most cohesive, resolute work to date, both lyrically and sonically. “This isn’t a sad album — it’s about as uplifting as my way of doing things will allow,” she says. “These songs explore worry and doubt and letting go, but those themes are framed brightly.” With confidence and quiet strength, each track provides an insight into Fenne’s ever-changing view of love and, ultimately, its redefinition — love as a process, not something to be lost and found.

While the album was written alone in Fenne’s Bristol flat – a fact intentionally reflected in its compact sonic quality – Big Picture was transformed from a solitary venture into a unifying collaboration during the recording process when she was joined by her touring band, Melina Dutere of Jay Som (mixing), Christian Lee Hutson (guitar and co production), and Katy Kirby (vocals). Notably, these 10 songs are Fenne’s first and only to have been written over the course of a relationship; 2018’s On Hold and 2020’s Breach both confront the pain of retrospection, saying goodbye to a love that’s gone. Big Picture does the exact opposite — rooted firmly in the present, it traces the narrative of two people trying their hardest not to implode, together. “This album is an observation of the way I think about love, the self[1]examination that comes with closeness and the responsibilities involved in being a big part of someone else’s small(er) world,” summarizes Fenne. “It was written in a place of relative emotional stability – stability that felt unstable because of its newness, but also because of the global context. 2020 was the year of letting go, but we’d all already let go of so much and nothing felt like mine anymore. Writing always did, though, so that’s what I chose to do.”

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1) Map Of Japan
2) Dawncolored Horse
3) Lights Light Up
4) 2+2
5) Superglued
SIDE B:
6) Henry
7) Pick
8) In My Own Time
9) Red Deer Day
10) Half Finished

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/ vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din.

Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything.

The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.”

But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

TRACK LISTING

01. Hot Grass Smell
02. Bull Believer
03. Got Shocked
04. Formula One
05. Chosen To Deserve
06. Bath County
07. Quarry
08. Turkey Vultures
09. What’s So Funny
10. TV In The Gas Pump

In a long and emotionally exhausting year of being inside (alone, in my case,) I have found myself thinking about mirrors. How to avoid spending too much time in them, most days. Taking inventory of the real, physical self is difficult work, work that I’m not entirely opposed to but work that became immediately more treacherous for me when I had to witness the very real toll that time, modern anxieties, isolation, and boredom were taking on me. It was easier, it seemed, to spiral into a not-so-distant glorious past, to use memory as a tool of both excitement and healing. But, speaking of excitement, I like to stumble towards a band with no agenda, no purpose, uncovering sound almost on accident. This is how I first heard Wednesday. The band came to me and I don’t remember how, or why. They simply arrived, as if we’d been traveling toward each other our whole lives.

I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone soaked into my summer of 2020, and in sound, in spirit, in central concerns and the execution of them, it took me back to an era before the current era, which I’d needed at the time. The past can feel less hellish than the present if we are, sometimes, not fully honest with ourselves. There is the trick of nostalgia that I spend a lot of time playing with in my own writing, and somewhat tormented by in my own living. The very real idea that nostalgia is both a useful tool and also a weapon if it isn’t paired with something that approaches a type of rigorous honesty.

But if I may go back to all of these ideas of nostalgia and our old, tricky, past selves that are, indeed, a part of the house of bricks that make up our present self, what I also hope you, listener, might adore about this album is the exact moment at the start of “The Burned Down Dairy Queen” when Karly sings I was hiding in a room in my mind / and I made me take a look at myself. Because if you, like me, have been avoiding mirrors – both metaphorical and real – this is where the album becomes a lighthouse, echoing bright across the darkness of my otherwise dark and empty chambers.

So much of these songs meditate on the past in far less romantic ways than I have found myself meditating on the past, and I was desperate for the recalibration that this album provided. So, yes, the songs are good. You will maybe roll down your windows on a comfortable day on the right stretch of road in a warm season and turn the volume up when “Birthday Song” gets good and loud and singalong-able. You might sit atop a rooftop at night, closer to the moon than you were on the ground, and let “Ghost Of A Dog” churn and rattle you to some nighttime realization that you couldn’t have had in silence. But, even on top of all of this, on top of all the pleasures and the mercies that the sounds on this album might afford. I hope and think, too, that it will remind anyone who listens that we are a collection of many reflections. All of them deserving patience. —Hanif Abdurraqib

TRACK LISTING

1) Twin Plagues
2) Handsome Man
3) The Burned Down Dairy Queen
4) Cliff
5) How Can You Live If You Can’t
Love How Can You If You Do
6) Cody’s Only
7) Toothache
8) Birthday Song
9) One More Last One
10) Three Sisters
11) Gary’s
12) Ghost Of A Dog

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone is Wednesday’s second full length album & first as a full band. The Asheville, NC quintet (guitarist/ vocalist Karly Hartzman, lead guitarist Daniel Gorham, pedal steel guitarist Xandy Chelmis, bassist Margo Schultz & drummer Alan Miller) maximizes the dark dissonance of a three guitar attack to highlight the emotionality of Hartzman’s bell-clear vocals & wisps of half-recalled memories & literary references that make up her lyrics.

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone’s eight songs meld elements of shoegaze, grunge, indie pop & southern American culture into a uniquely personal style of modern rock music that resonates with power & tenderness. The ever-darkening & deepening of Wednesdays’ sound on I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone owes a debt of influence to The Swirlies, Arthur Russell, Red House Painters, Tenniscoats, Ana Roxanne, Acetone, & their continued collaboration with MJ Lenderman (who lends backing vocals to the songs “Billboard” & “November”).

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone was recorded at Hartzman’s home with engineering assistance from her roommate Colin Miller. The depth & clarity of the recordings balance the distorted volume of Wednesday’s live performances with the intimacy of Hartzman’s voice. Her words hold the center of the chaos, unobscured by the power of the band. Hartzman describes her lyrics as “attempts to access old personal memories & do them justice through prose, with inspiration from the writings of Richard Brautigan, Flannery O’Connor, David Berman & Tom Robbins, & movies like Steel Magnolias.”

TRACK LISTING

1) Fate Is…
2) Billboard
3) Love Has No Pride (Condemned)
4) Underneath
5) November
6) Maura
8) Coyote
9) Revenge Of The Lawn

On the one hand, new album Food for Worms calls to mind a certain morbidity, but on the other, it’s a celebration of life; the way that, in the end, we need each other. The album is an ode to friendship, and a documentation of the dynamic that only five people who have grown up together - and grown so close, against all odds - can share.

For the first time, the band are not delving inwards, but seeking to capture the world around them. “I don’t think you can be in your own head forever,” says Steen. A conversation after one of their gigs with a friend prompted a stray thought that he held onto: “It’s weird, isn’t it? Popular music is always about love, heartbreak, or yourself. There isn’t much about your mates.”

It’s through this, and defiance, that the band have continually moved forward together; finding light in uncomfortable contractions and playing their vulnerabilities as strengths: The near-breakdowns, identity crises, frontman Charlie Steen routinely ripping his top off on stage as a way of tackling his body weight insecurities. Everything is thrown into their live show and the best shows of their lives are happening now.

Back in 2018, around debut album Songs of Praise, they were at the vanguard of a transformative scene that changed the underground music landscape in the UK; paving the way for artists soon to come. Then, Charlie Steen suffered a series of panic attacks which led to a tour’s cancellation. For the first time, since being plucked from the small pub stages of south London and catapulted into notoriety, shame were confronted with who they’d become on the other side of it. This era, of being forced to endure reality and the terror that comes with your own company, would form shame’s second album, 2021’s Drunk Tank Pink.

Now they arrive, finally, at a place of hard-won maturity. Enter: Food for Worms, which Steen declares to be “the Lamborghini of shame records.”

Reconnecting with what they first loved about being in a band hotwired them into making the album after a false start during the pandemic. Their management then presented them with a challenge: in three weeks, shame would play two intimate shows and debut two sets of entirely new songs. It meant the band returned the same ideology which propelled them to these heights in the first place: the love of playing live, on their own terms, fed by their audience. Thus, Food for Worms crashed into life faster than anything they’d created before. The band recorded it while playing festivals all over Europe, invigorated by the strength of the reaction their new material was met with. That live energy, what it’s like to witness shame in their element, is captured perfectly on record - like lightning in a bottle.

The album marks a sonic departure from anything they’ve done before. shame have abandoned their post-punk beginnings for far more eclectic influences, drawing from the sharp yet uncomplicated lyrical observations of Lou Reed and the more melodic works of 90s German band, Blumfeld.

They called upon renowned producer Flood (Nick Cave, U2, PJ Harvey, Foals) to execute their vision. Recording each track live meant a kind of surrender: here, the rough edges give the album its texture; the mistakes are more interesting than perfection. In a way, it harks back to the title itself and the way that with this record, the band are embracing frailty and by doing so, are tapping into a new source of bravery.

STAFF COMMENTS

Liam says: Oh boy, I've been HANKERING for this one! The third outing for shame, 'Food For Worms' has been declared by the band as "the Lamborghini of shame records" and we'd be hard pressed to argue with that. From the anthemic combo of 'Adderall'/'Orchid', to the psych-wail of 'Six-Pack' and the beautiful 90s emo tinged closer 'All The People', shame recapture that unbridled excitement that we all felt and fell in love way back in 2016 - stellar stuff!

TRACK LISTING

1. Fingers Of Steel
2. Six-Pack
3. Yankees
4. Alibis
5. Adderall
6. Orchid
7. The Fall Of Paul
8. Burning By Design
9. Different Person
10. All The People

TRACK LISTING

Hit The Switch
Down In A Rabbit Hole
Arc Of Time (Time Code)
Ship In A Bottle
Agenda Suicide
Gold Mine Gutted

TRACK LISTING

Old Soul Song (for The New World Order)
First Day Of My Life
Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel
We Are Nowhere And It’s Now
Road To Joy
Land Locked Blues

TRACK LISTING

The Big Picture
Method Acting
False Advertising
You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will.
Lover I Don’t Have To Love
Bowl Of Oranges
Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come
Nothing Gets Crossed Out
Make War
Waste Of Paint
From A Balance Beam
Laura Laurent
Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (to Love And To Be Loved)

TRACK LISTING

The Big Picture
You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will.
Laura Laurent
Nothing Gets Crossed Out
November
Waste Of Paint

“The first three are innocent in a way, because we didn’t have an audience when we were making them,” says Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst. “But from ‘Lifted’ on, I was definitely aware of an audience. ‘Lifted’ was well received right away, and then everything happened with ‘Wide Awake’ and ‘Digital Ash’.”

Those two albums came out simultaneously. And their lead singles - ‘Take It Easy (Love Nothing)’, from the austere, remote ‘Digital Ash’, and ‘Lua’, from the warm, folky ‘Wide Awake’ - debuted in the top two slots on the Billboard Hot 100. ‘First Day of My Life’, also from ‘Wide Awake’, would later be voted the Number One Love Song Of All Time by NPR Music’s readers’ poll. 

Bright Eyes had officially broken through. It was a heady, exciting time, but also fraught and tense, both because of the band’s careening new fame, and because of the state of the world. When Bright Eyes made their Tonight Show debut in 2006, they chose to perform none of their shiny new hits, instead delivering a searing, harrowing rendition of their caustic anti-Bush anthem, ‘When The President Talks To God’. 

TRACK LISTING

Time Code
Gold Mine Gutted
Arc Of Time (Time Code)
Down In A Rabbit Hole
Take It Easy (Love Nothing)
Hit The Switch
I Believe In Symmetry
Devil In The Details
Ship In A Bottle
Light Pollution
Theme To Piñata
Easy/Lucky/Free

“The first three are innocent in a way, because we didn’t have an audience when we were making them,” says Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst. “But from ‘Lifted’ on, I was definitely aware of an audience. ‘Lifted’ was well received right away, and then everything happened with ‘Wide Awake’ and ‘Digital Ash’.”

Those two albums came out simultaneously. And their lead singles - ‘Take It Easy (Love Nothing)’, from the austere, remote ‘Digital Ash’, and ‘Lua’, from the warm, folky ‘Wide Awake’ - debuted in the top two slots on the Billboard Hot 100. ‘First Day of My Life’, also from ‘Wide Awake’, would later be voted the Number One Love Song Of All Time by NPR Music’s readers’ poll. 

Bright Eyes had officially broken through. It was a heady, exciting time, but also fraught and tense, both because of the band’s careening new fame, and because of the state of the world. When Bright Eyes made their Tonight Show debut in 2006, they chose to perform none of their shiny new hits, instead delivering a searing, harrowing rendition of their caustic anti-Bush anthem, ‘When The President Talks To God’. 

TRACK LISTING

At The Bottom Of Everything
We Are Nowhere And It’s Now
Old Soul Song (For The New World Order)
Lua
Train Under Water
First Day Of My Life
Another Travelin’ Song
Land Locked Blues
Poison Oak
Road To Joy

Ali Farka Touré trekked the world, bringing his beloved Malian music to the masses. Dubbed “the African John Lee Hooker,” one could hear strong connections between the two; both employed a bluesy style of play with gritty textures that elicit calm and fury in equal measure. While the influence of Black blues music prevailed, Touré created a West African blend of 'desert blues' that garnered Grammy awards and widespread reverence.

Though he transcended in 2006, Ali’s musical legacy lives on through his son, Vieux aka “the Hendrix of the Sahara,” an accomplished guitarist and champion of Malian music in his own right. On Ali, his collaborative album with Khruangbin, Vieux pays homage to his father by recreating some of his most resonant work, putting new twists on it while maintaining the original’s integrity. The result is a rightful ode to a legend. Ali isn’t just a greatest hits compilation. It’s a lullaby, a remembrance of Ali's life through known highlights and B-sides from his catalog. It is a testament to what happens when creativity is approached through open arms and open hearts. “To me, music is magic, it is spontaneous, it is the energy between people,” Vieux says. “I think Khruangbin understands this very well.” The genesis of the album dates back to 2019, when Khruangbin, coming off their breakthrough album Con Todo el Mundo, was beginning to play to bigger crowds. The record was finished in 2021, as a global pandemic shuttered businesses and forced us to take stock of what Earth was becoming. Indirectly, Ali captures this as a moment of peace within a raging storm, a conversation between past and present without allegiance to suffering. Now, given Khruangbin’s reach as a unit with legions of fans (including the likes of Jay-Z and Paul McCartney), they’re poised to bring Malian music to broader groups of listeners. Ali is a masterful work in which the love surrounding it is just as vital as the music itself, driving it to unforeseen places; Vieux and Khruangbin are spreading the good word to a completely new generation. “I hope it takes them somewhere new, or puts them in a place they haven't felt or heard,” Lee says. “It is about the love of new friendship and making something beautiful together,” Vieux continues. “It is about pouring your love into something old to make it new again. In the end and in a word it is love, that's all.”

My Boy, the third solo record from New Zealand singer/ songwriter Marlon Williams, announces an artist emerging anew. Gone is the solemn, country-indebted crooner with the velvet voice – in his place comes a playful, shapeshifting creature. Following the release of his second album, 2018’s Make Way For Love, Williams’ toured the world, playing major festivals and collaborating with Lorde, Yo-Yo Ma and Florence Welch.

He also forged a fledgling acting career with roles in films The True History of the Kelly Gang and Netflix series Sweet Tooth, as well as a cameo in Oscar winning film A Star Is Born. My Boy parlays this flush of worldly experience into a vivid record as spirited and kinetic as the unfolding life of its performer. “I’ve always explored different character elements in my music,” says Williams. “And the more I get into acting, the more tricks I’m learning about representation and presentation. To get braver and bolder with exploring shifting contexts and new ways of doing things.”

As the pandemic paused global travel, Williams found himself at home in New Zealand, reconnecting with family and friends. Soon new demos and lyrical themes emerged: of self-identity and escapism; tribalism and a gnarled family tree; and ruminations on the role of masculinity and mateship. Co-produced with Tom Healy and recorded at Roundhead Studios in New Zealand, My Boy finds Williams’ leading a new band through a set of genre-hopping tunes: from the cheery sway of ‘My Boy’ and chugging ‘80s noir sheen of ‘Thinking Of Nina’, to the charging synth of ‘River Rival’, and the sultry pop jam ‘Don’t Go Back.’ All this sonic and emotional whiplash is intentional, and ultimately My Boy sees Williams having fun, even while interrogating the behaviors of himself and those around him.

TRACK LISTING

1. My Boy
2. Easy Does It
3. River Rival
4. My Heart The Wormhole
5. Princes Walk
6. Don’t Go Back
7. Soft Boys Make The Grade
8. Thinking Of Nina
9. Morning Crystals
10. Trips
11. Promises

It’s the desire to celebrate their sonic bounty that first got Oberst and the band excited about the idea of comprehensive reissues. But this wouldn’t be a Bright Eyes project if a moment devoted to appreciating the past weren’t turned into an opportunity to connect with the future. That’s where the nine companion EPs come in. Or as Oberst puts it, “the supplemental reading” for the primary reissues: One six-track EP per reissued album, each featuring five reworked songs from that album. “My thing was they had to sound different from the originals, we had to mess with them in a substantial way.” Plus one cover that felt “of the era” in which that particular albums was made – a song that meant something to the band at the time. To help the EPs come alive in the fullest way, Bright Eyes called in lots of old friends, like Bridgers, M. Ward, and Welch and Rawlings, as well as new ones like Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1.The Invisible Gardener
2. Patient Hope In New Snow
3. Saturday As Usual
4. Falling Out Of Love At This Volume
5. Exaltation On A Cool Kitchen Floor

SIDE B:
6. The Awful Sweetness Of Escaping Sweat
7. Puella Quam Amo Est Pulchra
8. Driving Fast Through A Big City At Night
9. How Many Lights Do You See?
10. I Watched You Taking Off

SIDE C:
11. A Celebration Upon Completion
12. Emiy, Sing Something Sweet
13. All Of The Truth
14. One Straw
15. Lila

SIDE D:
16. A Few Minutes On Friday
17. Supriya
18. Solid Jackson
19. Feb. 15th
20. The ‘Feel Good’ Revolution

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. If Winter Ends
2. Padraic My Prince
3. Contract And Compare
4. The City Has Sex
5. The Difference In The Shades
6. Touch

SIDE B:
7. June On The West Coast
8. Pull My Hair
9. A Poetic Retelling Of An
Unfortunate Seduction
10. Tereza And Tomas

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1.Driving Fast Through A Big City At Night
2. Solid Jackson
3. A Celebration Upon Completition
SIDE B:
4. Falling Out Of Love At This Volume
5. Exaltation On A Cool Kitchen Floor
6. Double Joe

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. The Difference In The Shades
2. The City Has Sex (feat. Waxahatchee)
3. Contrast And Compare (feat. Waxahatchee)
SIDE B:
4. Kathy With A K’s Song (feat. M Ward)
5. St. Ides Heaven (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
6. June On The West Coast (feat. Becky Stark)

It’s the desire to celebrate their sonic bounty that first got Oberst and the band excited about the idea of comprehensive reissues. But this wouldn’t be a Bright Eyes project if a moment devoted to appreciating the past weren’t turned into an opportunity to connect with the future. That’s where the nine companion EPs come in. Or as Oberst puts it, “the supplemental reading” for the primary reissues: One six-track EP per reissued album, each featuring five reworked songs from that album. “My thing was they had to sound different from the originals, we had to mess with them in a substantial way.” Plus one cover that felt “of the era” in which that particular albums was made – a song that meant something to the band at the time. To help the EPs come alive in the fullest way, Bright Eyes called in lots of old friends, like Bridgers, M. Ward, and Welch and Rawlings, as well as new ones like Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee.

TRACK LISTING

A Spindle, A Darkness, A Fever, And A Necklace
A Scale, A Mirror, And Those Indifferent Clocks
The Calendar Hung Itself…
Something Vague
The Movement Of A Hand
Arienette
When The Curious Girl
Realizes She Is Under Glass
Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh
The Center Of The World
Sunrise, Sunset
An Attempt To Tip The Scales
A Song To Pass The Time

It’s the desire to celebrate their sonic bounty that first got Oberst and the band excited about the idea of comprehensive reissues. But this wouldn’t be a Bright Eyes project if a moment devoted to appreciating the past weren’t turned into an opportunity to connect with the future. That’s where the nine companion EPs come in. Or as Oberst puts it, “the supplemental reading” for the primary reissues: One six-track EP per reissued album, each featuring five reworked songs from that album. “My thing was they had to sound different from the originals, we had to mess with them in a substantial way.” Plus one cover that felt “of the era” in which that particular albums was made – a song that meant something to the band at the time. To help the EPs come alive in the fullest way, Bright Eyes called in lots of old friends, like Bridgers, M. Ward, and Welch and Rawlings, as well as new ones like Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee.

TRACK LISTING

Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
A Scale, A Mirror, And Those Indifferent Clocks (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
Arienette
Hypnotist (Song For Daniel H)
When The Curious Girl Realizes She Is Under Glass (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
A Spindle, A Darkness, A Fever, And A Necklace (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)

Mary Lattimore’s version of 'Love Is The Tune' alongside Bill Fay's original.

TRACK LISTING

Mary Lattimore - Love Is The Tune
Bill Fay - Love Is The Tune

Toro y Moi’s seventh studio album, Mahal, is the boldest and most fascinating journey yet from musical mastermind Chaz Bear. The record spans genre and sound—encompassing the shaggy psychedelic rock of the 1960s and ‘70s, and the airy sounds of 1990s mod-post-rock—taking listeners on an auditory expedition, as if they’re riding in the back of Bear’s Filipino jeepney that adorns the album’s cover. But Mahal is also an unmistakably Toro y Moi experience, calling back to previous works while charting a new path forward in a way that only Bear can do. Mahal is the latest in an accomplished career for Bear, who’s undoubtedly one of the decade’s most influential musicians. Since the release of the electronic pop landmark Causers of This in 2009, subsequent records as Toro y Moi have repeatedly shifted the idea of what his sound can be. But there’s little in Bear’s catalog that will prepare you for the deep-groove excursions on Mahal, his most eclectic record to date.

The second the album begins we’re immediately transported into the passenger seat, jeep sounds and all, ready for the ride Chaz and company have concocted for us. Seeds of some of Mahal’s 13 songs date back to the more explicitly rock-oriented What For? from 2015. MAHAL was mostly completed last year in Bear’s Oakland studio with the involvement of a host of collaborators, Sofie Royer and Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Neilson to Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo and the Mattson 2.

“I wanted to make a record that featured more musicians on it than any other record of mine,” he explains. “To have them live on that record feels grounded, bringing a communal perspective to the table.” As a result, Mahal is lush and surprising at every turn, from the cool-handed “The Loop,” which recalls Sly and the Family Stones, to the elastic psych rock of “Foreplay” and the dizzying Mulatu Astatke-recalling of “Last Year.”

Lyrically, the album zooms in on generational concerns, picking up where the Outer Peace standout “Freelance” effectively left off. Bear seems to be surveying the ways in which we connect with technology, media, each other, and what disappears as a result. Cuts like the squishy “Postman” and “Magazine” take a deep dive into our relationship with media in a changing digital world. “It’s interesting to see how we adapt to this new age. We’re so connected, but we’re still missing out on things,” Bear ruminates while discussing the album’s themes. It’s not all introspection. Bear cools things down near the album’s end with the Mattson 2-featuring “Millennium,” a laid-back jam with tricky guitar licks about ringing in new times even when everything else seems upside down. “It’s about enjoying the new year, even when it’s been shitty,” Bear explains. “There’s nothing else to do.” Finding a sense of joy in the face of adversity is embedded in MAHAL’s DNA, right down to the jeepney that literally and figuratively brings the music out into the community. “We know that touring is messed up for now, and large gatherings are a fluke,” he explains. “It’s about the notion of us going out to the people and bringing the record to them.” And with the wide-open atmosphere of Mahal, Toro y Moi stands to connect with more listeners than ever before.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. The Medium
2. Goes By So Fast
3. Magazine (feat. Salami Rose Joe Louis)
4. Postman
5. The Loop
6. Last Year
7. Mississippi

SIDE B:
8. Clarity (feat. Sofie)
9. Foreplay
10. Déjà Vu
11. Way Too Hot
12. Millennium (feat.
The Mattson 2)
13. Days In Love

Bill Fay has always sung about attempting to understand the most universal questions: those of nature, spirituality, humanity. His songs are “calming hymns for another chaotic time,” he says. His influence can be traced through many artists’ works, so it only seemed right to celebrate this with a collection of newer voices interpreting his timeless tracks.

Originally released in 2010 by David Tibet (Current 93), ‘Still Some Light’ was issued as a double CD, made up of 70’s album demos (Disc One) and 2009 home recordings (Disc Two). This year, for the first time, this collection of recordings will be pressed to vinyl as a double LP with reimagined artwork, presented alongside contemporary reimaginings of the tracks by Julia Jacklin and Mary Lattimore. Bill Fay’s words and melodies remain unaffected by the passing of time and changing trends; and here alongside the original recordings, these reinvented versions still calmly guide us through another moment of chaos.

An extension of the two’s chart-topping four-song Texas Sun journey, Texas Moon is an introspective stroll through the dark. “Without joy, there can be no real perspective on sorrow,” says Khruangbin. “Without sunlight, all this rain keeps things from growing. How can you have the sun without the moon?”

Crediting their mutual home state for inspiration, Texas Moon pensively examines Texas’ musical perception, while paying homage to the marriage of country and R&B that’s become synonymous with the lone star state. Propelled by rolling guitar licks, conga and bongo, lead single “B-Side” meditates on meeting in a dream and frolics across the nearing contemplative nighttime state with its longing’s joy.

Elsewhere on Texas Moon, the artists channel a newly intimate musical scope that’s illustrated most dramatically when the spacy sensuality of the minimalistic “Chocolate Hills” leads into the stark spirituality addressed on “Father Father,” a reminder of both acts’ gospel roots. Over a simple rolling guitar figure, Bridges pleads with the heavens—“Look at the mess that I made/Just a man with unclean hands”—only to be reminded of God’s eternal love.

For Khruangbin, one song in particular was indicative of the trust that Bridges put in them. “The song ‘Doris’ is about his grandmother making the transition from this world to the next realm,” says Johnson. “It’s a very somber, very deep record. And when someone places that kind of work into your hands, the last thing you want to do is junk it up, overproduce it, or do too much. We treated it with the respect it deserved, and treated Doris with the respect she deserves.”

“It’s like a short story...,” Lee says of the music. “And it leaves room to continue having these stories together. It’s not Khruangbin, it’s not Leon, it’s this world we created together.”

Upon its release, Texas Sun soared to the No. 1 slot on Billboard’s Emerging Artists Chart along with landing the No.1 on spot on “Americana/Folk Albums,” No. 2 on “Vinyl Albums,” No. 4 on “Top Rock Albums” and No. 6 on “Top R&B Albums.” Significantly, both parties’ musical directions were deeply affected by their time working together on Texas Sun.

Khruangbin’s most recent studio album, Mordechai, moved their own vocals to the forefront, a change they readily admit was a direct result of working with Bridges. Their sound was also tapped for remix/reinterpretation of a Paul McCartney song for the McCartney III Imagined project. Meanwhile, in addition to his genre-defying Grammy-nominated album Gold-Digger’s Sound, Bridges has put out several other challenging, shared collaborative tracks, including work with John Mayer, Lucky Daye and most recently Jazmine Sullivan. Each of the artists appeared recently on Austin City Limits and will tour throughout the new year.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The last Khruangbin album with Leon Bridges was a perfect distillation of their respective sounds into a familiar sounding, but entirely new concoction. This latest offering continues that effortless melting pot of downbeat, Balearic and soul but with a woozy, crepuscular groove. You really can't go wrong here.

TRACK LISTING

1. Doris
2. B-Side
3.Chocolate Hills
4. Father Father
5. Mariella

Fenne was born in London and moved to Dorset as a toddler, where she grew up in the picturesque English countryside. She was a “free range kid,” as she calls it, after her parents took her out of school for a period at the age of seven. Over the following year, they taught her while the family travelled Europe in a live-in bus. Even after she returned to traditional school at 9, her home education never ended, extending to music. Her mother gifted Fenne with her old record collection, through which she discovered her love for T-Rex and the Velvet Underground and Nico. Soon after she fell for the strange genius of PJ Harvey and came to worship Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, and the richly crafted worlds of Feist, which inspired Fenne to pick up a guitar.

“On Hold,” a tender collection of expressive, open-hearted songs, was Fenne’s first foray into songwriting, written during her teenage years. Writing her own songs was initially a “therapy exercise” for Fenne, who is normally reserved when it comes to talking about her feelings. The album, self-released in 2018, organically found a large audience online, which grew after she opened for Lucy Dacus and Andy Shauf’s North American tours last spring. Surrounding its release, The Line of Best Fit deemed Fenne “a new and extraordinary voice capable of wringing profound and resonant moments out of loss.”

In Fenne’s words, “To have this record physically rereleased is a big deal for me and the person I was when I made it. A lot’s changed since then but these songs and what they’ve given me will remain dependable reminders of beginnings and endings that shaped me as a teenager. For an album whose title is half ‘hold’, it makes sense that now whoever wants to can finally do that again.”

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Car Park
2. Three Oh Nine
3. What’s Good
4. The Hand You Deal
5. More Than You Know

SIDE B:
6. On Hold
7. Top To Toe
8. Bud
9. Brother
10. For A While
11. Car Park (Overflow)

Bill Fay has always sung about attempting to understand the most universal questions: those of nature, spirituality, humanity. His songs are “calming hymns for another chaotic time”, he says. His influence can be traced through many artist’s work, and so it only seemed right to celebrate this with a collection of newer voices interpreting his timeless tracks. Originally released in 2010 by David Tibet (Current 93), Still Some Light was released as a double CD, made up of 70’s album demos (Disc One) and 2009 home recordings (Disc Two). This year, for the first time, this collection of recordings will be pressed to vinyl and released digitally, presented alongside contemporary reimaginings of the tracks by Kevin Morby, Steve Gunn, Julia Jacklin and Mary Lattimore. Bill Fay’s words and melodies remain unaffected by the passing of time and changing trends; and here alongside the original recordings, these reinvented versions still calmly guide us through another moment of chaos.

Bill Fay’s Still Some Light was originally released on compact disc as a two CD collection in 2010. Reimagined with new artwork and available for the first time ever on vinyl, Dead Oceans is pleased to present Still Some Light Pt. 1, collecting Fay’s archival recordings from 1970 and 1971. Many of the songs are intimate sketches which were eventually re-recorded for Fay’s self-titled debut and for his landmark album, Time of the Last Persecution. This double LP set includes heart wrenching versions of some of his timeless works, such as “I Hear You Calling” and “Pictures of Adolf Again”, and features equally powerful songs like “Arnold is a Simple Man” and “Love is the Tune,” which only appear in this collection

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A: 
1. Plan D
2. Sing Us One Of Your Songs May
3. I Will Find My Own Way Back
4. Love Is The Tune
SIDE B: 
1. Backwoods Maze
2. The Sun Is Bored
3. There's A Price Upon My Head
4. Time Of The Last Persecution
SIDE C: 
1. Pictures Of Adolph
2. Tell It Like It Is
3. Release Is In The Eye
4. Dust Filled Room
5. I Hear You Calling
SIDE D: 
1. Laughing Man
2. Arnold Is A Simple Man
3. Just To Be A Part
4. Inside The Keeper’s Pantry

“A big part of the project and why I did it,” says Sloppy Jane’s Haley Dahl of her Saddest Factory debut Madison, “Was because it felt similar to being a little kid and buying an outfit that was too big that I’d have to grow into. I really valued from the start that making Madison gave me someone I had to become.” The record, which Dahl first conceived of back in late 2017, is a grand gesture, a statement about big love, and about growing into yourself in the process.

Dahl and her 21 bandmates recorded all of Madison at the Lost World Caverns in West Virginia from 3pm to 8:30am each day over the course of two weeks (they also made four music videos on location during this time). To access the space, they’d enter through the back of a gift shop, down a long tunnel where they’d walk down 200 feet of stairs to reach the entrance. Dahl and her bandmates did this steep walk with a piano. The ceiling of Lost World Caverns is massively high and is a perfect dome. The inside was also 98 percent humidity, leading to both stellar sound and also problems with tuning and gear.

Engineer Ryan Howe sat in his parents Subaru above the cave with his mixing board and computer, and threaded cables down 90 feet through a hole in the ground to the ceiling of the cave. It’s the first time someone has ever recorded an entire album in a cave, and the results are pretty sonically stunning. That alone is a marvelous thing. Madison is an astounding, glorious record of melodrama of the highest order

TRACK LISTING

1. Overture
2. Party Anthem
3. Jesus And Your Living Room Floor
4. Judy’s Bedroom
5. Bianca Castafiore
6. Lullaby Formica
7. Madison
8. Wilt
9. Wonderama
10. The Constable
11. Epilogue

There are moments on Drunk Tank Pink where you almost have to reach for the sleeve to check this is the same band who made 2018’s Songs Of Praise. Such is the jump Shame have made from the riotous post-punk of their debut to the sprawling adventurism and twitching anxieties laid out here. The South Londoner’s blood and guts spirit, that wink and grin of devious charm, is still present, it’s just that it’s grown into something bigger, something deeper, more ambitious and unflinchingly honest. The genius of Drunk Tank Pink is how these lyrical themes dovetail with the music. Opener Alphabet dissects the premise of performance over a siren call of nervous, jerking guitars, its chorus thrown out like a beer bottle across a mosh pit.Songs spin off and lurch into unexpected directions throughout here, be it March Day’s escalating aural panic attack or the shapeshifting darkness of Snow Day. There’s a Berlin era Bowie beauty to the lovelorn Human For A Minute while closer Station Wagon weaves from a downbeat mooch into a souring, soullifting climax in which Steen elevates himself beyond the clouds and into the heavens. Or at least that’s what it sounds like.From the womb to the clouds (sort of), Shame are currently very much in the pink.

This deluxe edition includes the full tracklist as early demos. These previously unreleased versions tell the story behind the James Ford produced album that cemented the band as one of the most exciting in British music today.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Alphabet
2. Nigel Hitter
3. Born In Luton
4. March Day
5. Water In The Well
6. Snow Day

SIDE B:
7. Human, For A Minute
8. Great Dog
9. 6/1
10. Harsh Degrees
11. Station Wagon

SIDE C:
12. Alphabet (Demo)
13. Nigel Hitter (Demo)
14. Born In Luton (Demo)
15. March Day (Demo)
16. Water In The Well (Demo)
17. Snow Day (Demo)

SIDE D:
18. Human, For A Minute (Demo)
19. Great Dog (Demo)
20. 6/1 (Demo)
21. Harsh Degrees (Demo)
22. Station Wagon (Demo)

Born in 1999, Charlie Hickey grew up in South Pasadena, just minutes from Downtown Los Angeles. Raised by two singer-songwriter parents, Charlie’s second language was music since day one. As early as grade school, he was making sense of the world through songwriting, and by middle school he was writing, recording and performing songs that attracted a community of collaborators and could silence a room.

A turning point for Charlie came at around the age of thirteen, when he covered a song by then up-and-coming artist Phoebe Bridgers, who was still in high school herself. The two quickly became friends and collaborators, setting Charlie on an exciting new musical path. Years later, Bridgers introduced Charlie to songwriter, drummer, producer and her bandmate Marshall Vore, who noticed something special about Charlie. The two began writing and recording songs together, and soon Charlie dropped out of school to work on his music full-time.

Charlie Hickey’s first proper single is “No Good At Lying.” The Marshall Voreproduced track introduces us to Charlie’s evocative storytelling and features Phoebe Bridgers on backing vocals. “I’m no good at lying / on my back or through my teeth / but I’m good at dreaming / I can do it in my sleep,” he sings over hushed guitars and a whimsical banjo, searching for truth as his unconscious mind runs wild and bleeds into reality. It’s a slow, quiet, and understated peek to the world of Charlie Hickey, who is barely of legal drinking age, but taps into such universal themes that showcase a wisdom beyond his years and exudes promise for what’s to come

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. No Good At Lying
2. Count The Stairs
3. Two Haunted Houses

SIDE B:
4. Seeing Things
5. Ten Feet Tall
6. Notre Dame

Remixes not from, but of the entire outstanding Khruangbin album, "Mordechai"! Personal as ever, the list of remixers has been hand picked by the band, not simply a whose who of hype and click bait.  All have some connection to the band, sometimes personal friendships, musical connections, or simply mutual musical appreciation. Harvey Sutherland and Ginger Roots have both toured with the band, Kadhja Bonet and Ron Trent had their own mutual fan club going on, Knxwledge sampled "White Gloves" on a recent mixtape, Natasha Diggs and Soul Clap’s Eli’s are recent buddy-ups, Quantic is a mutual friend of Bonobo (crucial in the KB origin story), while Laura is also godmother to one of Felix Dickinson’s kids. 

It would be tiresome to detail each and every mix, but rest assured this is an exceptionally executed project. Bolstered by the sincere and detailed sleeve notes, which journey each artists' relationship with their band, a bit about their musical legacy, and why they were chosen. 

'A good remix is when the remixer's sonic fingerprint is present, without sounding forced. It should feel like its own story, with at least some of the same characters as the original' - Khruangbin state on these highly impressive sleeve notes - and each and every track on the album represents such forethought. Very few remix albums are put together with such love, dexterity and sympathy as this one - so much so it's bound to stand as a masterpiece in its own right, just as many of the classic 'dub' LPs did from Jamaica (an influence the band themself have highly creditted in informed their sound). 

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A: 
1. Father Bird, Mother Bird (Sunbirds)
2. Connaissais De Face (Tiger?)
3. Dearest Alfred (MyJoy)
4. First Class (Soul In The Horn Remix)
SIDE B:
5. If There Is No Question (Soul Clap’s Wild, But Not Crazy Mix)
6. Pelota (Cut A Rug Mix)
SIDE C:
7. Time (You And I)(Put A Smile On DJ’s Face Mix)
8. Shida (Bella’s Suite)
 SIDE D:
9. So We Won’t Forget (Mang Dynasty Version)
10. One To Remember (Forget Me Nots Dub)

Friends! I am so pleased to announce A Night At The Little Los Angeles - the 4-track version of Sundowner. Recorded at home and in my back shed - aka The Little Los Angeles - in suburban Kansas during the summer and winter seasons of 2017 and 2018. This is quite simply the sound of me alone in a room with a four-track to catch my songs as they fell out of my mouth. When I later went into a proper studio to make Sundowner my goal was to capture the essence of these initial recordings, and here you will now have access to the very essence I was chasing. In many ways, this feels like a proper album to me, as it’s my initial attempt to capture the Kansas sunset and put it into sound, where as Sundower was an attempt of an attempt. I love and am proud of them both, of course, but am happy to - for the first time - share this vulnerable side of my songwriting process with the public. Many of my favorite recordings have been made inside of an artist’s home without regard of the outside world, but instead deep in their own world that they’re creating in real time. And with that - I’d like to invite you into my own little world here and now and ask you to please....step inside of....and spend A Night At The Little Los Angeles! - Kevin Morby

****** Sundowner is Morby’s “attempt to put the Middle American twilight -- its beauty profound, though not always immediate -- into sound.” Released in fall 2020 on Dead Oceans, Morby’s distinctively conversational and reflective writing style was received with open arms and was beloved by fans and critics alike. Pitchfork lauded it as “a vision of the Midwest that feels mythical and enormous.” Sundowner’s vision was further fleshed out in comprehensive features in Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Stereogum, The FADER, Vice, Aquarium Drunkard, and more. In addition to traditional music publications, Morby appeared on Adult Swim’s Fishcenter and Office Hours with Tim Heidecker. Morby also made his network television debut on CBS This Morning, where he performed the songs “Campfire” and “Sundowner” as part of a special joint performance with his partner and fellow songwriter Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee.

TRACK LISTING

1. Campfire (4-Track Version)
2. Sundowner (4-Track Version)
3. A Night At The Little Los Angeles (4-Track Version)
4. Wander (4-Track Version)
5. Velvet Highway (4-Track Version)
6. Valley (4-Track Version)
7. Brother, Sister (4-Track Version)
8. Don’t Underestimate Midwest American Sun (4-Track Version)
9. Provisions (4-Track Version)
10. U.S. Mail (4-Track Version)

Last spring, Devendra Banhart and Noah Georgeson started to make a record that was like nothing they had made before — an ambient album that would be both a haven from a suddenly terrified world and a heartfelt musical dialogue between two artists who have been friends and collaborators for over two decades. Refuge is an album of profound meditative beauty which offers the listener a much-needed sense of peace and renewal. But while it was recorded in 2020 its roots go back much further — all the way to the start of their friendship and, beyond that, to the shared sounds and ethics of their childhoods.

Devendra grew up in Venezuela while Noah, six years older, is a native of Nevada City, California. But as they got to know each other, they realised that they had a similar history in the New Age subculture of the 1980s: a world of meditation, Eastern music, the Bhagavad Gita and The Whole Earth Catalog. Childhood memories were coloured by the aromas of health food stores and the sound of New Age labels like Windham Hill Records. Noah, whose production and mixing credits include Joanna Newsom and the Strokes, came on board as co-producer of Devendra’s 2005 album Cripple Crow and they have been working together ever since.

It was while making Devendra’s 2019 album Ma that the pair finally decided to make their ambient record. Despite complicating logistics, 2020 created an emotional craving for music with this contemplative, therapeutic quality. Inspired by both memories of the past and the needs of the present, Refuge is an act of companionship and generosity which gives the listener room to breathe. “We’re hoping to create a sense of comfort and coming back to the moment,” Devendra says. “It’s really important to have a little bit of space between us and our anxieties and impulses. What you do with that space is up to you.” Dorian Lynskey May 2021

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A: 
1. Book Of Bringhi
2. A Cat
3. Rise From Your Wave
4. Peloponnese Lament

SIDE B:
5. In A Cistern
6. Into Clouds
7. For Em

SIDE C: 
8. Three Gates
9. Horn In Deep Night
10. Sky Burial

SIDE D:
11. Asura Cave
12. Aran In Repose
13. Lament Return

‘Barn Breaks vol III’, presented by Owlvaro & Hugu, is the latest installment of oddball samples and loops from your favorite globe-trotting Texan trio, and is perfect for any portablist scratch jam or 7” DJ set... The latest in the series, this skipless 7” contains scratch samples from “Mordechai” - band hits, isolated basslines & vocals, guitar notes, keyboard stabs and drum loops - as well as custom “ahhhh” & “fressshh” sounds.

It’s funny cos we was just talking about scratch records and DJ tools the other day in the shop and how maybe they’ve kinda been superceded by Serato and digital DJing as it’s now much easier to line up a load of samples onto your USBs or Serato playlist and scratch till your hearts content… HOWEVER!!!! – you can’t beat that tangible feeling of black wax moving to and fro underneath your skillfully poised fingers and its nice to see hip, cool, tastemaking band Khruangbin reignite the fires of this particular format & style! 

Private Space, the group’s third album, is a previously untapped vibe at the heart of The Indications. Pushing beyond the boundaries of the funk and soul on their previous releases, Private Space unlocks the door to a wider range of sounds and launches boldly into a world of synthy modern soul and disco beats dotted with strings. It’s an organic, timeless record that’s as fresh as clean kicks and familiar as your favorite well-worn LP.

Developed after being apart for much of the year, Private Space is creatively explosive and delights in upending expectations. Its 10 tracks are both an escapist fantasy and a much-needed recentering after a tumultuous 2020. Throughout, The Indications highlight a collective resiliency – as well as the power of a good song to be a light in the darkness.

Durand Jones and The Indications have long provided the soulful soundtrack for such deep thoughts, both on stage and on your turntable. But as the world slowly resets from the chaos of the past year, Durand Jones and The Indications’ Private Space is arriving at just the right time.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It was always a brilliantly inventive maelstrom of sound emanating from a Durand Jones release, bridging the (admittedly small) gap between funk and soul, but this time sees them broaden their horizons into a wonderfully realised and perfectly weighted groove-laiden disco masterpiece. A stunning and completely essential outing.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Love Will Work It Out
2. Witchoo
3. Private Space
4. More Than Ever
5. Ride Or Die

SIDE B:
6. The Way That I Do
7. Reach Out
8. Sexy Thang
9. Sea Of Love
10. I Can See

From the moment she began writing her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee. After all, a jubilee is a celebration of the passage of time—a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor. Zauner’s first two albums garnered acclaim for the way they grappled with anguish; Psychopomp was written as her mother underwent cancer treatment, while Soft Sounds From Another Planet took the grief she held from her mother‘s death and used it as a conduit to explore the cosmos. Now, at the start of a new decade, Japanese Breakfast is ready to fight for happiness, an all-too-scarce resource in our seemingly crumbling world.

Jubilee finds Michelle Zauner embracing ambition and, with it, her boldest ideas and songs yet. Inspired by records like Bjork’s Homogenic, Zauner delivers bigness throughout -- big ideas, big textures, colors, sounds and feelings. At a time when virtually everything feels extreme, Jubilee sets its sights on maximal joy, imagination, and exhilaration.

It is, in Michelle Zauner’s words, “a record about fighting to feel. I wanted to re-experience the pure, unadulterated joy of creation…The songs are about recalling the optimism of youth and applying it to adulthood. They’re about making difficult choices, fighting ignominious impulses and honoring commitments, confronting the constant struggle we have with ourselves to be better people.”

Throughout Jubilee, Zauner pours her own life into the universe of each song to tell real stories, and allowing those universes, in turn, to fill in the details. Joy, change, evolution—these things take real time, and real effort. And Japanese Breakfast is here for it.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Japanese Breakfast has an uncanny knack to sit right at the intersection of so many genres, while simultaneously defying them all. 'Jubilee' comes across as a celebration, taking the tried and tested sounds of synthpop and soul and fusing them with a wealth of influence from all over the musical spectrum, resulting in a gloriously well produced and uncannily uplifting end product.

TRACK LISTING

1. Paprika
2. Be Sweet
3. Kokomo, IN
4. Slide Tackle
5. Posing In Bondage
6. Sit
7. Savage Good Boy
8. In Hell
9. Tactics
10. Posing For Cars

Copycat Killer is a 12” featuring 4 exclusive new versions of songs from Phoebe Bridgers’ wildly acclaimed Punisher album. Collaborating with arranger Rob Moose (Sufjan Stevens, The National, Bon Iver, Vampire Weekend, Jay-Z), these are brand new orchestral arrangements of the songs Kyoto, Savior Complex, Chinese Satellite and Punisher, all given a luscious revamp that is sure to delight any fans of Phoebe’s album and serve as perfect gateway for new listeners into what makes her one of the most special artists of 2020 and beyond.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Kyoto (Copycat Killer Version)
2. Savior Complex (Copycat Killer Version)
SIDE B:
3. Chinese Satellite (Copycat Killer Version)
4. Punisher (Copycat Killer Version)

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S., Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott descended into a state of mourning. Her plan had been to join her partner, Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, as violinist on tour, a privilege rarely afforded since both maintain busy road schedules, and for Truscott, the prospect of spending most of the year in a van wasn’t met with exhaustion so much as exhilaration. At long last, she’d be making a living playing music, no side hustle needed. The cancellation of the tour represented a sidelined dream. Routine was born of this disappointment. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, Truscott and Duterte’s collaborative project offers a glimpse of the creative possibilities that can emerge from a state of defeat. Written and recorded over the course of a month in Joshua Tree, Routine’s lush debut EP And Other Things finds the couple trying on new roles. Truscott, who plays bass in Chastity Belt, wrote the bulk of the material and sings on the EP, while Duterte, normally a band leader, used the project as an opportunity to, in her words, “Take the backseat,” as accompanist, producer, and engineer.

Duterte describes the making of the EP as “seamless.” In the mornings, Truscott sat outside of the cabin in the not-yet-blazing sun and worked out chord progressions on guitar while Duterte slept in. Staring out at the horizon, Truscott could see a smattering of houses and the sharp outline of a mountain range, but overall the property felt remote, far removed from home in Los Angeles. On long walks Truscott admired the recently bloomed spring flowers and pondered the legacy of friendships and experiences that made her. “I spend a lot of my time thinking about the people who’ve impacted my life,” she says. “Routine gave me an opportunity to explore those relationships through music.” It was on one of these walks that Truscott began writing “Cady Road,” a contemplative, country-tinged pop song that urges listeners to sit in the discomfort of the present moment. “Relax/ It’s fine/ You don’t have to know this time,” Truscott sings on the chorus, reflecting on the unsuredness that gripped her in those early days of the pandemic. Duterte joins in harmony, giving a song about being alone with your thoughts a collaborative dimension. “In Annie’s songs I hear a yearning for something just out of reach, something unachievable,” Duterte says. “She’s such a great singer, so it felt good to just layer instruments to make her vision for it feel fully fleshed out.” That impulse is heard vividly on “Cady Road,”where an abundant arrangement accompanies Truscott, replete with the spry notes of a banjolele. A true collaboration requires trust, intimacy, and patience, three elements that cohered almost mystically in the process of making this EP.

“Melina is the most calming presence. She’s so good at sitting with silences in a conversation and just observing,” Truscott says. The quality not only makes Duterte a good partner, but also a good bandmate and producer. “Calm and Collected” is a tribute to that enviable ability to maintain serenity amidst the chaos of experience. Though it was written in Joshua Tree, Duterte and Truscott recorded it in the attic of their home in LA, where Duterte set up a studio in the free time afforded by the pandemic. The song is the quietest of the collection, a gentle ode underscored by atmospheric swaths of synth that swaddle the listener. “I think of And Other Things as a series of vignettes,” Truscott says. “We aren’t telling one story here, we’re telling a series of short stories that people can hopefully relate to.” Asked how it feels to offer the EP up to the world during a time of major uncertainty in the music industry, Truscott offers only one word: “Cathartic.”

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Cady Road
2. Numb Enough

SIDE B:
3. Song 5
4. And Other Things
5. Calm And Collected

There are moments on Drunk Tank Pink where you almost have to reach for the sleeve to check this is the same band who made 2018’s Songs Of Praise. Such is the jump Shame have made from the riotous post-punk of their debut to the sprawling adventurism and twitching anxieties laid out here. The South Londoner’s blood and guts spirit, that wink and grin of devious charm, is still present, it’s just that it’s grown into something bigger, something deeper, more ambitious and unflinchingly honest.

The genius of Drunk Tank Pink is how these lyrical themes dovetail with the music. Opener Alphabet dissects the premise of performance over a siren call of nervous, jerking guitars, its chorus thrown out like a beer bottle across a mosh pit. Songs spin off and lurch into unexpected directions throughout here, be it March Day’s escalating aural panic attack or the shapeshifting darkness of Snow Day. There’s a Berlin era Bowie beauty to the lovelorn Human For A Minute while closer Station Wagon weaves from a downbeat mooch into a souring, soullifting climax in which Steen elevates himself beyond the clouds and into the heavens. Or at least that’s what it sounds like.

From the womb to the clouds (sort of), Shame are currently very much in the pink.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: As uncompromising and incendiary as ever, Shame's 'Drunk Tank Pink' takes all of the riotous guitars and pummeling percussion and twists them into a recognisable but refreshing take on their trademark sound. A lot more intricate, elaborate and nuanced, Shame go from strength to strength.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Alphabet
2. Nigel Hitter
3. Born In Luton
4. March Day
5. Water In The Well
6. Snow Day

SIDE B:
7. Human
8. Great Dog
9. 6/1
10. Harsh Degrees
11. Station Wagon

Soft-spoken with the look of a slightly disaffected 1950s matinee idol, Aaron Frazer possesses a unique voice that’s both contemporary and timeless. On ‘Introducing...’ - his debut solo album produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach - Aaron melds mid-60s soul with Auerbach’s particular sensibilities (‘Over You’), songs with a message in the key of Gil Scott-Heron (‘Bad News’) and uplifting tales of love told through a blend of disco, gospel and doowop (‘Have Mercy’).

The Brooklyn-based, Baltimore-raised songwriter first came into the international spotlight as multiinstrumentalist and co-lead singer of Durand Jones & The Indications but he’s more than a revivalist act. “I didn’t want ‘Introducing...’ to be an exact recreation of an era or a style,” Frazer says. “I’m excited to keep breaking some of the expectations around what exactly I’m supposed to be artistically and musically, or what this scene as a whole can be.” On ‘Introducing...’, Aaron expertly calibrates consciousness-raising and the desire to be enveloped by love.

Where previous records were written in a partial state of turmoil, Aaron’s debut LP shows maturation and range. ‘Introducing...’ is both loving and gracious, critical without losing hope and a showcase of a young artist on a seriously soulful ascent.

‘Introducing…’ features an all-star ensemble including players with the likes of Bruno Mars, Mark Ronson, Dolly Parton and Charles Bradley.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There's something warmingly familar about Aaron Frazer's swinging take on classic Northern Soul, nut imbued with a modern tilt that's not only perfect for the home stereo but would go down perfectly in a late night club-based scenario (remember those?)

TRACK LISTING

1. You Don’t Wanna Be My Baby
2. If I Got It (Your Love Brought It)
3. Can’t Leave It Alone
4. Bad News
5. Have Mercy
6. Done Lyin’
7. Lover Girl
8. Ride With Me
9. Girl On The Phone
10. Love Is
11. Over You
12. Leanin’ On Your Everlasting Love 

In the winter of 2017 I moved back to my hometown of Kansas City from Los Angeles. The move was sudden and unforeseen, just as I was tying a bow on the writing process for what would become my 2019 album, Oh My God. I bought a Four Track Tascam model 424 off of an old friend to help me get to the finish line, but much to my surprise and excitement, this new piece of equipment in my all-but-bare home didn’t help complete one album but rather inspire another: Sundowner. The new collection of songs came quickly and effortlessly as I did my best not to resist or refine the songs, but instead let them take shape all on their own.

As the songs kept coming I cleared out the crowded shed that was sitting dormant in my backyard and built a makeshift studio before adding drums, lead guitar and piano to complete the demos. Each day I would teach myself basic recording techniques, watching the channels illuminate and pulse as if the machine were breathing, and then emerge in the evenings as the sun was getting low: - around 5:30 in the winter, when the Kansan sunsets look icy and distant, like a pink ember inside of a display case, and 9 o’clock in the summer, when the sunsets are warm and abstract.

Landing back home felt jarring juxtaposed with a life full of chaos and adventure with my band on the road. But at the very least, I was happy to have - for the first time in my adulthood - a place to close the door, with no temptations other than to work on music and reflect on what I had built since I left. It was a new form of isolation, one I had never explored or expected to experience. Not ready to let go of the hand of the California desert, I spent the winter decorating the best I knew how; with mementos from my previous home, cactus and aloe vera and covering the walls in pinewood - immediately earning my house it’s nickname, The Little Los Angeles.

In January 2019 I contacted my friend and producer Brad Cook to help recreate what I had made in my shed. We chose to work in Texas; we wanted to make sure the record was done far away from any coastline, and in the heart of America. Brad played bass and some keys on the album, but beyond that he encouraged and inspired me to play almost everything else. All lead guitar, proper drums (save the drums on “A Night At The Little Los Angeles”), mellotron and what I believe to be the albums secret weapon - a WWII era collapsible and slightly out-of-tune pump organ - were performed by me. We did, however, bring in James Krivchenia towards the end of the session to fill out the percussion. It was an honor to work with him as he built maracas from pecans and played on the floor of the live room, adding flourish wherever he saw fit.

On the last evening of the session, after everything had wrapped, we all climbed on top of an empty water tower on the property, giving us a view in all directions. To the North you could see an endless Texas, with long wisps of cirrus clouds above the desert floor, and to the South there was Mexico, the recent detention camps only a mile beyond, with large cumulus clouds hovering over, bringing us to an ominous pause. To the West, towards the setting sun, the two families of clouds merged, holding the last light of the day in purple and orange. Below, a freight train cut the landscape in half as it whistled in the distance.

Almost as soon as the session wrapped, I was off and away on press trips and then proper tours for Oh My God, which came out in April that same year. Sundowner sat inside of a hard drive back at Sonic Ranch and did not see the light of day, until I found myself, as did the rest of the world, stuck inside their home and in quarantine in March 2020. My second year of touring for Oh My God was cancelled. Brad, Jerry and I worked from our respective homes, sending notes back and forth as we worked alone but together to mix the album, and suddenly, just like that, Sundowner was finished.

Songs, like sunsets, are fleeting, and it’s only due to a willingness and desire to catch them that you ever, if even only for a moment, grab a hold of one. When writing Sundowner, I was lucky to have had the Tascam 424 there to help capture both. Sundowner is my attempt to put the Middle American twilight -- it’s beauty profound, though not always immediate -- into sound. It is a depiction of isolation. Of the past. Of an uncertain future. Of provisions. Of an omen. Of a dead deer. Of an icon. Of a Los Angeles themed hotel in rural Kansas. Of billowing campfires, a mermaid and a highway lined in rabbit fur. It is a depiction of the nervous feeling that comes with the sky’s proud announcement that another day will be soon coming to a close as the pink light recedes and the street lamps and house lights suddenly click on. -- Kevin Morby, Kansas, 2020.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's a blessing in a way, that all of the artists we know and love have had a chance to get through some unfinished work sitting around on their hard drives (obviously the circumstances surrounding it are less than ideal..). Here we have a fully fledged gorgous new album from Morby that just wouldn't have been given the attention it deserved had his tour for the last album gone ahead. Thank goodness it got finished, 'Sundowner' is a triumph.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A: 
1. Valley
2. Brother, Sister
3. Sundowner
4. Campfire
5. Wander
SIDE B:
6. Don’t Underestimate Midwest American Sun
7.A Night At The Little Los Angeles
8. Jamie
9. Velvet Highway
10. Provisions

Isolation is nothing new for Fenne Lily – in fact, she’s written an album of songs all about it. “It’s kind of like writing a letter, and leaving it in a book that you know you’ll get out when you’re sad – like a message to yourself in the future,” she says, referring to BREACH, her Dead Oceans debut she wrote during a period of self-enforced isolation pre-COVID.

It’s an expansive, diaristic, frequently sardonic record that deals with the mess and the catharsis of entering your 20s and finding peace while being alone. “I think this record is proof that I can be emotionally stable, even if right now I feel a little bit up and down,” says Fenne. “There’s the ability to find clarity in that. It’s sobering, weirdly.”

Fenne was born in London and moved to Dorset as a toddler, where she grew up in the picturesque English countryside. She was a “free range kid,” as she calls it, after her parents took her out of school for a period at the age of seven. Over the following year, they taught her while the family travelled Europe in a live-in bus. Even after she returned to traditional school at 9, her home education never ended, extending to music. Her mother gifted Fenne with her old record collection, through which she discovered her love for T-Rex and the Velvet Underground and Nico. Soon after she fell for the strange genius of PJ Harvey and came to worship Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, and the richly crafted worlds of Feist, which inspired Fenne to pick up a guitar. It’s that journey to find peace inside herself that underpins the whole of Fenne’s second album.

Its title, BREACH, occurred to Fenne after deep conversations with her mum about her birth, during which she was breech, or upside down in the womb. The slippery double-sidedness of the word – which, spelled with an “A”, means to “break through” – drew her in. “That feels like what I was doing in this record; I was breaking through a wall that I built for myself, keeping myself safe, and dealing with the downside of feeling lonely and alone. I realized that I am comfortable in myself, and I don’t need to fixate on relationships to make myself feel like I have something to talk about. I felt like I broke through a mental barrier in that respect.” Even though it also carries implications of awkwardness, rebellion, and breakage, it’s a widereaching word, representing new beginnings and birth.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Perfectly on-point songwriting, crisp production and a keen ear for melody make this a perfect release for stalwart label, Dead Oceans. Fenne Lily writes clever, catchy and effecting poppy odes, rich with grit but *just* polished enough to shine. Beautiful.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. To Be A Woman Pt. 1
2. Alapathy
3. Berlin
4. Elliott
5. I, Nietzsche
6. Birthday

SIDE B:
7. Blood Moon
8. Solipsism
9. I Used To Hate My Body But Now I Just Hate You
10. ‘98
11. Someone Else’s Trees
12. Laundry And Jet Lag

A lone pair of footsteps meanders down a street in omaha, into the neighborhood bar and then into a near-imperceptible tangle of conversations – about wars, sleepless nights – a surrealist din pushing against the sound of ragtime. Then, as the background quiets, a line rings out clearly: “i think about how much people need – what they need right now is to feel like there’s something to look forward to. We have to hold on. We have to hold on.”

Thus we enter the fitting, cacophonic introduction to bright eyes’ tenth studio album and first release since 2011. Down in the weeds, where the world once was is an enormous record caught in the profound in-between of grief and clarity – one arm wrestling its demons, the other gripping the hand of love, in spite of it.

The end of bright eyes’ unofficial hiatus came naturally. Conor oberst pitched the idea of getting the band back together during a 2017 christmas party at bright eyes bandmate nathaniel walcott’s los angeles home. The two huddled in the bathroom and called mike mogis, who was christmas shopping at an omaha mall. Mogis immediately said yes. There was no specific catalyst for the trio, aside from finding comfort amidst a decade of brutal change. Sure, why now? Is the question, but for a project whose friendship is at the core, it was simply why not?

The resulting bright eyes album came together unlike any other of its predecessors. Down in the weeds is bright eyes’ most collaborative, stemming from only one demo and written in stints in omaha and in bits and pieces in walcott’s los angeles home. Radically altering a writing process 25 years into a project seems daunting, but oberst said there was no trepidation: “our history and our friendship, and my trust level with them, is so complete and deep. And i wanted it to feel as much like a three-headed monster as possible.”

As a title, as a thesis, down in the weeds, where the world once was functions on a global, apocalyptic level of anxiety that looms throughout the record. But on a personal level, it speaks to rooting around in the dirt of one’s memories, trying to find the preciousness that’s overgrown and unrecognizable. For oberst, coming back to bright eyes was a bit of that. A symbol of simpler times, vaguely nostalgic. And even though it wasn’t actually possible to go back to the way things were, even though there wasn’t an easy happy ending, there was a new reality left to work with.

And here, there is a bleary-eyed hopefulness – earnest, emotive recommitments to love appear on “dance and sing” and “just once in the world.” And throughout, down in the weeds features snippets of oberst’s loved ones speaking, in late-night conversations. The fleeting loveliness of intimate moments punctuates the bleakness of the record’s existential crisis, crackling like lightning bugs illuminating the long night.

Down in the weeds is a distillation of a prolific, enduring canon. It’s immediate and urgent, the product of its creators’ growth across a decade apart, as well as the need to make a record together to find solace from loss. Through deliberate, fearless experimentation in process, the trio made the truest bright eyes sound: the sound of a deep bond, of a band coming home, but also a seamless continuation, like bright eyes never went away. It’s the impossible, sprawling mess of human experience that bright eyes has always sought to put to tape, since the beginning – the sound of holding on. Why now? Why not?

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's been far too long since the last Bright Eyes album, and this one shows why we've missed him so much. Beautifully tender melodies, orchestral swoon and soaring crescendos aplenty. This is a new journey for Oberst & crew, but also warmingly familiar.

TRACK LISTING

Pageturners Rag
Dance And Sing
Just Once In The World
Mariana Trench
One And Done
Pan And Broom
Stairwell Song
Persona Non Grata
Tilt-a-whirl
Hot Car In The Sun
Forced Convalescence
To Death’s Heart (in Three Parts)
Calais To Dover
Comet Song

Khruangbin has always been multilingual, weaving far-flung musical languages like East Asian surf-rock, Persian funk, and Jamaican dub into mellifluous harmony. But on its third album, it’s finally speaking out loud. Mordechai features vocals prominently on nearly every song, a first for the mostly instrumental band. It’s a shift that rewards the risk, reorienting Khruangbin’s transportive sound toward a new sense of emotional directness, without losing the spirit of nomadic wandering that’s always defined it. And it all started with them coming home.

By the summer of 2019, the Houston group—bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, guitarist Mark Speer, drummer DJ Johnson—had been on tour for nearly three-and-ahalf years, playing to audiences across North and South America, Europe, and southeast Asia behind its acclaimed albums The Universe Smiles Upon You and Con Todo El Mundo. They returned to their farmhouse studio in Burton, Texas, ready to begin work on their third album. But they were also determined to slow down, to take their time and luxuriate in building something together. Musically, the band’s ever-restless ear saw it pulling reference points from Pakistan, Korea, and West Africa, incorporating strains of Indian chanting boxes and Congolese syncopated guitar. But more than anything, the album became a celebration of Houston, the eclectic city that had nurtured them, and a cultural nexus where you can check out country and zydeco, trap rap, or avant-garde opera on any given night.

In those years away from home, Khruangbin’s members often felt like they were swimming underwater, unsure of where they were going, or why they were going there. But Mordechai leads them gently back to the surface, allowing them to take a breath, look around, and find itself again. It is a snapshot taken along a larger journey—a moment all the more beautiful for its impermanence. And it’s a memory to revisit again and again, speaking to us now more clearly than ever.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. First Class
2. Time (You And I)
3. Connaissais De Face
4. Father Bird, Mother Bird
5. If There Is No Question

SIDE B:
6. Pelota
7. One To Remember
8. Dearest Alfred
9. So We Won’t Forget
10. Shida

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

Phoebe Bridgers doesn’t write love songs as much as songs about the impact love can have on our lives, personalities, and priorities.

Punisher, her fourth release and second solo album, is concerned with that subject. To say she writes about heartbreak is to undersell her blue wisdom, to say she writes about pain erases all the strange joy her music emanates. The arrival of Punisher cements Phoebe Bridgers as one of the most clever, tender and prolific songwriters of our era.

Bridgers is the rare artist with enough humour to deconstruct her own meteoric rise. Repeatedly praised by publications like The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Pitchfork, The Fader, The Los Angeles Times and countless others, Bridgers herself is more interested in discussing topics on Twitter, deadpanning meditations on the humiliating process of being a person, she presents a sweetly funny flipside to the strikingly sad songs she writes. Fittingly, Punisher is fascinated with, and driven by, that kind of impossible tension. Whether it’s writing tweets or songs, Bridgers’s singular talent lies in bringing fierce curiosity to slimy and painful things, interrogating them until they yield up answers that are beautiful and absurd, or faithfully reporting the reality that, sometimes, they are neither.

Bridgers pulls together a formidable crew of guests, including the Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, Christian Lee Hutson and Conor Oberst as well as Nathaniel Walcott (of Bright Eyes), Nick Zinner (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Jenny Lee Lindberg (of Warpaint), Blake Mills and Jim Keltner as well as her longtime bandmates Marshall Vore (drums), Harrison Whitford (guitar), Emily Retsas (bass) and Nick White (keys). The album was mixed by Mike Mogis, who also mixed Stranger In The Alps. On the album’s epic, freewheeling closer, “I Know The End,” Bridgers orchestrates wails and horns, drums and electric guitar into a sumptuous doomsday swirl, culminating in her own final whispered roar.

This is Punisher in a nutshell: devastating elegance punctuated by a moment of deeply campy self-awareness.

Driving anywhere in Texas can cost you half a day, easy. For example, it’ll take you over four hours just to get from R&B singer Leon Bridges’ hometown of Fort Worth down to Houston, where the psychedelic wanderers in Khruangbin hail from. The state is vast, crisscrossed with rugged expanses of road flanked by limestone cliffs and granite mountains, forests of pine and mesquite, miles of desert or acres of sprawling grassland, all depending on what part you’re in. And it’s all baking under the "Texas Sun" that lends its name to Bridges and Khruangbin’s new collaborative EP.

“Big sky country, that’s what they call Texas,” Khruangbin bassist Laura Lee says. “The horizon line goes all the way from one side to another without interruption. There’s something really comforting about that.”

On "Texas Sun", these two members of the state’s musical vanguard meet up somewhere in the middle of that scene, in the mythical nexus of Texas’ past, present, and future - a dreamy badlands where genres blur as seamlessly as the terrain. It calls equally to the cowboys bootscooting at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth, the chopped-and-screwed hip-hop fans rattling slabs on the southside of Houston, the art-school kids dropping acid in Austin, the cross-cultural progeny who grew up on listening to both mariachi and post-hardcore out on the Mexican borders of El Paso. All of these things, overlapping in a multicolored melange, purple hues as vivid and unpredictable as one of the state’s rightfully celebrated sunsets.

A journey through homesick reminiscences, backseat romances, and late-night contemplations, the kind of record made for listening with the windows down and the road humming softly beneath you. Like the highways that inspired it, "Texas Sun" is guaranteed to get you where you’re going -especially if you’re in no particular hurry to get there.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A mild departure for Khruangbin here, enlisting soulful maestro Leon Bridges on vox duties, adding a silky overtone to their nigh-horizontal grooves. A superb, hazy dream of an album.

TRACK LISTING

1. Texas Sun
2. Midnight
3. C-Side
4. Conversion

Have We Met, as Dan Bejar puts it, ‘came together in such a crazy way – all equal parts ecstasy and terror’. Initially conceived (but quickly ditched) as a Y2K album, Bejar was without a clear concept in mind. So he said “fuck it” and let it all rip while brainstorming at home. Culled from years’ worth of saved writing, set aside for projects “beyond music,” and recorded at his kitchen table, Have We Met harkens back to Kaputt-era Dan stringing together lyrics off hand while lounging on his couch. The resulting vocal sound exists in the sweet spot between two Destroyer worlds colliding: hints of the past, more strident Destroyer mixed in with a relaxed, new-aged Crooning one.

No re-recording. No cleaning up. Frequent collaborator John Collins was tasked with the role of layering synth and rhythm sections over a stream-of-consciousness Bejar, as Nic Bragg added ‘completely unexpected and somehow comforting’ three-dimensional, shredding guitar. The Destroyer band-orientated approach was shelved; “The record could have gone on and on, and the mixes kept evolving up until about a day before we sent them off to be mastered, which was also 48 hours before John and his wife went to the birthing centre, where their first child was born; our true deadline!” says Bejar.

Opener ‘Crimson Tide’ is a six-minute journey that takes its rightful place among other Destroyer epics. It welcomes with a sparse rhythm until percolating synths and propulsive bass build and make it all a reality with unsustainable imagery — oceans stuck inside hospital corridors and insane funerals. It’s the sound of a somewhat eccentric and unorthodox recording process laid out and built up by three musicians exploring the depth to which they can take an idea.

On “The Television Music Supervisor,” trickling keys, glitches, and “clickity click clicks” (a variation on the standard Bejar “la da das”) focuses on how those who dictate our relationships with music and media are susceptible to error, a most 21st century concern. Perhaps the most audacious Destroyer track yet, “Cue Synthesizer” steps back to address the rote and often-detached mechanics of music. Up next, the waltzy and woozy centerpiece “University Hill” drifts even further and applies that logic more broadly, insisting “the game is rigged in every direction” and “you’re made of string.”

Thirteen albums in, Have We Met manages to meet somewhere between trademarks and new territory – atmospheric approximations of feeling and place, wry gut-punches of one liners, and the deluge of energy meets a thematic catharsis of modern dread, delivered with an effortless, entrancing directness. But, no need to expound any further. He's got it all spelled out for you in the music.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: While still retaining the slightly oddball lounge aesthetic, 'Have We Met' takes all of Destroyer's myriad sounds and skilfully crafts them into an album full of twists and turns, brimming with warmth and rarely overproduced, Bejar is at his creative best.

TRACK LISTING

1. Crimson Tide
2. Kinda Dark
3. It Just Doesn’t Happen
4. The Television Music Supervisor
5. The Raven
6. Cue Synthesizer
7. University Hill
8. Have We Met
9. The Man In Black’s Blues
10. Foolssong

‘Don’t You Think You’ve Had Enough?’ is what Jennifer Clavin asked herself when she hit a turning point in her life. It’s also the title of the new record from Bleached, Jessie and Jennifer Clavin’s first album written from a place of sobriety. That newfound perspective serves as the guiding force, yielding a courageous, honest and sonically ambitious album. It’s a record about fighting both literally and figuratively for your life - and the clarity born from that struggle.

Writing began in early 2018, both in a Los Angeles practice space and with friends and co-writers in Nashville. Producer Shane Stoneback (Vampire Weekend, Sleigh Bells) helped open every door to experimentation, wanting to be exploratory while keeping the sound singularly Bleached.

The resulting album is explosive, grappling with the past; its twelve tracks mark some of the sisters’ most visceral, rawest songwriting to date - and some of their best. The work glimmers with inspiration found in touring with the likes of The Damned and Paramore. That arena-ready pop, incisively catchy, was a palpable influence helping to push Bleached’s sound in a new direction.

TRACK LISTING

Heartbeat Away
Hard To Kill
Daydream
I Get What I Need
Somebody Dial 911
Kiss You Goodbye
Rebound City
Silly Girl
Valley To LA
Real Life
Awkward Phase
Shitty Ballet

“Well, this is the largest amount of people we’ve ever had in a room to watch us, so it feels pretty damn special,” Marlon Williams says, sitting down to the piano during the first night of two sold-out shows at the historic Auckland Town Hall. May 25th, 2018 was special in many respects. Williams had returned home to New Zealand to close a 60-date world tour for his new album, Make Way For Love. He shared the stage with his second family, The Yarra Benders, with the two evenings at Auckland Town Hall serving as a fitting cap after having toured the globe together over the course of two album campaigns.

Across the past several years on the road, the Marlon Williams live show has taken on an almost mystical status — not just for Williams’ extraordinary voice, but also for the hypnotic command he has over an audience, his seamless blending of genres, and the effortless, instinctive relationship he shares with his band. Live at Auckland Town Hall showcases Williams at his finest, performing a set that includes songs from his acclaimed self-titled debut album, as well as 2018’s Make Way For Love, and standalone single, “Vampire Again.” The live album also includes previously unreleased covers of Barry Gibb, Yoko Ono, the late Lhasa De Sela, and a Williams live favorite, “Portrait of a Man” by Screaming Jay Hawkins.

Live at Auckland Town Hall captures an artist both early enough in his career to be humbled by the occasion, and developed enough to present a stunning catalogue of music and quality of performance. As Williams’ first official live release, Live at Auckland Town Hall feels sure to enter the canon of great live albums in the years to come, a dazzling snapshot of Marlon Williams’ musical singularity.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Come To Me
2. I Know A Jeweller
3. Everyone’s Got Something To Say
4. Beautiful Dress
5. I Didn’t Make A Plan
6. The Fire Of Love

SIDE B:
7. Is Anything Wrong?
8. Can I Call You
9. Dark Child
10. I’m Lost Without You
11. What’s Chasing You

SIDE C:
12. Party Boy
13. Carried Away
14. Vampire Again
15. Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore
16. Make Way For Love

SIDE D:
17. Love Is A Terrible Thing
18. Portrait Of A Man
19. When I Was A Young Girl

On her sophomore LP, The Best of Luck Club, 26-year-old Melbourne, Australia native Alex Lahey navigates the pangs of generational ennui with the pint half-full and a spot cleared on the bar stool next to her. Self-doubt, burn out, break-ups, mental health, moving in with her girlfriend, vibrators: The Best of Luck Club showcases the universal language of Lahey’s sharp songwriting, her propensity for taking the minute details of the personal and flipping it public through anthemic pop-punk. Lahey’s 2017 debut I Love You Like a Brother encases Lahey’s knack for writing a killer hook and her acute sense of humor delivered via a slacker-rock package and, in a way, The Best of Luck Club picks up where that record left off.

Lahey co-produced the album alongside acclaimed engineer and producer Catherine Marks (Local Natives, Wolf Alice, Manchester Orchestra), and dives headfirst into a broader spectrum of both emotion and sound through polished, arena pop-punk in the vein of Paramore with the introspective sheen of Alvvays or Tegan & Sara. Here, Lahey documents the highest highs and the lowest lows of her life to date. After a whirlwind of global touring in support of breakout debut I Love You Like a Brother, Lahey wrote the bulk of her follow-up in Nashville during 12-hour days of songwriting. There, she found the inspiration for The Best of Luck Clubís concept: the dive bar scene and its genuine energy.”Whether you’ve had the best day of your life or the worst day of your life, you can just sit up at the bar and turn to the person next to you - who has no idea who you are - and have a chat. And the response that you generally get at the end of the conversation is, "Best of luck", so The Best Of Luck Club is that place.

TRACK LISTING

1. I Don’t Get Invited To Parties Anymore
2. Am I Doing It Right
3. Interior Demeanour
4. Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself
5. Unspoken History
6. Misery Guts
7. Isabella
8. I Need To Move On
9. Black RM’s
10. I Want To Live With You

This is Kevin’s opus - a 2LP concept album on spirituality and religion. Throughout his four solo albums and myriad records of various collaboration, Kevin Morby has recognized in his work the ubiquity of an apparent religious theme. Though not identifying as “religious” in the slightest, Morby—the globetrotting son of Kansas City who has made music while living on both coasts before recently returning to his Midwestern stomping grounds—recognizes in himself a somewhat spiritual being with a secular attitude towards the soulful. And so, in an effort to tackle that notion head-on and once-and-for-all, he sat down in his form of church—on planes and in beds—and wrote what would become his first true concept-album: the lavish, resplendent, career-best double LP Oh My God.

“This one feels full circle, my most realized record yet,” he says. “It’s a cohesive piece; all the songs fit under the umbrella of this weird religious theme. I was able to write and record the album I wanted to make. It’s one of those marks of a life: this is why I slept on floors for seven years. I’ve now gotten the keys to my own little kingdom, and I’m devoting so much of my life to music that I just want to keep it interesting. At the end of the day, the only thing I don’t want is to be bored. If someone wants to get in my face about writing a non-religious religious record? Thank god. That’s all I gotta say.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Although Matt and I agree that the front cover of this looks unbelievably like a topless Dom Kozubik, don't let that put you off. 'Oh My God' is a tenderly delivered and perfectly measured slice of indie songwriting. Morby's ear for a tune and perfectly balanced juxtaposition of tender, brittle balladry and uplifting soulful soothe make this one for every collection.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Oh My God
2. No Halo
3. Nothing Sacred / All Things Wild
4. OMG Rock N Roll

SIDE B
5. Seven Devils
6. Hail Mary
7. Piss River
8. Savannah

SIDE C
9. Storm (Beneath The Weather)
10. Congratulations
11. I Want To Be Clean

SIDE D
12. Sing A Glad Song
13. Ballad Of Faye
14. O Behold

“When I was writing these songs, every day I would walk on the beach and I was completely alone and overwhelmed by fear...but then I realized how there really aren’t any rules for who you are, who you’ll become, or who you think you need to be. Eraserland is just that. It’s death to ego, and rebirth to anything or anyone you want to be.”

In December 2017, Tim Showalter was uncertain about his next record and the shape it would eventually take. With no new songs written, he was unprepared for the message he would receive from his friend Carl Broemel, the conversation that would follow, and the album that would become Eraserland. Leading off with standout track “Weird Ways” and his powerful declaration of “I don’t feel it anymore,” Eraserland traces Showalter’s evolution from apprehension to creative awakening, carving out a new and compelling future for Strand of Oaks.

Revived by the support of Broemel and his bandmates, Showalter felt the pressure to deliver songs worthy of musicians he had admired long before and after a 2015 Oaks/MMJ tour. So in February 2018, he spent two weeks alone in Wildwood, New Jersey writing and demoing all of the songs that would eventually comprise Eraserland. And in April, he went into the studio to record with Kevin Ratterman at La La Land Studios in Louisville, Kentucky, and with Broemel, Hallahan, Koster, and Blankenship as his band. Jason Isbell also contributed his Hendrix-esque guitar work to Eraserland, while singer/ songwriter Emma Ruth Rundle provided gorgeous vocals. Every song was recorded live, with all musicians playing together in one room and working to bring Showalter’s ideas to fruition. “I remember sitting next to Tim and Kevin listening to the final mixes with tears rolling down my cheeks,” said Hallahan. “From start to finish, this one came from the heart.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Weird Ways
2. Hyperspace Blues
3. Keys
4. Visions
5. Final Fires
6. Moon Landing
7. Ruby
8. Wild And Willing
9. Eraserland
10. Forever Chords
11. Cruel Fisherman