In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on December 12, 2025:
This Is Lorelei, Holo Boy
Nate Amos refines 10 tracks from his Bandcamp days on Holo Boy, his latest This Lorelei release. Following his official solo debut, 2024’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star, it’s billed as the project’s “sort-of-second sort-of-album,” but it’s got the feel of a best-of compilation. Amos revamps these songs with a confidence that rejuvenates even the most detached offerings: “I’ve been sleeping all my life/ And now I gotta wake up,” he sings on ‘Dreams Away’. In a press release, he explained, “I tried to look at the catalog as little as possible and more just think to myself, ‘What are songs from the past that I feel like are good songs, demonstrate growth, and are significant to me, in terms of embodying a certain period of time?’”
Nas & DJ Premier, Light-Years
Nas and DJ Premier’s long-teased collaborative LP, Light-Years, has arrived. The pair have been working together since the Queens rapper’s iconic 1994 debut, Illmatic, which boasted three DJ Premier beats. First announced in 2009, the sample-driven, celebratory album is out now via Mass Appeal as the seventh and final installment in the label’s Legend Has It… series of albums that were rolled out in 2025. “Already classic before you heard it,” Nas announces on opener ‘My Life Is Real’, “The spoiler was all my feature verses.”
Juliana Hatfield, Lightning Might Strike
Juliana Hatfield has released a new LP, Lightning Might Strike, via American Laundromat. The singer-songwriter plays guitar, keyboards, percussion, and bass on the record, which features Chris Anzalone on drums and Ed Valauskas on bass. Pat DiCenso mixed and mastered the album. “It was a difficult time for me when I started working on this album,” Hatfield reflected in a statement. “I had just uprooted myself from the city apartment building where I’d been living for 20 years to a house in a more rural town two hours away where I knew no one when one of my best friends died (‘Ashes’), and then my dog died (‘Constant Companion’), then my mother was diagnosed with esophagus cancer (‘Scratchers’). I was pretty depressed for a solid year (‘Long Slow Nervous Breakdown’) and was lost and very lonely (‘Harmonizing With Myself’). I was thinking about fate and circumstance and about how I’d ended up where I was (‘Where Are You Now’).”
21 Savage, What Happened to the Streets?
21 Savage is back with a new album, What Happened to the Streets?, which was announced earlier this week. The follow-up to 2024’s American Dream spans 14 tracks and boasts guest spots from Drake, Latto, Young Nudy, GloRilla, G Herbo, Metro Boomin, Lil Baby, and Jawan Harris. The album comes with alternative covers made in collaboration with British-Nigerian designer/artist Slawn, drawing inspiration from Kerry James Marshall’s 1980 work A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.
Other albums out today:
HEALTH, Conflict DLC; Conway the Machine, You Can’t Kill God With Bullets; Kramer, …and the crimson moon whispers goodbye; Paolo Tortora, Waves of Fading Memories.
