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The Hard Quartet's debut LP
New album: This seasoned pro supergroup of Stephen Malkmus (Pavement and Jicks), Matt Sweeney (Chavez), Emmett Kelly and Jim White create a marvellously muscular debut collection of indie, rock, blues punk, but also beautiful Byrds-like numbers
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Mdou Moctar: Funeral For Justice
New album: After 2021’s acclaimed Afrique Victime album, the brilliant Tuareg guitarist and band band from Agadez, Niger, return with explosive, powerful, emotive numbers, impassioned songs about his culture and social wrongs, wrapped in a frenzy of drums, guitars, bass and vocals
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Kim Gordon: The Collective
New album: Dark, crashing, whispering, abstract, deadpan internal monologues, dreamlike off-beat poetry, trip beats, crunchy electronica and industrial grunge-guitar noise, the ex-Sonic Youth frontwoman, bassist and visual artist’s new LP is a challenging, truly innovative release
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Part 1 selection of 2023 favourite albums
Welcome once again to the annual tradition of Song Bar’s favourite album releases of 2023. This is Part 1, and Part 2 is also out here. There’s no such thing as a chart rundown or ‘best of’ here, and these come in no particular order. This is all about quality and innovation …
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Queens of the Stone Age’s eighth LP, In Times New Roman
New album: After a six year absence, Josh Homme and co return with an eighth blistering, brutally brilliant, meaty loud rock LP, returning to more to their roots too – dark, powerfully emotional, ironic, sharp, witty and powerful, here with some elements of Scary Monsters-era Bowie, Cream, epic glam rock, and all fuelled by various personal tragedies
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Water From Your Eyes: Everyone's Crushed
New album: Uncategorisably ear-catching, experimental indie-pop by the Brooklyn duo Rachel Brown and Nate Amos, in a fifth LP filled with oddball, interweaving sounds, textures and landscapes, electronica to distorted guitar rock, absurdist clever lyrics and melodies
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Yo La Tengo: This Stupid World
New album: Nearly four decades into the New Jersey trio’s prolific career, Ira Kaplan Georgia Hubley and James McNew’s 17th studio LP one of their best, mesmeric, krautrock-inspired, semi-improvisational, shoegaze indie
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Belle and Sebastian’s 12th album Late Developers
New album: Recorded during the same period as late year’s LP A Bit of Previous culminating in a batch of 30 songs, this 12th LP and follow-up brings further likeable, wistful, bittersweet indie pop by the longstanding Glasgow band
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Ugly Season, by Perfume Genius
New album: The alias of American composer and high-voiced performer Mike Hadreas returns with profound, strange, compelling experimental pieces, ranging from ambience to electronica to pop with range of instruments and styles including chimes, Mellotron, celeste, guitarrón, and reggae syncopation
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Horsegirl
Debut album: Warmly engaging debut of shoegaze from the Chicago indie-rock trio of Penelope Lowenstein (guitar, vocals), Nora Cheng (guitar, vocals), and Gigi Reece (drums) in this album produced by John Agnello (Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth)
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Looking back to look forward: Belle and Sebastian’s 10th album
New album: The tenth studio album by the Glasgow folk-pop band is their first for seven years, and the first recorded in their home city since Fold Your Hands Child in 1999, sounding very much their usual wistful, gently melancholy but catchy selves
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Spoon’s 10th
New album: A solid 10/10 for the band from Austin, Texas, who, with this 10th studio album of 10 songs in 25 years and their familiar alt-blues rock sound remains consistently strong and unmistakably them, even when opening with a Smog cover
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Snail Mail’s Valentine
New album: Second LP by Lindsey Jordan, following 2018’s debut, Lush, broadens her folk-indie-rock brush with a bigger range of sounds and synths, as well as heartbreak, exchanging some of her initial musical intimacy perhaps to reach a broader commercial appeal
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Lucy Dacus
New album: Supremely sharp, personal and candid, this third solo album by the Virginia singer-songwriter and Boygenius member is a series of brilliant detailed diary entries with a dark, homicidal twist, and filled with ironic, killer lines
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Julien Baker: ‘There’s no glory in love, only the gore of our hearts’
Album review: The Tennessee indie artist’s third LP is an impassioned, raw emotion narrative of life falling apart in lockdown, her at times fractured voice and powerful instrumentation capturing a self-excoriating autobiography, stormy chaotic emotions, observations and experiences
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This week’s shiny new album selection collection
This week’s roundup has a wealth of genre-spanning artists from the wit and wisdom of Sparks and Magnetic Fields to the low-key funk of Nick Hakim, the gender-redefining pop of Perfume genius to the fusions of Witch ‘n’ Monk
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Lavinia Blackwall, formerly of Trembling Bells, releases her debut LP Muggington Lane End
This week’s roundup includes some new music self-definition from Car Seat Headrest and Happyness, an eclectic mix from Ghostpoet, and two wonderful solo albums by Michael J Sheehy and Lavinia Blackwall
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Grimes
A truly eclectic lineup characterises this week’s roundup with a concept album from Grimes, a work of ethereal beauty from Agnes Obel, space electronic-folk from The Pictish Trail, and much more …
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Halsey
A mixture of dark and light, hope and hopelessness decorate this week’s huge roundup of releases across many genres, including oddities and eccentricities, passions and playfulness from Emimen to Ivor Cutler, Halsey to Keeley Forsyth
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FKA twigs
The second part of this year’s LP favourites again includes several superb female artists. Also check out the first part published yesterday
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