In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on March 21, 2025:
Japanese Breakfast, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), the follow-up to Japanese Breakfast’s 2021 breakthrough Jubilee, has arrived. Don’t let the title – itself a nod to a John Cheever short story – fool you: the deeper you listen to the record, the harder it is to pigeonhole it. It’s less for any kind of female archetype than it is about a certain brand of foolish masculinity it frames as both timeless and contemporary. Michelle Zauner’s nuanced, moody vignettes are matched by richly baroque and luscious production courtesy of Blake Mills, who lends mountainous resonance even to the subtlest songs. Read the full track-by-track review.
YHWH Nailgun, 45 Pounds
YHWH Nailgun (pronounced “Yahweh”) have come through with their debut LP, 45 Pounds, via AD 93/Many Hats. The Brooklyn experimentalists maintain a grim, discomfiting atmosphere for a relentless 51 minutes, though the record leaves you to chew on its musical assault for much longer. It features the previously released singles ‘Penetrator’, ‘Castrato Raw (Fullback)’, ‘Tear Pusher’, and ‘Sickle Walk’.
Cross Record, Crush
Emily Cross has returned with her first Cross Record album in six years. The wondrous, spell-binding, and occasionally ominous Crush Me was produced by Theo Karon and began taking shape over a two-week recording session in Germany before being completed while Cross was pregnant and working as a death doula. Seth Manchester of Machines with Magnets mixed and mastered the LP. “I thought of it later and it dawned on me that Crush Me perfectly embodied the record,” Cross said of the album title. “Yes, the weight of a body laying limply atop yours, or the tight squeeze of a hug, can be pleasant. Go too far, and you’re in the hands of a cruel, adolescent god.”
Lonnie Holley, Tonky
Lonnie Holley isn’t just remembering on Tonky, the follow-up to 2023’s Oh Me Oh My: he’s “chasing memories,” as the veteran artist intones on the opening track. Holley keeps an insistent pulse going throughout the LP, which was once again made with the assistance of Jacknife Lee and features contributions from Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, rapper billy woods, Mary Lattimore, Alabaster DePlume, Open Mike Eagle, Angel Bat Dawid, Saul Williams, Jesca Hoop, and more. It’s named after his childhood nickname, which was given to him when he spent part of his upbringing in a honky-tonk.
Macie Stewart, When the Distance Is Blue
The Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser Macie Stewart has made her International Anthem debut with When the Distance is Blue. Described by Stewart as “a love letter to the moments we spend in-between,” the record abounds with memories and liminal spaces alike, filling itself with ineffable longing. It does so by returning to the musician’s first instrument, the piano, prepared with coins and contact mics. Stewart’s improvisations were then folded alongside a collection of field recordings captured during an extensive period of touring. “I wanted to recontextualize these recordings and evoke a nostalgia for something I wasn’t able to name,” she reflected.
Pictoria Vark, Nothing Sticks
Pictoria Vark (aka Victoria Park) has released her sophomore album, Nothing Sticks, via Get Better Records. She co-produced the follow-up to her 2022 debut The Parts I Dread with Gavin Caine and Bradford Krieger, and it’s as wonderfully realized as it is poignant, reflecting in part on the chaotic pace of touring. “I sing what I see,” she sings at one point, “First the spotlight/ Then a sea of nothing/ It screams when I scream.” It was previewed by the singles ‘Lucky Superstar’, ‘San Diego’, and ‘I Pushed it Down’.
Lucy Liyou, Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name
“Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name is an album I wanted to make since college,” Lucy Liyou explained of her (significantly more song-based) new album, which only heightens its raw vulnerability. “I began most of these songs when I was 19 in my dorm room, but I struggled to finish them. I didn’t feel skilled enough as a songwriter and a producer. Finishing this music now, almost 6-7 years later, has been interesting. It is nice to know that there are ideas here that I can still stand by. But the differences in my emotional state, then and now, made this process more difficult than I expected.” She added, “It’s not a breakup album. It’s just me doing my best to document what I’m feeling at this time.”
Dutch Interior, Moneyball
Los Angeles six-piece Dutch Interior – composed of lifelong friends Jack Nugent, Conner Reeves, Davis Stewart, Noah Kurtz, and brothers Shane Barton and Hayden Barton – have unveiled their Fat Possum debut, Moneyball. Following 2021’s Kindergarten and 2023’s Blinded By Fame, the 11-track effort was produced by Reeves and mixed by Phil Ek (Modest Mouse, Duster, Fleet Foxes). With the band’s members trading singing and songwriting duties, the record’s haunting, country-inflected sound splinters in different directions as much as it gels together.
Other albums out today:
My Morning Jacket, is; Desire, Games People Play; Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco, I Said I Love You First; The Horrors, Night Life; more eaze & claire Rousay, No Floor; Sharp Pins, Radio DDR; Young Widows, Power Sucker; Phil Cook, Appalachia Borealis; Saba & NO ID, From the Private Collection of Saba and No ID; Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith, Defiant Life; Tamino, Every Dawn’s a Mountain; Lola Kirke, Trailblazer; Graham Reynolds, Mountain; Welly, Big in the Suburbs; Kinlaw, Gut Ccheck; JEFRE CANTU-LEDESMA, Gift Songs; Broken English Club, Songs of Love and Decay.
