Hello! I was out for most of this week, so this Notable Releases had to be slightly on the shorter side, but I’ve picked six new albums that I recommend below, and Bill tackles more in Bill’s Indie Basement, including Ducks Ltd, Helado Negro, Pylon Reenactment Society, David Nance, and more.
On top of those, this week’s honorable mentions include this weekend’s Super Bowl Halftime Show headliner Usher, as well as Joel Ross, Hulder, Planet B, Mk.gee, Morbid Saint, 1999 WRITE THE FUTURE, Loving, Declan McKenna, Pouty, Mean Jeans, nothing,nowhere, King of Heck, Kali Malone, The Pineapple Thief, Split System, Theophonos, Marcellus Hall (Railroad Jerk), Dhani Harrison, Amiture, Crush++, The Dead South, The Strumbellas, Middle Sattre, Infected Rain, Zara Larsson, Astral Bakers, the Little Simz EP, the Shygirl EP, the Mx Lonely EP, the The Breath EP, the Hollow Suns EP, the Cell EP, the Snuffed EP, the MICHELLE EP, the Kelela remix album, Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk’s soundtrack for Daaaaaalí !, Este Haim & Christopher Stracey’s soundtrack for Suncoast, and Sonic Youth’s official release of the 1986 bootleg Walls Have Ears.
Read on for my picks. What’s your favorite release of the week?
Brittany Howard – What Now
Island
Brittany Howard says that she wrote the title track to What Now “during the pandemic when the question ‘What now?’ was on all of our minds,” and in many ways, that question is still on all of our minds. With those words lingering in the forefront, the album is a reflection of living in the present in the face of an uncertain future. There’s sadness (“Does anyone remember what it felt like to laugh all night and sleep in late, not worry about anyone or anything? Well I don’t”), there’s hope (“We were born in a time to change the paradigm/Peace is the prize of our timeline… I know we can do it”), and there are a handful of love songs. It’s an album that has some answers and even more questions, and it feels like it’s okay with not knowing. It’s very psychedelic, down to the album artwork, and it mostly varies between blissful soul and hard-edged funk, with forays into disco and jazz. Like Brittany’s dormant band Alabama Shakes, What Now uses retro signifiers in ways that feel modern or even futuristic. The music blurs the line between the familiar and the unknown, just like the lyrics often do.
The Chisel – What A Fucking Nightmare
Pure Noise
We’re in the midst of (another) Oi! revival, and UK band The Chisel (not to be confused with Ted Leo’s ’90s band Chisel) have had more than a little to do with that. Their 2021 debut LP Retaliation (originally released on UK label La Vida Es Un Mus Discos) helped breathe new life into the genre, and their Pure Noise debut What A Fucking Nightmare takes it to a new level, transcending the “revival” aspect entirely. The Chisel are still operating in an anthemic, no-frills punk realm, and they’re still writing face-value lyrics “about dickheads, working class people, punching people, getting punched,” but they’re doing a lot more than just mining a specific subset of influences. WAFN owes as much to UK street punk pioneers like Sham 69, Cock Sparrer, and Cockney Rejects as it does to The Replacements, and like all of the above, they just write catchy punk songs that beg to be shouted along to. With its undeniable choruses and sharp production–it was produced by Fucked Up’s Jonah Falco, mixed by Uniform’s Ben Greenberg, recorded by John Atkinson, and mastered by Arthur Rizk–What A Fucking Nightmare feels like as much a modern revitalization of street punk in the 2020s as Rancid and Dropkick Murphys were in the 1990s. The Chisel clearly love the past but they’re not stuck in it. They feel like the street punk band that a young person could call their own.
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Itasca – Imitation of War
Paradise of Bachelors
Itasca (aka Kayla Cohen) has long made timeless, ’60s/’70s-style psychedelic folk, and on her new album, she takes those vibes in a slightly more full-band rock direction. Imitation of War was co-produced and engineered by Robbie Cody of Wand and also features Wand members Evan Backer and Evan Burrows, plus Kayla’s regular collaborator Daniel Swire (who she also plays with in Gun Outfit), and the fuller band allows her to do things like go off into jammy territory on the nine-and-a-half minute “Easy Spirit.” The electric guitar suits Kayla’s otherworldly voice as much as an acoustic does, and like Itasca’s more stripped-down material, Imitation of War sounds as alluring in 2024 as it would have at Woodstock.
Spectral Voice – Sparagmos
Dark Descent
Blood Incantation said that 2024 will finally see the release of their first proper album since 2019’s Hidden History of the Human Race, but first, 3/4 of that band will release the first Spectral Voice album since their 2017 debut LP Eroded Corridors of Unbeing. Spectral Voice’s death metal leans much more overtly doom than Blood Incantation’s, but both bands are clearly very interested in bending genres and minds. Sparagmos is made up of four lengthy tracks of slow-paced death-doom, covered in a foggy haze and injected with the occasional burst of blastbeat-driven black metal. It’s a total sensory overload that’s as evil and abrasive as it is ethereal and trippy.
Chelsea Wolfe – She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She
Loma Vista
Chelsea Wolfe has been a master of the hauntingly ethereal for over a decade, and she continues to find new ways to expand her sound on She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She. Bill’s got a review of this one in Indie Basement, and I highly recommend it too.
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Madi Diaz – Weird Faith
ANTI-
Nashville singer/songwriter Madi Diaz follows her fantastic 2021 album History of a Feeling with more of what made that album so compelling: her vulnerable songwriting and soaring voice. While History of a Feeling documented a breakup, Weird Faith chronicles a new love, with a guest appearance from Kacey Musgraves on “Don’t Do Me Good” that’s a definite highlight. For a deeper dive into where Madi was coming from on this album, Madi told us about some of the influences behind it, including Sandy Denny, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, and more. [Amanda Hatfield]
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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Ducks Ltd, Helado Negro, Pylon Reenactment Society, David Nance, and more.
Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases archive or scroll down for previous weeks.
Looking for a podcast to listen to? Check out our new episode with In Defense of Ska‘s Aaron Carnes.
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.
