These are our picks for the best albums of the last three months.
Isleña Antumalen
ÑAÑA
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
There’s a point in “Mija,” which arrives early in Isleña Antumalen’s non-stop blast of an album ÑAÑA, where Antumalen is rapping so fast that even if I could speak Mapudungun, the language in which she sings, I doubt I’d be able to catch everything she was saying. That’s a compliment, in case it wasn’t clear; Antumalen’s astonishing vocal acrobatics are one of the many highlights of ÑAÑA, a record that tackles the topics of sexuality, decolonization, and liberation atop music that never stops moving. Dembow, reggaetón, cumbia, you name it—Antumalen uses all of it, and as a result ÑAÑA is a sweaty, joyous delight. But it’s her vocal delivery I keep coming back to: frantic, giddy, clipped, and insistent, Antumalen rat-a-tats every word so ferociously it’s like every syllable is grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you. Her choice to rap in the language of the Mapuche people (Antumalen was raised within their community on Huapi Island) is itself a political act. As she puts it in the press materials for the record, “The stripping away of Mapudungun was a political campaign on the part of the Chilean State over the course of its history—the idea being that a people who stop speaking their own language will lose their culture.” On ÑAÑA, the language bursts to life, across the lithe, reggae bounce of “Wallmapu sin carnet,” the frenetic minimalist reggaetón of “Poleo,” the woozy, humid R&B ballad “Ñaña descoloniza tu belleza.” It is a 20,000-ton powder-keg of joy.
–J. Edward Keyes
Charly Bliss
FOREVER
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
When Charly Bliss first popped up on my radar back in 2014, they were a rambunctious rock band spiking grunge’s guitar slurry with sticky, sugar-coated hooks. It’s a formula that, a decade later, the world has finally caught up with—and one that Charly Bliss themselves have moved past, transforming over three full-lengths into a knockout pop group that pulls from influences across decades and smashes them together into their Day-Glo songs. FOREVER is their best work to date, one that marries Eva Hendricks’s trademark heart-on-sleeve lyrics with the kind of radiant arrangements that offset their wrenching emotional content. Hendricks has always been an excellent lyricist, but she pushes even further here, wrestling with difficult truths in bracingly plainspoken language: when she takes stock of a broken relationship in “How Do You Do It,” it cuts deep—“Love is delusion/ You get through it, then you put yourself through it again”—and when she celebrates true love’s arrival, it’s in vivid, living language: “Last night I dreamt you just touched my back/ I’ve been swimming in darkness for days since that/ My stomach tied up in knots/ He carbonated my thoughts/ I live to drown in love like this/ I want you to be my last first kiss.” I’ve written variations of this sentence for the last decade now, but Charly Bliss is the kind of band that’s so good you want the entire world to wake up and realize it all at once, and for them to be playing on the biggest stage possible for the biggest audience an arena can hold. FOREVER proves, without a doubt, they’ve got the goods.
–J. Edward Keyes
The Drin
Elude the Torch
Vinyl LP
Never mind the swampy dub-punk production, droogy spoken-word vocals, or astral-projecting drone-folk figures: The fifth consecutive album in four years from Dylan McCartney and his merry brand of pranksters is their most focused, charming work yet. The Cincinnati band have always had a gift for leveraging lo-fi recording techniques and unfussed instrumentation as Woodstock-era tromp d’oiels, and Elude The Torch is no different, its lo-fi impurities (the rumblings of traffic, the clang of church bells), buzzy guitars, and limited dynamic range forever giving the impression of a ’60s freak-rock classic. Whether kicking up dust on the steady-rolling backwoods rock of “Tigers Cage” and “Canyon” or experimenting with deadpanned Greek on “Δεν είσαι, εντάξει.” they’ve got no shortage of devilish tricks, and they make it all look easy.
Read our Album of the Day on Elude the Torch.
–Zoe Camp
Dummy
Free Energy
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
Bands that are overtly transparent about their influences often become weighed down by the baggage of lazy comparison, but Dummy ensures this won’t be the case by packing sophomore record Free Energy with ideas, the result being as kinetic and nimble a psych-pop record as will be released this year. The follow-up to 2021’s Mandatory Enjoyment, a surprise hit that launched 1,000 Stereolab comparisons, the artistic choices made on Free Energy guide the songs towards the realm of elevated electronic rock that’s immediate and fiery in contrast to its predecessor’s cool remoteness. Here is Dummy as live band, their music radiating a suppleness as it slips and slides around various permutations of psychedelia, the ease of motion belying how imaginatively all the disparate pieces that make up this musical puzzle are arranged. If creativity is a case of perceiving and creating connections between seemingly unrelated things—say, sunshine pop and ambient music and field recordings and trip hop and that one part of that one MBV song on that one YouTube clip—then Dummy is surely one of the most creative rock bands currently working. Would anyone else think to end a dissonant banger of a track by running full bore into a solid wall of flutes? The answer is no.
Read our Album of the Day on Free Energy.
–Mariana Timony
Feeling Figures
Everything Around You
Vinyl LP
Feeling Figures’s music has the lived-in, familiar quality of that most comforting and direct style of punk: garage rock. From the immaculate stomp of “The Falcon” and the disjointed jangle pop of the title track to the VU chug of closer “Social Anatomy,” Everything About You feels chunky and fundamental, warped enough to earn weirdo stripes despite the record being essentially wholesome and even nutritious as far as music goes, its practically perfect list of influences fairly oozing coolness. But while the guitars alternate between spiky and strummy, the politics are punchy throughout, the band’s commitment to using underground music as engine of social change (or at least a method communication) imbuing many of their songs with a sense of urgency and soul often missing in this particular branch of the bashed-out guitar pop tree.
Read our Album of the Day on Everything Around You.
–Mariana Timony
Fontaines D.C.
Romance
2 x Vinyl LP, Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
Romance marks a turning point for Dublin’s premiere post-punk band. Die-hards may take issue with their new sound and Y2K-on-acid makeover but boundaries are made to be pushed—even their own. Essentially a smorgasbord of ‘90s rock influences and The Cure-style new romanticism, Romance is a surprisingly pop-forward record that, true to its title, explores themes of love albeit through a trademark slanted snark (and always in Grian Chatten’s thick Dubliner’s accent). The electrifying “Starburster” is a bit of a red herring as it’s the biggest departure in sound from the rest of the album, but it may just be Fontaines D.C.’s best yet. In Gorillaz-esque fashion, Chatten spits snarling nonsense in a talk-rap cadence between gasps on the down beat, building to panic attack-inducing intensity only to break into some sanguine crooning over a swell of strings. Snarling, sanguine: both can be true of a single song, let alone a single romance, so why not a single band? Fontaines D.C. may have more surprises in store for us yet.
–Stephanie Barclay
Skylar Gudasz
COUNTRY
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Skylar Gudasz’s COUNTRY, a work of atmospheric folk with an arresting art pop sensibility, traverses cinematic landscapes with a balmy ease that belies the record’s more existential themes. On “Fire Country,” sweeping images of wildfires and vast seascapes, either to be feared or marveled at, give way to the eternal strawberry-summer dreamscape of “Mother’s Daughter.” Meanwhile, the cruising, strummy “Atoll” plots a poetic critique of U.S. imperialism in the Pacific through measured invocations of men in uniforms amidst swaying palms and blue lagoons. Like the gentle undulations of a cool mountain spring, Gudasz’s voice runs throughout COUNTRY’s windswept landscapes with a refreshing clarity that has invoked comparisons to Joni Mitchell, a deserved comparison for the talented newcomer. Refreshingly inventive soundscapes and compelling storytelling makes COUNTRY one of the summer’s very best.
–Stephanie Barclay
J.R.C.G.
Grim Iconic...(Sadistic Mantra)
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), T-Shirt/Shirt
As the drummer for Seattle hardcore crushers Dreamdecay, Justin R. Cruz Gallego has made his career trading in unwieldy, hostile rhythms, the kind of talent paid for with thumb splinters and arch pain. Across the Sub Pop debut from new project J.R.C.G., he leverages ostensibly niche-specific strength as a universally applicable, endlessly transferable skill with serious crossover implications. A whirling dervish of Latin groove, industrial clang, and noise-pop froth, Grim Iconic...(Sadistic Mantra) is the white-knuckled electro-pop bash of the summer, propelled by the blunder-bussing force of tracks like “Dogear” and “Junk Corrido.” Hazard-strewn yet easy to navigate, it’s as punk rock as party music gets.
Read our Album of the Day on Grim Iconic…(Sadistic Mantra).
–Zoe Camp
Lava La Rue
STARFACE
Who knew that when I expressed my excitement back in 2021 to “witness an up-and-coming star’s ascent” that Lava La Rue would come crash-landing back to Earth as a Funkadelic alien superstar. STARFACE, their first full-length for indie label Dirty Hit, arrives as a sci-fi concept album following “a genderfluid psychedelic musical space alien” as they seek to understand what it means to be human. La Rue gives themself ample space across the album’s 51-minute runtime to plot an eclectic constellation of cosmic funk with smatterings of shimmering ‘80s synths, atmospheric strings, West London rap, alt-rock guitar shredding, and injections of drum & bass to boot. If that sounds too far-out for your liking, a.) don’t be lame, and b.) the record’s narrative throughline will keep you tethered to the proverbial mothership. Listen up, Earthlings!
Read our Album of the Day on STARFACE.
–Stephanie Barclay
Luna Li
When a Thought Grows Wings
Vinyl LP, Cassette, Compact Disc (CD)
For those of us seeking a reprieve from a summer dominated by Clairo’s Charm, Luna Li’s When A Thought Grows Wings is a much slept-on indie pop gem worthy of your attention. In teaming up with producer Andrew Lappin (L’Rain) for her sophomore LP, the singer and multinstrumentalist’s arrangements on harp, flute, and violin are lent a fantastical lushness in lockstep with her lyric’s dreamy, naturalistic imagery. Throughout the record, Luna Li’s faerie-lite vocals enchant with a wistful yet refreshing serenity, even as she sings of a relationship’s end on the dappling “Confusion Song.” Pretty melodies, jazzy grooves, and intricate instrumentation abound on this breezy outing from an artist just beginning to spread her wings.
–Stephanie Barclay
Magdalena Bay
Imaginal Disk
2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Three years on from Mercurial World, their 2021 debut and one of the great sleeper successes of pandemic-era pop, L.A.-based duo of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin have done it again, delivering everything that made their first record so great—and then some. Hyperrealist romps through the uncanny valley? “Killing Time” and “Vampire In The Corner” resemble bubblegum pop by way of the Backrooms, the three decades’ worth of muzak melted down and refracted through a kaleidoscopic, proggy lens. Catchy hooks? One listen to “Image,” all phase-shifting THX synths and new-wave boogie, and you can see why it’s had the internet in a chokehold since release—because how could it not? Extremely online worldbuilding? How does anthropogenic scenario involving ancient aliens, identity crises, and CDs applied directly to the forehead sound? This isn’t just an ambitious concept album; it’s the kind of immaculately shot, impressively constructed sci-fi rock opera A24 execs would kill for. These two were made for the widescreen.
Read our Album of the Day on Imaginal Disk.
–Zoe Camp
Mo Dotti
opaque
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
Like their lodestars MBV and to a lesser extent Ride, Mo Dotti understand the value of timing. After dripping out a scant two EPs over the past four years on which they established their musical M.O. of melody-forward noise pop, the L.A. band’s first full-length finally arrives in the midst of a vogue for shoegaze it seems tailor-made to capitalize upon, though there’s an confrontational punk quality to their textured walls of sound that’s always rattling the bars of the songs’ pop framework. Yet despite Gina Negrini’s swooning, crystalline vocals, and the layers of sparkling guitars, this is riff-centric rock music underpinned by a simmering sense of barely contained aggression, as if the band is just waiting to kick off. Part of the thrill of opaque is hearing how skillfully Mo Dotti are able to take the sweet with the rough as they surf from crescendo to fuzzed-out crescendo.
Read our Album of the Day on opaque.
–Mariana Timony
Keanu Nelson
Wilurarrakutu
Vinyl LP
The songs on Keanu Nelson’s Wilurarrakutu are sung in both Papunya Luritja and English, but you don’t need to be fluent in either language to feel the emotion coursing through every word. That’s all thanks to Nelson’s voice—a stunningly evocative instrument capable of conveying yearning and comfort and melancholy and hope in every gentle rise and fall. Nelson made the record on collaboration with Australian producer Yuta Matsumura, and the arrangements are as much a key to its magic as Nelson’s delivery. Matsumura deliberately keeps things spare; Casio keyboards are the cornerstone, and Matsumura uses them to create gentle, minimal arrangements in order to center Nelson’s voice. Extended bands of sound rise and fall like the morning sea on “Warumpinya”—two soft notes, up and down, again and again—and pool out like spilled watercolors across “Kutjupa Tjuta,” peaceful and still. Nelson’s voice—soothing, comforting—makes every moment feel reassuring. Wilurarrakutu is more than a record—it’s an optimistic prayer.
Read our Album of the Day on Wilurarrakutu.
–J. Edward Keyes
Oruã
PASSE
Vinyl LP
On the heels of a much-deserved signal boost from Built to Spill guitarist and songwriter Doug Martsch—who recruited them as the backing band for the legends’ 2018 Brazil tour, and more recently, the rhythm section for 2022’s album When The Wind Forgets Your Name—Rio de Janeiro psych rock unit Oruã stay the winding, spaced-out course on their fourth album, PASSE. A hyper-saturated co-mingling of ’70s kraut, ’80s dub, and ’90s indie, interwoven by abstract messages of resistance and political tension sung in Portuguese, it’s part protest record, part slacker-pop beach getaway—and one hundred percent refreshing.
Read our Album of the Day on PASSE.
–Zoe Camp
OSEES
Sorcs 80
2 x Vinyl LP, Vinyl LP
On Sorcs 80, OSEES’s latest stylistic evolution comes in the form of an ambitiously squelching suite of scorching synth punk constructed out of samples played like drums and nary a guitar in sight. But this doesn’t stop proceedings from being just as pummeling and lysergic as ever, perhaps more so for how the band’s artistic impulses are launched like rockets against John Dwyer’s self-imposed creative limitations. Remember, even at their most thrashed, OSEES always had a prickly and meticulous quality about their music, and that pops up here in the form of skronky sax and slithering grooves (drummer Dan Rincon is one of the best things about Sorcs 80) both of which give the record a down-to-earth tangibility that make it extra grimy, extra good.
–Mariana Timony
Pyrhhon
Exhaust
2 x Vinyl LP, Cassette, Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), T-Shirt/Shirt, Sweater/Hoodie
What happens when one of metal’s most technically disciplined, conceptually dense, critically revered bands goes full caveman? You get Exhaust, Pyrrhon’s shortest, most straight-shooting work to date, which they made on retreat in the Eastern Pennsylvania boonies with the aid of magic mushrooms, horror movies, and of course, their insane, almost telepathic chemistry. And can you really blame them for charting a more brutish, immediate course on tracks like “Strange Pains” and “Luck of the Draw”? The New York outfit’s last album, 2020’s Abcess Time, had the misfortune of coinciding with the pandemic’s first wave, the accompanying tour was canceled due to the Delta variant, and all the while, their members were navigating new jobs and other life changes, writer’s block constantly at the door. In wielding that impatience and frustration as a cudgel against the towering avant-garde structures we’ve come to expect from their music, Pyrrhon have unlocked a phenomenal new mode, which is to say…this record rips.
–Zoe Camp
Tristwch Y Fenywod
Tristwch Y Fenywod
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Tristwch Y Fenywod by the band of the same name emerges from the bog of Leeds’s experimental music scene seemingly fully-formed, although those familiar with the members might connect disparate sonic dots from their prior projects, which range from alternative rock to chaotic free improv. Together the trio conjure a witchy vision of gothic avant-pop sung entirely in Welsh, the type of music for which the word “eldritch” was created: coolly eccentric but also just cool and honestly quite groovy in parts—avant and pop, after all. With crisp electronic drums cutting through tingly, trebly plucks of double zither and cavernous vocals, the vibes are fitting for our fractured times, both sleekly modern and intriguingly ancient (by which I mean the 1980s).
Read our interview with Tristwch Y Fenywod.
–Mariana Timony
Various Artists
Love & Purpose (Volume One)
2 x Vinyl LP
The best compilations are the ones that transport you to the time and place in which its songs were created, and the first half of First Word’s Love & Purpose: A Celebration of British Soul Music accomplishes that with the synths that sparkle to life at the beginning of album opener “Dazzle You.” A buoyant pop/R&B confection from twin sister duo Dazzle, the song immediately winds the clock back to the late ‘80s, its swaying chorus and layered vocal harmonies recalling not only Atlantic Starr and Ready For the World, but also the lovers rock the sisters sang before forming Dazzle. The comp’s A-Side is a fizzy delight, a tour of London radio circa 35 years ago, with sparkling keys, chugging drum machines, and airy harmonies. Then, halfway through, it sets controls for the present. Kicking off with a bit of throwback roots reggae from Children of Zeus, the comp locates the seeds of UK late ‘80s/early ‘90s soul in contemporary artists. The results are seamless: Without prior knowledge, you’d be hard pressed to datestamp Gareth Donkin’s tender “Autumnbreeze” to this decade. Love & Purpose is a rousing ride through decades of R&B, every stop along the way uplifting.
–J. Edward Keyes
Various Artists
Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor in Ndola
2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
DJ Kampire cut her teeth as a DJ for the Nyege Nyege festival and has helmed the decks at festivals in Shanghai, Spain, Belgium, and countless others. But before all that, she was a teenager growing up in Zambia, and the music that surrounded her became her own personal musical education. She funnels all of that knowledge into A Dancefloor in Ndola, a giddy journey through the music of Zambia’s third-largest city, ranging from the buoyant, leaping soukous of Princess Aya Shara to the corkscrewing, synth-driven, call-and-response shangaas of The Gaza Sisters. The bulk of the tracks here date to the 1980s, and function as a fascinating window into how regional artists were adapting traditional sounds to emerging technology. It’s also, quite frankly, a window into the ways American artists were “borrowing” their sounds for hits of their own—listen to Pembey Sheiro’s bright, skipping “Sala Mi Toto” and tell me you don’t start subconsciously singing the “Party, Karamu, Fiesta, forever” part of Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long.” The whole thing is a blast to listen to—the loose, funky “Djepue” from Tshala Muana, the squirmy, wormy “Naughty Boy” from V-Mash, whose vocal fry is a thing of beauty. Any one of these tracks would still get a dancefloor moving decades after they were cut. All praise DJ Kampire for giving us the party record of the summer.
–J. Edward Keyes
Nilüfer Yanya
My Method Actor
Vinyl LP, 2 x Vinyl LP, Cassette
My Method Actor, London singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya’s third studio album, is a record worth taking in over multiple listens, as each one yields some new lyric, new meaning, or new texture to appreciate. Using method acting as a metaphor for the practice of songwriting, of dredging up difficult memories to be reenacted on stage, Yanya paints oblique and at times violent pictures of internal struggle with lyrics like “You should pull that trigger, aim it at my liver/ Losin’ a pulse and all my problems/ I love to dance in my new costume.” With a skittering drum beat and sudden dirges of reverb-heavy guitar, the titular single is indicative of the sound Yanya and collaborator Wilma Archer explore across the rest of the album, one which pulls from the singer’s early alt-rock influences in The Strokes and The Pixies. Carried by Yanya’s dusky, soulful vocals and catchy hooks, My Method Actor’s lo-fi fuzz and serrated poeticism is a deeply rewarding work of contradictions.
