Notable Releases of the Week (3/14)

It’s SXSW week, and if you’re in Austin, come hang with us at the BrooklynVegan shows, including our Friday night showcase at Mohawk (with Voxtrot, Wand, Maruja, Shallowater, and more) and our free Saturday day party at Mohawk (with billy woods, Kevin Morby, Good Looks, YHWH Nailgun, Holy Fuck, Porcelain, Friendship’s Dan Wriggins, and more). As for other music news from this week, WU LYF are back???

On the new music front, it’s also a very busy week. I highlight 11 new albums below, and Bill tackles more in Indie Basement, including Edwyn Collins, Throwing Muses, Bambara, Étienne de Crécy (ft. Damon Albarn, Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, Kero Kero Bonito & more), and the 20th anniversary edition of Of Montreal’s The Sunlandic Twins.

For more, this week’s honorable mentions include Playboi Carti (ft. Kendrick Lamar on 3 of its 30 songs), Coheed and Cambria, Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree), Curren$y & Harry Fraud, Twin Shadow, Whatever the Weather (Loraine James), Jonathan Personne (of Corridor), SOM, Terraplana, Envy of None (ft. Rush’s Alex Lifeson), Kronos Quartet & Mary Kouyoumdjian, Anoushka Shankar, T. Gowdy, Joni Void, DJ Elmoe, Chain (Mom Jeans, Graduating Life, Just Friends), Gregory Uhlmann/Josh Johnson/Sam Wilkes, Neal Morgan (Joanna Newsom, Bill Callahan), Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek, The Dennis Egberth Dynasty, Touch the Clouds, cootie catcher, Dream Brigade, K Camp, Slim Thug & Propain, B.G., Cleopatrick, Zoë Mc Pherson, ZZ Ward, Mia Wray, Das Beat, Warbringer, Warren Zeiders, Carly Pearce, St. Lucia, the Nasty EP, the Flora from Kansas EP, the Mia June EP, the WAEVE EP, the Casino Hearts EP, Ruston Kelly’s Dirt Emo Vol. 2 EP, the Bad Beat/D Bloc split EP, the LE SSERAFIM mini album, Beak>’s soundtrack for State of Silence, the Red Fang B-sides/rarities comp, the Ging Nang Boyz comp, Ovlov’s Buds demos, the 30th anniversary edition of Goo Goo Dolls’ A Boy Named Goo, the IA11 of Makaya McCraven’s 2015 album In the Moment, The Faint reissues, the Ozzy Osbourne box set, and the EP accompanying A24’s Opus with John Malkovich as fictional pop star Alfred Moretti.

Read on for my picks. What’s your favorite release of the week?

Rwake – The Return of Magik (Relapse)
The Little Rock band conjure up a mix of sludge, psych, prog, alt-country, witches, and crosses on their first album in nearly 14 years

Are we in the midst of a mini resurgence of aughts-era psychedelic Southern sludge? Kylesa are back for their first shows in nearly a decade, Baroness are doing a Red & Blue tour, and Little Rock, Arkansas’ Rwake have just released their first album in nearly 14 years, following some recent comeback shows with their Little Rock neighbors Pallbearer. Not to mention ’90s forebears Acid Bath are back for their first shows in nearly 30 years. (On a less positive note, this all comes as Mastodon parts ways with a crucial member.) Rwake left off with 2011’s Rest, an album that Decibel called one of that year’s best and Pitchfork called the best album of the band’s entire career, and The Return of Magik makes it feel like no time has passed, even if there’s even more space between Rest and The Return of Magik than there was between Rest and Rwake’s 1998 debut.

On The Return of Magik, the dual vocals of Chris Terry’s guttural roars and Brittany Fugate’s piercing shrieks sound as urgent and inspired as ever, and their softer moments of spoken word and hushed clean singing are just as impactful. With new lead guitarist Austin Sublett and the recorded debut of guitarist John Judkins (who joined shortly after Rest came out, but met Rwake when his old death metal band Denial of Grace opened for them in 1997), there’s both a freshness and a comforting familiarity to all the prog-psych-sludge riffage, and the longtime rhythm section of drummer Jeff Morgan and bassist Reid Raley remains absolutely gut-punching. Rwake make their Southern birthplace known by weaving elements of alt-country throughout the album and incorporating a spoken word segment by Jim “Dandy” Mangrum of the veteran Southern rock band Black Oak Arkansas, and lyrically the album reckons with distinctly Southern imagery, from witches in the woods to the towering presence of the Southern Baptist Church. On top of sounding as badass as it does, The Return of Magik resonates because it’s so incredibly vivid.

The Return Of Magik by Rwake

Nels Cline – Consentrik Quartet (Blue Note)
The long-running guitarist shares the spotlight with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock on the debut album from this slightly more traditional jazz combo

As a bandleader, the visionary jazz, rock, and free-improvisational guitarist Nels Cline has often avoided horns in his recent smaller combos, but a few years back, he got the itch for some sax. “I was, I guess, kind of burnt on the saxophone,” he said in a recent interview with PostGenre. “But suddenly – and I don’t have an explanation for it, frankly – I just wanted to hear the saxophone.” He brought in saxophonist Skerik for his 2020 Nels Cline Singers album Share the Wealth, and when he formed his new Consentrik Quartet, he brought in Ingrid Laubrock, who won him over when he heard her work in Mary Halvorson’s octet. Rounded out by bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Tom Rainey, the group first came together shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic for a free-improvisation set at the Brooklyn outpost of John Zorn’s NYC venue The Stone, and when lockdown hit, Nels started writing material for the Consentrik Quartet’s first album.

Nels says this quartet is “much more of a jazz group, if I dare use that word,” compared to the Nels Cline Singers, and he “wanted to have the music reflect the players, and have the players come forth so that everybody is able to hear them and enjoy their lucidity and their mastery.” In Ingrid Laubrock, he found not just a band member but essentially a co-leader. “When I listen to her playing on the Consentrik record,” he says, “I’m consistently blown away. To me, it sounds like it’s her record because of how she shines.”

Indeed, compared to some of Nels Cline’s more overtly guitar-forward albums, Ingrid’s saxophone frequently leads the way and Nels sounds more than happy to take a backseat on his own album. His fourth release for Blue Note, Consentrik Quartet clearly takes some inspiration from the label’s legacy (the album bio mentions ’60s-era Blue Note legends Eric Dolphy and Andrew Hill as influences), and save for a few moments like the punk-jazz freakouts in “Satomi,” the album sounds more rooted in the organic sounds of the mid-to-late ’60s post-bop era compared to some of the more overtly modern fusions on the last Nels Cline Singers album. The album also tends to favor a calmer, more meditative approach, something this quartet very much excels at. In that PostGenre interview, Nels referred to the “quieter free pieces” on his albums that “most people skip over when they’re going through the album if they passively listening to it” as “the pieces that I cherish the most, not just in my music but in music in general.” On Consentrik Quartet, those pieces are the album’s heart and soul.

Tiny Voices – Reasons I Won’t Change (PNWK)
The rising Midwest band’s debut album is one charged-up emo/pop punk banger after the next

There’s a part on the bridge of Tiny Voices’ song “Backseat Therapist” where one member lets out a throat-shredding scream, followed on the very next line by a picture-perfect pop punk harmony. The song seesaws between the two extremes of Tiny Voices’ sound in about 10 seconds, quickly summing up exactly what kind of itch the Wisconsin band’s debut album Reasons I Won’t Change scratches. Like The Wonder Years and Hot Mulligan (the latter of whom’s Chris Freeman sings on this album’s lead single “Yesterday”), Tiny Voices make charged-up pop punk that’s in touch with the rawer, grittier aspects of hardcore and emo, and they’ve quickly become a force in that space. The young band formed shortly before COVID and Reasons I Won’t Change follows EPs from 2021 (Where the Time Went) and 2023 (Make Up Your Place), and Tiny Voices already have the towering confidence and the cathartic hooks of a band who’s been around two or three times as long as they have. If they sound this impactful already, I can’t wait to hear what they’ll be doing a few years down the line.

Reasons I Won’t Change by Tiny Voices

Circuit des Yeux – Halo On the Inside (Matador)
Haley Fohr enters her ’80s-inspired goth era in a way that only she can

Haley Fohr has made all kinds of music, from avant-folk to art pop to contemporary classical, and for her new album as Circuit des Yeux, she’s going full goth. On Halo On the Inside, her breathtaking voice is propped up by a bed of retro synths, arena-sized guitars, orchestral swells, and skittering beats, resulting in what sounds like a cross between Depeche Mode, ANOHNI and the Johnsons, and Fever Ray. Opening with the goth-club stomp of “Megaloner,” Halo wastes no time dropping you right into the middle of CdY’s latest stylistic departure. Not totally unlike the new ’80s goth-inspired Sharon Van Etten album, Halo On the Inside feels overtly retro and forward-thinking all at once, thanks in no small part to Haley being a natural-born innovator. Bold, daring music is just about the only kind of music she makes, but never before has a Circuit des Yeux album had this much swagger.

Halo On The Inside by Circuit des Yeux

Huremic – Seeking Darkness (self-released)
The anonymous artist behind Parannoul adopts a new moniker to explore prog, post-rock, and more on this hypnotic new album

Parannoul releases some of the most interesting shoegaze around under that moniker, and the anonymous South Korean artist also sometimes drops music under different monikers as well. This week, that artist surprise-released an album under the name Huremic, and it’s much different from Parannoul. Across five lengthy songs that range between 9 and 14 minutes each, Seeking Darkness offers up long stretches of hypnotic rock music that sounds like a mix of Slint, Swans, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Red-era King Crimson. Stereogum points out that the Bandcamp liner notes (translated into English via Google) say the album uses samples from “the Korean traditional music virtual instrument sound source library developed by the Seoul National University Arts and Science Center,” but even with the incorporation of samples, this sounds like a loud, lively rock band. I’ll be honest, those song lengths seemed a little daunting to me, but I was hooked from the minute that mesmerizing bass groove enters on track one, and once it gets going, Seeking Darkness never lets up on the intensity.

Seeking Darkness by Huremic

clipping. – Dead Channel Sky (Sub Pop)
Hip hop and cyberpunk meet on the LA trio’s immersive new 20-song concept album

Since forming over a decade ago, clipping. have launched themselves into the forefront of futuristic space-age rap, a lineage that stretches back over 40 years, from the days of Afrika Bambaataa to Aquemini-era OutKast, Deltron 3030, and clipping.’s Sub Pop labelmates Shabazz Palaces. The trio’s new LP shares DNA with all of those artists, and it also takes a lot of inspiration from something outside of rap: cyberpunk, the sci-fi subgenre made famous by Blade Runner, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and The Matrix. Dead Channel Sky is a 20-song concept album that’s cinematic in scope and full of production that sounds like it could score an actual cyberpunk film, like hip hop’s answer to Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero. The whole thing is a total head-trip, and they’ve got some interesting guests along for the ride, including fellow rap weirdo Aesop Rock, guitarist (and album release day buddy) Nels Cline, Sub Pop labelmates Cartel Madras, rapper/actress Tia Nomore, and “computer music collective” Bitpanic. Even decades removed from the inception of cyberpunk, Dead Channel Sky‘s sonic choices scan as futuristic and science “fiction,” but the album doesn’t require much suspension of disbelief. The dystopian setting that clipping. leader Daveed Diggs paints looks a whole lot like the real-life present.

Dead Channel Sky by clipping.

Intensive Care & The Body – Was I Good Enough? (Closed Casket Activities)
Taking inspiration from chopped & screwed, the new collaborative album from Intensive Care and The Body ditches guitars for something that’s just as heavy and caustic as metal

Back in November, Andrew Nolan of Toronto duo Intensive Care released a collaborative album with Full of Hell, who Portland, Oregon (via Providence, Rhode Island) duo The Body have released two collaborative albums with. Now, these two duos–who also toured together in 2018–have released a collaborative album of their own. The Body have recently gone in increasingly guitar-less, electronic directions, and Intensive Care ditched their usual guitar-based sludge for this collaboration too, instead aiming to make electronic music that’s just as heavy and caustic as guitar-based metal. They took inspiration from Houston hip hop, recording their own music and then chopping and screwing it until they came out with the unsettling sounds of Was I Good Enough?. From the bloodcurdling screams to the speaker-busting synths, this is some of the gnarliest music that either of these duos have made to date.

Was I Good Enough? by the body, intensive Care

Mikau – Agartha (self-released)
No pleasure is too guilty for the DC metalcore band’s outlandish sophomore album

For a while, there was a thick line drawn between “real” metalcore (like Botch) and the much-maligned Myspace popcore (like I Set My Friends On Fire), but lately, bands have been emerging that are every bit as “real” as the former and still see the artistic value in the latter. Mikau are one of those bands, and their sophomore LP Agartha is an excellent display of how great it can sound to take that thick line and watch it crumble. Agartha goes from metalcore that’s as badass and down-to-earth as it gets to glittery synths and brightly auto-tuned choruses, and it all works. Agartha also has a straight-up hyperpop dance jam, “Not Alone,” and it sounds great sandwiched in between the sludgy deathcore coda of “Morphic Resonance” and the late ’90s metalcore revival that kicks off “Seven Days of Fire.” It’s outlandish, ridiculous, and self-aware, but most importantly, it just rocks.

Agartha by Mikau

Charley Crocket – Lonesome Drifter (Island)
The famously prolific and independent country cult hero sticks to his guns on his major label debut

Charley Crocket has released about 8,000 old-soul country albums throughout the past decade (okay, 14), more than half of which have come out in the past five years, and he’s also remained independent, releasing all of his albums on his own Son of Davy label. He shies away from the Nashville machine in more ways than one, but the cult following he developed got so big that the major labels came knocking, and now he decided to go with Island for album #15, Lonesome Drifter. And if you’re wondering how the move might’ve affected his music, the answer seems to be “not at all.” He cites such classic influences as Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Bill Withers, and Waylon Jennings (whose son Shooter co-produced this album), and everything about Lonesome Drifter sounds like it could’ve come out during the late ’60s/early ’70s outlaw country heyday, from the songwriting to the production. Coming off two albums in 2024, it seems like Crocket is remaining as prolific as ever; he told Billboard that Lonesome Drifter is part of a planned trilogy of albums, the second of which is already done and the third of which he’s already sketched out. It’s hard to keep up with him, but Lonesome Drifter is a good reminder that pretty much any Charley Crockett album is a good place to jump in.

Courting – Lust For Life, Or: How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story (Lower Third/PIAS)
The dream of the mid-aughts post-punk revival is alive in Liverpool

In case you haven’t heard, the mid 2000s indie rock well has been tapped again, and Courting are drinking from it. The buzzed-about Liverpool band’s third album sounds like all those post-Strokes/Bloc Party bands that cropped up circa 2006, meaning it’s a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, but it’s also a pretty damn fun record so whatever. It’s kinda refreshing to hear a new post-punk band go for unabashedly big, catchy choruses like this one does, and for all the extremely mid-aughts Popular Indie moments on Lust For Life, there are some curveballs on there too. The creepy art rock of “Steal Rollback” and the vocoder workout in the six-and-a-half minute genre-collage title track prove that these sugary pop songsmiths do some of their best work when they flaunt their weird side.

Lust for Life, Or: ‘How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story’ by Courting

Dana Gavanski – Again Again EP (Full Time Hobby)
The Canadian art pop auteur sits down at the piano for this short but sweet EP

Dana Gavanaski’s latest album, 2024’s Late Slap, found her going into synth-fueled art pop territory, but for her new EP Again Again, she took to the upright piano. She went for a “live, in the room feeling without obsessing about perfection,” and the result is a short-but-sweet batch of songs with a stripped-back urgency. It’s not as ambitious or grand-scale as Late Slap, but the songwriting on Again Again is just as strong as on any of her “proper” albums. If anything, the no-frills approach often makes her songs hit even harder.

Again Again by Dana Gavanski

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Edwyn Collins, Throwing Muses, Bambara, Étienne de Crécy, and the 20th anniversary edition of Of Montreal‘s The Sunlandic Twins.

Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases archive.

Looking for a podcast to listen to? Check out our new episode with Turnover’s Austin Getz celebrating the 10th anniversary of Peripheral Vision.

Pick up the BrooklynVegan x Alexisonfire special edition 80-page magazine, which tells the career-spanning story of Alexisonfire and comes on its own or paired with our new exclusive AOF box set and/or individual reissues, in the BV shop. Also pick up the new Glassjaw box set & book, created in part with BrooklynVegan.