Music Releases 06-24-22
Soccer Mommy
Sometimes, Forever [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Pink/Black Splatter LP]
Vinyl: $24.98 Buy
Sometimes, Forever, the immersive and compulsively replayable new Soccer Mommy full-length, cements Sophie Allison’s status as one of the most gifted songwriters making rock music right now. The album finds Sophie broadening the borders of her aesthetic without abandoning the unsparing lyricism and addictive melodies that made earlier songs so easy to obsess over. To support her vision Sophie enlisted producer Daniel Lopatin, whose recent credits include the Uncut Gems movie score and The Weeknd’s Dawn FM.
Meet The Moonlight, Johnson's eighth studio LP and first full-length release in five years, was produced by Blake Mills (Alabama Shakes, Perfume Genius, Jim James) and recorded in Los Angeles and Hawaii. The creation process marks a major artistic milestone from past work, taking shape from a one-on-one collaboration with Mills and unveiled an intimate and highly experimental process that involved embedding Johnson's elegantly stripped-back arrangements with enchanting sonic details.
Conan Gray has emerged as one of the pre-eminent pop superstars of his generation. After the commercial success of the global multi-platinum hits, “Heather” and “Maniac,” his music maintains its unflinching authenticity and originality. Gray’s debut album, Kid Krow, reached #5 on the Billboard 200, #1 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart, and was the biggest new artist debut of the year. Gray’s much anticipated sophomore album, SUPERACHE, is set for release on June 24, 2022.
'Heart Under', Just Mustard's second album, asks you to forget what you know. At every turn, this remarkable record reconfigures and stretches the ideas and ambition of a rock band, and turns a year of lockdown and personal struggles into a breathtaking artistic statement. The music the five friends from Dundalk, Ireland make is strikingly untraditional. Though to look at them, it appears that the band are a five-piece with uniform make-up of a vocalist, two guitarists, a bassist and a drummer, not a single one of them utilizes their instrument in a confined or regular fashion. Guitarists David Noonan and Mete Kalyoncuoglu make their six-strings shriek and wail, the sounds produced sounding like everything from whirring machinery to horror movie monsters. Behind them, drummer Shane Maguire uses the rim of his drums almost as much as the skins, providing a clattering, metallic backbeat. Most of the melodies on offer poke through from Rob Clarke's inventive, nodding bass lines. Then there's Katie on vocals; she's the transfixing focal point of the band. Across its 10 tracks, the album presents a coherent style and ethos ' those scything guitars, Katie's magical vocals ' but still incorporates a wide and untethered vision. There are brooding, atmospheric rock songs and others that apply a lighter, dreamier touch, all tied together with impeccable instrumentation and a united vision. 'Heart Under' serves as the next stage of this development, with every instrument brilliantly pushed to its limit and every boundary of the band stretched.
Mixing old school blues and folk with new school hip-hop and funk, G. Love’s electrifying new album, Philadelphia Mississippi, brings together both sides of the genre-bending pioneer’s eclectic career in a wildly innovative and deeply reverent sonic pilgrimage to the heart of the South. Produced by North Mississippi All-Stars’ Luther Dickinson, the collection is loose and spontaneous, full of joyful, improvised performances and freewheeling collaborations with a slew of special guests including blues torchbearers like Alvin Youngblood Hart and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and rap icons like Schoolly D and Speech. It would have been easy for G. Love to play it safe coming off his GRAMMY-nominated 2020 release, The Juice, but Philadelphia Mississippi is perhaps his most adventurous collection to date, ditching all the rules as it experiments with form and function in an ecstatic celebration of music’s power to connect across genres and generations.
Born Garrett Dutton in Philadelphia, PA, G. Love first broke out in the early ’90s with his band, Special Sauce, on the strength of their Gold-selling self-titled debut. Over the next three decades, he would go on to release seven more critically acclaimed albums with Special Sauce (plus five on his own), become a fixture on festival lineups from Bonnaroo to Lollapalooza, and collaborate on the road and in the studio with artists as diverse as Lucinda Williams, Dave Matthews, The Avett Brothers, Jack Johnson, Keb’ Mo’, and DJ Logic.
Porcupine Tree
Closure / Continuation [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition White 2LP]
Porcupine Tree have made their comeback today with a new single "Harridan". This will be off their new album "CLOSURE/CONTINUATION" which hits stores on 6/24. The band last released an album in 2009 (‘The Incident’). They released ten albums between 1992’s ‘On The Sunday of Life’ and 2009’s ‘The Incident’ before entering a hiatus after their biggest live show to date at the Royal Albert Hall in October 2010. The band is composed of Steven Wilson, Richard Barbieri and Gavin Harrison.
Coheed & Cambria
Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Transparent Sea Blue 2LP]
Vinyl: $39.98 Buy
Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind welcomes us back to “The Amory Wars” as the 2nd installment of the new five-part “Vaxis” arc about a couple on the run from tyrannical forces and their mysterious new addition.
Ella Fitzgerald's "Songbook" records - with her peerless renditions of the best songs from iconic composers from Irving Berlin to Rogers & Hart to Cole Porter to George & Ira Gershwin - are the cornerstone of the Verve catalog and the standard for jazz vocal recordings. Ella never released a live version of these Songbooks. This record, discovered in the private collection of Norman Granz, will make the first time a live Songbook has been released from the First Lady of Song.
Live at The Roxy was recorded on May 3, 1991, originally for the Westwood One Radio Network. Prior to its inclusion on the 2021 'Road Apples' Deluxe package, the full concert had never been officially available and was a much sought-after show for the bootleggers and die-hard Hip fans. The 15-song set includes the legendary "Killer Whale Tank" version of "New Orleans is Sinking" and "She Didn’t Know". 2 LP black vinyl.
Never before on vinyl - original cover art by the legendary Mear One. Featuring Oddisee (4 tracks), Apollo Brown (2 tracks), Roc Marciano, Black Milk, Georgia Anne Muldrow, !llmind and more.
Lately, if you blink you may miss Goose fly by. Attributing much of their success to a dedicated and exponentially expanding fan base, steady creative output, and a collective commitment to improvement, the band is now universally recognized as a premier musical act nationwide. Dripfield, Goose’s forthcoming studio offering, is a tale of introspection, carefully dissecting the details of the journey.
Produced and engineered by D. James Goodwin at The ISOKON in Woodstock, NY, Dripfield is the band’s first full-length project completed exclusively with an executive producer. Known for his unconventional recording style and eclectic equipment collection, Goodwin guided Goose through an entirely new process of album creation.
Undoubtedly the product of multiple sold out concerts and consistent recording and songwriting, Dripfield is anchored by the theme of balance. Fittingly, the project features a mix of unheard originals and re-imagined catalog staples.
MUNA is magic. What other band could have stamped the forsaken year of 2021 with spangles and pom-poms, could have made you sing (and maybe even believe) that “Life’s so fun, life’s so fun,” during what may well have been the most uneasy stretch of your life? “SilkChiffon,” MUNA’s instant-classic cult smash, featuring the band’s new label head Phoebe Bridgers, hit the gray skies of the pandemic’s year-and-a-half mark like a double rainbow. Since MUNA — lead singer/songwriter Katie Gavin, guitarist/producer Naomi McPherson, guitarist Josette Maskin — began making music together in college, at USC, they’d always embraced pain as a bedrock of longing, a part of growing up, and an inherent factor of marginalized experience: the band’s members belong to queer and minority communities, and play for these fellow-travelers above all. But sometimes, for MUNA, after nearly a decade of friendship and a long stretch of pandemic-induced self-reckoning, the most radical note possible is that of bliss.
MUNA, the band’s self-titled third album, is a landmark — the forceful, deliberate, dimensional output of a band who has nothing to prove to anyone except themselves.The synth on “What I Want” scintillates like a Robyn dance-floor anthem; “Anything But Me,” galloping in 12/8, gives off Shania Twain in eighties neon; “Kind of Girl,” wit hits soaring, plaintive The Chicks chorus, begs to be sung at max volume with your best friends. It’s marked by a newfound creative assurance and technical ability, both in terms of McPherson and Maskin’s arrangements and production as well as Gavin’s songwriting, which is as propulsive as ever, but here opens up into new moments of perspective and grace. Here, more than ever, MUNA musters their unique powers to break through the existential muck and transport you, suddenly, into a room where everything is possible — a place where the disco ball’s never stopped throwing sparkles on the walls, where you can sweat and cry and lie down on the floor and make out with whoever, where vulnerability in the presence of those who love you can make you feel momentarily bulletproof, and self-consciousness only sharpens the swell of joy.
Hollie Cook
Happy Hour [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Peak Orchid & Tangerine LP]
Vinyl: $20.98 Buy
Multiplatinum-selling duo Surfaces release their fourth studio album, Pacifico, via TenThousand Projects. The highly anticipated project arrives after the success of singles “Wave of You,” “Next Thing (Loverboy),” and “So Far Away.” Recorded by Forrest Frank and Colin Padalecki at a home studio in Malibu, Pacifico is a sunny pop album arriving just in time for the summer. LP pressed on clear vinyl.
Low Spirit, recorded in collaboration with the Rolling Hill Band, finds Jack M. Senff at his folkiest & most optimistic yet. While the record dives into the deepest pits of American disillusionment, touching on police brutality and imperialism, a layer of hope remains. The album blends together seamlessly, but beneath each track is a wayward feeling pulled from worldly uncertainty. Low Spirit is intended to feel like a sonic & thematic odyssey that trawls the depths and tries to figure it out.
Namir Blade will have a new release called Metropolis on 6/24 via Mello Music Group. Namir Blade was recently featured in the NBA2k22 game. Also named #1 Hiphop artist by Nashville Scene Weekly Paper. Namir wrote the NPR Nashville Affiliate WXNP theme song. There is production featured on Joell Ortiz (Slaughterhouse) album with CyHi the Prynce.