Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - 5 April (2024)

The latest suite by composer (and Stars Of The Lid co-founder) Adam Wiltzie took shape following a move north from Brussels into the Flemish countryside, although it was initially inspired by a recurring dream wherein "if someone listened to the music I created, then they would die." The album uniquely evokes and evades the allure of oblivion, keening between beauty and ruin, forever unresolved. Wiltzie cites the barbiturate of the title as both muse and sacred escape: "When you are sitting face forward on the daily emotional meat grinder of life, I always wished I could have some, so I could just fall asleep automatically and the feeling would not be there anymore."Recorded at Wilzie's home studio, with strings added in Budapest at the old Hungarian National radio facility (Magyar Radio), the tracks feel simultaneously intimate and infinite, unfolding vistas glimpsed in an inner space. Robert Hampson of English drone rock icons Loop mixed the album, further lending the music a sense of cinematic expanse and oblique hypnosis. These are fugue states as much as fugues in a literal classical music sense-smeared epiphanies of uncertain memory and spatial dislocation, coaxed from the unconscious and set aloft.

When Bob Vylan won the first MOBO award for Best Alternative Music Act in 2022, the punk-grime duo took to the stage and used the platform to speak about how they managed to achieve the impossible as independent artists in a genre-defying space. Humble as the Sun, the forthcoming album from Bob Vylan continues with much of the rage and urgency that they have come to be known and loved for, but this latest project shows that they are now stronger and wiser, bolstered by the wins and learnings that they have fought hard for along the way. The resulting tracklist aims to leave the listener feeling power alongside their anger, and brings a fresh and compelling blend of punk, rock, grime and rap together in an experimental way. From masculinity to myths about the G Spot, the themes and topics explored on Humble As The Sun make for an often humorously empowering celebration of the peoples ability to endure, overcome and bring about change. The lyricism on this album is even more layered than their previous projects, still darkly humorous, anti-establishment and unforgiving but at times pauses to deliver much-needed words of afrmation to listeners. At a time when so little trust or faith exists between the people and the powers that be, Bob Vylan ofers out a hand in the despondent darkness that has overwhelmed so many in the shadow of a burning planet. They guides the listener to a place where they can see some light and feel empowered to do something, to fight back, to continue pushing forwards despite the challenges faced along the way. Mixing all of the best quintessentially British - and Jamaican - musical elements from punk to drum and bass, grime and rock, Bob Vylan creates a sound that reflects the state of the nation, at once voicing the frustrations that normal people have, while also highlighting one's ability to persevere, overcome hardship and to change.

Caleb Landry Jones, the enigmatic and multi-talented artist, is set to release his highly anticipated fourth album, Hey Gary, Hey Dawn, on the esteemed Sacred Bones label.Renowned as a multi-instrumentalist crafting intricate cinematic works that hover on the fringes of prog, Jones breaks new ground with a deliberate focus on live performance for his latest record. Jones has in fact intentionally designed Hey Gary, Hey Dawn with the live stage in mind, a previously missing element in his musical career.Assembling a formidable band, he sets the stage for an enthralling experience, kickstarting a month-long residency in Austin, Texas, this February, culminating in a standout performance at SXSW. The residency serves as a precursor to a series of planned US and international tours, promising to bring the album's electrifying energy to audiences worldwide.The music is Jones's heaviest to date, and though often reticent about direct influences and resistant to categorizations, he weaves a sonic tapestry that hints at punk and grunge elements within his signature kaleidoscopic symphonies. "It's not for me to say what it is. I'm only here to give it up," he asserts, emphasizing the individual listening experience. But even though these songs are his most succinct, they are anything but simple. Over 20 talented musicians, including a quartet, contributed to the album, adding layers of depth and complexity to this dynamic collection of songs that seamlessly traverse a multitude of genres.Since his last album Gadzooks Vol. 2 Jones has been steadfast in making visual art, some of which graces the album art for Hey Gary, Hey Dawn. Simultaneously, he has continued to captivate audiences on the big screen, starring in Luc Besson's acclaimed film Dogman and preparing for multiple roles in 2024.Hey Gary, Hey Dawn is a testament to Caleb Landry Jones's artistic evolution, demonstrating his ability to push boundaries while maintaining a distinct and indescribable quality. With a blend of intensity, vulnerability, and musical virtuosity, Jones invites listeners to embark on a journey that transcends traditional genres, promising an immersive experience that resonates long after the final note.

Conan Gray, the critically acclaimed global pop superstar, is back with his third studio album, ‘FOUND HEAVEN.’ The highly anticipated 3rd LP includes singles “Never Ending Song,” “Winner,” “Killing Me,” and “Lonely Dancers.” Conan reigns in his magnetic new era and sound as he expresses his undeniable authenticity and originality through his art.

Coral Morphologic are the Miami duo of marine biologist Colin Foord and musician J.D. McKay; since 2007, they have used a variety of multimedia projects to generate environmental awareness of marine biodiversity—most notably Coral City Camera, an underwater webcam streaming live from an urban reef ecosystem in PortMiami. Their citymate Nick León is a linchpin of South Florida’s contemporary leftfield electronic scene, with releases for Tra Tra Trax, Future Times, and NAAFI, and credits on records by Rosalía, GAIKA, and Iceboy Violet, among others.

This collaborative project dates back to 2022, when Coral Morphologic mounted a monumental projection-mapping installation on Biscayne Boulevard. For five nights in late November and early December, macroscopic films of corals played out across the exterior of Knight Concert Hall. The installation was, on the one hand, a glimpse into a possible future, imagining how the city’s skyline might appear if unchecked global warming and rising seas led coral reefs to colonize the built environment. But it also represented a look back into the deep past, a reminder that Miami is literally built from marine limestone mined from the Everglades. Its concrete foundations began life, eons ago, as a marine ecosystem—the same ecosystem that may one day reclaim them. As above, so below.

For more or less a brand-new artist, Fabiana Palladino faces an unusual level of anticipation. The London musician broke out in 2017 as one of the Paul Institute’s founding artists after her shadowy, classicist R&B influenced pop reached Jai Paul, who started the label alongside his brother A. K. Paul. Releasing just three singles in four years, she caught the ear of critics – Pitchfork likened “Mystery” to “a scratch track from a big-budget 80s studio that’s been smuggled out on reel-to-reel tape” – but Palladino’s output remained slight while she worked as an in-demand session musician for the likes of SBTRKT and Jessie Ware, cycling from one tour to the next. This year, she formed part of Jai’s band for his live debut (which she also supported), the most wildly awaited performances in years. “I’m taking it one bit at a time because it is very strange and a bit overwhelming,” says Palladino.

All Heartbeat is Kollaikal’s third release as Flung, and rather than shy away from earlier material, it honors that work. Fans of Kollaikal’s past albums Shaky But My Hair Is Grown (2020) and Apricot Angel (2022) may recognize pieces of familiar songs re-arranged, reversed, and stitched into the fabric of these new compositions.

Ramona is a work of raw truth rendered in it's most beautiful form. Melbourne-based Grace Cummings traveled to Los Angeles to work with producer Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty) and dreamed up a lavishly orchestrated sound that fully accommodates the depth and scope of her vocal prowess. With it's visceral reflection on grief, self-destruction and emotional violence, Ramona brings a stunning new grandeur to Cummings' music while refusing to soften or temper it's humanity. 

Katie Pruitt - "Mantras" / Katie Pruitt is living proof of music's power to transform the way we experience the world. With her sophomore album Mantras, mainly produced by Collin Pastore and Jake Finch (boygenius, Lucy Dacus), Pruitt looks inward to explore such matters as gender identity, self-compassion or the lack thereof, and the struggle for peace in times of chaos and uncertainty-ultimately arriving at a body of work that speaks to the strength in undoing harmful self- beliefs and fully living your truth.

Khruangbin's fourth studio album, A La Sala ("To the Room" in Spanish), is an exercise in returning in order to go further, and doing so on your own terms. It continues the mystery and sanctity that is the key to how bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald "DJ" Johnson, Jr. And guitarist Mark "Marko" Speer approach music. If 2020's Mordechai, the last studio LP Khruangbin made without collaborators, was a party record that enhanced the band's musical reputation far and wide, then A La Sala is the measured morning after. It's a gorgeously airy record completed only in the company of the group's longtime engineer Steve Christensen, with minimal overdubs. It's a window onto the bounties powering Khruangbin's vision, a reimagining and refueling for the long haul ahead. A La Sala scales Khruangbin down to scale up, a creative strategy with the future in mind.The trio's collective musical DNA, the years spent constructing it in Houston's local-meets-global cultural stew, ensures the band continues to sound like no one but itself. A cascade of crisp melodies emanates from Marko's reverb-heavy electric, dancing gently around Laura Lee's minimalist almost-dub bass triangles, while DJ's drums serve as the tightened-up pocket and unwavering dance-floor on which all this movement takes place. Yet there's a freshness to A La Sala's instrumental interactivity, less concerned with getting further out than going deeper in, a profound desire to celebrate the world's external wonders. Where prior albums strived towards music's polyglot edges, such inquiries now sound like beloved intimacies. Here, Khruangbin's sonic touch-points - whether spaghetti-western film scores (on "Fifteen Fifty-Three"), West African discos (on "Pon Pón"), G-funk fantasias ("Todavía Viva"), living room dancing moments (the first single, "A Love International"), or even ambient found-sounds (on "Farolim de Felgueiras and throughout the album") - are ingrained characteristics. This is who they are! Unique and huge (and growing), ambitious and driven.Khruangbin's aspirations and commitment to playful creativity even extends to A La Sala's vinyl packages, of which there will be seven distinctive covers and color-sets. Designed by the band using Marko's multitude of travelog photos, the images are windows from the band's living room onto a set of daydreams, scenes of impossible skies, external glances that illuminate what is going on inside. Each cover image comes with a matching color vinyl. These too are all about looking out and looking back, in order to better look ahead.

.Mood Swings is the latest album from South Carolina native, Marcus King, the Grammy-nominated artist, performer, guitarist and songwriter. The music here is deeply personal, driven by King’s emotive vocals as much his revered guitar work, and whilst the subjects dealt with are often raw in nature (heartache, addiction, mental health), there’s always a sense of hope in the power of the voice.

The Sunset Violent began in a disused frat house in the American Yucca Valley. Kimbie’s founding members Dominic Maker & Kai Campos began work on their first proper album together since 2017’s Love What Survives – the decision was made to leave London. Campos and Maker relocated for a month to a town in the middle of a desert. The resulting album, finished in London with longtime confidante Dillip Harris and their band mates Andrea Balency-Béarn and Marc Pell, is 37 minutes of Mount Kimbie at simultaneously their most daring and their most giddily infectious.

The 13th studio album from Old 97's arose from what vocalist/guitarist Rhett Miller refers to as a "de-evolution". "As much as I want us to calm down and grow up, the songs that felt right for this record were mostly big and loud and brutal and dirty." - Produced by Tucker Martine and featuring appearances from Peter Buck (R.E.M.) and Scott McCaughey (The Minus 5) -American Primitive is gloriously rowdy, revealing a band more attuned than ever to the raw, reckless energy of timeless rock-and-roll

Armed with an already extensive catalog of stunning music, Palace return their deeply personal, fourth studio album, Ultrasound. The record's production sees the band reunited with Adam Jaffrey, eight years after working together on their debut album, and arrives off the back of Part I - When Everything Was Lost and Part II - Nightmares & Ice Cream, the band's 2023 companion EPs.

Joe Pernice has been writing for a long time—most of his life, in fact—and has crafted a remarkable catalog that boldly reinterprets and recasts classic American pop. Who Will You Believe may be his most moving and nuanced album yet; it’s certainly his timeliest. “These songs were all written during the same time period,” he says, “and they all seemed to tap into a mood I was in at the time. I go through spells where I’m a certain way for three or four months. I might be more reticent than usual, or more outgoing. With all of my records—and especially with this one—the songs all feel like they belong together, probably because they all arrived during the same stretch of time.” In a single six-month stretch he was left reeling from the deaths of three close friends, including David Berman, poet and songwriter for Silver Jews and Purple Mountains, and Gary Stewart, the Rhino Records co-founder and tireless Pernice Brothers supporter since their first album in 1998. “That was such a bad patch when David and Gary both took their own lives. And my cousin Joe Harvard, who started Fort Apache Studios in Boston and was like a brother to me—he died, too. It was such a tough year. I was thinking about them a lot and watching how divided America had become. I was doing my best to try and take nothing for granted.” Pernice has been releasing albums for over 25 years. And with age comes a greater patience and an immense appreciation for the act of creation. Who Will You Believe showcases a beautiful balance between such sadness and moments of solemnity with warm humor and camaraderie.

Revelator is an album that speaks to "the grand sadness in life" - perennial Phosphorescent subject matter, by Matthew Houck's estimation. In some ways, Revelator extends seamlessly from the story begun by Muchacho and continued by C'est La Vie. It finds Houck further mastering his unique blend of ragged, experiment-y classicism intertwined with ethereal, lachrymose atmospherics. Across Revelator, Houck sings from a woozy, worn headspace, but leads us to a place where dreams and reality mingle.

We Belong, is the eighth studio album from Sinkane, a band led by multi-instrumentalist Ahmed Gallab. And like much of Sinkane’s previous releases, it resists genre. It’s pop. It’s funk. It’s electronic. It blends the gritty punk newness of a 70s and 80s New York with the steady, foundational soul of the rhythms of his native Sudan. Though We Belong comes deep into the catalog of a long career, it also resists stagnation. It moves and travels—through words and eras, through emotion and healing. Gallab calls this album his “love letter to Black music,” and each track pulses with the energy of different eras and forms: the gospel-soaked “Everything Is Everything,” the dreamy, Quiet Storm-influenced Afro-beats of “Rise Above,” the 70s-funk of “We Belong” and its Sly Stone influence, the Stevie Wonder-edged “Another Day”—they tell a story about Black music and Black people.

The sixth album from Still Corners is “Dream Talk”. Beautifully arranged, elegant and wistful, Dream Talks is a set of ten carefully crafted classic songs. From the autumnal opener "Today is the Day" to the hot summer night finale of "Turquoise Moon", Still Corners have created a sound that is focused, stylish and seductive. Tessa Murray says, "The genesis for a lot of these songs came from dreams. Every night I would write down the dreams I could remember. While recording I would pull out my book of dreams and sing over various looped phrases Greg had been working on, the repetitive nature of the looping and singing almost felt like going into a trance. A lot of the songs came from that process, it was fun and what I thought were sort of ramblings ended up surprising us with their various meanings and imagery."

Ohio Players is The Black Keys’ fourth album in five years, a momentum with a simple explanation, Auerbach says: “We never stopped recording.” There was his and Carney’s reunion, after a five-year hiatus, on 2019’s "Let’s Rock”, then the 2021 blast of Mississippi-hill-country covers, Delta Kream. A rapid-fire follow-up of new originals, 2022’s Dropout Boogie, featured the duo working with outside writers for the first time: Greg Cartwright of Memphis rockers Reigning Sound and Angelo Petraglia, who has worked with Kings of Leon and the teenage Taylor Swift. (Cartwright and Petraglia are back for Ohio Players too.) “We'd never worked harder to make a record,” Dan Auerbach says. “It's never taken us this long to make an album. We took our time and did it right.” “What we wanted to accomplish with this record was make something that was fun,” Patrick Carney says. “And something that most bands 20 years into their career don’t make, which is an approachable, fun record that is also cool.” While making Ohio Players, a title inspired by the legendary Dayton, OH funk band of the same name, The Black Keys were also DJing dance parties in cities around the world that they called “record hangs,” spinning 45s from their own eclectic and growing collections. Mojo reports, “The spirit of those parties infused the album’s DNA. ‘That’s been the fun of it,’ [says] Auerbach. ‘Letting go a little bit.’”

The Libertines release their fourth studio album entitled, All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade. The release marks the band’s first new album in nine years and opens with the infectious new single, Run Run Run. On All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade, the quartet of unlikely lads have gathered from their new-found homes in France, Denmark, Margate and London to solder a strongest-ever internal bond, and scale new creative heights resulting in the best music of their extraordinary career so far.

Only God Was Above Us is the fifth studio album from Vampire Weekend. The album is inspired by and infused with the essence of the band’s birthplace of New York City, though recorded all over the world, from New York to Los Angeles to London and Tokyo. The album was produced by Ezra Koenig, and longtime collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid. The album title is lifted directly from the album artwork, which is a photo taken from a Subway graveyard in New Jersey in 1988 by photographer Steven Siegel. Only God Was Above Us includes universal themes ranging from the urge to question the world in which we live, and the quest for peace that can only be found through acceptance. The album is equal parts as direct yet complex as anything the band has ever released, as beautiful and melodic as they’ve ever sounded but also at their grittiest.

Vegyn releases his emotionally rich sophomore album, The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions. Sublimely crafted songs, each allowing for a dose of human imperfection, wobbling on a tightrope between elation and an eerie melancholia. The record includes guest features from John Glacier, Léa Sen, Matt Maltese, Lauren Auder and Ethan P.Flynn, and is released through his own imprint, PLZ Make It Ruins. The producer's shape-shifting musical output has so far tended towards excess, whether working with some of the world’s biggest rap and R&B artists (Frank Ocean, Travis Scott, KaliUchis), or unleashing 70 track mixtapes, letting light into his creative process by sharing scraps from the cutting room floor. By contrast, this new album emerged from a space of free-flowing experimentation, with a lighter touch to the productions. His trademark flourishes and BPM changes take a backseat to melody and clear structure. As Vegyn himself puts it: “I’m just trying to make interesting songs – feeling was the focus.”