The music industry calls it Q4. The festivals are done; Brat Summer is dead; and a glorious calm has fallen as music’s oddballs come out to play. The result is a seasonal roundup of few marquee releases, but plenty of obsession-worthy curios: comebacks from the Cure, Bon Iver, Laura Marling, Stephen Malkmus, Japandroids, Kim Deal, and Iceage’s Elias Rønnenfelt; rapid-fire reloads from the Smile, Charli XCX, and Mount Eerie. The welcome returns of the likes of Yasmin Williams, Chat Pile, Elucid, and Father John Misty, meanwhile, feel right on time. Read on, below, to catch up on all that and more.
A$AP Rocky: Don’t Be Dumb
A$AP Rocky had planned to release Don’t Be Dumb on August 30, but he’s pushed his Testing follow-up into the autumn. While we continue to wait for the Harlem rapper’s first project since 2018, he’s released the songs “Highjack” (featuring Jessica Pratt!) and “Ruby Rosary.”
–Matthew Strauss
Balance and Composure: With You in Spirit
Balance and Composure’s last album, Light We Made, arrived nearly a decade ago. Now, after reconnecting during the pandemic following a breakup and four-year hiatus, the Pennsylvania rock quintet has prepared a follow-up. With You in Spirit is produced and co-written by longtime collaborator Will Yip, and the band has shared five singles: the slow-simmering “Cross to Bear,” “Sorrow Machine,” “Believe the Hype,” “Any Means,” and “With You in Spirit.” The group has also announced a tour to coincide with the record.
–Eric Torres
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Bon Iver: SABLE, EP
Justin Vernon looks to be returning to his roots with the SABLE, EP. The spare, soft lead single “S P E Y S I D E” is the closest Vernon has come to returning to the days of For Emma, Forever Ago and Blood Bank. It’s a short release—just three real songs—but it’s nonetheless exciting to have Bon Iver music for a serene autumn ahead of a good winter.
–Matthew Strauss
Charli XCX: Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat
The title says it all, doesn’t it? Charli XCX has been gathering superstars, like Robyn, Billie Eilish, and Lorde, to update Brat songs, and she’s now collecting those remixes and more on Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat. Just be sure not to get this one confused with the other Brat deluxe album, Brat and It’s the Same but There’s Three More Songs So It’s Not.
–Matthew Strauss
Chat Pile: Cool World
Cool World is noise-rock quartet Chat Pile’s sophomore album. The follow-up to 2022’s God’s Country is led by the sludgy single “I Am Dog Now.” In a press release, vocalist Raygun Busch explained that “Cool World covers similar themes to our last album, except now exploded from a micro to macro scale, with thoughts specifically about disasters abroad, at home, and how they affect one another.” The Oklahoma band will also hit the road in support of the new LP, starting in November.
–Eric Torres
Christopher Owens: I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair
Nearly a decade after releasing his last solo album—2015’s Chrissybaby Forever—former Girls frontman Christopher Owens is returning with I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair. The 10-song LP includes his comeback single “I Think About Heaven,” from earlier this summer, as well as the follow-up track “No Good.” Owens laid down the new record in San Francisco, co-producing alongside Doug Boehm. Ariel Rechtshaid and Jacob Portrait also contributed to the song “This Is My Guitar.” Speaking in press materials, Owens referred to the album as “a journey back to the center of myself.”
–Madison Bloom
Contour: Take Off From Mercy
South Carolina singer and producer Contour worked with Saul Williams, Mndsgn and co-producer Omari Jazz on his forthcoming album, Take Off From Mercy—his first for renowned indie label Mexican Summer. The new album includes lead singles “Theresa” and “Gin Rummy,” which foreground Contour’s oaky voice, backed with loose percussion and noirish synths.
–Madison Bloom
The Cure: Songs of a Lost World
The Cure are releasing an album for the first time since the second Bush administration. That album, 2008’s 4:13 Dream, was released pretty much a week before Senator Barack Obama became President-elect Barack Obama. Maybe coincidentally, the new album, Songs of a Lost World, is also arriving in the days before a U.S. presidential election. Is Robert Smith trying to sway the goth vote??
–Matthew Strauss
Dawn Richard / Spencer Zahn: Quiet in a World Full of Noise
Dawn Richard’s journey from R&B royalty to the experimental pop vanguard continues on Quiet in a World Full of Noise, her latest collaboration with composer and multi-instrumentalist Spencer Zahn. Richard’s finely wrought melodies surge and teeter over songs that bridge jazz, ambient, and beyond, her intimate R&B vocals a beating heart in the often skeletal compositions. “Right now, everyone’s a little bit overwhelmed,” Richard said in press materials. “I hope that this will be the record that people put on when they need the opportunity for reflection, when they need the stillness in their lives.”
–Jazz Monroe
Elias Rønnenfelt: Heavy Glory
Iceage’s Elias Rønnenfelt closes his debut solo album with covers of Spacemen 3 and Townes Van Zandt, which gives you some idea of the chameleonic singer-guitarist’s approach on Heavy Glory. The album drunkenly swaggers through a country-rock fever dream as Rønnenfelt surveys his many lifetimes since teenage Iceage burst out of Denmark, in 2011, with the post-hardcore classic New Brigade. He started writing the new record in a post-pandemic-lockdown period of 2022, compulsively churning out songs and performing in any European venue that would have him. On Heavy Glory, you hear that urgency—the songs seem to burst out of him.
–Jazz Monroe
Elucid: Revelator
Rapper and producer Elucid—who also records in Armand Hammer with billy woods—is readying his third solo album, Revelator. He announced the LP with the release of lead single “Instant Transfer,” which is produced by Samiyam and features vocals from woods. Elucid also enlisted verses from Creature and Skech185 for Revelator, and worked with additional contributors August Fanon, Child Actor, the Lasso, DJ Haram, and Jon Nellen, who co-produced the album.
–Madison Bloom
Father John Misty: Mahashmashana
Father John Misty teased his new album, Mahashmashana, by including its second-longest song, “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All,” on a greatest-hits compilation. Perhaps an audacious move for others, but the sort of wry irony that’s come to define the Josh Tillman project. The actual longest song on the new album is its opening song, “Mahashmashana,” suggesting that, as is often the case, Tillman has a lot to say right out of the gate.
–Matthew Strauss
Fievel Is Glauque: Rong Weicknes
Rong Weickens is the sophomore album from multi-instrumentalist Zach Phillips and singer Ma Clément, who record as Fievel Is Glauque. Since issuing their debut LP, Flaming Swords, in 2022, the duo signed with Fat Possum, issuing their first two singles on the label in 2023. Those tracks—“I’m Scanning Things I Can’t See” and “Dark Dancing”—both appear on the new, 15-song record, as does the subsequent “As Above So Below.” Phillips and Clément enlisted six additional musicians to record Rong Weicknes, which they laid down in upstate New York last summer. Guitarists Chris Weisman and Thom Gill, bassist Logan Kane, percussionist Daniel Rossi, woodwind player André Sacalxot, and drummer Gaspard Sicx joined the sessions, which consisted of three different takes—one foundational, one improvisatory, and one “antagonistic” version. Fievel Is Glauque layered these takes in the production process, yielding Rong Weicknes’ stratified sound.
–Madison Bloom
Geordie Greep: The New Sound
As Black Midi face an uncertain future, the unruly trio’s frontperson, Geordie Greep, strikes out on his own with this collection of freaky cabaret tunes, absurdist disco monologues, shaggy-dog stories, and all the other musical and lyrical excursions you would expect. The New Sound was led by one such showpiece, the hysterically theatrical “Holy, Holy,” whose hectic salsa rhythms and chronicles of a delusional lothario make for an auspicious preview of his maiden solo voyage.
–Jazz Monroe
Glorilla: Glorious
Glorilla followed through on the promise of her 2022 breakout song, “F.N.F. (Let’s Go),” with yet another hit in “TGIF.” The Memphis upstart will look to cement her legacy on debut album Glorious. The full-length will follow the April project Ehhthang, Ehhthang, which featured “Yeah Glo!” and the Megan Thee Stallion collaboration “Wanna Be.”
–Matthew Strauss
The Hard Quartet: The Hard Quartet
Stephen Malkmus, Chavez’s Matt Sweeney, Dirty Three’s Jim White, and the Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly are the Hard Quartet, whose self-titled debut album marks Malkmus’ first major activity since his 2020 solo album Traditional Techniques and the subsequent Pavement reunion tours. Lead single “Earth Hater” follows in the vein of Malkmus’ work with his band the Jicks, equal parts skronky and tuneful. They’ll take the record on the road in October before a full tour in 2025.
–Jazz Monroe
Japandroids: Fate & Alcohol
Japandroids are calling it quits after nearly 20 years, but they’re releasing one more album before packing it in. Fate & Alcohol follows their 2017 LP, Near to the Wild Heart of Life, as well as their 2020 live album Massey Fucking Hall. Guitarist and vocalist Brian King and drummer and vocalist David Prowse told fans that their new material presents a more “cinematic take on [their] signature sound.”
–Madison Bloom
Karate: Make It Fit
After a run of concerts in 2022, Boston jazz-rockers Karate have reconvened on Make It Fit, their first studio album in two decades. The 10-song LP was mixed by their longtime colleague Andy Hong. Karate announced the new record with the release of two singles: “Defendants” and “Silence, Sound.” The trio of Geoff Farina, Gavin McCarthy, and Jeff Goddard also revealed they’d be hitting the road in support of Make It Fit. Karate’s last LP, Pockets, came out in 2004.
–Madison Bloom
Katie Gavin: What a Relief
Katie Gavin, leader of Los Angeles indie-pop trio Muna, is stepping out on her own. Her debut solo album, What a Relief, examines a “deep desire for connection” and the obstacles that have thwarted it, as Gavin relayed in press materials while announcing her new project. Gavin first shared “Aftertaste,” from the LP, followed by “Casual Drug Use”; both singles are sonically indebted to the mid-to-late 1990s—an era the still-active Muna expressed affection for during this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, when they sang along to “Ironic” with headliner Alanis Morissette. What a Relief, which is being issued on Phoebe Bridgers’ label Saddest Factory Records, also features a collaboration with Mitski titled “As Good as It Gets.”
–Madison Bloom
Kendrick Lamar
An undercurrent of the spring beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake was that Lamar was going to drop a whole new album. Who knows, did Lamar have a full-length of disses ready to go? Or is he just working on a traditional follow-up to Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers? In any case, “Not Like Us,” a rare non-album single for Lamar, stood out as a top-tier song of the summer.
–Matthew Strauss
Kim Deal: Nobody Loves You More
Kim Deal has been a fixture in alternative rock for nearly 40 years, but the Breeders frontwoman and former Pixies stalwart is only now releasing a debut album. She’s worked on the new album, Nobody Loves You More, for at least 13 years, and she recorded some of it at the late Steve Albini’s famed Chicago studio, Electrical Audio. So far, Deal has shared the album’s “Coast” and “Crystal Breath.”
–Matthew Strauss
Lana Del Rey: Lasso
“The music business is going country. We’re going country. It’s happening.” So said Lana Del Rey this February at a Billboard event while announcing her new LP, Lasso, initially slated for a September arrival. (That hope, of course, has come and gone.) The singer-songwriter mentioned that she and frequent producer Jack Antonoff have been recording new music for the record in Muscle Shoals, Nashville, and Mississippi, but further details are scarce. Still, if Del Rey’s recent, piano-led cover of the John Denver staple “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is any indication, a full set of country-fried Del Rey songs will be intriguing.
–Eric Torres
Laura Marling: Patterns in Repeat
Laura Marling’s new album, Patterns in Repeat, is essentially in conversation with her 2020 full-length, Song for Our Daughter. While the latter was written figuratively to a future fictional daughter, the former was composed after the birth of her real daughter last year. Written, recorded, and co-produced by Marling herself at her home studio, Patterns in Repeat follows one of modern folk music’s most illuminating singer-songwriters as she muses on family, behaviors, and what’s passed on through generations. Leading her eighth album are singles like “Patterns” and “No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can,” both of which tap into the enormity of parenthood and seeing the world through the eyes of your child.
–Nina Corcoran
Lorde
Details are sparse, but Lorde has been teasing new music for half a year now, beginning with a December post captioned, “Listening to myself.” More recently, she shared a saliva-indebted carousel with a symbol-laden message, “Use the existing tools wherever possible ©𝑳ĿŁု⑷♶ If the tools do not exist you are spiritually obliged to create them © 𝑳ĿŁု⑷♶⚤✬✹❁✰㉗✬✹❁🀥⚭ 𓆝𓃹𓁙.” Make of that what you can!
–Matthew Strauss
Michael Kiwanuka: Small Changes
Michael Kiwanuka won the Mercury Prize, in 2020, for his album Kiwanuka. He made that record with Danger Mouse and Inflo, and he reunited with the producers for Small Changes.
–Matthew Strauss
Mount Eerie: Night Palace
After a Microphones album, the inimitable Microphones in 2020, and a collaboration with Julie Doiron, 2019’s Lost Wisdom, Pt. 2, Phil Elverum returns for the first time since 2018 with a Mount Eerie album that’s all his own. Titles on Night Palace, such as “Empty Paper Towel Roll,” “I Saw Another Bird,” and “I Spoke With a Fish,” should feel familiar to fans of Elverum’s poetic, stream-of-consciousness musings.
–Matthew Strauss
Oliver Coates: Throb, Shiver, Arrow of Time
Since his revelatory 2020 LP, Skins n Slime, Oliver Coates has kept busy as a film and TV composer, scoring Aftersun, The Stranger, Significant Other, Occupied City, and the recent historical drama series Mary & George. Now, he returns to his role as a master producer and drone cellist, using samples and effects pedals to develop the “viscous and melting” live approach debuted on Skins n Slime. Fragments of shoegaze and a serene sort of metal peek through, but Throb, Shiver, Arrow of Time feels less concerned with melody than mesmerizing us into a state of psychedelic meditation, helped along by guest vocalists Malibu, Chrysanthemum Bear, and Faten Kanaan.
–Jazz Monroe
Playboi Carti: Music
Playboi Carti’s album rollout has become so protracted that NBA teams are joining Opium stans in urging the rapper to drop Music. So far, all that’s arrived officially is the single “All Red.” Unofficially, Carti has also teased or previewed “Different Day,” “2024,” “H00dByAir,” “Backr00ms,” “EvilJ0rdan,” and “Ketamine.”
–Matthew Strauss
Porridge Radio: Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me
British quartet Porridge Radio are returning with their fourth studio album, Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me. The new record was produced by Big Thief and Laura Marling engineer Dom Monks, who captured the band’s 11 songs in the Somerset countryside earlier this year. More sprawling and subdued than their raw breakthrough LP, 2020’s Every Bad, Clouds finds frontperson Dana Margolin parsing creative exhaustion and crumbling relationships with ragged vulnerability. The album arrives two years after Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky, and features lead single “Sick of the Blues.”
–Madison Bloom
Soccer Mommy: Evergreen
After working with Oneohtrix Point Never on her kaleidoscopic 2022 LP, Sometimes, Forever, Sophie Allison returns to her bedroom pop roots on her upcoming Soccer Mommy entry. Working with producer Ben H. Allen, Allison cut Evergreen in Atlanta’s Maze Studios, opting for a simpler array of instruments including strings, acoustic guitar, flute, and percussion.
–Madison Bloom
The Smile: Cutouts
The Smile show no signs of slowing down. Cutouts is the trio’s third studio album and second of 2024, following January’s very good Wall of Eyes. The singles “Foreign Spies” and “Don’t Get Me Started” suggest the group is delving further into electronics—welcome news for disciples of parent band Radiohead’s Kid A era.
–Matthew Strauss
St. Vincent: Todos Nacen Gritando
St. Vincent has toured the world for years, and she decided she wanted her fans in Hispanophone countries to be able to sing her songs in their native tongue. To achieve her goal, Annie Clark worked with filmmaker and close friend Alan Del Rio Ortiz to make Todos Nacen Gritando, a Spanish-language reimagining of All Born Screaming. Who knows, maybe this sets the table for Extraña Misericordia, San Vicente, and Papi Esta en Casa.
–Matthew Strauss
Touché Amoré: Spiral in a Straight Line
On their Rise Records debut, Touché Amoré reunite with famed nu-metal producer Ross Robinson, who previously worked with the band on 2020’s sobering Lament, for a new batch of post-hardcore songs. With heavy but clean construction, Spiral in a Straight Line documents what it feels like to attempt to move forward in life while potent memories, painful experiences, and deep emotions keep whizzing by. To set the scene, Touché Amoré open the album with “Nobody’s,” a reflection on how tempting it is to give in to those struggles and stay home to lick your wounds. Instead, singer Jeremy Bolm offers a different reminder about how to handle your private life: “We‘re nobody’s business.”
–Nina Corcoran
Two Shell: Two Shell
Here are some of the songs on Two Shell’s debut album: “</>,” “(Rock✧Solid),” “({~_-}),” and “₊˚⊹Gimmi It.” That last one seems like an update of May’s “Gimmi It,” but the point is: it is hard to keep up with the electronic duo’s tricks. It may be a fool’s errand to try to pronounce those tracks’ titles, but it makes it all the more fun to hear them.
–Matthew Strauss
Undeath: More Insane
Undeath, the black metal five-piece from Rochester, New York, are gearing up to drop their third studio album. More Insane follows the excellent It’s Time…to Rise from the Grave, from 2022; the new, 10-song LP includes lead single “Brandish the Blade,” which landed in July with a very metal music video. True to form, Undeath have packed More Insane with plenty of ultra-heavy song titles; see “Wailing Cadavers,” “Cramped Caskets (Necrology),” and “Disattachment of a Prophylactic in the Brain,” to name just a few.
–Madison Bloom
Yasmin Williams: Acadia
Three years after she released Urban Driftwood, Yasmin Williams returns with the third studio album of her career: Acadia. The guitar virtuoso, composer, and Virginia native takes up banjo, kora, calabash drum, and tap shoes for her latest exploration of folk music, pushing the boundaries of her vision. Led by single “Virga,” which features Boston baroque pop group Darlingside on vocals and Rich Ruth on synthesizer, Acadia has nine songs of mainly instrumental numbers on which she’s joined by a rotating cast of guests—Aoife O’Donovan, William Tyler, Dom Flemons, Kaki King, Marcus Gilmore, and Immanuel Wilkins, among others—who don’t just help Williams seek refuge, but rather define it.
–Nina Corcoran
