Manchester-born, London-based songwriter and saxophonist Alabaster dePlume has announced a new LP, Come With Fierce Grace, with the single ‘Did You Know’. The follow-up to last year’s GOLD comes out September 8 via International Anthem. It includes contributions from Rozi Plain, Tom Skinner of the Smile and Sons of Kemet, Falle Nioke, Donna Thompson, and James Howard, among others. New single ‘Did You Know’ features singer and drummer Momoko Gill (aka MettaShiba), and you can check it out along with the album’s cover art and tracklist below.
Come With Fierce Grace Cover Artwork:
Come With Fierce Grace Tracklist:
1. Sibomandi [feat. Falle Nioke]
2. What Can It Take
3. To That Voice and Say
4. Greek Honey Slick [feat. Tom Skinner]
5. Give Me Away
6. Fall on Flowers
7. Did You Know [feat. Momoko Gill]
8. Levels of Human
9. Not Even Sobbing
10. The Best Thing in the World
11. Naked Like Water [feat. Donna Thompson]
12. Broken Again
Jeff Rosenstock has announced his next album: HELLMODE drops September 1 via Polyvinyl. New single ‘Doubt’ is out today alongside animated video made by the team behind Craig of the Creek, the Cartoon Network series for which Rosenstock provides the music. Check it out below, and scroll down for the album cover and tracklist.
“I wanted to make an anime-inspired video that captures the feeling of dread you feel when you know you’re gonna have to deal with some bad shit, and then that bad shit ends up way worse than you had even imagined,” Rosenstock explained in a statement. “I’ve also always wanted to make a video with some of the ridiculously talented artists at Craig of the Creek. We met up at Tony’s Darts Away in Burbank – which I feel obliged to shout out because they didn’t kick us out even though five of us sat outside there for about 3 hours and ordered one pretzel and one coffee in total. Everyone started throwing ideas around and pretty quickly, Najja, Dashawn & Deena started sketching out their storyboards right there at the bar. Soon enough a tiny animation pipeline was formed with Cory and Jon and poof boom bang uh-oh video happened. It was pretty incredible to see it all come together!”
HELLMODE, which follows 2020’s NO DREAM and its 2021 companion SKA DREAM, will include the previously released single ‘Liked U Better’. “To me, the album feels like the chaos of being alive right now,” Rosestock reflected. “We’re experiencing all these things at the same time that trigger our senses, and emotions that make us feel terrible. We’re just feeling way too much all at once!”
HELLMODE Cover Artwork:
LLMODE Tracklist:
1. WILL U STILL U
2. HEAD
3. LIKED U BETTER
4. DOUBT
5. FUTURE IS DUMB
6. SOFT LIVING
7. HEALMODE
8. LIFE ADMIN
9. I WANNA BE WRONG
10. GRAVEYARD SONG
11. 3 SUMMERS
Strawberry Runners, the project led by Emi Night, has announced a new self-titled album. Following 2017’s In the Garden, In the Night EP, Strawberry Runners was co-produced by Night and Michael Cormier-O’Leary. It includes the recently released track ‘Circle, Circle’, as well as a new song called ‘Look Like This’. Check out a video for it and see the album cover and tracklist below.
Night shared the following statement about the new song and video:
This is the first song that Michael Cormier O’Leary and I worked on together production-wise. We actually recorded another version as a straightforward rock/power pop song with the Philly band a few years back, but it never felt right. Last year, Mike was living up in Maine and looking to take on more production work. When he visited Brooklyn for a gig, we hung out for most of a day and got into talking about what happened with the album we started in Philly. I had left off midway through finishing the album when some heavy stuff came up with my family – a pause that extended through the pandemic. It was a combination of that and the fact that the songs weren’t feeling right. Together we figured that it might be fun to revisit the record with fresh ears, and re-work some of the old songs.
I told Mike that “Look Like This” was the first song I’d cut from the album as it was, so he offered to take a swing at re-arranging it. I re-recorded the song with just acoustic guitar and vocals, slowing down the tempo and lowering the key a bit to mellow it out. I sent some references for drum sounds I was into, along with a long playlist of music references for the vibe in general. Very soon after, maybe within a couple of days, he sent back a new keys/synth/midi arrangement under my vocal tracks. He had re-worked the rhythm a bit to pick the energy up, maintaining most of the guitar licks but keeping the track pretty keys/synths forward. There was a bit of back and forth after that and we honed the sound in the studio, adding more instrumentation. But when I heard that first pass from Mike, that was the moment I finally let myself start to feel excited about the possibility of this album getting out into the world.
“Look Like This” is a song about ego distortions, depression, the contradictions of the false self, and finding the boundary between imposed perceptions and one’s own spontaneous reality. Finding this boundary for yourself is something we should all strive to do in our image-driven world. The intention is to gather energy, to break out of oppressive thinking patterns, and find clarity.
In the video, I was thinking about the way that depression and your ego can distort your view of the world and yourself. I thought of a few ways to distort figures in video form – shadows, reflections, filters, lenses, and spent a couple days filming my bandmates and myself.”
The video features Benedict Kupstas, and the shadows of Michael Cormier O’Leary and Nico Hedley. It was edited by Santi and Ana Slade.
Strawberry Runners Cover Artwork:
Strawberry RunnersTracklist:
1. When I Walk
2. Breakup 2
3. ha ha
4. Alison
5. Angel in the Glass
6. Slip Through
7. Look Like This
8. Buddy
9. Hollow
10. Can I Take This
11. Bed and Blanket
12. Circle Circle
Jenny Owen Youngs has announced her first full-length studio album in over a decade. Avalanche is set to arrive on September 22 via Yep Roc Records. To celebrate the news, Youngs has shared the LP’s title track, which was co-written with Madi Diaz and is accompanied by a live performance video featuring Peter Silberman of the Antlers. Check it out below, alongside the album artwork and tracklist.
“An avalanche is an extreme force, it can cause great harm, and when it’s over, you can be certain things will be different than they were before,” Youngs reflected in a statement. “When it came time to name the album, this song leapt forward as the title track, because the unifying theme of this body of songs, to me, is the idea of moving from destruction to restoration, traveling through pain to possibility.”
Avalanche was recorded with producer Josh Kaufman. In addition to Madi Diaz and Peter Silberman, it features contributions from Christian Lee Hutson and drumming from the Walkmen’s Matt Barrick.. “There’s a good deal of heartbreak and disappointment in this music, but it ultimately gives way to excitement and promise, to the incredible, immeasurable bliss of falling in love and finding yourself again,” Youngs added. “These songs travel the whole emotional spectrum.”
1. Avalanche
2. Knife Went In
3. Goldenrod
4. Everglades
5. Bury Me Slowly
6. Next Time Around
7. It’s Later Than You Think
8. Salt
9. Set It On Fire
10. Now Comes the Mystery
Will Butler + Sister Squares have announced their new self-titled album, which will be out on September 22 on Merge Records. The follow-up to 2020’s Generations includes the previously released track ‘Willows’, as well as a new single, ‘Long Grass’. Check it out below.
Sister Squares — Sara Dobbs, Julie Shore, Jenny Shore, and Miles Francis — have been touring and recording with Butler for nearly a decade. “I met Jenny—my wife!—in college, the year before I joined Arcade Fire,” Butler explained. “When I needed a band to tour Policy, I asked [Jenny’s sister] Julie to join because I trusted her musically. And I asked Sara, Jenny and Julie’s childhood friend, because I knew she was super talented.”
“After Generations, I considered making a weird solo record,” Butler remarked. “Me alone in the basement, etc., etc. Mostly I realised that what I wanted was the opposite.” He ended up co-producing the record with Francis, who commented: “Will and I organically discovered our relationship as a production duo through making this album. We didn’t have to talk too much about things as they happened, because the music just flowed. As a producer, working with Jenny, Julie, and Sara is the dream. They connect so innately. In one motion they can conjure a mood, or get at the root of a feeling.”
In a press release, Butler also said leaving Arcade Fire was “maybe the most complex decision of my life. I had spent the preceding two years at home with my three children. I was 39 years old. I was waking up every morning and reading Emily Dickinson, until I had read every Emily Dickinson poem. I was listening to Morrissey, to Shostakovich, to the Spotify top 50. I had unformed questions with inchoate answers. But, honestly, I was feeling great about the record.”
Of the album’s lead single, he added: “I had read this novella called Jamila by a Soviet/Kyrgyz author named Chingiz Aitmatov from the ’50s. It’s about an artist looking back on his childhood in a small town in Kyrgyzstan in WWII. It’s about love, and becoming an artist, and melancholy, and vast landscapes with a single train track running through them. And it reminded me of young adulthood, of wandering moodily down the train tracks. Maybe the song is also about leaving behind the things that formed us, but trying to remember the world as it used to be?”
Will Butler + Sister Squares Cover Artwork:
Will Butler + Sister Squares Tracklist:
1. Open
2. Stop Talking
3. Willows
4. Long Grass
5. Me & My Friends
6. Saturday Night
7. Car Crash
8. Sunlight
9. Arrow of Time
10. I Am Standing in a Room
11. Good Friday, 1613
12. Old Year
13. Hee Loop
14. The Window
Chicago artist Sen Morimoto has announced his new album Diagnosis, which is due for release on November 3 via City Slang and his own Sooper Records. It includes the previously unveiled single ‘If The Answer Isn’t Love’, and the title track is out today alongside an accompanying video. Check it out below.
“The video for diagnosis is an over the top story about the music industry and an artist who thinks they can fix it from within (he can’t!),” Morimoto said in a statement. “I worked with New Trash again to continue the story from ‘If The Answer Isn’t Love’ and they really brought the Faustian nightmare to life. The way the video is edited feels so true to how we experience life now. It’s a hyper-capitalist information overload where every part of your story is happening all at once.”
“I’ve now released a couple of albums in a time when the most commercially exploitable asset an artist has is their social identity and their trauma,” Morimoto added of the LP. “Over this time the discussion of this pattern has come up repeatedly with peers who felt similarly tired of being expected to share every private detail of an immigrant household or to romanticize the struggle of their working class upbringing only to find questions on the craft itself reserved for artists without those burdens. While the songs on my third album range in topic from love to radicalization to spirituality and the internal effects of life under capitalism, every song on Diagnosis is, at its core, an attempt to flip the lens around. To hold a magnifying glass over the systems we live in and empower us to investigate them with the same scrutiny.”
Diagnosis Cover Artwork:
Diagnosis Tracklist:
1. If The Answer Isn’t Love
2. Bad State
3. St. Peter Blind
4. Diagnosis
5. Pressure On The Pulse
6. Naive
7. Feel Change
8. What You Say
9. Surrender
10. Deeper
11. Pain
12. Forsythia (レンギョウの旋律)
13. Reality
Ahead of the release of their new album I’ve Got Me this Friday (June 30) via Fat Possum, Joanna Sternberg has shared one more single from it. ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ follows earlier cuts ‘Mountains High’, ‘People Are Toys to You’, and the title track. Check out its accompanying video, animated by Sternberg, below.
“I was surprised that my friends encouraged me about this song because originally I was too embarrassed to even consider showing it to anyone,” Sternberg said in a press release. “It is about looking back on a romantic relationship and realising all of these things that you thought were normal at the time were actually very damaging to you, including the relationship itself.”
Blonde Redhead have unveiled a new song called ‘Melody Experiment’. It’s the second offering from their first new album in 8 years, Sit Down for Dinner, following ‘Snowman’. Give it a listen below.
“This song is a conversational piece between two people,” Kazu Makino said of ‘Melody Experiment’ in a statement. “One is questioning the intentions, integrity, and consequences of one’s emotions and actions. She is hypersensitive. The other keeps things simple, allowing himself to go with the flow. Musically, I was able to find something that is quite true and natural to myself, and now I want to continue on this path.”
Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanna has announced a new album, Baudelaire & Orchestra, which comes out July 28 via SusannaSonata. It’s the latest in a series of albums exploring the work and persona of French poet Charles Baudelaire, following 2020’s Baudelaire and Piano and last year’s Elevation. Listen to the new single ‘Obsession’ below.
On the new album, Susanna is joined by Oslo’s KORK orchestra. The music was arranged by Jarle G. Storløkken, with contributions from composer Jan Martin Smørdal, while Deathprod produced and mastered the record.
“I’ve been wanting to develop this material since the first Baudelaire album,” Susanna remarked in a press release. “There’s a bit more complexity in the harmonies and the rhythms than you can hear in the bare piano arrangements. I think these songs have become even more accessible in these orchestral versions, and I hope many more people will be able to enjoy the music.”
Baudelaire & Orchestra Cover Artwork:
Baudelaire & Orchestra Tracklist:
1. Sarcophagi
2. Obsession
3. The Ghost
4. Burial
5. Heavy Sleep
6. Destruction
7. Rewind
8. Longing for Nothingness,
9. Alchemy of Suffering
10. Elevation
11. The Vampire
Young Thug has released Business Is Business (Metro’s Version), a new deluxe edition of his latest album, which came out last week. Metro Boomin serves as the album’s executive producer. The new version of the LP includes the new song ‘Money’ featuring Nicki Minaj and the late Juice WRLD, which you can hear ibelow.
The original Business Is Business features guest spots from Drake, Future, 21 Savage, Lil Gotit, Yak Gotti, Travis Scott, Bslime, and fun.’s Nate Ruess. Young Thug is currently incarcerated and awaiting trial on RICO gang charges.
