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

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

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.

Joni Mitchell to Play First Headline Concert in Over 20 Years

Konstantinos Pappis
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Joni Mitchell to Play First Headline Concert in Over 20 Years

Joni Mitchell is set to play her first headline concert in 23 years. The folk icon will take the stage at Washington’s Gorge Amphitheatre June 20, 2023, marking her first publicly announced headline set since she toured with Herbie Hancock in 2000.

Brandi Carlile, who joined Mitchell druing her surprise set at this year’s Newport Folk Festival, revealed the news on last night’s The Daily Show. “She said, ‘I want to play again.’… Joni Mitchell is going to play,” Carlile told Trevor Noah. “No one’s been able to buy a ticket to see Joni Mitchell play in 20 years.”

Since suffering a brain aneurysm in 2015, Mitchell has been holding private ‘Joni Jams’ for years, which has played a crucial role in her recovery, according to Carlile. She also said that the other musicians who performed at the Newport Folk set didn’t know Mitchell was planning to sing live that day. “We thought it was a jam,” Carlile told Noah. “We didn’t know that she was going to sing all the leads on those songs. She just started singing. We had rehearsed the songs ourselves, and we didn’t know whether we should stop or what we should do, you know, so we just sang with her.”

“She always has a plan,” she added. “She knows what she wants to do, even if she doesn’t say it.”

The C.I.A. (Ty and Denée Segall, Emmett Kelly) Announce New Album, Share Video for New Single

Konstantinos Pappis
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The C.I.A. (Ty and Denée Segall, Emmett Kelly) Announce New Album, Share Video for New Single

The C.I.A. – the band made up of Ty Segall, his wife Denée Segall, and the Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly – have announced their latest LP, Surgery Channel. It’s set to drop on January 20 via In the Red. Lead single ‘Impersonator’ arrives alongside a music video co-directed by Joshua Erkman and Denée Segall. Check it out below.

The C.I.A’s self-titled debut album came out in 2018. Its follow-up was written in 2021 and recorded with Mike Kriebel at Segall’s own Harmonizer Studios. Ty Segall released his most recent solo record, “Hello, Hi”, back in July.

Surgery Channel Cover Artwork:

Surgery Channel Tracklist:

1. Introduction
2. Better
3. Inhale Exhale
4. Impersonator
5. Surgery Channel Pt. I
6. Surgery Channel Pt. II
7. Bubble
8. You Can Be Here
9. The Wait
10. Construct
11. Under
12. Over

Album Review: Arctic Monkeys, ‘The Car’

Konstantinos Pappis
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Album Review: Arctic Monkeys, ‘The Car’

On The Car, Arctic Monkeys’ seventh studio album, Alex Turner can still be found wandering in a haze. It’s been four years since the release of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, and both the mood and scenery have shifted: that album’s elaborate framework, at once cosmic and intimate, seems to have slowly faded away, tearing a hole through the heart of the band’s spacey, enigmatic lounge pop. Stylistically, Turner and company still use a lot of the same tricks: fragmented narration, sumptuous arrangements, cryptic metaphors, and a vague sentimentality for a past that’s long gone, their combined effect sometimes elevating but more often clouding the drama unraveling beneath the surface. The new album doesn’t sound grounded – if anything, it confirms that the airy, elusive space its predecessor immersed itself in was less a one-time experiment than a kind of new home base.

But you get why Turner, in characteristically ambiguous fashion, has branded it their “return to Earth.” (Last time a much-anticipated album was framed as such, we got an hour-long fungus-themed record about motherhood, so always take that statement with a grain of salt.) As convoluted and obtuse as his lyricism can be, the veneer is no longer impenetrable – there’s a sense that we’re getting closer to the core of things rather than venturing further into the stratosphere. If this all sounds fairly abstract, that’s still how the songwriting comes across. You’ll have trouble following Turner’s train of thought, because, well, his characters, too, are left wondering where they are and how they got here; they drift from one place to the next but seem to not move at all, clinging onto old obsessions and new fantasies, disillusioned and stuck in a life of opulent mundanity where the cracks are finally starting to show. Lead single ‘There’d Better Be a Mirrorball’ is as lush and cinematic as the album gets, but any glint of romance is overshadowed by a sweeping melancholy that goes on to infuse much of the album.

Throughout The Car, Turner weaves and grinds his voice around words that don’t often carry the same elegance or weight, an incongruousness that points to an untrustworthy narrator whose most glamorous performances belie deception. He has the power to command a whole orchestra with chilling ease, but seemingly no control over how the truth comes out, even when he’s the one to spell it out. There is a song called ‘Mr. Schwartz’ that presents itself like a strange character study, yet every detail becomes background noise for the weighty realization that it’s “as fine a time as any to deduce the fact that neither you or I has ever had a clue.”

If these retro-tinged songs mirrored the structure of the ones they’re modeled after, such revelations would be at the center of any given track. Instead, they creep along the edges of songs overflowing with absurd non-sequiturs and sly jokes that aim to distract from the emotional debris that’s scattered throughout. Over the eerie march of ‘Sculptures of Anything Goes’, Turner imagines “performing in Spanish on Italian TV sometime in the future/ Whilst wondering if your mother still ever thinks of me,” only to be met by silence and the challenge of a much more unsettling question: “Is that vague sense of longing kinda trying to cause a scene?” ‘Body Paint’ also opens with an attempt at witty humour (“For a master of deception and subterfuge you’ve made yourself quite the bed to lie in”), but it grows into one of the most subtly devastating tracks on The Car, an epic ballad of betrayal you can easily trace in Turner’s aching falsetto.

The record begins with a taunt – “Don’t get emotional/ That ain’t like you” – and it’s in the songs with the least amount of action that that emotion leaks out, like the wrenching guitar solo that bleeds through the languid title track. Although the album sounds sublime, adorned by strings that naturally give it a luxurious, velvety sheen, there’s also an aspect of the music that feels deliberately drained of colour. Even the unexpectedly vibrant, funky ‘I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am’ reeks of a certain stiffness, which is in line with references to “blank expressions” and “awkward silences” but ends up feeling inconsequential; ‘Hello You’ is bold enough to evoke an AM riff, stripping away all the swagger to suit the song’s nostalgic narrative, but fails to push it forward.

It seems inevitable, maybe even part of the point, that The Car would leave something to be desired. It’s an album that hints at vulnerability but never really opens its arms to it, always getting somewhere – getting emotional – to avoid being in one place. Which might be exactly what the band was going for, and to a large extent, it works: it’s a consistently evocative record and a dazzling mystery to unpack. But what can you do – how much can you evoke when the façade that’s about to break only reveals more of an empty, disjointed thread? Do you patch it back up and try to get the engine running? On The Car, Arctic Monkeys seem to be on their way to figuring out – or maybe this is just an oddly perfect goodbye, question mark still flying in the air.

Macie Stewart Unveils New Single ‘Defeat’

Konstantinos Pappis
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Macie Stewart Unveils New Single ‘Defeat’

Chicago-based singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Macie Stewart (of Finom, formerly known as Ohmme) has released a new track called ‘Defeat’. It comes alongside a video directed Sid Branca. Check it out below.

“’Defeat’ is about confronting overextension and overcommitment,” Stewart said in a statement. “Sometimes you say yes so many times- to work, to hangs, to relationships, that you cease to bring your best in all those avenues. I think it can sneak up on you, but even when it does, it’s hard to admit how you’ve gotten there. I try to have patience with myself when I experience that- always trying to learn when and where that limit is. I feel very grateful to have VV Lightbody on flutes for this song- a dear friend who has helped me through many of these conversations.”

Stewart’s debut solo LP, Mouth Full of Glass, arrived in September 2021. Earlier this year, they shared the song ‘Maya, Please’ to accompany the album’s UK release. Check out our Artist Spotlight interview with Macie Stewart.

Tanukichan Returns With New Single ‘Make Believe’

Konstantinos Pappis
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Tanukichan Returns With New Single ‘Make Believe’

Hannah Van Loon, who records shoegazey music under the moniker Tanukichan in collaboration with Toro y Moi’s Chaz Bear, is back with a new single. Released via Company Records, ‘Make Believe’ marks the project’s first new music since their 2018 debut Sundays. Take a listen below.

Young Fathers Announce New Album ‘Heavy Heavy’, Share Video for New Single ‘I Saw’

Konstantinos Pappis
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Young Fathers Announce New Album ‘Heavy Heavy’, Share Video for New Single ‘I Saw’

Young Fathers have announced their next album: Heavy Heavy lands on February 3 via Ninja Tune. The group’s first LP since 2018’s Cocoa Sugar will include the previously shared track ‘Geronimo’, which came out in July, as well as a new one called ‘I Saw’. Check out its accompanying video, directed by David Uzochukwu, below.

Of the album, Young Fathers’ Kayus Bankole remarked in a statement: “You let the demons out and deal with it. Make sense of it after.”

Heavy Heavy Cover Artwork:

Heavy Heavy Tracklist:

1. Rice
2. I Saw
3. Drum
4. Tell Somebody
5. Geronimo
6. Shoot Me Down
7. Ululation
8. Sink or Swim
9. Holy Moly
10. Be Your Lady

Biig Piig Announces Debut Mixtape, Shares New Song ‘This Is What They Meant’

Konstantinos Pappis
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Biig Piig Announces Debut Mixtape, Shares New Song ‘This Is What They Meant’

Biig Piig has dropped a new song called ‘This Is What They Meant’. It will appear on her forthcoming debut mixtape, Bubblegum, which has been set for release on January 20 via RCA. The song is about “experiencing the city through someone else’s eyes, and wanting to stay in that moment regardless of the consequences,” according to Biig Piig. Listen to it below.

Bubblegum, which follows last year’s The Sky Is Bleeding EP, will include the previously released single ‘Kerosene’.

Siv Jakobsen Unveils New Single ‘Tangerine’

Konstantinos Pappis
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Siv Jakobsen Unveils New Single ‘Tangerine’

Norwegian singer-songwriter Siv Jakobsen has released a new song, ‘Tangerine’, lifted from her upcoming album Gardening. The track features contributions from Marcus Hamblett (Laura Marling, James Holden) and (This Is The Kit, Lucy Rose). Give it a listen elow.

“I imagined someone who was held against their own will inside a run of the mill suburban house, looking out from the front room and willing for someone to come let them out,” Jakobsen said of ‘Tangerine’ in a statement. “This someone is mentally stuck, a deer in headlights, scared and frozen. Not wanting to stay but unable to leave – worthless in another’s world, like a carefully peeled, squashed and tossed tangerine.”

 Gardening will be released on January 20, 2023 via The Nordic Mellow. Jakobsen has some tour dates this November in support of Beach Bunny before embarking on a headline UK/EU tour in February 2023.

PONY Release Video for New Song ‘French Class’

Konstantinos Pappis
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PONY Release Video for New Song ‘French Class’

Sam Bielanski and Pretty Matty are back with a new PONY track, ‘French Class’. Following their recent outings ‘Peach’ and ‘Did It Again’, the song was originally written as part of the Tornto band’s TV and songwriting podcast ‘2 MUCHTV’, where they go through the The Ringer‘s Top 100 TV Episodes of all time list and write a song about each one. Check out the video for ‘French Class’ below.

PONY’s debut album, TV Baby, was released last year. Check out our Artist Spotlight interview with PONY.

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