Denison Witmer has teamed up with Sufjan Stevens for a new single, ‘Older and Free’. Stevens produced the track, which you can hear below.
“One of the benefits of getting older and knowing yourself is being able to seek out the things that reset you in times when things feel off balance,” Witmer said in a statement. “For me, alone time is very important. Nature is very important. Moving my body and getting lost in my thoughts has become a must – whether it be running or, in the case of this song, hiking. I wrote this song when I was solo camping for a night at French Creek State Park not far from my home in PA.”
“During Covid lockdown, my wife and I realized that we would burn out in the responsibilities of our day-to-day life if we didn’t take time to ourselves,” he continued. “The melody and lyrics came to me as I was hiking the Lenape Trail back to my campsite. I have a little classical guitar that goes with me most places, and I wrote the song in completion that evening. I got so attached to the sound that the little guitar ended up being the instrument we recorded the basic tracks with.”
Phil Lesh, the co-founder and bassist of Grateful Dead, has died. According to a statement on his official social media accounts, Lesh “passed peacefully” on Friday, October 25. “He was surrounded by his family and full of love,” the statement read. “Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.” Lesh was 84.
Born in Berkeley, California, on March 15, 1940, Lesh started out as a violinist before switching to trumpet while enrolled at Berkeley High School. Having developed an interest in avant-garde classical music and free jazz, he went on to become the first trumpet chair at the University of California, where he studied under Italian composer Luciano Berio. He was also a classmate of Steve Reich. After meeting Jerry Garcia at Berkeley’s KPFA radio station, Lesh became the bassist for Garcia’s then-band, the Warlocks, in 1964 alongside guitarist Bob Weir, keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and drummer Bill Kreutzmann.
By late 1965, the group rebranded as the Grateful Dead, soon becoming a staple in San Francisco’s counterculture and psychedelic rock scene. They released their first album, also named Grateful Dead, in March 1967. Between 1967 and 1990, Lesh played on all 13 of the Dead’s studio releases and 10 official live albums. He provided harmony vocals until vocal cord damage in the 1970s, later returning as a baritone. He also co-wrote some of the band’s most iconic songs, including the opening and closing tracks on 1970’s American Beauty, ‘Box of Rain’ and ‘Truckin’’.
Following Garcia’s death in 1995, Lesh led his own band, Phil Lesh and Friends, and continued to perform with various Grateful Dead offshoots such as the Other Ones and the Dead. In 2009, Lesh and Weir formed the band Furthur. In 2012, he opened a popular venue called Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, California, where he often performed with his sons Grahame and Brian until its closure in 2021. Though he took part in the Dead’s Fare Thee Well concerts in 2015, Lesh was not a member of Dead & Company, the offshoot band started by Weir, Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart.
“I would have to say that music and performing are as essential as food and drink to me, but even more so as I get older,” Lesh told The Marin Independent Journal earlier this year. “While it can sometimes be more of a challenge physically than it was when I was a young whippersnapper, I’ve found that age brings wisdom, and with that comes musical experience and knowledge that I didn’t have when I was younger.”
Lesh battled multiple health challenges over his life, including a liver transplant in 1998. He underwent surgery for prostate cancer in 2016 and later bladder cancer in 2015 before needing back surgery in 2019. Just two days before Lesh’s death, MusiCares named the Grateful Dead its 2025 Persons of the Year.
Surviving Grateful Dead members Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann have penned a lengthy tribute to Lesh, which you can read below.
Today we lost a brother. Our hearts and love go out to Jill Lesh, Brian and Grahame. Phil Lesh was irreplaceable. In one note from the Phil Zone, you could hear and feel the world being born. His bass flowed like a river would flow. It went where the muse took it. He was an… pic.twitter.com/3u5lOomXxi
Phil Lesh was my brother. Not by blood but still by family. I’ve heard so many of you tell me that the Grateful Dead changed your life. Yeah, well… Phil Lesh changed mine.
Summer Walker has announced her third studio album, Finally Over It. The record, which does not yet have a release date, will follow 2019’s Over It and 2021’s Still Over It. It’s led by the single ‘Heart of a Woman’, which was co-written with David “Dos Dias” Bishop and produced by Tavaras Jordan. Check it out below.
Soccer Mommy is back with a new album, Evergreen, out via Loma Vista. The follow-up to 2022’s Sometimes, Forever was previewed by the singles ‘Lost’, ‘M’, and ‘Driver’. Sophie Allison made the album in Atlanta with producer Ben H. Allen III (Deerhunter, Animal Collective, Youth Lagoon, Belle and Sebastian), foregoing synthesizers and electronic flourishes in favour of acoustic guitars, rich percussion, strings, and flutes. Read our review of Evergreen.
Laura Marling has returned with a new album,Patterns in Repeat, released via Chrysalis/Partisan Records. The follow-up to 2020’s Song for Our Daughter was recorded primarily at Marling’s home studio and co-produced by Dom Monks, with assistance from Rob Moose. The songs are directly inspired by the birth of her daughter: “This banal constellation seems to have dominated the writing of Patterns in Repeat – the drama of the domestic sphere, the frail threads that bind a family together, the good intentions we hold onto for our progeny and the many and various ways they get lost in time,” she explained in press materials. “So much complexity in the banal, the caged, the everyday.”
Fashion Club – the moniker of Los Angeles-based artist Pascal Stevenson – has dropped her sophomore album, A Love You Cannot Shake. The follow-up to 2022’s Scrunity was preceded by the Perfume Genius-assisted ‘Forget’, ‘Rotten Mind’ featuring Julie Byrne, ‘Confusion’, and the Jay Som collaboration ‘Ghost’. “Anger, acceptance; depression, acceptance; love, hate: all of this stuff is very cyclical, and accepting that one of them is part of the other is, to me, really an uncomfortable truth,” Stevenson said in our Artist Spotlight interview. “I think that’s a big part of what I wanted to get at with a lot of these songs, that uncomfortable feeling of trying to work through hate, trying to work through anger, but knowing that it’s shaping the love that you have and the acceptance that you have – it’s shaping who you are just as much as those other, more positive feelings are.”
Pom Pom Squad have followed up 2021’s Death of a Cheerleader with a new LP, Mirror Starts Moving Without Me, out now on City Slang Records. The singles ‘Downhill’, ‘Spinning’, and ‘Street Fighter’ arrived ahead of the release. “I took a lot of inspiration from my younger self on this album. I wanted to get back in touch with my creative roots,” frontperson Mia Berrin explained. “After hitting a particularly rough bout of writer’s block, I challenged myself to make a playlist of my all-time favorite songs from childhood to adulthood. It was healing in a way I didn’t expect! Before we went into the studio I made my bandmates and Cody do the same, then we all listened to each other’s and had a long conversation about them. Through the sessions for Mirror we were all pulling references from our collective playlists more than anything else.”
Amyl & the Sniffers have put out their third LP, Cartoon Darkness, through Rough Trade Records. The band recorded the follow-up to 2021’s Comfort to Me with producer Nick Launay at Foo Fighters’ 606 Studios in Los Angeles in early 2024. “Cartoon Darkness is about climate crisis, war, AI, tiptoeing on the eggshells of politics, and people feeling like they’re helping by having a voice online when we’re all just feeding the data beast of Big Tech, our modern-day god,” Amy Taylor explained. “It’s about the fact that our generation is spoon-fed information. We look like adults, but we’re children forever cocooned in a shell. We’re all passively gulping up distractions that don’t even cause pleasure, sensation or joy, they just cause numbness.”
2nd Grade, the Philadelphia power-pop project led by Peter Gill, is back with a new album. Out now on Double Double Whammy, Scheduled Explosions follows 2022’s Easy Listening and has been previewed in threes, with Gill having already shared nine of the LP’s 23 tracks. The album was home-recorded with engineer Lucas Knapp and is described as “an odyssey of 60s-inspired dream logic driven by melody, charted through an environment of ambient violence and existential dread, and touching down in a pantheon of prolific pop weirdos like Robert Pollard, Alex Chilton, Lily Konigsberg, Chris Weisman, and Nate Amos.”
Two Shell’s long-awaited self-titled debut album has arrived via Young. The enigmatic London duo offered an early taste of the record with the singles ‘gimmi it’ and ‘Everybody Worldwide’. It follows their 2023 EP lil spirits. In a rare interview with Mixmag, Two Shell said: “You can either be a leader or a follower. Start eating or get chewed. If you come out on the front foot the rights holder they will respek it. They’re probably, like, damn. These lads have got spunk and that’s how we felt when we wrote the damn lyrics.”
Halsey’s latest album, The Great Impersonator, is out today. The follow-up to 2021’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power was preceded by the singles ‘The End’, ‘Lucky’, ‘Lonely Is the Muse’, ‘Ego’, and ‘I Never Loved You’. “I made this record in the space between life and death,” Halsey wrote on X. “And it feels like I’ve waited an eternity for you to have it. I’ll wait a bit longer. I’ve waited a decade, already.” In a trailer for the album, she said, “I really thought this album might be the last one I ever made. When you get sick like that, you start thinking about ways it could’ve all been different. What if this isn’t how it all went down? 18-year-old Ashley becomes Halsey in 2014.”
Fievel Is Glauque have unveiled their sophomore LP, Rong Weicknes, via Fat Possum. The follow-up to 2022’s Flaming Swords includes the previously released singles ‘As Above So Below’ and ‘Love Weapon’. To make the new LP, the duo of multi-instrumentalist Zach Phillips and Brussels-based singer and performer Ma Clément enlisted Thom Gill on guitar, Logan Kane on bass, Daniel Rossi on percussion, André Sacalxot on saxophone and flute, Gaspard Sicx on drums, and Chris Weisman on guitar and electric sitar. The musicians convened at the Outlier Inn, a farm and music studio in upstate New York, to record the album, with mixing and mastering engineer Steve Vealey.
Norway’s Onsloow have dropped their sophomore full-length, Full Speed Anywhere Else, via Tiny Engines. It follows the band’s self-titled debut, which came out in 2022, and features the early singles ‘Taxi’ and ‘Body Parts’. “In many ways, Full Speed Anywhere Else is a breakup album, rediscovering phases through different lenses and perspectives,” drummer Morten Samdal said in a statement about the latter track. “Not exclusively, though; we also address more existential themes, dwell on the costs of friendship, etc. But a bunch of the tracks are about love, and ‘Body Parts’ is one of them!”
Iceage leader Elias Rønnenfelt has released his debut album, Heavy Glory, via Escho. Recorded in Copenhagen, the LP was co-produced by Rønnenfelt and Nis Bysted. Contributors to the album include Kjær Nielsen of Iceage, Peter Peter, Fauzia, and Joanne Robertson. “I’ve done this so many times, but capturing and crystallising an album remains a singular ritual, just with different circumstances,” Rønnenfelt remarked. “We are capturing something that is hard to hold down.” Ahead of its release, he dropped the singles ‘Worm Grew a Spine’, ‘Like Lovers Do’, ‘No One Else’, ‘Soldier Song’, and ‘Doomsday Childsplay’.
Katie Gavin’s debut solo album, What a Relief, has arrived via Saddest Factory Records. The MUNA bandleader previewed the LP with the tracks ‘Casual Drug Use’ and ‘Inconsolable’, and a video for the Mitski collab ‘As Good As It Gets’ accompanied today’s release. “It’s been really special for me to return to the sound that was my first musical home – the realm of the singer/songwriter, and to give light to these songs that I’ve cared for for a long time,” Gavin said in a press release. “I’m going to love playing them for y’all. I hope you get some gentleness and hope out of them. “
Out now via Dais, Chameleon is the debut full-length by Fort Worth-based shoegazers trauma ray. It follows their 2022 EP Transmissions. “The theme is death,” the band’s Uriel Avila explained in press materials. “And a chameleon, like death, can shape-shift in and out our lives in different forms.” The singles ‘Bishop’, ‘Spectre’, and ‘Bardo’ arrived ahead of the release.
Hey, ily! have come out with a new album called Hey, I Loathe You!. Arriving via Lonely Ghost Records, the 11-track LP follows their 2022 debut I Psychokinetic Love Songs and includes the previously released track ‘(Dis)Connected’. Other track titles on the emo band’s latest include ‘The Impending Dissolve of Hey, Ily!’ and ‘Pass the Body Dysmorphia, Please!’. In addition to lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Caleb Haynes is credited with “debilitating anxiety”; keyboardist Skyy Haman with “big burps”; lead guitarist Trevin Baker with “big words”; bassist Stephen Redmond contributed “silly faces”, while drummer Conner Haman was responsible for “dad jokes.”
Other albums out today:
Megan Thee Stallion, MEGAN: ACT II; Tess Parks, Pomegranate; Cali Bellow, Ciao Bella; Pixies, The Night the Zombies Came; Peach Pit, Magpie; Squint, Big Hand; Anna McClellan, Electric Bouquet; Ruthven, Rough & Ready; Félicia Atkinson, Space as an Instrument; Razorlight, Planet Nowhere; Rejjie Snow, Peace 2 Da World; Little Moon, Dear Divine; Tangerine, You’re Still the Only One; Shigeto, Cherry Blossom Baby.
Amber Mark has put out a new single, ‘Sink In’. Written, produced, and performed entirely by Mark, it’s set to appear on her forthcoming EP alongside the recently unveiled track ‘Won’t Cry’. Check it out below.
MUNA bandleader Katie Gavin’s debut solo album, What a Relief, is out today via Saddest Factory Records. To coincide with the release, she’s shared the music video for the focus track ‘As Good As It Gets’, a collaboration with Mitski. Check it out below.
“This song was an attempt at a realistic love song,” Gavin explained in a statement. “Some people may hear it as a break up song. It concerns itself with the everyday feeling of a long term relationship, and the assertion of ‘I think this is as good as it gets’ evokes the question ‘…is this as good as it gets?’ I am honored to have Mitski singing on this song, and am so glad we got to make a video for it with Alexa Viscius. ”
Miya Folick has dropped a new single, ‘Alaska’. It follows last month’s ‘La Da Da’, and you can check it out via the accompanying visual below.
‘Alaska’ is inspired by the line “desire is a buffalo standing on my chest” from Jeremy Radin’s poem ‘Dear Sal’. “The song is me exploring the weight of my fear of losing my relationship, but also finding comfort in the fact that if I did, things would be okay,” Folick explained in a statement. “The line ‘I could lose you’ is a double entendre. When we translated it into Japanese for the cover art, we used the verb for ‘I am able to” and the verb for ‘It is possible [to lose you].’ This song is both a coming to terms with how much my relationship matters to me, and how much I value my relationship to myself. I would be so sad if I lost this person in my life, but it would be equally as sad if I lost myself.”
Medium Build, aka Nick Carpenter, has enlisted Julien Baker for a new song, ‘Yoke’. It’s taken from Medium Build’s upcoming Marietta EP, which comes out November 15 via Slowplay/Island Records. Check it out below.
Marietta follows Medium Build’s debut LP, Country, which was released earlier this year. “Marietta is more so a zoom out of my childhood,” Carpenter explained. “Extending grace to my family. To myself. I just wanna thank myself and my parents for surviving my childhood.”
Addison Rae is back with a new single called ‘Aquamarine’. Arriving on the heels of August’s ‘Diet Pepsi’, the track arrives with a music video directed by Sean Price Williams. Check it out below.
On Instagram, Rae wrote: “Aquamarine is officially out everywhere!!!!! I wrote this song earlier in the year with my beautiful friends, Luka & Elvira, not long after writing Diet Pepsi! Oh and we shot the music video in PARIS!!! Ahhhhhh!! I hope when you listen you can lose yourself and feel freeeeeeeeeee. Second times the charm!”
Lady Gaga has shared a new track, ‘Disease’, which she teased earlier this week. It’s the first single from her forthcoming album, dubbed LG7. Lady Gaga wrote the song with Andrew Watt, Cirkut, and Michael Polansky. Check it out below.
Last month, Lady Gaga released Harlequin, a concept album that serves as a companion piece to Joker: Folie à Deux, in which she stars alongside Joaquin Phoenix as Harley Quinn.
Soccer Mommy
Laura Marling
Fashion Club
Pom Pom Squad
Amyl & the Sniffers have put out their third LP, 
2nd Grade, the Philadelphia power-pop project led by Peter Gill, is back with a new album. Out now on 
Two Shell’s long-awaited self-titled debut album has arrived via 
Halsey’s latest album, The Great Impersonator, is out today. The follow-up to 2021’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power was preceded by the singles 
Fievel Is Glauque
Norway’s Onsloow have dropped their sophomore full-length, 
Iceage leader Elias Rønnenfelt has released his debut album, 
Katie Gavin’s debut solo album, 
Out now via 
Hey, ily! have come out with a new album called Hey, I Loathe You!. Arriving via
