Notable Releases of the Week (5/2)

It’s been a busy week in the music world that’s included Lana Del Rey debuting new songs at Stagecoach, The Bear star and celebrity chef Matty Matheson debuting his hardcore band in Toronto, Acid Bath playing their first shows in 28 years, Lorde announcing her new album, and more. Here in NYC, it was MJ Lenderman week. We caught night two of his sold-out, three-night at Brooklyn Steel, which was opened by This Is Lorelei and ended with an encore that had Nate from This Is Lorelei and Lenderman playing “Dancing in the Club” together live for the first time. The other two nights had surprises too; Lenderman brought out NYC democratic socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Kwame Mamdani to speak at night one, and Lenderman’s Wednesday bandmate Karly Hartzman joined MJ and his band for almost their entire set on night three. This week also marks the start of May, and we took a look at the 10 best punk, emo & hardcore songs and 5 best rap albums of April.

As for this week’s new albums, I highlight nine below and Bill tackles more in Indie Basement, including Jenny Hval, Mei Semones, Sextile, and Moon Mullins. On top of those, this week’s honorable mentions include Propagandhi, Car Seat Headrest, Pet Symmetry, Boldy James & Real Bad Man, Benny the Butcher, Angel Bat Dawid & Naima Nefertari, Shearling (ex-Sprain), Thanya Iyer, Chris Brokaw, Andy Bell (Erasure), Suzzallo (Rocky Votolato), Suzanne Vega, Kassi Valazza, Two Shell, Key Glock, Yung Lean, Eric Church, The Farm, The Austerity Program, Your Spirit Dies, Froglord, Namebearer, Bleed, Eli Winter, Lael Neale, James Krivchenia (Big Thief), DDG, OMB Peezy & FBLMANNY, Pap Chanel, Scarlxrd, Leather Hearse (mem Loincloth, Triptykon, etc), GBMystical, Samantha Crain, Nightfall, Wretch 32, Anthony Naples, Litronix, Låpsley, Lights, Lucius, Death Row’s gospel album, the Flume & JPEGMAFIA EP, the Bladee EP, the Ro$ama EP, the Say Sue Me EP, the Nuxx EP, the NewDad EP, the Hardy EP, the Teens In Trouble/Bat Boy split EP, the Real Estate rarities comp, Arab Strap’s album of stripped-back songs from I’m Totally Fine with It Don’t Give a Fuck Anymore, the 10th anniversary edition of Turnover’s Peripheral Vision, and last but not least, Puddle of Mudd.

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

Model/Actriz – Pirouette (True Panther/Dirty Hit)
The NYC industrial/noise rockers offset the cacophony with thumping rave beats, pop diva power, and a deeply woven coming out story on their remarkable sophomore album.

Model/Actriz’s sophomore album is a coming out story in more ways than one. Lyrically, it’s a coming out story for singer Cole Haden’s confused, closeted, childhood self. And musically, it finds the NYC band bursting out of its shell in ways they never have before–no small feat for a band with a raucous debut album and a reputation for walking off the stage and directly engaging with the crowd at their unforgettable live shows. Model/Actriz’s debut LP Dogsbody is a screeching blend of industrial and noise rock with hooks that claw their way into your skin rather than jump out at you. The only semblance of Cole’s pop diva side came as a lyrical reference to Lady Gaga’s real name.

On Pirouette, the industrial/noise rock remains and so much more is worked in, including Cole unabashedly going full diva, really singing in a way he never did on Dogsbody, and other members embracing their love of electronic and dance music. The loud blasts of cacophony are offset by thumping rave beats and delicate, pretty moments like the baroque pop-leaning “Acid Rain.” If you can picture a cross between A Place To Bury Strangers, Xiu Xiu, and the new FKA twigs album, you might get the idea. Pirouette is an album that’s built to break down barriers; it’s pop music for the noise freaks, rock music for the ravers, dance music for the hardcore kids, and maybe if we’re lucky, it’ll be the most caustic album in the Main Pop conversation. Pirouette storms past fears of a sophomore slump and leaves any buzz band talk in the dust. Model/Actriz are the real deal, and this album makes that clearer than ever.

Pirouette by Model/Actriz

Esther Rose – Want (New West)
The alt-country singer gets louder, grungier, and more direct than ever on her best album yet.

Esther Rose apparently considered quitting music after the exhaustion that set in throughout her tour supporting 2023’s Safe to Run. Instead, she made her loudest, boldest, most confident, and best album yet. It’s an album informed by divorce, desire, family, quitting drinking, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, and the wisdom that comes with getting older, and she addresses things head-on in a memoir-like fashion that her songwriting only ever hinted at in the past. Her lyrics are more direct than ever, and her singing is louder and clearer too. In a time where we’re seeing indie rock bands go country, Esther took the opposite approach, pushing her country roots towards grunge and shoegaze and coming out with something that can sound like a cross between Hop Along and MJ Lenderman. With a backing band that was ready to follow her lead, she came out with a hard-hitting, propulsive record that’s perfect for the fiery subject matter.

Want by Esther Rose

PUP – Who Will Look After the Dogs? (Little Dipper/Rise)
The Toronto punks take a back-to-basics approach on their speaker-busting fifth album.

After releasing their most ambitious, most genre-defying album to date with 2022’s THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND, PUP have taken on the opposite approach with Who Will Look After the Dogs?. It marks their first collaboration with producer John Congleton (Cloud Nothings, Mannequin Pussy, etc), and the Toronto punks say John helped encourage them to make a back-to-basics album that just sounds like four people rocking out in a room, not worrying if every take is “perfect.” In fact, there’s even one song featuring Jeff Rosenstock where Jeff messed up the lyrics and they decided to leave it in. Who Will Look After the Dogs? isn’t just a return to the pre-UNRAVELING days; it’s the loudest, rawest, most no-nonsense punk album they’ve released since their 2013 self-titled debut. Adding to the controlled chaos is a speaker-busting, clipping-on-purpose production style that sometimes makes it sound like PUP’s version of Weezer’s Pinkerton. Like that album, the strangest and sloppiest moments are often the best.

Who Will Look After The Dogs? by PUP

Blondshell – If You Asked for a Picture (Partisan)
The ’90s-rock torch-carrier keeps the memorable lyrical turns coming on the followup to her breakthrough 2023 debut.

Sabrina Teitelbaum’s self-titled debut album as Blondshell swept year-end lists in 2023 and had people hailing her as the heir to tourmate Liz Phair’s throne. The candid, endlessly relatable lyrics that make that album so memorable are once again front and center on its followup, including on “What’s Fair,” where Teitelbaum addresses an absent maternal figure who she “grew up fast” without, and tells her, matter-of-factly, some things she missed: “Sixteen, sucking dick in the bathroom.” Her frank question of “23’s a baby, why’d you have a baby?” on “23’s A Baby” is kind of funny, but also a bewildered encapsulation of the conflicting expectations of one’s early twenties. And on “Event of a Fire,” she admits, “part of me still sits at home in a panic over fifteen pounds,” while lamenting, “what if I’m burnt out?” If You Asked for a Picture has some of Blondshell’s catchiest and most immediate songs yet, like the hooky, harmony-filled “Two Times,” which has lived rent-free in my head for months, and the punchy “T&A.” She also incorporates a couple of gentler songs to bookend the album: folky, pensive opener “Thumbtack,” and pretty, wistful closer “Model Rockets.” Teitelbaum may not fully shake the ’90s comparisons that have abounded for her work as Blondshell quite yet, but If You Asked for a Picture takes steps towards expanding her sound beyond that decade while only sharpening her lyrical candor. [Amanda Hatfield]

If You Asked For A Picture by Blondshell

Pyramids – Pythagoras (The Flenser)
The first album in 10 years from experimental band Pyramids is an unlikely fusion of reggaeton/neoperreo and noise/drone.

Rich Loren Balling’s Pyramids project is historically best known for being experimental and metal-adjacent, but as he discussed on the BrooklynVegan podcast back in 2022–around the time his progressive post-hardcore band The Sound of Animals Fighting released their first EP in 14 years–lately he’s been finding more innovation in female pop singers than in heavy, noisy bands. His pop music journey eventually took him to reggaeton and reggaeton’s more alternative subgenre neoperreo, and that’s where he got the inspiration for the first Pyramids album in 10 years, Pythagoras. “After years of listening to extreme metal and harsh noise,” he said when the album was announced, “this was my ground zero for the next reinvention.”

The album features Balling and fellow original Pyramids members Matthew Kelly, Matt Embree, and David Embree joined by Buenos Aires singer Emy Smith on co-lead vocals, and it’s pretty much exactly what it promises to be: a 50/50 split of neoperreo and the experimental/noise/drone elements of Pyramids’ past material. (There’s pretty much no metal though.) It’s almost surprising that it works; reggaeton/neoperreo is bright, catchy, communal dance music and the noise/drone side tends to be dark, introverted, and antisocial, but leave it to the wild mind of Rich Loren Balling to make this happen. This isn’t the first time he’s put two (or more) seemingly disparate styles of music together, and he makes it sound more natural than you’d probably ever guess anyone would.

Pythagoras by PYRAMIDS

Club Night – Joy Coming Down (Tiny Engines)
The Oakland band’s noisy, artful, cathartic sophomore LP balks at the idea of choosing between youthful energy and sophisticated songwriting.

Trading the catharsis of punk and emo in for the more buttoned-up sounds of indie rock is a tale as old as time, but finding a musician who did the opposite of that is excitingly rare. Enter Club Night, who formed in the late 2010s out of the ashes of singer/guitarist Josh Bertram’s Animal Collective-y freak folk band Our Brother the Native. Josh told Stereogum in 2018 that he wanted to make something “propulsive and chaotic” in response to his previous band’s “pile of mush,” and the result was their 2017 EP Hell Ya and 2019 debut album What Life. Then came the pandemic and a period of hibernation for Club Night, but now they’re back with their first album in six years and it finds them sounding even more propulsive and chaotic than they did when we last heard from them. Joy Coming Down is an album informed by loss and grief, including a closing track written for Josh’s mentor and friend Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit (titled “Rabbit”), and it makes sense that Club Night found emo-style catharsis to be the perfect vessel for this album’s themes. The comparisons that most quickly come to mind are the ways Los Campesinos! and Japandroids moved towards something louder, sweatier, and more vulnerable over the years, and Club Night do a phenomenal job of scratching a similar itch to those bands while leaving their own mark on noisy, artful, top-of-your-lungs rock music. This record balks at the idea that you ever have to choose between youthful energy and sophisticated songwriting, with all kinds of eccentric twists and turns weaved into its explosive release.

Joy Coming Down by Club Night

Xiao – Control (Twelve Gauge)
The Stockholm band’s debut LP is an onslaught of fast, pissed-off, tuneful hardcore.

Between the long-awaited new Iron Lung album, the Ceremony 20th anniversary shows, and the 20-year nostalgia cycle in general, it feels like we’re in for a resurgence of aughts-era, powerviolence-y hardcore punk. And anyone who wants more of that in their life should turn their attention to the debut album from Stockholm band Xiao. They cite ’00s-era bands like Coke Bust, Mind Eraser, and Hatred Surge as core influences (along with anything from Minor Threat to Dismember to Converge), and their fast, pissed-off, tuneful hardcore brings that sound back in a thrilling new way. Control follows two EPs (2021’s Pain and 2023’s Burn), and it’s a whiplash-inducing mix of PV, grind, and D-beat with the occasional sludgy breakdown and ferocious shrieks from vocalist Emelie Johannesson (and a few guest growlers). With lyrics by both Emelie and guitarist Daniel Pilsäter, Xiao do not mince words as they spit in the face of everything from fascism, nazis, and corporate greed to social climbers, gatekeepers, and the other shitty people you encounter in your day-to-day life. (Also: “Some punk ass bitch in a Tesla.”) There’s never any lack of good hardcore coming out, but it’s admittedly been a minute since I’ve heard a debut LP that hits like a bolt of lightning the way this one does.

CONTROL by XIAO

fallfiftyfeet – Counterfeit Recollections (self-released)
The emo-and-metalcore band’s sophomore album is a step up in every way: tighter, catchier, heavier, better-produced, you name it.

As someone who picked up a lot of compilation CDs in the early 2000s, I have a fond sense of nostalgia for the days when you’d hear Poison The Well, Converge, and Jimmy Eat World or Avenged Sevenfold, Thrice, and The Weakerthans or Killswitch Engage, Every Time I Die, and Boys Night Out all on one disc. It was a unique period when the lines between metalcore, punk, post-hardcore, and emo didn’t really exist at all, and in which the mainstream pop potential of some of these bands was hinted at but not fully realized. I don’t know if the members of fallfiftyfeet ever owned any of those same comps, but their sophomore album Counterfeit Recollections makes me feel a lot like I did when I was absorbing all of that stuff at once. It’s got everything from the most vicious metalcore breakdowns to the brightest emo-pop hooks, and it’s a step up from their rock-solid 2021 debut LP Twisted World Perspective in every way: tighter, catchier, heavier, better-produced, you name it. Matching the musical evolution is the growth that’s present in the lyrics, which look at death and grief with a sobering maturity. If there’s a moment that sums up the album best it’s the climactic intro of the song “Phantom Growing Pains,” when fallfiftyfeet cleanly and clearly sing “We all become ghosts eventually” and then the bludgeoning metalcore kicks in.

Counterfeit Recollections by fallfiftyfeet

Emma Goldman – All You Are Is We (Zegema Beach)

Emma Goldman is a band from Vancouver named after the influential anarchist, and there’s enough musical and lyrical rebellion in their debut LP All You Are Is We to make their namesake proud. This is some truly vicious screamo that puts the anger and discontent in the forefront, and for all of the album’s magnetic fury, some of its most memorable moments come from the spoken word passages and the breakbeat-fueled electronic interludes.

all you are is we by EMMA GOLDMAN

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Jenny Hval, Mei Semones, Sextile, Moon Mullins, and more.

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

Looking for a podcast to listen to? Check out our new episodes with Turnover and Bayside about the 10th anniversary of Peripheral Vision and the 20th anniversary of Bayside self-titled, respectively.

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, and browse the BrooklynVegan shop for more exclusive vinyl.