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Albums Out Today: Mitski, Animal Collective, Cate Le Bon, Black Country, New Road, and More

Konstantinos Pappis
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Albums Out Today: Mitski, Animal Collective, Cate Le Bon, Black Country, New Road, and More

In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on February 4, 2022:

Mitski, Laurel Hell

Mitski is back with her sixth studio album, Laurel Hell. Out now via Dead Oceans, the follow-up to 2018’s Be the Cowboy includes the previously released songs ‘Working for the Knife’, ‘The Only Heartbreaker’, ‘Heat Lightning’, and ‘Love Me More’. “I needed love songs about real relationships that are not power struggles to be won or lost,” Mitski said of the new album in press materials. “I needed songs that could help me forgive both others and myself. I make mistakes all the time. I don’t want to put on a front where I’m a role model, but I’m also not a bad person. I needed to create this space mostly for myself where I sat in that gray area.” She recorded the LP with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland during the pandemic, when some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower,” and the record as a whole became “more uptempo and dance-y.” Read our review of the album.

Animal Collective, Time Skiffs

Animal Collective have returned with their eleventh studio album and first since 2016’s Painting With. Out today via Domino, Time Skiffs was preceded by the tracks ‘Prester John’, ‘Walker’, and ‘Strung With Everything’, and ‘We Go Back’. Avey Tare, Deakin, Geologist, and Panda Bear recorded the LP across the course of 2020, with Marta Salogni handling the mixing. A press release described the songs on the album as “love letters, distress signals, en plein air observations, and relaxation hymns, the collected transmissions of four people who have grown into relationships and parenthood and adult worry. But they are rendered with Animal Collective’s singular sense of exploratory wonder, same as they ever were.”

Cate Le Bon, Pompeii

Cate Le Bon has released her new album Pompeii via Mexican Summer. The Welsh musician wrote and recorded her sixth LP with co-producer Samur Khouja in an “uninterrupted vacuum” in Cardiff, with exits sealed, granting herself “permission to annihilate identity.” Le Bon explained in a statement: “Pompeii was written and recorded in a quagmire of unease. Solo. In a time warp. In a house I had a life in 15 years ago. I grappled with existence, resignation and faith. I felt culpable for the mess but it smacked hard of the collective guilt imposed by religion and original sin.” The album was previewed with the singles ‘Running Away’, ‘Moderation’, and ‘Remembering Me’.

Black Country, New Road, Ants From Up Here

Black Country, New Road have followed up their 2021 debut For the first time with Ants From Up Here, which is out now via Ninja Tune. The 10-track LP includes the previously unveiled tracks ‘Concorde’, ‘Bread Song’, ‘Chaos Space Marine’, and ‘Snow Globes’. While their debut blended klezmer, post-rock, and experimental music, their latest also incorporates elements of classical minimalism and indie folk. “Releasing two albums in one year has been a fun and interesting challenge,” the band stated in a press release. “At the start of 2021 we decided to make something really good together. We were lucky enough to leave London and cross a small body of water to go to the Isle of Wight to record the album – being in the countryside was a creatively enriching experience.” Just days ahead of the album’s release, the London collective announced that frontman Isaac Wood has left the group, which will continue as a six-piece.

Los Bitchos, Let The Festivities Begin!

Let The Festivities Begin!, the debut album from Los Bitchos, has arrived via City Slang. The London-based, pan-continental instrumental four-piece – comprised of Serra Petale, Agustina Ruiz, Josefine Jonsson, and Nic Crawshaw – previewed the record with the singles ‘Good to Go!’ and ‘Las Panteras’, and ‘Pista (Fresh Start)’, all of which came with videos directed by Tom Mitchell. The record was produced by Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand in Gallery Studios, London, the recording space owned by Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera.

yeule, Glitch Princess

yeule, the London-based artist born Nat Ćmiel, has released their latest LP, Glitch Princess. The follow-up to 2019’s Serotonin II features the previously shared tracks ‘Friendly Machine’, ‘Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself’, and ‘Too Dead Inside’. Combining video game sounds, experimental shoegaze, and art-pop, Glitch Princess “opens a channel to the in-between spaces: error messages and broken computer code, what it is to be conceptually manifested and the curation of the aesthete,” according to a press release. “Ćmiel’s experiences with sobriety resulted in a flood of emotions and Glitch Princess is the undiluted excerpt of this downpour. A redirection of chaotic energy into verse, and the opportunity to confront their own vices.”

Saba, Few Good Things

Saba has dropped a new album called Few Good Things. It marks the Chicago rapper-producer and Pivot Gang co-Founder’s third studio LP and includes collaborations with Pivot Gang, G Herbo, Black Thought, Krayzie Bone, 6LACK, Smino, Mereba, Fousheé, Benjamin Earl Turner. “The concept of ‘Few Good Things’ is the realization of self after a search for exterior fulfillment,” Saba explained in a statement. “It is the satisfaction and completeness you gain by simply living a life that is yours. Few is a small number, but few is not lonely. In the face of all adversity, a few good things is recognizing and accepting blessings. Few is to count them, one by one – an empty glass is full of air, an empty bank is full of lessons., and an empty heart is full of memories. Few good things is to grow comfortable with the empty, and despite that, finding your fullness.”

Rolo Tomassi, Where Myth Becomes Memory

Rolo Tomassi have put out their latest album, Where Myth Becomes Memory, via MNRK. The follow-up to the UK post-hardcore band’s 2018 LP Time Will Die And Love Will Bury It was preceded by the singles ‘Cloaked’, ‘Drip’, and ‘Closer’. It completes a trilogy of albums that began with 2015’s Grievances, with all three albums being produced by longtime collaborator Lewis Johns. “This is a really important album for all of us,” keyboardist/vocalist James Spence explained in press materials. “Of anything we’ve done, it’s the one I’m most proud of. I think it’s the most ambitious and creative that our band has ever sounded and something that we’ve all needed to get through the last few years. We can’t wait to share it and to have you help us bring it to life.”

Other albums out today:

Erin Rae, Lighten Up; Korn, Requiem; 2 Chainz, Dope Don’t Sell Itself; The Districts, Great American Painting; A Place to Bury Strangers, See Through You; Hippo Campus, LP3; recovery girl, NAUSEA POP vol 2; The Reds, Pinks and Purples, Summer at Land’s End; Bastille, Give Me the Future; Wild Rivers, Sidelines; Partner Look, By the Book; Sofia Bolt, Soft Like a Peach.

METZ Release New Single ‘Demolition Row’

Konstantinos Pappis
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METZ Release New Single ‘Demolition Row’

METZ have shared a new song called ‘Demolition Row’. The track will appear on an upcoming split 7″ with Adulkt Life, which is set for release on March 4 on What’s Your Rupture?. Listen to it below.

“Our motivation for doing this split 7″ was really just a way of doing something special for our upcoming tour where we’ll be playing with Adulkt Life in London,” METZ said in a press release. “We’ve done a few similar projects in the past (Mission of Burma, John Reis, APTBS remix, Clipping) and it’s because we are fans of the music. Book of Curses was a record we all enjoyed and one thing led to another. ‘Demolition Row’ is a song we recorded ourselves and I think it’s quite singular as far as the METZ catalogue is concerned. We’ve never sounded this way before.”

Adulkt Life released their debut LP, Book of Curses, in 2020. That same year, METZ issued their most recent full-length, Atlas Vending.

Kae Tempest Unveils New Song ‘Salt Coast’

Konstantinos Pappis
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Kae Tempest Unveils New Song ‘Salt Coast’

Kae Tempest has shared a new track, ‘Salt Coast’, the second offering from their upcomnig album The Line is a Curve. “My love song to this complex, devastating, deeply beautiful island Salt Coast is out now,” Tempest said in a statement. “This song means the world to me. Hope you feel it.” Take a listen below.

The Line is a Curve, the follow-up to 2019’s The Book of Traps and Lessons, is out on April 8 via Fiction Records. It was led by the single ‘More Pressure’, which features Kevin Abstract of BROCKHAMPTON.

Liam Gallagher Teams Up With Dave Grohl for New Song ‘Everything’s Electric’

Konstantinos Pappis
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0
Liam Gallagher Teams Up With Dave Grohl for New Song ‘Everything’s Electric’

Liam Gallagher has shared the first single from his upcoming album, C’mon You Know, which is out May 27 via Warner. ‘Everything’s Electric’ is produced by Greg Kurstin and co-written by Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl. According to press materials, the track takes inspiration from Beastie Boys’ ‘Sabotage’ with and The Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’. Give it a listen below.

‘Everything’s Electric’ marks Liam Gallagher’s first new song since 2020’s ‘All You’re Dreaming Of’. Gallagher is set to perform the track at the BRIT Awards on Tuesday, February 8. His last album was 2019’s Why Me? Why Not?. 

Kavinsky Details New Album, Shares New Single ‘Zenith’

Konstantinos Pappis
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Kavinsky Details New Album, Shares New Single ‘Zenith’

French producer Kavinsky has announced the release date and tracklist of his upcoming album Reborn. The follow-up to 2013’s OutRun is out March 25 via Fiction/Virgin Music France. He’s also previewing the LP with a new song called ‘Zenith’, which features vocals from Prudence (formerly of The Dø) and Diamond Nights vocalist Morgan Phalen. According to a press release, Kavinsky envisioned ‘Zenith’ as a sequel to his 2010 breakout single ‘Nightcall’. Check it out below, along with the album tracklist.

Back in December, Kavinsky returned with ‘Renegade’, which was co-written by Justice’s Gaspard Augé and featured vocals from Cautious Clay.

Reborn Tracklist:

1. Pulsar
2. Reborn [feat. Romuald]
3. Renegade [feat. Cautious Clay]
4. Trigger
5. Goodbye [feat. Sébastien Tellier]
6. Plasma [feat. Morgan Phalen]
7. Cameo [feat. Kareen Lomax]
8. Zenith [feat. Morgan Phalen, Prudence]
9. Vigilante [feat. Morgan Phalen]
10. Zombie
11. Outsider
12. Horizon

Watch Mitski’s New Video for ‘Stay Soft’

Konstantinos Pappis
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Watch Mitski’s New Video for ‘Stay Soft’

Mitski has shared a new music video for ‘Stay Soft’, a track that appears on her just-released album Laurel Hell. The clip is directed by Maegan Houang, who previously co-directed the visual for ‘The Only Heartbreaker’. Watch it below.

“This video is heavily inspired by Romanticism and paintings and artwork from the Victorian era,” Houang explained in a press release. “Like the lyrics of the song ‘Stay Soft,’ paintings from that era have a gentle quality, but they still evoke a certain feeling of unexplored darkness and danger. I want the audience to feel safe within this fabricated world and then realize that the character Mitski plays is being hunted.”

Of the song, Mitski said:

‘Stay Soft’ was a more straightforward rock song when I wrote it on guitar, but the darkly sexual lyrics sung in that context felt too heavy and melodramatic. So we couched the depressing lyrics in an inviting dance beat, which is a trick people have used for hundreds of years. The remnants of the original grungy feeling can be heard starting at the instrumental interlude, when the distorted guitar comes in.

This song, frankly, is about hurt people finding each other, and using sex to make sense of their pain. This is by no means the correct way to cope with trauma, but it’s a thing people do regardless, and I always want to write songs about what we actually do, so that we don’t feel alone in them.

Out now via Dead Oceans, Laurel Hell includes the previously released singles ‘Working for the Knife’, ‘The Only Heartbreaker’, ‘Heat Lightning’, and ‘Love Me More’. Read our review of the album here.

Nicki Minaj and Lil Baby Team Up on New Song ‘Do We Have a Problem?’

Konstantinos Pappis
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0
Nicki Minaj and Lil Baby Team Up on New Song ‘Do We Have a Problem?’

Nicki Minaj and Lil Baby have teamed up for the new song ‘Do We Have a Problem?’. The single was announced with an advice hotline through which fans could submit any problems they were facing to be solved by Minaj. It comes paired with a music video directed by Benny Boom and co-starring the actors Joseph Sikora and Cory Hardrict. Check it out below.

Nicki Minaj’s last album, Queen, dropped in 2018. Lil Baby released a collaboration with Lil Durk, The Voice of the Heroes, last year.

Red Hot Chili Peppers Announce New Album ‘Unlimited Love’, Release New Song ‘Black Summer’

Konstantinos Pappis
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0
Red Hot Chili Peppers Announce New Album ‘Unlimited Love’, Release New Song ‘Black Summer’

Red Hot Chili Peppers have announced a new album: Unlimited Love is out April 1 via Warner. It marks their first album with guitarist John Frusciante back in the lineup since 2006 and their first with producer Rick Rubin since 2011. The record is led by the new single ‘Black Summer’, which arrives ahead of the band’s upcoming global stadium tour with the Strokes, Haim, A$AP Rocky, St. Vincent, and more, set to kick off in June 2022. Check it out below.

“Our only goal is to get lost in the music,” the band said of their new album in a press release. “We (John, Anthony, Chad and Flea) spent thousands of hours, collectively and individually, honing our craft and showing up for one another, to make the best album we could. Our antennae attuned to the divine cosmos, we were just so damn grateful for the opportunity to be in a room together, and, once again, try to get better. Days, weeks and months spent listening to each other, composing, jamming freely, and arranging the fruit of those jams with great care and purpose. The sounds, rhythms, vibrations, words and melodies had us enrapt.”

They continued: “We yearn to shine a light in the world, to uplift, connect, and bring people together. Each of the songs on our new album UNLIMITED LOVE, is a facet of us, reflecting our view of the universe. This is our life’s mission. We work, focus, and prepare, so that when the biggest wave comes, we are ready to ride it. The ocean has gifted us a mighty wave and this record is the ride that is the sum of our lives. Thank you for listening, we hope you enjoy it. ROCK OUT MOTHERFUCKERS!”

Frusciante added: “When we got together to start writing material, we began by playing old songs by people like Johnny “Guitar” Watson, The Kinks, The New York Dolls, Richard Barrett and others. Ever so gradually, we started bringing in new ideas, and turning jams into songs, and after a couple of months the new stuff was all we were playing. The feeling of effortless fun we had when we were playing songs by other people, stayed with us the whole time we were writing. For me, this record represents our love for, and faith in each other.”

Red Hot Chili Peppers’ previous album, The Getaway, came out in 2016. Produced by Danger Mouse, it marked their last with Josh Klinghoffer, who began playing with the band in 2007.

Unlimited Love Cover Artwork:

Unlimited Love Tracklist:

1. Black Summer
2. Here Ever After
3. Aquatic Mouth Dance
4. Not The One
5. Poster Child
6. The Great Apes
7. It’s Only Natural
8. She’s A Lover
9. These Are The Ways
10. Whatchu Thinkin’
11. Bastards of Light
12. White Braids & Pillow Chair
13. One Way Traffic
14. Veronica
15. Let ‘Em Cry
16. The Heavy Wing
17. Tangelo

Rosalía Shares Video for New Single ‘SAOKO’

Konstantinos Pappis
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Rosalía Shares Video for New Single ‘SAOKO’

Rosalía has dropped a new single called ‘SAOKO’, taken from her forthcoming album MOTOMAMI. The track arrives with an accompanying video directed by Valentin Petit. Check it out below.

In a statement, Rosalía explained:

Naming my next track “SAOKO” and sampling Yankee and Wisin for me is the most direct homage I can make to classic reggaeton, a genre that I love and that has been a constant and great inspiration throughout the MOTOMAMI project.

I started “SAOKO”‘s beat playing the upright piano at Electric Lady’s Studio B in NY, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was at night and making this beat seemed as fun as driving a Lambo. I then distorted this piano and added some classic reggaeton drums from a library that NaisGai had sent me some time ago, which by the way is something very special to me because this library has been passed from one generation of producers to another for a long time.

Before starting this track I kept thinking that I wanted to see some jazz touches in a reggaeton track and sampling Wisin and Yankee’s iconic track seemed like the best way for me to open the song. I also thank Noah, David, Dylan and Uzi for sharing this creative process with me.

If you notice, the lyrics revolve around the same concept: transformation. Each and every phrase is an image of transformation. Celebrating transformation, celebrating change. Celebrating that you are always yourself even though you are in constant transformation or even that you are you more than ever at the very moment you are changing.

Rosalía revealed the artwork for MOTOMAMI, the follow-up to 2018’s El Mal Querer, last month. She previously shared a video for her collaboration with the Weeknd, ‘LA FAMA’. The LP is out March 18 via Columbia.

Album Review: Mitski, ‘Laurel Hell’

Konstantinos Pappis
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0
Album Review: Mitski, ‘Laurel Hell’

When you listen to Mitski, a single line can feel so wrenching in its intensity that it’s a wonder there’s a whole song wrapped around it. Although she has been mostly inactive over the past few years, her music has exploded in popularity, breaking out on platforms like TikTok, where songs can only be heard for a few seconds and the lyrics displayed on-screen. Even reduced to another social media trend or an endless stream of memes, just a moment from a Mitski song can offer a glimpse into her complicated universe of feeling: Few songwriters are as adept at expressing the all-consuming yet fleeting nature of outsized emotions, how the constant push-and-pull between fear and desire can feel both isolating and enthralling. It’s also a gateway to experiencing the full richness and complexity her music acquires once you put it in context, which is as true of revisiting her earlier work as it is when delving into her latest album, Laurel Hell.

More than obsessive identification or analysis, Mitski’s music strives towards immersion. She’s always had a knack for evocative album openers, and Laurel Hell’s ‘Valentine, Texas’ is no exception, following in the footsteps of Be the Cowboy’s ‘Geyser’. Despite the ambivalence of its narrator – a trick Mitski pulls off throughout the album – the song’s invitation to step into the dark feels as tender as it is disarming, her voice drifting through a fog of droning organ before being lifted into the sky. Her lyrics lean more than ever towards abstract imagery, but the way she employs it is as vivid and potent as ever. Over the course of the album, she navigates her relationship with the dark, later opening her arms to it, until it eventually ceases to be a metaphor. The mere mention of the word “fire” is enough shift the energy of a song, clearing the path halfway through ‘Valentine, Texas’ and invoking a world of passion on ‘There’s Nothing Left for You’. She introduces her most resonant metaphor on lead single ‘Working for the Knife’, in which she laments the suffocating reality of working life, but the next track turns it from a cold object of systemic oppression to a fiery, violent part of the self.

If Be the Cowboy twisted pop structures into something forlorn and introspective, Laurel Hell’s biggest, most straightforward moments aren’t so much an attempt to break through the mainstream as they are to make it out of a self-perpetuating cycle. In other words, they seem genuinely brighter and more extroverted, even as the narrator wrestles with her own identity. “Who will I be tonight? Who will I become tonight?” Mitski sings on the opening track, and the rest of the album alternates between upbeat, danceable synthpop and slow, ethereal ballads – a clear dichotomy compared to her previous albums’ distinctly dynamic fusion of styles. Knowing these songs went through several iterations over the years, including country and punk versions, might make you long for a more varied collection than Laurel Hell, which does feel somewhat slight by comparison. But not only does the album’s divided focus align with its conflicting moods of disaffection and longing, it also sets the stage for some of Mitski’s most strikingly cinematic offerings on either end of the spectrum – from the defiant ‘The Only Heartbreaker’, co-written with Adele and Taylor Swift collaborator Dan Wilson, to the sublime ‘Heat Lightning’.

But the contradictions that have defined Mitski’s music so far – whether big or small, direct or subtle – are still ever-present. The album’s title refers to a term used to describe laurel bushes that grow in thickets so dense and wide they create a maze that’s beautiful and hormonious in appearance yet poisonous and impossible to pass through. As Laurel Hell oscillates between futility and hope, the singer restlessly contemplating which path to take, the two roads start to look eerily similar. “Sometimes I think I am free/ Until I find I’m back in line again,” she sings over the steady pulse of ‘Everyone’, caught in the same loop that runs through 2018’s ‘A Horse Named Cold Air’ (“I thought I’d traveled a long way/ But I had circled/ The same old sin.”) ‘Working for the Knife’ was written in late 2019, when Mitski had privately decided to quit the music industry but was reminded of her contractual obligation to make another album. The song’s narrative most closely resembles her own, but its attitude towards the future is still ambiguous: “Maybe at 30 I’ll see a way to change.”

Soon enough, Mitski falls back into hopelessness, this time surrendering herself. “Not much I can change/ I give it up to you,” she sings on ‘Heat Lightning’, though the song’s placement frames it less as a moment of finality than what she later calls “strange serenity.” From then on, she struggles to commit to a single role, and each version of herself, real or imagined, seems inevitably tied to her relationships. In ‘Should’ve Been Me’, the narrator empathizes with a partner who seeks love from someone who looks just like her because she herself is emotionally unreachable – a passive state she then describes in her own internal terms, comparing it to a hand lifting and dropping her inside a labyrinth: “When I saw the girl looked just like me, I thought/ Must be lonely loving someone/ Trying to find their way out of a maze.”

Whenever Mitski sings of desire on the album, she’s either recognizing someone else’s or begging them to spell it out. It’s why ‘Love Me More’ is at once the most magnetic and conflicted song on the album, full of yearning mirrored – or maybe answered – in the dazzling production, which has the deliberate effect of drowning her out. Even then, it’s a need, not a want – the same way she’s presented the shift to a more ‘80s-inspired sound (“I needed to dance.”) There’s no freedom of choice in such a declaration, not much room for change; only weariness, only more. “I’ll have to learn/ To be somebody else,” she concedes on ‘I Guess’, less an ending than a resignation. She could be singing to anybody when she says, “It’s been you and me/ Since before I was me/ Without you I don’t yet know/ Quite how to live.” But as she trails through Laurel Hell, it’s clear that no one can know or trace the movement of her own feelings like she does. No one can make the same dance. And when that strange calm washes over these mountains, naturally, she holds it.

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