Nas has unveiled the tracklist for his recently announced album King’s Disease II, which arrives this Friday, August 6 (via Mass Appeal Records). The sequel to 2020’s King’s Disease, which was executive produced by Hit-Boy, will feature guest spots from Ms. Lauryn Hill, Eminem, EPMD, Charlie Wilson, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, YG, and more. Check out the full tracklist below.
King’s Disease earned Nas his first ever Grammy Award for Best Rap Album, beating records by D Smoke, Freddie Gibbs and the Alchemist, Jay Electronica, and Royce 5’9″.
King’s Disease II Tracklist:
1. The Pressure
2. Death Row East
3. 40 Side
4. EPMD 2 [feat. EPMD & Eminem]
5. Rare
6. YKTV [feat. A Boogie Wit da Hoodie & YG]
7. Store Run
8. Moments
9. Some Place [feat. Ms. Lauryn Hill]
10. No Phony [feat. Charlie Wilson]
11. Brunch on Sundays [feat. Blxst]
12. Count Me In
13. Composure [feat. Hit-Boy]
14. My Bible
15. Nas is Good
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.
