Notable Releases of the Week (6/17)
After a couple lighter weeks, today is a massive week for new albums, and not just because one of the biggest rap superstars in the world decided to drop a new one on us at the last minute. I highlight nine new albums below, and Bill talks about more in Bill’s Indie Basement, including Flasher, Fresh Pepper, Sun’s Signature (Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins), Hercules & Love Affair (with ANOHNI involved for the first time since their 2007 debut album), TV Priest, Sound of Ceres, Melts, and more. Like I said, big week!
And that’s not all. Honorable mentions: Conway the Machine & Big Ghost Ltd, Krallice, Foals, Grey Daze (Chester Bennington), Horse Jumper of Love, ZORA, Plato III, Kevin Gates, Westside Boogie, Erica Banks, Duke Deuce, Vatican, Harkin, White Ward, Wild Up, Caregiver, Anne Malin, Counterpunch, Perspective A Lovely Hand to Hold , Σtella, Nerver, Inexorum, Atraxy, Executioner’s Mask, ONI, Revelators Sound System, Pet Fox, Ron Trent, IV and the Strange Band, Hank Williams Jr, J Stone, Ataraxy, Counterpunch, Half-Handed Cloud, Ben Lee, Night Sins, Nova Twins, the Lakeyah EP, the Luis (DJ Python) EP, the ME REX EP, the Couplet (ex-You Blew It) EP, the Jada Kingdom EP, the Hazel English EP, the Nick Cave spoken word album, the Alanis Morissette meditation album, the C.V.E. compilation, the Tirzah remix album (ft. Arca, Loraine James, Actress, Wu-Lu, Lafawndah & more), the Snoop Dogg Presents Death Row Summer 2022 compilation, and Gucci Mane’s SO ICY GANG: THE REUP compilation.
Read on for my picks. What’s your favorite release of the week?
Bartees Strange – Farm To Table
4AD
Indie rock with musical ambition never fully went away, but it hasn’t been as fashionable lately as it was in the mid to late 2000s. In more recent years, the genre has seemed split between artists who want to go full pop and artists who want to go back to the more humble sounds of ’90s indie, but Bartees Strange is here to pick up where his mid 2000s heroes left off. Right off the bat, he was releasing covers of bands like The National and TV on the Radio, and now he’s signed to the label that both of those bands released classic albums on, 4AD. And with his label debut Farm To Table, he’s written an ambitious indie rock album that stands tall next to both of those bands. On songs like “Heavy Heart” and “Escape This Circus,” he reaches explosive climaxes that really put the “rock” in indie rock. With “Hold The Line,” “Hennessy,” and the folky “Tours,” he contrasts those bangers with a more ballad-driven side that’s just as arresting. As on his 2020 debut album Live Forever, he casually defies genre, incorporating bits of hip hop on “Mulholland Dr,” straight-up rapping on “Cosigns,” and bringing in twitchy electronics on “We Were Only Close For Like Two Weeks.” With “Black Gold,” he fuses a soaring falsetto with a glitch-infused backdrop that recalls and rivals self-titled Bon Iver (one of the artists he namedrops on “Cosigns”). Even more so than his debut, this album finds Bartees swinging for the fences, coming out with a version of indie rock that’s refreshing and frequently life-affirming.
Pick up Bartees’ new album on yellow vinyl.
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Perfume Genius – Ugly Season
Matador
Ugly Season, Perfume Genius’ first release since 2020’s excellent Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, features 10 songs that originally began as accompaniment to Perfume Genius and choreographer Kate Wallich’s dance piece The Sun Still Burns Here, which actually debuted before Set My Heart On Fire Immediately was released. “Some were ‘traditional’ songs that I took into the studio,” Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) said, “while other pieces were born out of improvisations between Blake [Mills] and I.” Some of the album is indeed more score-like than previous Perfume Genius albums, but what Ugly Season reveals is that Mike Hadreas approaches scores the same way he approaches traditional songwriting, and the gap between his score-like pieces and his “traditional” songwriting is smaller than you might expect. Like every other Perfume Genius album, Ugly Season is full of moments that stop you in your tracks. There’s “Herem,” a stunning, seven-minute dose of ethereal pop with a vocal performance as distinct and jaw-dropping as any of Perfume Genius’ biggest singles. On the title track, he puts the Perfume Genius spin on dub/reggae, coming out with a song unlike any other in his catalog. “Eye in the Wall” puts his soaring voice over pounding, polyrhythmic dance beats, and evolves into an extended, hypnotic dance remix-type piece that lasts nearly nine minutes. Ugly Season may have started out as musical accompaniment to another medium, but it stands as tall on its own as any Perfume Genius album before it.
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Yaya Bey – Remember Your North Star
Big Dada
Brooklyn’s Yaya Bey has been making an intimate, homespun version of neo-soul for the past few years, and since 2020’s Madison Tapes — her first album made without her ex-husband and former collaborator — she says she’s been in a “new era” of her career. That continued on 2021’s brief The Things I Can’t Take With Me EP, and now again on her new full-length album, Remember Your North Star. The album was entirely self-written, and Bey produced it alongside DJ Nativesun and Phony Ppl’s Aja Grant, and its 18 tracks pull you into Bey’s world, a world of crackling soul with forays into rap (“big daddy ya”), reggae (“meet me in brooklyn”), shuffling club beats (“pour up”), and more. It’s a personal album, matching the intimate tone of the music, and Yaya is an increasingly powerful lyricist. Sometimes she turns your head with a succinct one-liner, and other times she goes full-on stream-of-consciousness, like on the jazz-inflected showstopper “reprise.” It’s an album that can seem small on the surface, but when you dive in, is incredibly vast.
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Drake – Honestly, Nevermind
OVO/Republic
The same day Beyoncé announces her first album in six years (and a month after Kendrick Lamar released his first album in five), Drake put out a new album with just hours notice called Honestly, Nevermind, and it’s… almost entirely him singing over dance beats? Honestly, he should do this kind of thing more often! I haven’t dug much into the lyrics yet, but it’s the most drastic musical departure any Drake album has made in a while, and it suits him so well that I’m surprised it took him this long to do something like this.
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Anteloper – Pink Dolphins
International Anthem
Anteloper is the duo of jaimie branch and Jason Nazary, and their new album Pink Dolphins was produced and mixed by Jeff Parker, who also contributed various instruments to it. As solo artists, all three of these musicians make music that generally falls under the jazz umbrella, but calling them jazz musicians would be like calling Radiohead a rock band; it might start there, but the destinations are limitless. Especially in the modern world, so much jazz overlaps with hip hop and electronic music (and vice versa), and Pink Dolphins is all over that venn diagram. The duo’s influences on these songs include Sun Ra, Mouse On Mars, J Dilla, and Autechre, and it has sonic crossover with all of those acts. “We’re improvisers first and we’re bringing ‘moment music’ into these other zones of hip hop and electronic music, drum-machine music, sound-system culture… Acoustic musicians sun-kissed by electro-magnetism, flowing out into everything,” jaimie says. “this is the shit that we want to be playing on big ass systems. Omnivorous, energy space time, mosh pit dance-music. Get it in the subwoofers so you can feel it hit, cuz the music has to begin in the body!” I don’t think I could possibly sum it up any better than jaimie herself did; that’s exactly what Pink Dolphins is. It’s jazz-informed, it’s improvisational, but at its heart, this is dance music, this is want you want to hear blaring in a hip hop club or over a Jamaican sound system. Jazz sometimes gets a reputation for being too cerebral, but this is body music.
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Grumpster – Fever Dream
Pure Noise
Bay Area trio Grumpster channel the homegrown sound of the classic 924 Gilman/Lookout! Records scene, and they also have a modern indie-punk vibe that sits nicely next to stuff like Lemuria, Tigers Jaw, and Joyce Manor. After releasing their 2019 debut LP Underwhelmed on Asian Man Records, they signed to Pure Noise for its followup, linked up with Anti-Flag bassist Chris #2 to produce it, and it finds them sounding even sharper, tighter, and catchier than they did on their debut. They also spoke to us about the music that influenced it, and you can read that here.
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Logic – Vinyl Days
Def Jam
Logic’s critics usually accuse of him being too much of a tryhard, too obsessed with trying to make classics for the hip hop canon instead of just actually making music that’s good enough to be discussed alongside Logic’s heroes. That may still be true, but on Vinyl Days, he seems a little less concerned with canonization and more concerned with just paying tribute to the music he loves the most: ’90s boom bap and underground hip hop. From the album title alone, it’s clear that this project is meant to induce nostalgia, and as a fan of all the stuff Logic is paying tribute to, I have to say this one’s kinda hard to deny. He pays tribute to J Dilla, he has a whole song where he calls Madlib the greatest producer of all time but urges him to revive his rap alter-ego Quasimoto, and contributors include other boom bap devotees like Action Bronson, Curren$y, Blu & Exile, and The Game, plus some actual boom bap legends like DJ Premier, RZA, and AZ. At 30 songs, it’s really long, but it sounds like Logic’s having fun, and it’s fun to listen to too.
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Spencer Krug – Twenty Twenty Twenty One
Pronounced Kroog
In 2019, Spencer Krug (Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, Moonface, etc) began posting a song a month to his Patreon page, and songs from those sessions first led to his 2021 album Fading Graffiti, and now Twenty Twenty Twenty One. The songs are all home-recorded and self-produced, and Spencer did everything himself except for the drums on “New Kind of Summer Love” (done by Bucky from Land of Talk), and they’re all cut from the same quirky, unconventional art pop cloth as Spencer’s Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown classics. He combines acoustic instruments with synthetic ones, coming out with a collection that includes folk songs, piano ballads, spacey electronic odysseys, eccentric indie rock, and more. The songs are more intimate than the work Spencer’s done with his full-band projects, but thanks to his unwavering singing and songwriting style, they scratch the same itch as his most widely-acclaimed material.
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Burner – A Vision of the End EP
Church Road
Death metal and hardcore have been crossing paths a lot lately, and one of the most promising new bands to come out of that musical melting pot is South London quarter Burner, who arrived fully formed on their 2021 debut single “Ingsoc.” That’s no real surprise, as the members had played in other UK hardcore and metal bands over the years, and right off the bat they were working with in-demand producer Lewis Johns (Loathe, Svalbard, Employed to Serve, Rolo Tomassi, many others), but Burner are something fresh and new. “Ingsoc” and five other songs make up their debut EP A Vision of the End, and all six of these songs are ragers that completely blur the lines between hardcore and death metal. The early singles have already earned the band comparisons to legends like Converge and Entombed, and really their shared traits with those bands are more conceptual than anything else. Like both of those bands, Burner aren’t trying to fit into any molds, they’re just trying to make songs that are heavy as fuck. And so far, they’re doing a damn good job of it.
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Read Bill’s Indie Basement for more new album reviews.
Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases archive or scroll down for previous weeks.
For even more metal, browse the ‘Upcoming Releases’ each week on Invisible Oranges.
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