Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - 17 January (2025)

David Gray is back doing what he does better than almost anyone, and fans of complex, serious, lyrical songcraft should rejoice. Dear Life may be the deepest, strangest, loveliest album this pioneering British singer-songwriter has ever delivered. Years in the making, it is an album of emotional crisis and resolution, mortality and faith, reality and illusion, love and heartbreak, magic, science, loss and acceptance. Dear Life is David Gray's 13th album. It's the result of "a starburst of songwriting"... it just seemed like the gods of songwriting were being kind. An album of emotional crisis and resolution, mortality and faith, reality and illusion, love and heartbreak, magic, science, loss and acceptance. While it is full of yearning and hope, there is an undercurrent of darkness, a tension between competing forces of hope and despair: a cavalcade of emotions in what is his most lyrically-focused collection to-date.

Colombian artist Ela Minus' 2020 debut acts of rebellion, felt intentionally small, as if pounding inside the club with late-night reverie, DIA is both introspective and expansive, the wide sweep of its songs revealing more of Ela as person and producer than ever before. DIA is a record about becoming, from a process that entailed self-discovery at a deliberate pace to songs that seem to collectively ask where we go from here, long after we’ve been broken butlong before we intend to be broken forever. Throughout the 10 songs, mixed by Marta Salogni and mastered by Heba Kadry, the same team behind acts of rebellion, Ela seems to saddle a line between worlds of pop accessibility and experimental aplomb, her incandescent choruses always surrounded by meticulous and imaginative sonics.

Balloonerism is a full-length album that Mac Miller created around the time of the release of Faces in 2014. It is an album that showcases both the breadth of his musical talents and fearlessness as an artist. Fans of Watching Movies with the Sound Off, Delusional Thomas, Faces and more will immediately understand the album's creative ambition, agnostic of genre.

The Weather Station returns with new album, Humanhood, following up 2021's Critically acclaimed album, Ignorance, and its companion piece, How is it That I Should Look at the Stars. In the fall of 2023, Tamara Lindeman gathered six musicians at Canterbury Music Company, where she had recorded Ignorance and How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars. Several of these players - drummer Kieran Adams, keyboardist Ben Boye, percussionist Phillippe Melanson, reed-and-wind specialist Karen Ng, and bassist Ben Whiteley - had worked together but never in this specific arrangement or context. Much of Humanhood is a riveting and real document of what it means to be lost, to be hamstrung by confusion, unease, and grief for a period so long you begin to wonder if there is an end.