The Metallica Blacklist features 53 artists covering songs from Metallica’s self-titled ‘Black Album’, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this month. The album is out on September 10, along with a deluxe reissue of the LP.
Back in May, Weezer released their most recent album, the hard rock-inspired Van Weezer.
Ty Segall has released a surprise new album titled Harmonizer. The musician’s first proper album since 2019’s First Taste, the 10-track LP was co-produced by Cave’s Cooper Crain and features contributions from Segall’s Freedom Band as well as his wife Denée Segall. Harmonizer will be available in all physical formats in October, but you can stream the project in full below.
The World is a Beautiful Place & I am No Longer Afraid to Die have announced their fourth studio album. Illusory Walls, the follow-up to 2017’s Always Foreign, arrives digitally October 8 and on vinyl December 3 via Epitaph. The album takes its name from the video game Dark Souls, as does its lead single, ‘Invading the World of the Guilty as a Spirit of Vengeance’, which is out today alongside an Adam Peditto-directed music video. Check it out below and scroll down for the LP’s cover artwork and tracklist.
Illusory Walls was written and recorded remotely between Connecticut and Philadelphia and was co-produced by Chris Teti and Greg Thomas. Elaborating on the album’s title, vocalist/guitarist David F. Bello. explained that it “refers to a hidden surface that seems to prevent entry, but upon inspection is nothing more than a visual illusion.”
Illusory Walls Cover Artwork:
Illusory Walls Tracklist:
1. Afraid to Die
2. Queen Sophie for President
3. Invading the World of the Guilty as a Spirit of Vengeance
4. Blank // Drone
5. We Saw Birds through the Hole in the Ceiling
6. Died in the Prison of the Holy Office
7. Your Brain is a Rubbermaid
8. Blank // Worker
9. Trouble
10. Infinite Josh
11. Fewer Afraid
Hand Habits, the project of Los Angeles-based musician Meg Duffy, has announced their new album Fun House. It’s out October 22 via Saddle Creek. Today’s announcement comes with the release of the lead single ‘Aquamarine’, which is accompanied by a V Haddad-directed video. Check it out below and scroll down for the LP’s cover art and tracklist.
“What originally started as a minimally arranged acoustic ballad, ‘Aquamarine’ evolved into the story of certain events in life, what informs my identity, the silence in the questions left unanswered that become the shape of understanding who I am,” Duffy explained in a statement. “It was my goal to cloak some of the perils of mortality (lyrically) in a musical landscape that didn’t require the listener for a large amount of patience, to bring grief into the metaphorical club. We filmed this video in my aunt’s bar and club in upstate New York, linking the origin and lineage themes in the song with the visuals of changing identities and characters in a space I used to wander as a teen.”
Fun House was produced by Sasami Ashworth (SASAMI) and Kyle Thomas (King Tuff), while Mike Hadreas of Perfume Genius contributes vocals on ‘No Difference’ and ‘Just To Hear You’. “I felt a massive shift in the way that I was seeing the world and seeing myself, moving through certain emotional patterns and behavioural patterns, and really taking them apart,” Duffy added. “Sasami empowered me to take up a lot of different sonic spaces and challenged me to rethink these limitations that I had about my own identity. I wouldn’t allow myself to step into certain roles because of the little box I was putting myself in based on all of these false narratives that I had come to believe about myself. I think this also coincides with my trans identity too, because so much of that journey for me has been me really fighting against what I’m not ‘allowed’ to be.”
Duffy elaborated on the concept behind the new album:
I like that the idea of a ‘fun house’ can have so many different connotations. It’s disorienting, it’s filled with all these different rooms with different energies and emotions. There’s a risk that there will be manipulation happening to your environment, but you sign up for it. I really liked the idea that we could take risks, that these songs could sound very different but still make sense together. A lot of the demos for this record were really just folk songs — pretty slow and sparse — but the fun was thinking about what they could become. It was like, what if we wrapped this really traumatic, at times literal, loss of identity story from your life in a dance song? Or what if we layered this secret confession about your compulsive behavioural patterns within a beautiful acapella beach boys arrangement? Yes, let’s do that.
Hand Habits’ last album was 2019’s placeholder. Earlier this year, Duffy released the dirt EP and teamed up with Joel Fort for their self-titled yes/and project.
Fun House Cover Artwork:
Fun House Tracklist:
1. More Than Love
2. Aquamarine
3. Just To Hear You [feat. Perfume Genius]
4. No Difference
5. Graves
6. False Start
7. Clean Air
8. Concrete & Feathers
9. The Answer
10. Gold/Rust
11. Control
Chubby and the Gang have released a new song, ‘I Hate the Radio’, taken from their upcoming album The Mutt’s Nuts. It comes with an accompanying video directed by Molly Manning Walker and edited by Lesley Manning, sister and mother respectively to the band’s lead singer Charlie Manning Walker. Check it out below.
In a press release, Manning Walker said of ‘I Hate the Radio’: “This song is about when you finish a relationship with someone but you have a certain association between them and a song, and then that song comes on the radio. It’s like, ‘Man, I never want to hear this song again!’ And then of course you get In the car and it comes on.”
Tierra Whack has released a new single called ‘Walk the Beat’. Produced by J Melodic, the song features the repeated words, “Fashion shows, fancy clothes/ That’s just the way it goes.” Give it a listen below.
The Philadelphia rapper recently dropped ’76’, a song celebrating her hometown basketball team, the Philadelphia 76ers. Since issuing her debut audiovisual album Whack World in 2018, she’s released a string of singles including ‘Dora’, ‘Link’, ‘feel good’, and more. Last month, Whack featured on Willow Smith’s latest album lately I feel EVERYTHING, on the song ‘Xtra’.
Bad Bunny and legendary bachata band Aventura have joined forces for the new song ‘Volví’. The Puerto Rican megastar first teased the collaboration on Instagram, sharing photos from a video set of him performing alongside members of the group, including its breakout star Romeo Santos. Watch the video for ‘Volví’ below.
Bad Bunny has shared a series of singles in 2021, including ‘De Museo’, ‘Yonaguni’, and ‘100 Milliones’. Last year, he released three solo albums: El Último Tour Del Mundo, YHLQMDLG, and Las Que No Iban a Salir.
Kedr Livanskiy has announced a new album titled Liminal Soul. It’s set for release on October 1 via 2MR. The Russian producer and musician has previewed the LP with the new single ‘Stars Light Up’, which comes with an accompanying video shot by director Sergey Kostromin on 8mm film in one of the oldest church complexes in Moscow. Check it out and find the album’s cover artwork and tracklist below.
Livanskiy said of the song and video in a statement: “White-hipped roof vaults – antique arches, but with a Slavic tint. This place is very personal to me. I feel the connection of antiquity, with those times when people turned their gaze to the sky in search of answers to their questions, in order to feel some kind of otherworldly energy and strength. ‘Look at the sky’ is sung in the song, urging people of our time not to lose contact with heaven – not necessarily in a religious sense, but rather a broader metaphysical one.”
Liminal Soul will follow Livanskiy’s 2019 record Your Need. The new LP features contributions from Moscow producer Flaty and avant-electronic Synecdoche Montauk. “Urban being and intuitive organic life are inseparable within a man,” Livanskiy added. “That’s the boundary I intended to discover, an archaic pulse inside modern people.”
Liminal Soul Cover Artwork:
Liminal Soul Tracklist:
1. Celestial Ether
2. My Invisible
3. Boy
4. Stars Light Up
5. Teardrop
6. Night [feat. Synecdoche Montauk]
7. Your Turn [feat. Flaty]
8. Badlands
9. Storm Dancer
The Blow – the duo comprised of Khaela Maricich and Melissa Dyn – have shared a cover of the 10cc’s classic ‘I’m Not In Love’. Check it out below.
Talking about the cover, Maricich explained in a press release:
We’ve both been obsessed with this song, ever since we discovered how it was made. Even though it sounds like an 80s song, it was actually made in 1975, by a rock band, before electronic pop really existed (at least on a mainstream level). 10cc produced it using a crazy and elaborate process, recording their voices in layers for weeks, taking a big risk on an experiment that ended up being a huge hit. It was one of the rare moments when experimentation is canonized in popular culture, and that’s exciting because sometimes the things that happen in the mainstream are inspiring, and sometimes they just make you feel small.
We made this song in our apartment, while the cat that we got during Covid watched us. For most of the process he laid there on a sheepskin-covered chair, arching his body in time with the sounds. Sometimes, at the especially swoony parts, he would roll on his back, stare into space, and hold completely still; we chose to read this as an indication of bliss and took it to believe the song was good. Or at least good for cats. Good for cats is good for us, especially after this past year, and maybe it’s always the goal to strive for. Last year was hard but it seems like it was actually a pretty good year for cats, and that’s a nice way to remember it.
In 2019, the same year that Billie Eilish leapt into stardom, another Gen Z artist who rose out of the SoundCloud bedroom pop scene delivered her own fully realized debut. Clairo’s Immunity and Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? were released just months apart from each other, and though the first leaned more on indie pop where the latter twisted the sounds of trap, hip-hop, and EDM, they both displayed a similar candidness about issues surrounding mental health and depression. Despite often being lumped in the same category of sensitive young artists, their trajectories ended up being vastly different but not entirely divergent. Between earning more Grammys than she seemed equipped to handle and having her every move scrutinized, Eilish would see the world she had created on her debut expand far beyond her grasp.
Unlike Clairo, who stepped away from the spotlight and didn’t release new music for almost two years, Eilish offered an intimate look into her emotional journey through a series of singles going back to 2019’s ‘everything i wanted’ – which brought her yet another Grammy – and the deeply personal documentary Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry. Rather than feed the hype machine, each release was a conscious attempt to expose the trappings of celebrity and trace a path to her own happiness when the idea of success had lost all meaning. Still, it did little to change the public’s perception: “When I retell a story, I make everything sound worse,” she sings on the opening track of her new album, Happier Than Ever, before realizing she’ll be faced with ignorance not just when she is being honest, but even when she’s not.
She refuses to alter her course; if anything, honesty is the one thing that keeps her grounded. “I’ve had some trauma, did things I didn’t wanna/ Was too afraid to tell ya, but now, I think it’s time,” she affirms at the end of the song, which is called ‘Getting Older’, effectively setting the stage for the rest of the album. The sentiment of the chorus – in which the future is disconcertingly uncertain and getting bored of what was once a dream is a real possibility – isn’t too far removed from the insecurities Clairo relayed on her own sophomore album, Sling, released earlier this month. If ‘Your Power’ was the only advance single from the album rather than one of five – as was the case with Clairo’s ‘Blouse’ – it might have been impossible not to compare the two release cycles. Not only do both artists confront past abusers while navigating their place in a music industry that objectifies them, they do so by ditching the alt-pop stylings of their respective debuts in favour of a more intimate and organic folk sound. And though Eilish’s palette on Happier Than Ever is more varied, they both seem eager to retreat into the sounds of an era they couldn’t have experienced first hand – Clairo looked to ‘70s singer-songwriter music, while Eilish, now 19, drew inspiration from jazz singers like Julie London, Frank Sinatra, and Peggy Lee.
The effect is similar: In the absence of inescapable hooks and bold production choices, Eilish’s restraint forces you to pay closer attention. Slower tempos allow the songs to breathe and move more freely, and Eilish’s voice is less often buried in a thick low-end or run through a filter, resulting in a different kind of intimacy. If When We All Fall Asleep masterfully channeled adolescent anxiety into a nightmarish pop album, the new LP gives the external impression of a dream while being rooted in the realities of fame. Eilish doesn’t flirt with fantasies of the past or the future so much as she explores the ways they haunt the present, her growing sense of responsibility reverberating through tracks like ‘Getting Older’, ‘Not My Responsibility’, and ‘Everybody Dies’. As she figures out her best course of action – or rather, reaction – her tone ranges from confrontational (‘Therefore I Am’) to darkly humorous (‘NDA’) to hopeful (‘my future’) – and when it does latch onto a sense of optimism, it’s neither corny nor ironic, but painfully earnest.
Relative to Sling, Happier Than Ever covers a lot more sonic territory, but it’s still a more cohesive album than When We All Fall Asleep. At its most exciting, it sounds less like a stylistic pivot than a maturation of the qualities that marked her debut, from the dark rush of ‘Oxycotin’ to the pulsating ‘NDA’ and the infectious energy of ‘Therefore I Am’. Just as Eilish’s voice and songwriting are given the space to shine, her brother and primary collaborator Finneas hones in on his ability to not only capture a mood but allow it to spread out in different directions. The climactic title track, teased as a simple acoustic cut, erupts into a moment of cathartic anger elevated by distorted guitars and soaring drums: “I don’t relate to you, no/ ‘Cause I’d never treat me this shitty!/ You made me hate this city!” Without it, the whole thing might have felt too flat.
Indeed, some of the album’s quieter moments, like ‘Everybody Dies’ and ‘Halley’s Comet’, are subdued but lacking in nuance, interesting but half-baked. A notable exception is the final track, ‘Male Fantasy’, the kind of plaintive acoustic song you could now imagine Clairo singing backing vocals on, and that the ‘i love you’ singer can no doubt do wonders with. In the past, Finneas would often join her in this type of song, but here it’s all just her. What begins as an attempt to “distract myself with pornography” becomes a critique of the titular theme, and finally, an opportunity for self-reflection: “It’s all I think about when I’m behind the wheel/ I worry this is how I’m always gonna feel/ But nothing lasts, I know the deal,” she sings with devastating resolve. Talking to herself, with the rest of the world seemingly shut out, she sounds like no one else.