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    Albums Out Today: Taylor Swift, Arctic Monkeys, Dry Cleaning, Carly Rae Jepsen, and More

    by Konstantinos Pappis

    In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on October 21, 2022:

    Taylor Swift, Midnights

    Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album, Midnights, is out now. Most of the LP’s songs were written and recorded with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. “Jack and I found ourselves back in New York, alone, recording every night, staying up late and exploring old memories and midnights past,” Swift wrote on social media. “Midnights is a collage of intensity, highs and lows and ebbs and flows. Life can be dark, starry, cloudy, terrifying, electrifying, hot, cold, romantic or lonely. Just like Midnights.” In addition to Lana Del Rey, who appears as a featured guest on ‘Snow on the Beach’, Midnights features contributions from Zoë Kravitz, William Bowery (aka Swift’s boyfriend Joe Alwyn), Jahaan Sweet (known for his work with Kendrick Lamar), and Antonoff’s Red Hearse bandmates Sam Dew and Sounwave.

    Arctic Monkeys, The Car

    Arctic Monkeys are back with a new album, The Car, out now via Domino. The follow-up to 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino includes the advance singles ‘There’d Better Be a Mirrorball’, ‘Body Paint’, and ‘I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am’. The LP was produced by James Ford and recorded at Butley Priory in Suffolk, La Frette in Paris, and RAK Studios in London. Its cover artwork was shot by drummer Matt Helders. “It’s not so much to do with becoming technically better,” frontman Alex Turner said of the album in press materials. “It’s perhaps about singing in a way that’s more in tune with what you’re trying to express deep down which sometimes the words can almost get in the way of.” Read our review of The Car.

    Dry Cleaning, Stumpwork

    Dry Cleaning have followed up their 2021 debut New Long Leg with a new album, Stumpwork, which was once again recorded with producer John Parish, this time at Rockfield Studios. It was preceded by the singles ‘Don’t Press Me’, ‘Anna Calls From the Arctic’, ‘Gary Ashby’, and ‘No Decent Shoes for Rain’. “I wrote about the things that preoccupied me over this period, like loss, masculinity, feminism, my mum, being separated from my partner for little stretches in the lockdown, lust,” vocalist Florence Shaw explained in press materials. “There were two murders of women in London that were extensively covered on the news, and the specific details of one of those murders were reported on whilst we were at Rockfield. That coverage influenced some of my writing and my state of mind.” Read our review of Stumpwork.

    Carly Rae Jepsen, The Loneliest Time

    Carly Rae Jepsen has returned with her new album The Loneliest Time, out now via 604/Schoolboy/Interscope. On the new LP, which follows 2019’s Dedicated and its accompanying Side B, Jepsen collaborated with Rostam Batmanglij, Tavish Crowe, Bullion, Captain Cuts, John Hill, Kyle Shearer, and Alex Hope. “I’m quite fascinated by loneliness. It can be really beautiful when you turn it over and look at it,” Jepsen wrote in a statement. “Just like love, it can cause some extreme human reactions.” The singles ‘Talking to Yourself’, ‘Beach House’, ‘Western Wind’, and the Rufus Wainwright-featuring title track arrived ahead of the release.

    Lowertown, I Love to Lie

    I Love to Lie is the official studio debut by Lowertown, the duo of Olivia Osby and Avsha Weinberg. Out now via Dirty Hit, the follow-up to the group’s The Gaping Mouth EP was previewed by the singles ‘Bucktooth’, ‘Antibiotics’, and ‘No Way’. The album was recorded with Catherine Marks (Foals, St. Vincent, Manchester Orchestra, Wolf Alice) in London. “I just want each album to feel good or better than the last,” Osby said in press materials. “I want to keep surprising people and pushing the weirdness of the music. Hopefully, they’ll stick with us.”

    Frankie Cosmos, Inner World Peace

    Frankie Cosmos have put out their latest album, Inner World Peace, via Sub Pop. Following 2019’s Close It Quietly, the record was produced by the band, Nate Mendelsohn, and Katie Von Schleicher at Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn. “To me, the album is about perception,” bandleader Greta Kline commented in a statement. “It’s about the question of ‘Who am I?’ and whether or not the answer matters. It’s about quantum time, the possibilities of invisible worlds. The album is about finding myself floating in a new context. A teenager again, living with my parents. An adult, choosing to live with my family in an act of love. Time propelled us forward, aged us, and also froze. If you don’t leave the house, who are you to the world? Can you take the person you discover there out with you?”

    Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn, Pigments

    Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn have collaborated on the full-length project Pigments, out now via Merge. “I felt like the tools that I and other people like me were dealt weren’t shiny,” Richard explained in a statement. “Yet we still painted these beautiful pictures. This album is what it means to be a dreamer and finally reach a place where you’ve decided to love the pigments that you have.” Pigments is a tribute to Richard’s father Frank Richard, who was the lead singer of the funk band Chocolate Milk. “The point is that we’re going through the same thing in different ways,” Richard added. “No matter what walks of life we come from, the story can be similar.”

    Tegan and Sara, ‎Crybaby

    Tegan and Sara have issued their 10th studio album and first for Mom+Pop, Crybaby. The Canadian twin duo co-produced the LP with John Congleton and recorded it at Studio Litho in Seattle and LA’s Sargent Recorders. “This was the first time where, while we were still drafting our demos, we were thinking about how the songs were going to work together,” Tegan said in a press release. “It wasn’t even just that Sara was making lyric changes or reorganizing the parts to my songs, it was that she was also saying to me, ‘This song is going to be faster,’ or ‘It’s going to be in a different key.’ But Sara effectively improves everything of mine that she works on.” Sara added: “Maybe I am the renovator. I’m the house-flipper of the Tegan and Sara band.”

    Pinkshift, Love Me Forever

    Pinkshift have dropped their debut album, Love Me Forever, today via Hopeless. It was recorded by Will Yip and includes the early singles  ‘nothing (in my head)’, ‘i’m not crying, you’re crying’, ‘Get Out’, and ‘in a breath’. “We were concerned this wouldn’t feel like an actual album, but because we all worked on it together throughout this period of time, it feels really cohesive,” vocalist Ashrita Kumar shared in a statement. “It defines an era of our lives.” Drummer Myron Houngbedji added: “With everything that’s going on – both in the world and in our own lives – it feels like it was a very transitional period that influenced what we were writing about. They all have similar themes.”

    Nick Hakim, Love Me Forever

    Nick Hakim has released COMETA, the follow-up to 2020’s WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD, via ATO Records. The album features the singles ‘Happen’, ‘Vertigo’, ‘M1’, and ‘Feeling Myself’, as well as collaborations with DJ Dahi, Helado Negro, and Arto Lindsay. Talking about the themes of the album, Hakim said in a press release: “The key is to find that extremity of love for yourself. It’s about growing into someone you want to be; it’s about finding pure love within yourself when the world around us seems to be crumbling.” He added, “I think it’s nice to have love in your life and to have people that are sharing and wanting that. It’s my interpretation of a really romantic way to express love in my own way.”

    Other albums out today:

    Archers of Loaf, Reason in Decline; Alice Boman, The Space Between; Wiki & Subjxct 5, Cold Cuts; Bibio, BIB10; The Soft Pink Truth, Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This?; Brutus, Unison Life; Hagop Tchaparian, Bolts; Sloan, Steady; Rubblebucket, Earth Worship; Goat, Oh Death; Ariel Zetina, Cyclorama; Simple Minds, Direction of the Heart; Shutups, I can’t eat nearly as much as I want to vomit; uji, Timebeing; Their / They’re / There, Their / They’re / There; Witch Fever, Congregation; Whitmer Thomas, The Older I Get the Funnier I Was; a-ha, True North; Twain, Noon; Persher, Man With the Magic Soap; Architects, The Classic Symptoms of a Broken Spirit; Robyn Hitchcock, Shufflemania!; Jade Imagine, Cold Memory; Exhumed, To the Dead; Meghan Trainor, TAKIN’ IT BACK; Dego, Love Was Never Your Goal; Flore Laurentienne, Volume II; Armani Caesar, THE LIZ 2; Clarice Jensen, Esthesis; Nina Gala, swan heart; Cate Kennan, The Arbitrary Dimension of Dreams.

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