In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on February 21, 2025:
Youth Lagoon, Rarely Do I Dream
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Youth Lagoon is back with a new album, Rarely Do I Dream, following up 2023’s Heaven Is a Junkyard. A string of singles arrived ahead of the release, including ‘Speed Freak’, ‘Football’, ‘Lucy Takes a Picture’, ‘My Beautiful Girl’, and ‘Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)’. For the new LP, Trevor Powers drew inspiration from a shoebox of home videos he discovered in his parents’ basement, which prompted him to start incorporating them into his music. The end result blurs the line between memory and nostalgia. “What I was really consumed with was how much I could zoom in on my actual history,” he explained. “I wanted to really make someone feel like they were inside my living room in 1993, but rearrange the furniture a bit. Something about combining that level of hyperreality with fairytales of devils and detectives weirdly felt like the truest way to immortalize these pieces of my family.”
Baths, Gut
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On Gut, his first Baths album in seven years, Will Wiesenfeld set out to make music “from the stomach” as opposed to writing from the heart. The results are equal parts visceral and vibrant. “I think about men, and sex, quite literally all the time,” he explained. “To make a new album that felt like an actual honest effort meant exploring this fact further than I’ve ever been comfortable with, with no regard to personal embarrassment or relatability… I’m sketching my strongest and most pervasive feelings out quickly and treating their roughness as gospel, then exploring them in greater detail with the added sheen of time and perspective. I ended up not just writing about sex but also about personal shortcomings, dreamless living, harmful fantasies, and dissonant self-identities, things I also think about all the time.”
Masma Dream World, PLEASE COME TO ME
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Devi Mambouka, who records as Masma Dream World, has released a haunting, transcendent new album called PLEASE COME TO ME. It follows the experimental artist’s 2020 debut Play at Night. “In 2013, I heard a voice that said I was supposed to make Masma Dream World, and I don’t have to worry about anything,” Mambouka said in our Artist Spotlight interview. “They’re going to tell me how to do the sounds. They’re gonna direct it. And I didn’t believe them until the EP came out, and people responded to it. At some point, you can’t doubt anymore. You’re just doing it. With those sounds that you’re talking about, is that specific or not – it’s like there is something that organizes this world, and I try to surrender to it.”
Saya Gray, SAYA
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After her impressive pair of QWERTY EPs, Saya Gray has come through with her debut full-length, SAYA. While the Japanese-Canadian artist’s approach remains captivatingly unconventional, the album format makes way for a more cohesive and focused body of work. In a statement, Gray explained. “I move fast. Transition quick, hit change! My documentations have barely kept up. My mind & body caught up for this album. I had to calm down for this record. I had to document the clean up. Remnants as I move from places, people & patterns. We only have ourselves at the end of it all! This is a record for your transitions (emotional, spiritual & physical), for your heartbreaks and journeys from point A to B. An album to drop the shit you don’t want and to pick up what you need.”
Anxious, Bambi
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Connecticut-based band Anxious are levelling up on their sophomore album, Bambi. The follow-up to 2022’s Little Green House is ambitious and relentlessly anthemic, as evidenced by the early singles ‘Head & Spine’, ‘Counting Sheep’, ‘Some Girls’, and ‘Never Said’. The album is named after one of the original discarded ideas for the band’s name. “The idea that Bambi should have been the band name sort of turned into this sentiment that got carried onto the LP,” Anxious vocalist Grady Allen explained. “Bambi is the band we could have been, that I want us to be–and I think the record is that.”
Patterson Hood, Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams
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Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams is Drive-By Truckers co-founder Patterson Hood’s first solo album in 12 years. It features collaborations with Waxahatchee, Wednesday, and Lydia Loveless, which are some of the record’s most affecting songs. The Decemberists’ Chris Funk produced the album, which also includes contributions from The Decemberists’ Nate Query, Kevin Morby, Brad and Phil Cook, Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin, David Barbe, Stuart Bogie, Patterson’s DBT bandmates Brad Morgan and Jay Gonzalez, and more. “This record has all these kind of unintended themes,” Patterson shared. “I don’t know if that was anything I set out to do as much as it just kind of worked out that way. You know, there are a lot a lot of happy accidents in this record.”
Sam Fender, People Watching
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- TIDAL
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Sam Fender’s third LP, People Watching, has arrived. Following 2021’s Seventeen Going Under, the album was produced with Markus Dravs and The War On Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, who only bolsters the Newcastle songwriter’s heartland rock style. Wistful and rousing, it pays homage to Fender’s late friend and mentor Annie Orwin, inspired by his visits to her palliative care home near the end of her life.
Other albums out today:
Tate McRae, So Close to What; The Murder Capital, Blindness; Pissgrave, Malignant Worthlessness; Nina Garcia, Bye Bye Bird; Nao, Jupiter; Yazz Ahmed, A Paradise in the Hold; Jules Reidy, Ghost/Spirit; Eem Triplin, Melody of a Memory; Emile Mosseri, Trying to Be Born.
