Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - 20 June (2025)

Benson Boone is quickly soaring to global pop stardom on the heels of a breakout year in 2024. His brand new album American Heart builds upon that success and expands his sonic landscape, creating a project that feels both larger-than-life and sincere at its core. Boasting lead single "Sorry I'm Here For Someone Else" in addition to standout tracks like "Mystical Magical," "I Wanna Be The One You Call," "Young American Heart," and the deeply personal "Momma Song," American Heart sees Benson hone in on compelling narratives and a rock-tinged, 70s pop sound that delivers a sense of nostalgia while feeling fresh and inventive. American Heart follows Boone's Platinum-certified 2024 debut album Fireworks and Rollerblades, which features the breakout smash hit "Beautiful Things." The chart-conquering track was the #1 most streamed song in the world last year, earning Benson a myriad of accolades, including a nomination for Best New Artist at the 2025 Grammy Awards, where he went on to deliver a show-stopping performance. With the release of American Heart and a global headline tour on the horizon, Boone is on track for a record year in 2025.

HAIM’s highly anticipated fourth studio album, written primarily by HAIM and Rostam Batmanglij, with production by Batmanglij and Danielle Haim. The album radiates the raw energy of seasoned performers whose deep reverence for classic rock shapes songs that are built for live performance. The album features follows previously released album tracks “Relationships” and “Everybody’s trying to figure me out,” which were both met with critical praise. Pitchfork noted “what’s that sound? Is it the first song of the summer?” while Vulture raved, “Haim is back… they’re not taking anything too seriously except for the quality of what they put out into the world,” and Stereogum hailed it as, “a return to the sleek genre-hybrid sounds of classic Haim.” I quit is the first new album since the band’s 2020 album Women In Music, Pt. III, which earned them a Brit Award for International Group. Women In Music, Pt. III received two GRAMMY Award nominations, including the prestigious “Album of the Year” recognition. With this nomination, HAIM became the first all-female rock group to be included in the GRAMMY’s top category. Women In Music, Pt. III debuted #1 on the U.S. Album Sales chart, as well as the Rock and Alternative charts and entered at #1 on the UK Album chart.

Hotline TNT return with their third album Raspberry Moon, via Third Man Records. The follow up to Cartwheel, the band’s “exquisite” (Billboard) 2023 breakthrough, Raspberry Moon is the most sweeping and compelling Hotline TNT album to date and, crucially, the first built by a full band. Funneled into the album are moments of vulnerability and romance, creating a generationally great statement of youthful wistfulness and very adult growth that also happens to be very charming and sometimes funny.  

When his father died in 2021, James McMurtry went through his effects and discovered a rough pencil sketch of himself as a child. “I knew it was of me, but I didn’t realize who drew it. I had to ask my stepmom, and she said it looked like Ken Kesey’s work back in the ‘60s.” The Merry Pranksters—Kesey’s roving band of hippie activists and creators—stopped by often to visit Larry McMurtry, his wife Faye, and his very young son James. He held on to that drawing as he worked on a new album, The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy, his eleventh. It’s a collection of rough-hewn story-songs and richly drawn character sketches that have elements of Americana—rolling guitars, barroom harmonies, traces of banjo and harmonica—but sound too sly and smart for such a generalized category. Funny and sad often in the same breath, it adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a recent resurgence as younger songwriters like Sarah Jarosz (who plays on the new album) and Jason Isbell (who took McMurtry on tour) cite him as a formative influence. McMurtry’s characters face similar realizations, although theirs are harder, sadder, and arrive at the end of life rather than the beginning. Sometimes they find life savers, like a calling or a fond memory; sometimes they drown, like that South Texas lawman. Even the songwriter himself doesn’t always know what will happen or what will inspire him. “You follow the words where they lead. If you can get a character, maybe you can get a story. If you can set it to a verse-chorus structure, maybe you can get a song."

The album arrives as the highly anticipated follow-up to the acclaimed 2022 release Hugo, which earned Carner his second Mercury Prize nomination and a second Top Three album. According to a new description, the LP finds the British artist embarking on a life-affirming journey through themes of fatherhood, childhood, and alternative music. He also pushes beyond his comfort zone, taking on singing, production duties, and "accidentally forming the band of his dreams." The overall tone of the album carries an uplifting and positive spirit, as Carner fosters healthier personal boundaries while inviting listeners deeper into his personal world.

Lukas Nelson came of age in the dives and diners of this country and his itinerant life showed him America as few others get to see it. Nelson ponders his relationship this country with all its joy and heartbreak on American Romance, his first solo album and first under Sony Music Nashville. Recorded by Grammy Award-winning producer Shooter Jennings, it shows the singer-songwriter expanding his sound while doubling down on the fundamentals of his artistry. “It’s been a long and inspiring journey in the band,” he says. “This is an opportunity to experiment with some new colors in the palette.” American Romance brings out those new colors in dazzling fashion, demonstrating Nelson to be a singer-songwriter of uncommon dexterity. He’s just as likely to wrestle with heady existential matters as he is to lament his losses, and he’s steeped in tradition without being strictly bound to it. Much like the land that provided its name, American Romance is a novelistic album teeming with great complexity and beauty that plays out like a series of chapters from his life. “The heartache that America has brought me and the joy that it has brought me,” he muses, “It's all led to where I am right now.”

Metallic Life Review is the sound of two people who have collected field recordings of metal objects from around the world for years of their lives together, collaging their magpie hoard into rhythmic patterns, sometimes writing melodies and basslines, but sometimes just letting sound be sound. Patient gathering yields to ADHD editing. Painstakingly made but blink and you’ll miss it. Is it music or is it noise? It is without a doubt exceptionally beautiful music wrought from metal detritus. By employing the strong contrast between a harsh industrial clatter-fest and a sweeter melodic dimension that acts as a deliberate counterforce, Matmos created an album that is utterly delightful. A “life review” is a phrase used to describe the psychological phenomena reported by people who have survived near death experiences: the sense captured in the phrase “my life flashed before my eyes.” Metallic Life Review is a kind of compressed fast-forward of Matmos’ career with a sonic parade of the metallic objects from their lives. The sounds on the album were captured over the entire length of the existence of Matmos as a band.

The first fragments of what became “Ipsa Corpora” arrived in a torrent, overwhelming my abilities to keep them straight. I thought that imagining them as individuals, like characters in a play, could be a useful mnemonic, so I tried assigning an identity to each, poaching from gauzy memories of long-dead relatives. These arbitrary associations failed. The new pieces couldn’t correspond to the old apparitions. They were real—subjects in themselves, paradoxically, synesthetically, embodied in sound. I wasn’t happy with this conclusion but I couldn’t shake it, and as more pieces of the eventual whole revealed themselves over the following months, the effect became like guests arriving: like physical visitation, when the air in a room is ruffled and displaced as a body moves into and through it. During that period (Fall 2023) events transpired which severely complicated this mode of thought. As the world began to watch, with a crushing technological capacity for bearing witness, bodies instrumentalized—desecrated, barbarized, destroyed—for political, ideological, and eschatological ends, I relied on this expanding composition as an outlet for my grief and sputtering, impotent rage. It felt like a kind of ritual mourning device. It also offered a site for meditation on the seams of relation between individuals, in flesh or sound. Meantime the silences in the piece multiplied, each insisting on its own singularity. A “kind of interruption…” wrote Maurice Blanchot, “introduces waiting, which measures the distance between two speakers, not the reducible distance but the irreducible…. Now what is at stake is the distance between us.” The audible subjects had been prerequisites for their essential counterparts, connective tissues of decay, distance, silence: actual bodies themselves. – Nathan Salsburg, March 2025

S.G. Goodman returns from the Western Kentucky bottomland with her latest full-length album, Planting by the Signs, available June 20, 2025 on her very own Slough Water Records via Thirty Tigers. Composed of songs inspired by love, loss, reconciliation, and the aforementioned ancient practice - how planting a garden, or weaning a baby, or getting a haircut are best timed in accordance with the cycle of the moon. A concept diametrically opposed to the tech-obsessed, profit margin-driven mania swirling around us. Through exploring themes related to planting by the signs, Goodman hopes to help herself and others reconcile this jarring disconnect, as well to pass along the story of the practice.

Genre-bending Tropical Fuck Storm present their highly anticipated fourth album, ‘Fairyland Codex,’ on their new label home Fire Records. Recorded with co-producer Michael Beach at the band’s Dodgy Brothers studio in Nagambie, Australia, the songs on ‘Fairyland Codex’ immerse us in the chaos of a fateful landslide, picking out the characters that litter the impending collapse of society. Acidic, acerbic, anarchic; Tropical Fuck Storm's command of wordplay, undercut by snarling guitars, pulsing rhythms, and explosive salvos, populates a hinterland between light and dark. The vocal interplay between Liddiard and the soaring harmonies of Kitschin and Dunn creates a teetering balancing act that’s intensified by the frantic narratives that evolve from their collective psyche. “Tropical Fuck Storm are masters of tension and release.” The Guardian Tropical Fuck Storm formed when guitarist and vocalist Gareth Liddiard and bassist and vocalist Fiona Kitschin’s previous band, The Drones, went on hiatus in 2016. Joined by guitarist, keyboardist, and vocalist Erica Dunn and drummer Lauren Hammel, the group has released a string of critically acclaimed albums and gained a reputation for their incendiary live shows. “Tropical Fuck Storm stir up a psychedelic, dadaist spectacle.” Bandcamp

When Meg Remy, the visionary behind U.S. Girls, got an offer to play a festival in Hot Springs, Arkansas in early 2024, she enlisted Nashville-based friend Dillon Watson (Savoy Motel, Jack Name) to assemble a one-time band for the occasion. The show went so well that she decided to ride that energy right back to where the impromptu band initially rehearsed, in Music City, kickstarting the journey toward Scratch It. In ten days, Remy and her band — Watson on guitar, Jack Lawrence (The Dead Weather, The Raconteurs, Loretta Lynn) on bass, Domo Donoho on drums, Jo Schornikow and Tina Norwood on keys and harmonica legend Charlie McCoy (Elvis, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison) — recorded Scratch It live. Closeness and ease emanate from this core band with Remy’s singular voice sparkling on top of every tune. Album opener “Like James Said” is an ELO-styled nugget of AM gold; a nod to the power of dancing alone and a lyrical response to James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing”. Lead single “Bookends” — a sprawling, 12-minute ballad co-written with Edwin de Goeij — is the heart of the album, paying tribute to the late Power Trip frontman Riley Gale through the lens of John Carey’s Eyewitness to History. Later, slinky diss track “No Fruit” finds Watson’s wah-wah punctuating Remy’s biting, poetic prophecy, aimed either at a lover or the greater modern world. Scratch It weaves together country, gospel, garage rock, soul, disco, folk balladry, and more, with Remy’s masterful songwriting threaded throughout. Her choice to discard the computer-based production of previous albums in favor of two-inch tape serves the songs well, introducing an element of sonic shapeshifting expected from an artist nearly twenty years into making records. If instinct was an instrument, Remy would be a virtuoso. Scratch It and see.

Having sold out tours and headlined festivals around the globe, including his own music festival, YUNGBLUD releases his highly anticipated fourth album, Idols. With #1 albums in seven countries and a reputation for defying convention, YUNGBLUD describes Idols as "a project with no limitations," marking his boldest and most ambitious work yet.