Interpol always carried themselves a little more sharply than their East Village neighbors, dressing in tailored suits and sport coats and slicking back their hair.
Interpol: This Mirror Weighs a Ton [Partisan].
On This Mirror Weighs a Ton, Paul Banks, Daniel Kessler, and Sam Fogarino age into the (relatively) moneyed New York life, which is to say they sound more like the National than ever.
The album’s cover depicts an artwork from the Whitney Museum, and its producer, Andrew Wyatt, has credits on Charli XCX’s Crash and Rosalía’s Lux. Of course, this is Interpol, so paranoia and discontent lurk around every street corner.
Listen on Apple MusicListen on SpotifyListen on TidalListen on Amazon MusicListen/Buy at BandcampBuy at Rough Trade.
Turnstile: Never Enough: Versions [Roadrunner].
Never Enough: Versions is not a collection of Turnstile cover songs or remixes. The Baltimore experimental hardcore band is adamant that it’s a “reimagined album” of songs from last year’s Grammy-winning full-length Never Enough.
What’s the difference? For starters, there’s more collaborators than there are songs on the original tracklist, and the list is as diverse in names as their music sounds: Elton John, Alex G, Slayyyter, Panda Bear, Hayley Williams, Dying Fetus, Oklou, Julien Baker, Blood Orange, Faye Webster, Dan Deacon, Four Tet, A.
Erykah Badu / the Alchemist: Before the World Blows [Young].
Before the World Blows, the first full-length Erykah Badu project since the 2015 mixtape But You Caint Use My Phone, evokes a hallucinatory house party that never quite spins out of control, with Earl Sweatshirt, Westside Gunn, and Steve Lacy among the drop-ins.
The 16-track LP, co-produced by the Alchemist, conjures a fever dream of vibe-heavy hip-hop beats and percussive excursions that frame Badu’s timeless riffs on modern times.
Kamasi Washington shows up for closer “Black Box,” the latest dispatch from Badu’s chaotic superego, expressing her ambivalence towards phones and their chokehold on our wellbeing.
As Badu tells The Guardian, “It’s the first thing we reach for in the morning—it has become our pseudo-husband and wife—and one thing I do know is that the first thing we do in the morning that gives us dopamine is what we will reach for all day long.” Trust in Erykah by making Before the World Blows the next, if not the first, thing you reach for today.
Alabama Shakes: I Must Be Dreaming [Island].
It feels much longer than 11 years since Alabama Shakes released their last album, Sound & Color. For starters, a shocking amount has changed since 2015, and frontperson Brittany Howard can’t help looking around her and clocking how “the world is so fucking crazy right now” and yet “the world is so incredibly beautiful,” too.
Hence the double meaning behind I Must Be Dreaming, the Southern rock band’s comeback record. From Howard’s soulful screams on “Another Life” to her cataloguing of our worsening quality of life in the protest song “American Dream,” she and her bandmates arrive where they left off, even if our country’s landscape looks vastly different.
Mike D revives the scrappy spirit of early Beastie Boys on Thank You, the first album from a member of the group since its own 2011 LP, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two.
Working with musicians including SZA collaborator Carter Lang and Mike’s two sons, the rapper-producer gets back into the groove with stentorian vocals that slalom through whirligig beats and peaked analog synths, splitting the difference between post-punk, no wave, noise, experimental hip-hop, and outré electronic music.
Thank You feels less like a midlife rap comeback than a brain-mangling blast of retro-future-shock.
To make Wowed Out, Jim James rescued from limbo a number of songs he had made in the early ’10s, with Sofia Coppola composer Brian Reitzell, ostensibly for future movies.
Now unvaulted, the tracks sparkle with the My Morning Jacket frontman’s “now-familiar blend of folk, soul, and psychedelia” while taking “spiritual cues from recordings of meditative organ performances by Alice Coltrane,” Ryan Leas writes in Pitchfork’s review.
That sense of restraint frees James to access familiar registers of wonderment and bliss without adopting the rote largesse that has characterized his main band’s latter-day work.
Asher White: Love Aggregates [Joyful Noise].
Asher White’s all-singing, all-dancing, one-woman band swerves from mercurial pop to literary art-rock to rusty-stringed folk on Love Aggregates, the follow-up to the Providence tunesmith’s recent full-length cover of Jessica Pratt’s self-titled.
It is the latest in a prolific run of genre-trespassing records, first drip-fed to Bandcamp and now via Joyful Noise. The title of this breakup record of sorts, White notes, is “a reminder that new love happens, and it does not replace nor censor the old love, it just aggregates and aggregates.
And now you have this record that has snapshots from various stages of various loves, from totally abysmal open wounds to adolescent horniness and whatever else.”.
Dinosaur Jr.: There Near [Jagjagwuar].
J Mascis made There Near, the sixth Dinosaur Jr. album since the band’s 2006 rebirth, according to an old Rick Rubin dictum: “Sit down and listen to [your] first album and say let’s get back to that sound,” as Mascis puts it in press materials.
A pair of tracks from Lou Barlow, “Blowin’ Up” and “No One’s Ready,” seemingly take aim at the political establishment, but for the most part, There Near pursues mindless escape and self-salvation through a soft aura of distortion.
Liim: A Sunflower Garden in Harlem Is Hard to Find [Three Times Louder].
Liim’s second album travels from the projects in Harlem to the Lower East to his new home of Brooklyn. As he tours all the delights of a New York Summer—young love, dirt bikes, and “buttas”—he retools familiar genres with the flair of someone who grew up on Eric B.
& Rakim, Dev Hynes, Tyler, the Creator. He flits between sharp-witted raps and soulful croons, painting intimate scenes across a nostalgic landscape of ’80s hip-hop, ’90s neo soul, and outsized N.
E. R. D-styled beats. As Liim stumbles through young adulthood, he exudes a palpable hunger for more certain days, but a wisdom peaks through that assures you he’s on the cusp of finding everything he’s looking for.
The Linda Lindas: Gotta Get Out [Reprise].
After their first two albums established their pop-punk songwriting chops, the Linda Lindas entered the studio with their sights set on switching things up. The viral Los Angeles quartet are still writing melodic earworms, but they’re embracing their instincts when it comes to changing in other ways — a natural result of becoming teenagers, or, for guitarist Bela Salazar, being the first to turn 21.
There’s full-on hardcore punk (“Blood on Our Hands”) and all-star collaborations (“Closer” features Paramore singer Hayley Williams) on their follow-up to 2024’s No Obligation.
If they’re looking to avoid burning out like the lead single suggests, then the Linda Lindas are using Gotta Get Out to replenish their creative juices.
Billy Strings: So Much for Goodbyes [Reprise].
Sarah Davachi: The Will of Tongues [Late].
The Will of Tongues is, in the Sarah Davachi tradition, at once minimalist and all-consuming, timeless and century-spanning. Her assemblages of medieval pipe organ works, chorales, and compositions for various orchestral suites are as magnetic and unknowable as the hum of the planets.
Her reverence for ancient instruments and rich tones dovetails with a sensibility evolved from downtown minimalism; acoustic and electric converge, chamber instruments thread into tape loops, all sinking deeper into the frequencies of a single, meditative drone.
Mastodon’s first album in five years—and first since the sudden death of former frontman Brent Hinds—doubles as a mythological meditation on grief and perseverance.
Originally conceived in response to the death of drummer Brann Dailor’s mother, Marrow Deep inevitably grew in scope when the sludge-metal stalwarts started recording two weeks after their old bandmate’s death.
The songs, riven with lively keys from new addition João Nogueira, lack Hinds’ “mad-scientist songwriting and uninhibited guitar work,” writes Brad Sanders in Pitchfork’s upcoming review.
But while “the band’s ceiling will almost certainly be lower, their floor should also be higher.”.
