Rock & Pop

A Place to Bury Strangers defund post-punk orthodoxy with the most audacious and varied songwriting of their career on their sixth album, See Through You' out February 4, 2022, on Oliver Ackermann's label, Dedstrange.

Following up on 2021"s highly acclaimed Hologram EP, the rebooted lineup' vocalist/guitarist Oliver Ackermann plus drummer/vocalist Sandra Fedowitz and bassist John Fedowitz (both of Ceremony East Coast)' delivers an overclocked set of futuristic electronic punk music encoded with punishing industrial rhythms, swirling voltage-starved guitars and unclassifiable auditory annihilation.

Across thirteen tracks recorded in seclusion throughout the nihilistic absurdity of the coronavirus pandemic, See Through You is proof-positive that the group hailed as 'The Loudest Band in New York' is still finding new ways to push the needle deeper in the red.

Jenny Hval is an Oslo-based musician, composer and writer. Multidisciplinary and transgressive are words often employed to describe her art, but Jenny Hval'spolyphonic artistry is in fact seamlessly interwoven between musical, literary, visual and performative modes of expression. She has released several solo albums and novels, including 2018's Paradise Rotand 2020's Girls Against God, both published via Verso Books.

Limited milky clear colored vinyl. The Dream is an album where true-crime-inspired stories and tales of Hollywood and the Chateau Marmont rub shoulders with some of the band's more personal moments to date. Both beauty and darkness lay side-by-side - often seamlessly merging on the same track, a purposeful choice that pays dividends across the record. The band's dazzling instrumentation has matured; there are still far-out moments, but now they are deployed with artful precision.

A collection of 10 unreleased demos written for PJ Harvey's ninth studio album, The Hope Six Demolition Project, including demos of "The Wheel" and "The Community of Hope." It features brand-new artwork with the cover based on a drawing by Polly Jean Harvey, plus previously unseen photos by Maria Mochnacz and Seamus Murphy. The artwork is overseen by Michelle Henning with Rob Crane. Mastering by Jason Mitchell at Loud Mastering, under the guidance of long-time PJ Harvey producer John Parish.

Gold Afternoon Fix is the sixth album by the Australian alternative rock band The Church, originally released in April 1990. After the 1988 hit album Starfish, The Church continued to receive critical appraise and gained a larger audience with Gold Afternoon Fix. The single "Metropolis" reached #1 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. This is also the only release by The Church that doesn't feature a 12-string electric guitar, as guitarists Marty Wilson-Piper's 12-string Rickenbacker had been stolen during the previous tour. This temporary change in sound didn't stop the band from maintaining a devoted following, and the band were induced into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2010.

Australian Exclusive White Vinyl Edition. Gatefold cover. Growing out of the success of their initial EPs and singles, The 1975's self-titled album shot straight to the top of the U.K. charts in 2013. Mastering 1980s pop sounds and a dash of '90s R&B/soul sound with a modern edge and lyrics, The 1975 has the catchy new sound out of Manchester, England. The band's odd name was inspired by an inscription they found in an old book of beat poetry. With so many hits such as "The City," "Sex," "Chocolate" and "Settle Down," this first album is a double vinyll LP pressing handsomely housed in a gatefold cover. Interscope Records.

Fall in love with Todd Rundgren's Johnson all over again with this newly retooled reissue of the explosive 2010 album!This album is Rundgren's tribute to foundational blues legend Robert Johnson, taking Johnson's acoustic-based compositions and transforming them into full-fledged blues rock masterpieces!Includes such blues classics as "Dust My Broom," "Crossroads Blues," "Sweet Home Chicago," "Come On In My Kitchen" and more!Packaged in a gatefold jacket with PINK vinyl and all new artwork plus digitally remastered audio!

The Nonesuch debut of Hurray for the Riff Raff (aka Alynda Segarra),LIFE ON EARTH, out February 18, 2022, is a departure for the Bronx-born, New Orleans-based singer/songwriter. Its eleven new “nature punk” tracks on the theme of survival are music for a world in flux—songs about thriving, not just surviving, while disaster is happening.For her eighth full-length album, Segarra (they/she) drew inspiration from The Clash, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Bad Bunny, and the author ofEmergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown. Recorded during the pandemic, Life on Earth was produced by Brad Cook (Waxahatchee, Bon Iver, Kevin Morby).

In the wake of his time leading The Healers, Marr’s solo career has given rise to three UK Top Ten albums - The Messenger (2013), Playland (2014) and 2018’s Call The Comet. He now returns with his most expansive work to date, Fever Dreams Pts 1-4. It was created during the long, uncertain period that followed the arrival of the UK’s first lockdown, when his focus was pushed into both his interior life, and evoking the emotional states of others. “It’s an inspired record, and I couldn’t wait to get in and record every day,” he says. “But I had to go inwards.”

The new album reflects his multi-faceted past, but takes his music somewhere startlingly new. “There’s a set of influences and a very broad sound that I’ve been developing - really since getting out of The Smiths,” he says.  “And I hear it in this record. There are so many strands of music in it. I think it’s the most ambitious solo record I’ve done.”

Remastered black vinyl. Third studio album by the Scottish alternative rock band. The album gave the band substantial US success when the single 'Star Sign' reached number four on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, becoming their biggest hit in that country, with 'What You Do to Me' and 'The Concept' also becoming top 20 hits on that chart.

Hits to The Head gathers all your favorite Franz Ferdinand singles in one handy album. 18 stone cold classics with brand new future hits "Billy Goodbye" & "Curious."

Available again in an all new repress, Twilight Sad's third full-length, No One Can Ever Know, marked a sonic shift for the band. Freshly inspired by a listening diet of Cabaret Voltaire, Can, Liars, Magazine, Autechre, and Public Image Limited, the band turned to a dark, synth-heavy sound and the resulting LP shares thematic and sonic space with the most innovative offerings from Depeche Mode, The Cure, or even Nine Inch Nails. "We wanted to be a lot more spontaneous, get outside our comfort zone - not to fall back into repeating what we've done previously," explains guitarist Andy MacFarlane. "So we moved to London for a month to record at The Pool and got Andrew Weatherall involved to bounce ideas off and to generally reassure us of the direction we were already progressing in - toward a sparser sound, with a colder, slightly militant feel."

Available in a new repress, Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters is the the breakthrough debut album from The Twilight Sad. A complete record, the nine tracks work together to create a strong narrative flow. Deceptively simple songs are rendered transcendent. Bleached, overdriven guitars consistently ride a line between ambient and coruscating, working in tandem with an articulate, at times tumultuous rhythm section, forever poised between tension and release. Augmented by piano and more frequently accordion, which provide the songs with a dramatic swoon, The Twilight Sad purvey an awestruck, ragged sentimentality. Lyrically suggestive and metaphorical, their songs give glimpses of bitter experience and romantic failure, their songs at times verging on the anthemic or celebratory, yet firmly rooted in the familiar, often unsaid hurt behind day to day events.

The Sophtware Slump... On A Wooden Piano - So this new "The Sophtware Slump" isn't a recontextualization of old songs as a stealth anthology for newcomers. This newly recorded "The Sophtware Slump" with the songs' skeletons are the same, but the bones dance differently. Slower songs like "Undearneath the Weeping Willow" make a natural transition to this sparer presentation. Greater revelations occur with the once louder songs like "The Crystal Lake" and "Chartsengrafs." The effect at times is that of unfolding an origami dinosaur and refashioning it into a swan. The album's sharp melodic sense isn't dampened at all, but the words step forward, which only enhances the aspirational lift at album's end, about aiming toward the sky.

Single LP on green & yellow color vinyl in same packaging as standard version. Full album download included. Ltd edition. Indie only.

Like every record Superchunk has made over the last thirty-some years, Wild Loneliness is unskippably excellent and infectious. It’s a blend of stripped-down and lush, electric and acoustic, highs and lows, and I love it all. On Wild Loneliness I hear echoes of Come Pick Me Up, Here’s to Shutting Up, and Majesty Shredding. After the (ahem, completely justifiable) anger of What a Time to Be Alive, this new record is less about what we’ve lost in these harrowing times and more about what we have to be thankful for. (I know something about gratitude. I’ve been a huge Superchunk fan since the 1990s, around the same time I first found my way to poetry, so the fact that I’m writing these words feels like a minor miracle.)

On Wild Loneliness, it feels like the band is refocusing on possibility, and possibility is built into the songs themselves, in the sweet surprises tucked inside them. I say all the time that what makes a good poem—the “secret ingredient”—is surprise. Perhaps the same is true of songs. Like when the sax comes in on the title track, played by Wye Oak’s Andy Stack, adding a completely new texture to the song. Or when Owen Pallett’s strings come in on “This Night.” But my favorite surprise on Wild Loneliness is when the harmonies of Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley of Teenage Fanclub kick in on “Endless Summer.” It’s as perfect a pop song as you’ll ever hear—sweet, bright, flat-out gorgeous—and yet it grapples with the depressing reality of climate change: “Is this the year the leaves don’t lose their color / and hummingbirds, they don’t come back to hover / I don’t mean to be a giant bummer but / I’m not ready / for an endless summer, no / I’m not ready for an endless summer.” I love how the music acts as a kind of counterweight to the lyrics.

Because of COVID, Mac, Laura, Jim, and Jon each recorded separately, but a silver lining is that this method made other long-distance contributions possible, from R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, Sharon Van Etten, Franklin Bruno, and Tracyanne Campbell of Camera Obscura, among others. Some of the songs for the record were written before the pandemic hit, but others, like “Wild Loneliness,” were written from and about isolation.

I’ve been thinking of songs as memory machines. Every time we play a record, we remember when we heard it before, and where we were, and who we were. Music crystallizes memories so well: listening to “Detroit Has a Skyline,” suddenly I’m shoutsinging along with it at a show in Detroit twenty years ago; listening to “Overflows,” I’m transported back to whisper-singing a slowed-down version of it to my young son, that year it was his most-requested lullaby.

Wild Loneliness is becoming part of my life, part of my memories, too. And it will be part of yours. I can picture people in 20, 50, or 100 years listening to this record and marveling at what these artists created together—beauty, possibility, surprise—during this alarming (and alarmingly isolated) time. But why wait? Let’s marvel now.

—Maggie Smith

WHO CARES? is the eagerly anticipated new album from Rex Orange County. This new album was announced and launched with the single, and video, “KEEP IT UP.”

WHO CARES? was made in close partnership with musician Benny Sings, over the course of a few sessions in Sings’ Amsterdam studio. After spending the bulk of 2020 quarantined back home in the UK due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Rex made the trek to Amsterdam that fall to record with Sings. What started as sessions without expectations turned into an incredibly productive 48-hour window of recording with Benny, prompting a follow-up trip to Amsterdam. The subsequent 10 days of work together produced his fourth album, made in close partnership with Benny, that is a playful record by an artist in a playful mood. The album also finds Rex reunited with Tyler, The Creator, who contributes a verse to "OPEN A WINDOW," which marks the first time the two have collaborated since Tyler's 2017 album Flower Boy.

WHO CARES? is Rex’s first studio album since 2019’s critically acclaimed album, PONY.

Coming February 11th: Spoon's tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, is alive, vital and inarguably the band's heaviest work to date. The first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in its hometown, Austin, in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years ' both in and out of shutdown ' these songs feel like a culmination of Spoon's career while marking a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more vivid.

Neil Young + Promise Of The Real announce a new live album, Noise & Flowers, that captures the group in all their glory on their 2019 European tour. The release will be accompanied by a similarly titled concert film that’s included in the album’s 2xLP+CD Deluxe Edition. 

Noise & Flowers documents a 9-date tour that began just two weeks after Young’s lifetime friend and manager of more than 50 years, Elliot Roberts, passed away at age 76. Performing alongside a photograph of Roberts taped to his road case, Young approached each show as a celebratory memorial service to honor his late friend. It’s a trek the legendary singer/songwriter describes as “wondrous.”

“Playing in his memory [made it] one of the most special tours ever,” Young says in the album’s liner notes. “We hit the road and took his great spirit with us into every song. This music belongs to no one. It’s in the air. Every note was played for music’s great friend, Elliot.” In paying tribute to the manager who guided Young’s career for over a half-century, Noise & Flowers explores all corners of his vast discography.

It balances all-timer anthems (“Mr. Soul,” “Helpless,” “Rockin’ in the Free World”) with rarely aired ‘70s deep cuts (“Field of Opportunity,” “On the Beach”) and ’90s gems (“From Hank to Hendrix,” “Throw Your Hatred Down”). His frequent backing band since 2015, Promise of the Real effectively bridges the extremes in Young’s sound, infusing his raging rockers and country serenades with their casual brilliance and telepathic intuition.

The Mercury Prize-winning, multiple GRAMMY- and BRIT Award-nominated band alt-J have announced their eagerly-awaited fourth album The Dream, set for release February 11, 2022. The Dream is an album of intrigue, beauty and humanity - a coalescence of everything that has made alt-J a global band with true staying power. True-crime inspired stories and tales of Hollywood and the Chateau Marmont rub shoulders with some of the band’s most personal moments to-date The album was created after a period of rest for the band following their seismic world tour in support of previous record RELAXER. It is a record that is the sound of a band growing as songwriters and storytellers.

On their EP entitled perfect, MANNEQUIN PUSSY’s new songs burst forth from the sprawling months of social isolation & internet-fueled anxiety. The band rages about the practice of condensing your daily life into a manicured stream of images for social media. What happens to the social impulse when everyone you love or even like is leveled into a set of pixels. “It was a really weird psychological experience, being bombarded by images of other people constantly when you are not around a lot of other people,” vocalist Missy Dabice says.

After spending most of the year 2020 apart from each other and everyone else, the members of MANNEQUIN PUSSY decided to book studio time and work together in person again. What came out of that compressed session time were some of MANNEQUIN PUSSY’s most furious, incandescent songs yet. The Philadelphia based band teams up yet again with producer Will Yip to satiate fans with perfect, the EP follow-up to their critically acclaimed 2019 Epitaph debut Patience (Pitchfork Best New Music, sold out US tour, and “one of the best rock releases of 2019” according to Paste Magazine). “We just figured if we forced ourselves into this situation where someone could hit ‘record,’ something might come out,” Dabice says. “We’d never written that way before.”

The sixth studio album by psychedelic rock band Portugal. The Man was recorded over a period of eight months, and produced by John Hill, the band's frontman John Gourley, and Casey Bates. Originally released on July 19, 2011 through Atlantic Records, In The Mountain In The Cloud is Portugal. The Man's major-label debut.

After a 15-year hiatus, Seattle, WA's David Bazan reformed his legendary project Pedro the Lion with the release of Phoenix, it's first new album in over a decade. Phoenix became an instant critical darling, with publications such as NPR saying "It's a feat to reignite an old flame after 15 years; it's another thing altogether to make it burn brighter than ever," and Vulture calling it "Bazan's best work in years and a worthy successor to a back catalog beloved by indie rock and emo fans for over 20 years."Phoenix not only marked the project's official comeback, it quietly introduced Bazan's ambitious plan of recording 5 full-length albums devoted to each city he lived in throughout his youth. With Havasu, Bazan goes back to the seventh grade, where he and his family spent one year living in Lake Havasu City, AZ. The result is an open-hearted acknowledgment of shame and elation both, spaciously but delicately arranged in affirmation of the nurturing those feelings deserve-even if the kid in need of validation has long since grown up and moved away. After 25 years refining and building what he calls his "garden of songs," David Bazan has sold hundreds of thousands of albums, performed in sold-out clubs and living rooms around the globe, and played high-profile live sessions with the likes of NPR's Tiny Desk, KEXP, WNYC's Soundcheck, and many others. His music has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, SPIN, Vox, Paste and others, as well as 2019 year-end lists from NPR and Aquarium Drunkard. With Havasu, Bazan continues his prolific trajectory while planting the seeds for darker stories ahead.

It's been ten years since Grouplove met on a commune in Greece and brought the idea of forming a band back to California. They'd never have anticipated making it this far: five albums, multiple chart-topping singles across alternative and pop formats, a Grammy nomination, and critical acclaim from outlets such as Rolling Stone, which heralded the group as “a band who have perfected big, radio-friendly rock songs.” As their debut album ‘Never Trust A Happy Song 10^th Anniversary Edition’ approaches its tenth anniversary, Grouplove is ready to celebrate with the fans by releasing a limited edition vinyl, pressed on 180 gram green vinyl.