Haroumi Hosono, the pioneering Japanese musician, producer, composer, and founding member of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Happy End, has “found his voice in a late career renaissance," writes The Wire. His five-decade legacy continues to grow and attract new fans, and has been cited by an acclaimed list of artists, including Mac DeMarco, Cameron Winter, Ginger Root, Vampire Weekend, and Harry Styles. Shaped by mid-century American music, Hosono's work now reverberates back through a new generation of Western artists—a remarkable circular exchange.

'Yours Sincerely', his 23rd studio album and first collection of new music in over seven years, finds Hosono ever-pushing his exploratory songcraft: “I am now 78 years old, but from here on, I feel a growing curiosity toward the unknown music that my new self will create, while also embracing the music of my former self—as if I now carry two musical worlds within me.” Across arrangements that span tender psych-folk and bubbling avant pop, Hosono contemplates the concept of a maternal force that envelops the Earth, “humanity’s understanding of the unconditional love possessed by those who give us life,” he says. Songs tap into a collective current, engaging the “deeply buried instincts—maternal compassion and mercy, things we rarely engage with in our daily lives.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Note of Mothership
2. Sincerely
3. Ayurveda
4. M for Mandala
5. Rojiura (Walking Vibration)
6. Happy Holiday
7. To A Wild Rose
8. Humming "Dream Of Love"
9. Figlio Perdute
10. Anemo Wheel

A companion to the 2020 album 'I Feel Alive', the long sold-out 'Empty Seats' is a fan favorite release, containing some of the band’s most pointed and effervescent material, drawing comparisons to bands like The Whitest Boy Alive and Men I Trust. As the bio says, with a heart firmly attached to their sleeves, their song-craft delves into the emotional intricacy of personal relationships, asking questions about power and desire. Riley Fleck’s measured drumming and David Carriere’s trademark guitar licks mesh with Marta Cikojevic’s lush keyboards. All these elements work in tandem and in service of Jane Penny’s unmistakable, wistful voice. The result of this mixture is a collection of four self-produced records and a handful of singles that cover a range of moods and a complex emotional realm while maintaining a groove and musicality.

TRACK LISTING

1. Perfected Steps
2. Janet Planet
3. Waiting
4. Party Again
5. Future Waits

Sudanese-American artist Dua Saleh continues their boundless ascent with 'Of Earth & Wires', a resolutely warm, spiritual, and frenetic album exploring notions of home, humanity, and renewal.

Featuring contributions from Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), aja monet, Gaidaa, and more, Saleh threads and deconstructs indie, R&B, and electronic pop with flashes of Sudanese folk, UK dance, and reggaeton, sounds intrinsic to their story, all held together by ambitious, future-facing production and clear-eyed lyricism.

Saleh’s soulful, gritty, shape-shifting style has found fans from The New York Times to NME, alongside their breakout role in the Netflix series Sex Education, making 2024's Ghostly International debut, 'I SHOULD CALL THEM', a proper arrival. The highly anticipated 'Of Earth & Wires' responds to the moment as both a watershed in their career and an urgent dialogue with struggles faced on a universal level.

TRACK LISTING

1. 5 Days
2. B Re A T H E
3. Flood (feat. Bon Iver)
4. Cállate
5. Firestorm
6. I Do, I Do
7. Keep Away (feat. Bon Iver)
8. Glow (feat. Bon Iver)
9. Speed Up
10. Anemic (feat. Gaidaa)
11. ALL IS LOVE (feat. Aja Monet)

Repressed in a brand new limited colour in honour of its 10 year anniversary, Tycho's Grammy-nominated album, 'Epoch' (Best Dance/Electronic Album), is the final installment in a trilogy following 'Dive' (2011) and 'Awake' (2014) and the culmination of over a decade’s work. The album captures the project's evolution from a delicate solo act into a powerful, multi-layered live band performing on the world’s largest stages.

TRACK LISTING

1. Glider
2. Horizon
3. Slack
4. Receiver
5. Epoch
6. Division
7. Source
8. Local
9. Rings
10. Continuum
11. Field

As Green-House, musicians Olive Ardizoni and Michael Flanagan engage human nature and the natural world through joyous, dynamic synthesis. Overlaying frequencies and expressions like camouflage, their deeply layered collaborative process begins with either artist; Ardizoni is often drawn to melody, Flanagan to harmonics. The power lies in how their ideas helix together, achieving a depth greater than the sum of its parts. For their first LP with new label home, Ghostly International, Green-House grows and refines their vivid instrumental songcraft with uncharted, genre-defying freedom and movement, a more active, percussive, and emotion-filled energy, marked by flowing bodies of sound and sweeping vistas. Hinterlands tunes into the beauty of the world with defiant, radical sincerity.

Since 2020, across a catalog of acclaimed releases via the scene-creating Los Angeles imprint, Leaving Records, the duo has pursued a curiosity in environments, reaching for innate and faraway spaces by way of organic and synthetic instrumentation, high-definition sound design, and “idiosyncratic melodies crafted with the patient and methodical hand of a gardener,” writes Pitchfork. Green-House doesn’t fit neatly into any single category. Ardizoni and Flanagan aren’t aligned with New Age ideologies or spirituality, and the ambient tag feels increasingly limited given all that’s going on in their songs, which skew closer to the realms of IDM or even modern classical on their new album. What remains inherent is an open sense of wonder, “the idea of legitimizing certain emotions within music that often aren’t taken seriously in art, like happiness and joy,” says Ardizoni, whose eclectic personality shines through even without lyrics.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sun Dogs
2. Sanibel
3. Farewell, Little Island 04. Misty Step
5. Dragline Silk
6. Hinterland I
7. Hinterland II
8. Hinterland III
9. Well Of The World
10. Under The Oak
11. Bronze Age
12. Valley Of Blue

Released in 2020, 'I Feel Alive' marks a shimmering return for Montreal indie-pop band TOPS, blending their signature soft-focus synths, bright guitar lines, and Jane Penny’s emotionally direct vocals into their most vibrant work yet. The album balances glossy pop warmth with introspective lyricism, exploring themes of desire, transformation, and self-realization. With a sound that feels both nostalgic and refreshingly modern, 'I Feel Alive' captures the band at a new creative peak—lush, intimate, and effortlessly cool, reaffirming TOPS as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary dream-pop.

TRACK LISTING

1. Direct Sunlight
2. I Feel Alive
3. Pirouette
4. Ballads & Sad Movies
5. Colder & Closer
6. Witching Hour
7. Take Down
8. Drowning In Paradise
9. OK Fine Whatever
10. Looking To Remember
11. Too Much

Released in 2016, It’s Immaterial found Black Marble refining its coldwave and synth-pop foundations into a warmer, more melodic expression of isolation, longing, and quiet resilience. Guided by Chris Stewart’s unmistakable baritone and a palette of analog synths, pulsing basslines, and minimalist rhythms, the album feels simultaneously nostalgic and forward-leaning. Its songs drift between shadowy introspection and subtle hope, creating a cinematic atmosphere that’s both intimate and hypnotic. With It’s Immaterial, Black Marble deepened its signature sound, offering a collection that resonates like a faded memory—soft, hazy, and endlessly replayable.

"Melodies twist inward and out of the comfort zone, but never overstep their boundaries or demand extra attention they don’t deserve. The fragments that have been found, from beginning to end, click and fall into place almost effortlessly. It’s surprising how nothing feels forced." - Drowned in Sound

TRACK LISTING

01. Interdiction
02. Iron Lung
03. It’s Conditional
04. Woods
05. A Million Billion Stars
06. Missing Sibling
07. Frisk
08. Golden Heart
09. Self Guided Tours
10. Portland U
11. Collene

'Psychic 9-5 Club' marks the beginning of a new chapter for HTRK. It's an album that looks back on a time of sadness and struggle, and within that struggle they find hope and humour and love. It's Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang's first album recorded entirely as a duo— former band member Sean Stewart died halfway through the recording of their last LP, 2011's 'Work (Work, Work)'.

Though the record is instantly recognisable as HTRK—Standish's vocal delivery remains central to the band's sound, while the productions are typically lean and dubby—they've found ample room for exploration within this framework. Gone are the reverb-soaked guitar explorations of 2009's 'Marry Me Tonight' and the fuzzy growls that ran through 'Work (Work Work)'. They've been replaced with something tender, velvety and polished. This is HTRK, but the flesh has been stripped from their sound, throwing the focus on naked arrangements and minimalist sound design.

The album was recorded at Blazer Sound Studios in New Mexico with Excepter's Nathan Corbin, who had previously directed the video clip for 'Work (Work Work)' cut 'Bendin'. Inviting a third party into their world was no easy decision, but in Corbin they found a kindred spirit. The LP was then refined and reworked in Australia at the turn of 2013, before the finishing touches were applied in New York during the summer.

Of all the themes that run through 'Psychic 9-5 Club', love is the most central. The word is laced throughout the album in lyrics and titles— love as a distraction, loving yourself, loving others. Standish's lyrics explore the complexities of sexuality and the body's reaction to personal loss, though there's room for wry humour—a constant through much of the best experimental Australian music of the past few decades.

Standish explores her vocal range fully—her husky spoken-word drawl remains, but we also hear her laugh and sing. Equally, Yang's exploratory production techniques—particularly his well-documented love of dub—are given room to shine. They dip headlong into some of the things that make humans tick—love, loss and desire—with the kind of integrity that has marked the band out from day one. 'Psychic 9-5 Club' is truly an album for the body and for the soul.

TRACK LISTING

1. Give It Up
2. Blue Sunshine
3. Feels Like Love
4. Soul Sleep
5. Wet Dream
6. Love Is Distraction
7. Chinatown Style
8. The Body You Deserve

Ghostly International has celebrated over 25 years as both a record label and art company, culminating in a unique marriage of sound and image. What does Ghostly sound like? “Genre-less” was a term thrown around in the early days, and that idea still holds true. Ghostly’s music — as with all of its artistic pursuits — straddles stylistic divisions, carving out space where sounds and ideas can cavort without inhibition or category.

This ethos comes to life in the first book dedicated to Ghostly, created with Hat & Beard Press. The immense volume delves into the label’s archives and history, featuring essays by critics Michaelangelo Matos and Philip Sherburne, alongside original interviews and oral histories with both musical and visual artists from across the roster.

Marking the five year anniversary from its original vinyl release and following a mammoth Minecraft year, that saw the release of the global box-office-topping ‘A Minecraft Movie’ starring Jack Black and Jason Mamoa, Ghostly International are making an ultra-rare ‘Warp Speed’ vinyl variant of C418’s legendary video game soundtrack available for the first time at UK retail.

Originally self-released in 2013, 'Minecraft Volume Beta' was C418’s longest batch of music to date at nearly 140 minutes. The collection features tracks that were “silently” added to Minecraft during its music updates and a few that never officially entered the game. The run time is now adapted to fit the double LP format, while digital downloads include the full set. Rosenfeld’s unmistakable abilities are on display; he creates a sweeping variety of musical ideas that mirror the limitless universe of Minecraft. Ghostly International is thrilled to give this unique collaboration its due treatment and hopes to see the creative inspiration which drives Minecraft and Rosenfeld continue to disperse by virtue of this unexpectedly universal music.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ki
2. Alpha
3. Blind Spots
4. Mutation
5. Biome Fest
6. Aria Math
7. Taswell
8. Beginning 2
9. Moog City 2
10. The End
11. Kyoto
12. Chirp
13. Mellohi
14. Stal
15. Eleven
16. Far
17. Intro

Joviale makes music that feels like a show; drama lies in the tension between pop impulse and something more cerebral and sensorial. A multidisciplinary artist from North London, they came up as a theater kid and now harness their prismatic creative expression across mediums, fusing components of visual art, performance, and recording into a singular world.

In 2021, following their 'Hurricane Belle' EP, which caught the attention of Pitchfork and Crack Magazine, they quietly receded from view in an effort to learn and evolve. In 2025, out from behind the curtains comes 'Mount Crystal', their full-length debut on Ghostly International, an ascendent conceptual album that reintroduces Joviale’s point of view. Songs are electric and soulful, dashed with jazzy experimentation, rhythmic rock, and vibrant sound design, all realized alongside co-producers John Carroll Kirby and Jkarri and a cast of collaborators, including Sam Wilkes, Carter Lang, and Will Miller, among others.

Initially imagined as a play, 'Mount Crystal' brims and bursts with life — peril, humor, and the buzz of the human spirit — conjuring a metaphysical climb that transcends the audio format. With plans to further manifest the vision as a live set and more, Joviale sets the course: “'Mount Crystal's lore is driven by the embodiment of desire, danger, and desperation. A mirrored dimension in a distant reality where nothing is left unsaid. These chapters crave to tear apart the illusion of pleasure by alchemising the unrelenting pain I’ve experienced in my efforts to love, deny, and embrace the sweetest melodies with the sweetest friends.”

TRACK LISTING

1. The Mountain (intro)
2. Snow
3. Heavy
4. Crush
5. HARK!
6. Foul Play
7. Let Me Down
8. Moonshine
9. Both Ways
10. MC (intermission)
11. Beam
12. Blu
13. Disappear
14. Wishing

TOPS — musicians David Carriere, Jane Penny,Marta Cikojevic, and Riley Fleck — write timeless music that reliably threads immediacy and depth. 'Bury the Key', their first full-length since 2020 and with new label home Ghostly International, is a captivating reintroduction for the Montréal band:ever refined, undoubtedly masters of their melodic craft yet unafraid of evolving and testing themselves against different, at times darker tones.The album faces feelings once locked away,engaging the give-and-take between happiness,hedonism, and self-destruction. While often inhabited by fictional figures, their glowing,grooving, self-produced songs draw from personal observations: intimacy (both inside and outside theband), toxic behavior, drug use, and apocalyptic dread. When recording started, they noticed a shift and leaned in, jokingly dubbed "evil TOPS," says Penny. "We're always kind of seen as a soft band orlike naive or friendly in a Canadian way, but we made it a challenge to really channel the world around us." Through the lens of a looming epoch and the clarity that comes with age, TOPS dip into amore sinister disco realm with 'Bury the Key', giving their soft-focus sophisti-pop a sharpened edge.

TRACK LISTING

1. Stars Come After You
2. Wheels At Night
3. ICU2
4. Outstanding In The Rain
5. Annihilation
6. Falling On My Sword
7. Call You Back
8. Chlorine
9. Mean Streak
10. Your Ride
11. Standing At The Edge Of Fire
12. Paper House

In his label debut on Ghostly International, Brooklyn-born, South London-based artist Goya Gumbani redefines his recording project with rich, full-band arrangements, crossing London's new jazz generation with New York City's hip-hop storytelling legacy. Warlord of the Weejuns is a triumph of taste, heritage, and pride from one of rap music's most dexterous talents. Guests include Fatima, lojii, Seafood Sam, and Yaya Bey. London-based Swedish soul singer Fatima appears in two singles; first, there's "Firefly," a cosmic R&B groove that captures the rawness of a recent breakup. "Fatima came and just laid the hook, and I was like, damn, you're embodying how I'm feeling," says Goya, who built it out with contributions from Swarvy, Omari Jazz, Les Lockheart, and his Ghostly labelmate quickly, quickly.

TRACK LISTING

1. Weejuns (intro) Ft. Will Stowe
2. Beautiful BLACK
3. One Hand Washes The Other Ft. Lojii
4. Crossroad(s)
5. Negroni (Skit)
6. FireFly Ft. Fatima
7. Nothin’ To Say
8. UPtown Mami (Skit)
9. Manuva(s) Ft. Joe Armon-Jones
10. Driftin’ Interlude Ft. Pearl De Luna
11. Chase The Sunrise Ft. Yaya Bey, Lojii, Fatima
12. First Dates
13. Quiz Interlude Ft. Salimata
14. Lizards / Dancin' With The Devil Ft. Jaydon Clover & The Hotel
15. Mind, Body, Spirit Ft. Seafood Sam
16. FOREVER POOH

Across a remarkable run of releases in barely half a decade, London’s Loraine James has established her identity through a blend of refined composition, gritty experimentation, and unpredictable, intricate electronic programming. While titles released under her given name on Hyperdub tend toward IDM-influenced, vocal-heavy collaborations, James reserves her Ghostly International-signed alias, Whatever The Weather, for an inward gaze that explores innate “emotional temperature” and environment (shown in degree-based track titling).

Her second full-length is a markedly warmer outing compared to its predecessor, as signaled by the shift from LP1’s arctic cover photo to LP2’s desert climes. Common to both albums is the mastering work of friend and collaborator Josh Eustis(aka Telefon Tel Aviv), who lends his keen ear to James’ complexities to craft a strikingly three-dimensional sonic experience. Flowing from hypnotic atmospheres to mottled rhythms to processed collages of diaristic field recordings, 'Whatever The Weather II' is a compelling union of organic and human elements from one of electronic music’s most imaginative talents.

The lead single and closing track to Whatever The Weather’s(Loraine James) new LP, '12°C', drifts from bustling human spaces into a concrete groove, weaving melody and texture into a truly unusual, soul-stirring fullness. In its final moments, a languid acoustic guitar and gentle, finger-tapped beat join her pitch-shifted voice. 'Whatever The Weather II' is full of such passages, where formal composition appears like a film in negative, and conventions are upturned with wit, intelligence, and skill.

TRACK LISTING

1. 1°C
2. 3°C
3. 18°C
4. 20°C
5. 23°C (Intermittent Sunshine)
6. 5°C
7. 8°C
8. 26°C
9. 11°C (Intermittent Rain)
10. 9°C
11. 15°C
12. 12°C

HTRK step into their 21st year on reflective terms, launching a series of collaborations, covers/remixes, installations, and performances alongside the new repress of their full-length debut, 'Marry Me Tonight'. First released in 2009 via Blast First Petite, the album saw its first vinyl pressing in 2015 via Ghostly International and has since been out of stock.

Few groups in history elevate mood to such singular, smoldering supremacy as the Australian duo of Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang, aka HTRK (or "hate rock" if informed). Across two decades of work and wounds, HTRK’s sound has shape-shifted between densities and intensities, noise and nakedness, but never wavered in its delicate poetic gravity. In HTRK’s sound world, cavernous reverberations of dub techno are mixed with frosted post-punk motifs and the gravelly imperfections of industrial, reimagined in the setting of a dingy basement.

Like all HTRK albums, 'Marry Me Tonight' was singular in sound and circumstance. It's the only album the outfit recorded from start to finish as a trio, and it's the only HTRK record that bears the co-production stamp of Rowland S. Howard. Breathy, caustic, and rife with contradiction, 'Marry Me Tonight' took the raw material recorded on 2005's 'Nostalgia' and transformed it into a pop record — pop that buckled and warped beneath the glare of Howard, fellow producer Lindsay Gravina, and the HTRK trio: Jonnine Standish, Nigel Yang and Sean Stewart. Howard died at the end of 2009; Stewart died the year after. Things would never be the same. The band would carry on and reach new heights despite it all, but as a trio, this is their definitive document.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ha
2. Rent Boy
3. Your Mistress Turns To Dust
4. Kiss Before The Fall
5. Waltz Real Slow
6. Panties
7. She’s Seventeen
8. Fascinator
9. Disco

Some called Studio, the project of Swedish musicians Dan Lissvik and Rasmus Hägg, “the missing link between The Cure and Lindstrøm,” Pitchfork heard Durutti Column and Can, as the duo’s story became swept up in a loosely developing scene — adjacent first to the label Service (Jens Lekman, The Whitest Boy Alive) and later Sincerely Yours (The Tough Alliance, jj) — and a precursor to the 2010s boom at the axis of electronic and psychedelic music guided by indie greats like Caribou, Four Tet, and Darkside.

'West Coast', their seminal 2006 debut, captured a faraway romanticism of Balearic brushed up against Krautrock, disco, dub, and afrobeat, with pop lyricism lifted from new wave, all made modern by two art school grads in Gothenburg. First pressed in a small vinyl-only run via their own Information label, the album has been notably absent from most streaming services, and the internet’s record of its initial impact is all but fossilized from a bygone blog era, while its sound is simply untraceable to any one moment in music.

Outside of three 7” releases, they’d keep the music to themselves for several more years. In 2005, Hägg remembers, “We got our degrees and were kicked out of our studio spaces so all these recordings were just piled up. A year later we dusted them off and started to deconstruct and assemble them in a more drawn-out fashion.” In the same breadth, they cite DJ Screw, J Dilla, and Joy Division, along with early ‘80s European live DJ sets from the likes of Beppe Loda, Dj Mozart, and Baldelli as reference points. “The anything-goes mentality was very encouraging and was a big cornerstone to the Studio sound,” says Hägg. “But there’s so much more to the picture, we were not that young then and had lots of musical baggage in our suitcases, the new thing was that we finally let it all come through, not bound by any borders that was often the case with music identity in Sweden during the 90s.”

In the afterglow of the record’s 2007 reception, Studio receded from view, clouded behind a mountain of remix requests (including one for Kylie Minogue that saw release) and label bureaucracy. “It’s easy to wish we would have done some proper recordings of our own instead,” Hägg reflects. But both artists, now well into respective careers beyond Studio, have come to peace with West Coast as their most enduring effort together. Lissvik adds, “It serves as a good reminder for me to keep to that decision and promise and to continue exploring and growing.

TRACK LISTING

1. Out There
2. West Coast
3.Origin
4. Life’s A Beach!
5. Self Service
6. Indo

Released in 2010, nearly a decade into his craft, Black City was a watershed moment for Matthew Dear. A steely noir set that straddled electronic dance and indie rock classification, earning him Best New Music from Pitchfork and a worldwide tour with a besuited band, the album unlocked Dear's darkest and most engrossing ideas to date. The love-obsessed songwriter of 2007's Asa Breed had given way to a more existentially paranoid entity. Creeping disco tempos, cavernous atmospherics, and strange distortions brought his signature avant-pop sound to a moodier place. Black City wasn't to be found on any map. It was a composite, an imaginary metropolis peopled by desperate cases, lovelorn souls, and amoral motives, with flashes of sweetness and hope.

In Black City, nothing is at it seems: leadoff single "Little People (Black City)" is a nine-and-a-half minute disco odyssey, subverting its gleaming electronic lead with eerily giddy backing vocals and cryptic, ominous lyrics ("a frozen wasted heart / has died", "love me like a clown"); "You Put a Smell on Me" is a sordid sex romp set to hysterically chattering percussion and a serrated synth line that will set your teeth on edge; "More Surgery" at first recalls the barely-there Krautrock of Harmonia in its burbling minimalism, until Dear's chanted chorus of "Alter genetics / to make my body glow / I need more surgery / there's so much more to know" sends the track hurtling into a dystopian future.

And yet, for all the foreboding moods on Black City, it's the album's sweeter moments that illustrate Matthew Dear's growing maturity as a songwriter. "Slowdance" is a futuristic lullaby in which Dear articulates a lover's helplessness ("I can't be the one to tell you everything's wrong") over breathy, Arthur Russell-esque cello swishes; the album-closing "Gem" is an achingly simple, reverb-drenched piano ballad that ends with a long, slow fade.
"...it's not too surprising when Dear takes Reznor's ‘Closer’ pulse out for a moonless 4 a.m. test drive on ‘You Put a Smell on Me.’ With Black City, Dear offers a precisely thought-out guide to losing your mind.”
- in Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2010

Matthew Dear toured Black City worldwide with a full band, presenting a unique crossover between electronic and indie circles, landing support tours with Depeche Mode, Hot Chip, Interpol, and later, MGMT.

Matthew Dear's work traverses myriad musical worlds while belonging to none; he also helped shape the sound of Ghostly's dancefloor offshoot, Spectral Sound, with several releases under his techno alias Audion and DJ Mixes for DJ-Kicks, Fabric, and more.

Dear has collaborated with Tegan and Sara, The Drums, Protomartyr, and Ricardo Villalobos and released remix projects with Spoon, Charlotte Gainsbourg, The Postal Service, and MGMT.

TRACK LISTING

1. Honey
2. I Can’t Feel
3. Little People (Black City)
4. Slowdance
5. Soil To Seed
6. You Put A Spell On Me
7. Shortwave
8. Monkey
9. More Surgery
10. Gem

With her proper full-length debut, Songs From A Thousand Frames Of Mind, Virginia-born, LA-based songwriter Kate Bollinger redefines and refines her craft with intention. Inspired by pop, rock, and folk songs of the 1960s, Bollinger and her band — including collaborators Jacob Grissom, Adam Brisbin, Matthew E. White, and Sam Evian — favor the eclectic, melodic, and majestic, supporting intimate, stream-of-consciousness lyricism with classic instrumentation. It's a collection of pop songs, polished yet scrappy with an underlying punk spirit, navigating life, relationships, and growing up. The release follows a run of singles since her 2022 record on Ghostly International, lauded by the likes of NPR and The Fader, contributions to friend's projects (Drugdealer, Paul Cherry), and tours with Faye Webster, Liz Phair, Devendra Banhart, and others.

TRACK LISTING

01. What’s This About (La La La La)
02. To Your Own Devices
03. Any Day Now
04. God Interlude
05. Lonely
06. Running
07. In A Smile
08. Postcard From A Cloud
09. I See It Now
10. Sweet Devil
11. All This Time

"Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting," Casey MQ sings at the start of Later that day, the day before, or the day before that, his new LP and Ghostly International debut. It's a phrase fittingly misremembered from something the LA-based, Canadian-born composer came upon as he spiraled into unconscious and subconscious-led writing sessions at the piano. Casey’s known for his 2020 breakthrough release babycasey, which gave voice to songs seen through the lens of childhood, various film score work and collaborations with artists such as Oklou (who returns here), Eartheater, and Vagabon. His gifts as a producer and songwriter are rooted in textural world-building and the excavation of personal truth. With Later that day... he questions what is true entirely, understanding our mind's tendency to bend and project onto pictures of the past. Across vivid, baroque pop balladry, Casey MQ reorients his recording project and point of view under the notion that memories are malleable. All the joy, pain, love, and loss housed within remembrance is open to interpretation and deconstruction, which he does deftly, with curiosity and complete artistic freedom.

"It's a memory album," Casey puts it simply, winding up for the deeper unpacking, "and it might be a breakup album, too...there are more questions than answers." Engaging his dreams and sitting with sheet music at his newly acquired piano, he looked to new and old inspirations including the works of Claude Debussy, Joni Mitchell, and Joe Hisaishi's beloved Studio Ghibli film scores. "Since I was young, I always wanted to write a piano album." babycasey's studied electronic sound isn't wholly abandoned on Later that day... instead, it comes through like an atmosphere, giving Casey's more spacious, minimal arrangements a distinct luster and sheen. The textures and tones shift from song to song as if mirroring the way our minds constantly recontextualize, remember, and forget.

Cathartic opener "Grey Gardens" — its title derived from a dream abstractly related to the Toronto restaurant, but not the 1975 film, which he cites as another coincidental false memory — presents the record's plaintive, haunted feeling. "Even if not reading into lyrics, sonically I wanted it to feel like you're being pulled into a universe. Not fantasy or otherworldly per se, something more tangible, of the body and mind,” Casey says. “Hearing it back, I realized this track was the key to unlocking it." His tender falsetto hovers above ambient washes and echoed keys, each word falling carefully in the crevices. "Asleep At The Wheel" unfolds on arpeggiated synth before a burst of symphonic color; the synth returns inverted to harmonize with the outro, "I love a car crash, I love a story, I love a memory, I swear it's real..."

Casey leans into digital imagination on the warm, introspective "Me I Think I Found It." Subdued, stuttered percussion underscores the singer as he cycles through pixelated imagery — screenshots, smiles, streetlights — searching for higher meaning through love. Built on ascendent chord distortions, "Dying Til I'm Born" gives the record one of its boldest pulses of emotion. The back half stretches out; "Is This Only Water" is sparse and foggy, "Baby Voice" is intimate and desperate for something to remain. "Words For Love" grooves on guitar, and "Tennisman9" aches in heartbreak. French musician Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou, appears as the collection’s only guest for the closing duet, "The Make Believe," a bright and buoyant send-off that gives Later that day... both a sense of resolve and cyclical-motion. "We are young, under the sun," they sing together, a parting image brimming with lightness.

TRACK LISTING

01. Grey Gardens
02. Asleep At The Wheel
03. Me, I Think I Found It
04. Dying 'Til I'm Born
05. Is This Only Water
06. See You Later
07. Baby Voice
08. Words For Love
09 Tennisman9
10. The Make Believe (feat. Oklou)

Twenty-plus years into his career, producer / vocalist / songwriter / DJ Matthew Dear remains artistically unpredictable in pursuit of his prescient strain of electronically-formed, organically-delivered indie pop. His work traverses myriad musical worlds, belonging to none. But these fluid moves have not been without a few forks in the road, decisive turns, and what-ifs. Most notable is the pivot-point following Dear’s acclaimed 2007 avant-pop LP, “Asa Breed”, in which he broke away from the 4/4 grid of his techno / house debut “Leave Luck To Heaven” and into something much more wild and idiosyncratic. Traveling between his adopted Detroit and his home state of Texas throughout 2008 and 2009, Dear amassed a set of personal, playful, looping guitar-centric recordings he’d consider for his next album. Given the new momentum of the hybrid electronic pop of “Asa Breed” which led to an opening slot for Hot Chip and remixes for ‘00 heroes like Spoon and Postal Service, Dear decided to shelf the material. He moved ahead to work on his watershed 2010 album, “Black City”, a steely noir set which earned him a Best New Music on Pitchfork and a worldwide tour with a besuited band. This lost album had a sound, a spirited country romp in the techno barn, and it had a rough title, a scribble on one of the CD-Rs passed to Ghostly label founder Sam Valenti IV, Preacher’s Sigh & Potion. He never fully walked away from it, and merely kept moving down the road, waiting for the audience to catch up. Over a decade later, that time is now.

“Preacher’s Sigh & Potion” finds Dear unknowingly at an intersection in his young run, a burgeoning songwriter at his most freewheeling and unaffected. In hindsight, there were hints of Preacher’s sound on “Asa Breed”, but the set still registers endearingly out of step with his eventual direction. This was the first time Dear tapped so directly into his late father’s influence as a fingerpicking guitar player in the 1960s and ‘70s and a gateway to the music of John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, and Emmylou Harris.

From the twang and tambourine stomp of album opener “Muscle Beach,” to the metronome-like pulse of “Hikers Y” complete with an unmistakable Matthew Dear dryly dismissive mantra, to the gloomy carnival-leaving-town pomp of “Gutters and Beyond”, “Preacher’s Sigh & Potion” is filled with the reckless notions of an artist dashing the history of pop and rock, the twang of country, the build and release of techno. Dear is an auteur, and in retrospect, so many of his signatures crop up in these relics from his former self. Dear remembers him well: ‘It’s crazy how music memory exists in a very deep and indescribable tangibility. I know the person who made all these, and remember glimpses of the desk, or studio set up for each recording. I know who wrote these lyrics, and where they were mentally during that process.’ Revisiting this material now also has Dear thinking about his father’s legacy.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: A cosmic-acid, hillbilly-'tronica album anyone? It sounds pretty batshit, but I can't help thinking this was everything Moby was trying to achieve in 1999.

TRACK LISTING

01. Muscle Beach
02. Sow Down
03. Hikers Y
04. Never Divide
05. All Her Fits
06. Supper Times
07. Crash And Burn
08. Heart To Sing
09. Eye
10. Head
11. Gutters And Beyond

It was the end of 2013 and Jannis Noya Makrigiannis, the frontman and principal persona behind Choir of Young Believers, was worn out. He’d been touring the band’s last record the haunting Rhine Gold, for the better part of a year and, when it was over, he felt confused, adrift and didn’t feel like playing music. He was doubting the future of the band. The way he coped was to detach. He postponed writing in favor of traveling, deciding that instead of diving back into the creation of another record, he would allow himself to move in whatever direction he desired. His impulses guided his decisions; he wasn’t feeling very inspired by the guitar or the piano, so he started to fiddle around with a small pocket sampler his mother got him for Christmas, using it to make small soundscapes, beats and collages. Those early experiments became the building blocks for Grasque, from the warped, weird choral vocals that open “Serious Lover” to breezey, breathy R&B of “Jeg Ser Dig,” on which he sounds like a Scandinavian Sade.

The record pulls in a host of unlikely influences: smoky jazz on the noirish “The Whirlpool Enigma” twinkling pop on “Gamma Moth” and sun-bathed soul on “Cloud Nine.” It’s not so much a reinvention as a redirection, maintaining all of the group’s essential elements but setting them within a new context. Much of that is because, when Makrigiannis started the project, it wasn’t meant to be a new COYB record. Having been inspired by everything from experimental electronic music to Danish ‘80s and ‘90s pop, to modern hip-hop and R&B to techno and westcoast slow jams, he’d made a new, imaginary band in his head called Grasque to reflect those influences. He quickly recorded both “Græske” and “Face Melting” with Aske Zidore, who had also produced Rhine Gold, and when Choir of Young Believers reconvened to tour with Depeche Mode, he wrote a few guitar-based songs to play live. Gradually, he realized all of his new ideas and music could melt together with Choir of Young Believers. A couple of months later, he and Aske went to a small Swedish farm for a week and came back with more than 10 hours of new music.

The result is an album that is confident and expansive, incorporating an encyclopedia of styles while still maintaining the essential elements of Choir of Young Believers’ DNA. It’s pop music, put through a kaleidoscopic filter. “I must admit, one of the things I worried about was ‘What will people think?’” Makrigiannis says. “With almost all ofthese songs, I had been in doubt. Some, I felt, were too poppy, others too experimental some didn’t even feel like songs, but more like trips, or feelings. Some even had Danish and Greek lyrics. But now, it’s all Choir of Young Believers to me, and it feels great to have pushed the walls around the band, giving it a bit more space. It’s weird for me to think about all that doubt ”Could I do this? Could I do that? I mean, it’s my fucking band. I can do what I want with it. Right?”

TRACK LISTING

1. Olimpiyskiy
2. Serious Lover
3. Vaserne
4. Face Melting
5. Græske
6. Jeg Ser Dig
7. Cloud Nine
8. The Whirlpool Enigma
9. Perfect Estocada
10. Salvatore
11. Gamma Moth
12. Does It Look As If I Care

On his third album, the Pennsylvania snake-synth-charmer deepens his approach to aural depravity. 'Ultima II Massage' widens a jagged swath through the dude’s own weird catalogue, each disparate track damaged to the point of contributing to some sort of greater, lurching Frankenstein-like state. Immediately after finishing 2010’s 'Maniac Meat', he went to work on the beat-addled series begun with 'Fucked Up Friends' in 2008. But he's saved the worst for last, amassing the most misanthropic material for 'Ultima'. To wit, SPIN dubbed early share “Lipstick Destroyer” a “junkyard takedown of Daft Punk’s beloved, pristine electro.”

This is easily Tobacco’s most diverse set to date - his own Stereopathetic Soulmanure, but about that 1-900 hotline life: massage parlors, plasticized sleaze, fake tans, old dial-ups to the fan clubs of dead B-actors. Fittingly, the album’s only contributor is music director Brian LeBarton who shrieks as Notrabel on the grimy freak-out “Streaker.” At 17 tracks, Ultima is stacked with beautifully perverse hits - from the sickly sticky “Eruption,” to the wobbly demon swaggerer “Face Breakout,” to the distorted punk spazz of “Dipsmack,” to the apocalyptic sepia ambience of “Spitlord.” You may hear disembodied bits of Boards of Canada, early Def Jam records, and Gary Numan, or maybe just public-access TV and bad VHS dubs of ‘80s horror flicks. Or the sun exploding and everything you’ve ever loved melting. Again, Tobacco was just trying to make meditation music.

But to find that rotted sweet spot, as always, he had to subvert his pop urges. Tobacco went back to the cassette decks he started off with - analog weapons of distortion to compliment his hissing vocoder and blown rhythms. Any moment that felt “just right” was brutally assaulted until ugly again. All to accomplish one end: “This might be my most purposely difficult album yet, but I promise if you let it in, it can fuck you up.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Streaker (ft. Notrabel),
2. Good Complexion,
3. Video Warning Attempts,
4. Eruption,
5. Lipstick Destroyer,
6. Self Tanner,
7. Face Breakout,
8. Blow Your Heart,
9. Beast Sting,
10. Dipsmack,
11. Creaming For Beginners,
12. Omen Classic,
13. Pool City, McKnight Road,
14. Spitlord,
15. Father Sister Berzerker,
16. The Touch From Within,
17. Bronze Hogan.