Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - 7 June (2024)

Actress' tenth studio album, the celestial andmeditative 'Statik' is released this Spring viaSmalltown Supersound. The cosmic collaborationbetween Darren Cunningham and the esteemed Oslobased purveyors of elevated sonics evolvedorganically following Actress' remix of a Carmen Villaincut for the 12" of her Only Love From Now album.In this vein, the entire 'Statik' project, from conceptionthrough creation and release, has been blessed withan almost unnatural ease. For Actress, who wrote themajority of his subtly majestic new record in anextensive deep flow state, the project serves as acohesive testament to artistic liberation. Resultantly,the contemplative new album is imbued with a senseof freedom, while belying it's creator's expertisethrough forensic attention to textural detail andsignature Actress resonances.Listening closely, influential visions of aquatic realms,such as the mythic Atlantis, and evocations of flyingbirds (and, perhaps, humans) may reveal themselves.No matter if Statik inspires you to soar above or belowthe horizon, Actress and Smalltown Supersoundpromise you a safe and transcendent journey.

.'Radiosoul', Alfie Templeman's second studio album, is an ambitious suite of tracks that showcase a bold new acid-pop direction for the Bedfordshire-born polymath. The record features production from Templeman as well as Nile Rodgers, Dan Carey, Karma Kid, Oscar Scheller, Will Bloomfield, Justin Young, Josh Scarbrow and Charlie J Perry. It is an album of self-discovery, one that zips between genres at whim and showcases a newfound incisiveness and acerbic humour to Templeman’s lyricism, whilst retaining the sense of joy that defined his previous releases. It is the work of a prodigiously talented songwriter truly coming into his own.

On Beings' There Is A Garden, shapeshifting melodies highlight each players' voice. In one second, the album may sound hectic, teeming with craggy, unpredictable melodies, but by the time the next track rolls around, it'll transform into a psychedelic reverie or blossom into a sprawling drone. For Beings, the NYC-based supergroup quartet of Zoh Amba, Steve Gunn, Shahzad Ismaily, and Jim White, the music flows naturally: It's an ever-transforming organism built on the quartet's openness and willingness to explore, together.

Forever features 12 new songs from one of history’s most iconic bands, Bon Jovi, including the hit lead single, Legendary.

Over the years, Bonny Light Horseman has accumulated manymiles on the collective odometer of life. The band's core trio -Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman - has amassed anincomparable collected resume. Mitchell is a celebrated solo artistas well as the playwright and songwriter behind the hit Broadwaymusical Hadestown, which notched eight Tony Awards and aGrammy for Best Musical Theater Album. Johnson is best known asthe mind behind beloved indie mainstays Fruit Bats, as a longtimecollaborator with The Shins, and as a film score composer. AndKaufman is a multi-hyphenate extraordinaire: songwriter, producer,and position player, having recorded and performed with artistsranging from Bob Weir to The War on Drugs to Taylor Swift, HissGolden Messenger and The Hold Steady. As a group, Bonny LightHorseman's debut album received a Grammy nomination for BestFolk Album, and the track "Deep in Love" was nominated for BestAmerican Roots Performance. More important than any of this, though, they've also lived a big ol'messy and tangled up pile of life, and all that living permeates theirmusic with the wisdom, humor, and depth that underlies theaccolades. Theirs is the stuff that defines folk music as a genre: loveand loss, hope and sorrow, community and family, change and time.The Big Stuff, with the stakes sky high. At the center of Bonny Light Horseman is, always, the singularcombination of three powerful and tender artists, artists whoexpertly dodge superlatives but are quick to acknowledge that theirbond makes each one better, braver and more vulnerable thanthey'd be on their own. Nowhere is this more apparent than in theforce of their voices together, which work with complete trust inone another through the gentlest moments and the most ruthlesswails. Bonny Light Horseman's new album, Keep Me on Your Mind/SeeYou Free, is an ode to the blessed mess of our humanity. Confidentand generous, it is an unvarnished offering that puts every feelingand supposed flaw out in the open. The themes are stacked highand staked even higher: love and loss, hope and sorrow, communityand family, change and time all permeate Bonny Light Horseman'smost vulnerable and bounteous offering to date. Yet for all of it'shumanistic touchpoints, Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free wasforged from a kind of unexplainable magic.

"Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting," Casey Mq sings at the start of Later that day, the day before, or the day before that, his new LP and Ghostly International debut. It's a phrase fittingly misremembered from something the LA-based, Canadian-born composer came upon as he spiraled into unconscious and subconscious-led writing sessions at the piano. Casey's known for his 2020 breakthrough release babycasey, which gave voice to songs seen through the lens of childhood, various film score work and collaborations with artists such as Oklou (who returns here), Eartheater, and Vagabon. His gifts as a producer and songwriter are rooted in textural world-building and the excavation of personal truth. With Later that day... he questions what is true entirely, understanding our mind's tendency to bend and project onto pictures of the past. Across vivid, baroque pop balladry, Casey Mq reorients his recording project and point of view under the notion that memories are malleable. All the joy, pain, love, and loss housed within remembrance is open to interpretation and deconstruction, which he does deftly, with curiosity and complete artistic freedom. "It's a memory album," Casey puts it simply, winding up for the deeper unpacking, "and it might be a breakup album, too... there are more questions than answers." Engaging his dreams and sitting with sheet music at his newly acquired piano, he looked to new and old inspirations including the works of Claude Debussy, Joni Mitchell, and Joe Hisaishi's beloved Studio Ghibli film scores. "Since I was young, I always wanted to write a piano album." babycasey's studied electronic sound isn't wholly abandoned on Later that day... instead, it comes through like an atmosphere, giving Casey's more spacious, minimal arrangements a distinct luster and sheen. The textures and tones shift from song to song as if mirroring the way our minds constantly recontextualize, remember, and forget. Cathartic opener "Grey Gardens" - it's title derived from a dream abstractly related to the Toronto restaurant, but not the 1975 film, which he cites as another coincidental false memory - presents the record's plaintive, haunted feeling. "Even if not reading into lyrics, sonically I wanted it to feel like you're being pulled into a universe. Not fantasy or otherworldly per se, something more tangible, of the body and mind," Casey says. "Hearing it back, I realized this track was the key to unlocking it." His tender falsetto hovers above ambient washes and echoed keys, each word falling carefully in the crevices. "Asleep At The Wheel" unfolds on arpeggiated synth before a burst of symphonic color; the synth returns inverted to harmonize with the outro, "I love a car crash, I love a story, I love a memory, I swear it's real... " Casey leans into digital imagination on the warm, introspective "Me I Think I Found It." Subdued, stuttered percussion underscores the singer as he cycles through pixelated imagery - screenshots, smiles, streetlights - searching for higher meaning through love. Built on ascendent chord distortions, "Dying Til I'm Born" gives the record one of it's boldest pulses of emotion. The back half stretches out; "Is This Only Water" is sparse and foggy, "Baby Voice" is intimate and desperate for something to remain. "Words For Love" grooves on guitar, and "Tennisman9" aches in heartbreak. French musician Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou, appears as the collection's only guest for the closing duet, "The Make Believe," a bright and buoyant send-off that gives Later that day... both a sense of resolve and cyclical-motion. "We are young, under the sun," they sing together, a parting image brimming with lightness.

Charli XCX’s sixth studio album Brat is the eagerly awaited follow up to 2022’s Crash, which reached number 1 on the UK’s official album chart. Brat is an exhilarating club record built around high art references and social commentary. Avant-pop and electronic superstar Charli XCX has become an iconic figure in the arts, having helped expand the landscape of popular music over the last decade by seamlessly traversing the underground and mainstream with her artistic output. Over the course of a trailblazing career, the multi-hyphenate creative has earned critical acclaim for her innovative style and entrepreneurial spirit and seen her forward-thinking approach reshape pop culture in the process.

Eels, the ever-changing critically acclaimed project of principal singer/songwriter E (Mark Oliver Everett), have released 14 studio albums since their 1996 debut, Beautiful Freak. The new album, Eels Time! Was recorded between Los Feliz, California and Dublin, Ireland. It consists of twelve brand new tracks with some of E's most introspective and personal material in recent years, and features collaborations with American musician and actor Tyson Ritter.

Progressing from their angst-fuelled self-titled debut (2018), to the escapist world of sophomore LP On All Fours (2021), the South London trio, consisting of Rosy Bones, Lottie Pendlebury and Holly Mullineaux, enter their most self-assured era in 2024, with third album Below The Waste. Co-produced by the band & John Spud Murphy (Lankum/black midi), the album takes the band's distinctive sound to new extremes, as they delve fearlessly into expansive noise-rock, delicate folk and synth-driven pop. -Co-produced alongside John ‘Spud’ Murphy (black midi’s Cavalcade and more recently Lankum’s Mercury-nominated False Lankum) -Instrumentation was tracked mostly over a 10 day stint in Ireland at Hellfire Studios -Additional strings (Reuben Kyriakides and Nic Pendlebury), woodwind instruments (Alex McKenzie) and vocals (including a choir made up of family and friends) were added to this framework at a number of locations, from a barn in Essex to Goat Girl’s own studio in South London

Good Looks write kindhearted and cathartic rock songs about the persistence required to make it through hard times. In April 2022, the Austin, Texas quartet released their critically acclaimed debut Bummer Year. Immediately after their triumphant hometown record release show, lead guitarist Jake Ames was hit by a car crossing the street, fracturing his skull and tailbone. Thankfully, Ames made a full recovery. The traumatic accident strengthened the bond that built their electric new album Lived Here For A While. Out May 3 via Keeled Scales, it's fearlessly direct music that captures the full-throated intensity of their galvanizing live show. Reinvigorated, Good Looks tracked Lived Here For A While at Texas' Dandy Sounds with producer/engineer Dan Duszynski (of Loma and Cross Record) the following summer. Though Ames had to relearn some of his parts, his palpably energetic performances elevated the entire record. On the LP, the band trades the Americana sound that colored in the lines of Bummer Year for clanging post-punk guitars and expansive indie rock. Lyrically, the songs on this album are healing meditations on family dysfunction, new relationships, and how a home can become unrecognizable. Lyricist Tyler Jordan's songs explore how relationships can crumble irrevocably but also how those partnerships can be centering, hopeful, and exciting. In another horrific accident in July 2023, their tour van was rear-ended by a speeding car, causing their van, instruments, merch, and records, to become engulfed in flames. Thankfully, none of the band members suffered serious injuries. This resilience is essential to Good Looks and why the songs on Lived Here For A While resonate so profoundly.

The long-awaited second album from NxWorries – the iconic duo of superstar vocalist Anderson .Paak and GRAMMY Award-winning beatmaker and producer Knxwledge. 8 years after their breakthrough debut Yes Lawd!, NxWorries return with Why Lawd? – a winning combination of Knx’s unmistakeable beats and .Paak’s instantly recognizable vocals. This time, special guests are invited along for the ride. Featured artists include H.E.R., Snoop Dogg, Thundercat, Earl Sweatshirt, Rae Khalil and more.

On Pedro the Lion's new album Santa Cruz, critically acclaimed musician David Bazan returns with a new chapter in his ambitious and ongoing recording project - 5 albums devoted to places he lived in throughout his life. Santa Cruz is Bazan's third album in the series and follows up where 2022's Havasu and 2019's Phoenix left off. Tracks like "Modesto" and "Little Help" foreshadow Bazan's exposure and ultimate love of classic rock n' roll records, while songs like "It'll All Work Out" showcase his unique approach to synthesizers, something he introduced with the 2005 self-titled Headphones album. The stories on Santa Cruz highlight Bazan's teenage years and solidifies what he sees as an exposition in a traditional three-act structure.After 25 years refining and building what he calls his "garden of songs," David Bazan has sold hundreds of thousands of albums, performed in sold-out venues and living rooms around the globe, and played high-profile live sessions with the likes of NPR's Tiny Desk, KEXP, WNYC's Soundcheck, WXPN's World Cafe and many others. His music has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, SPIN, Vox, Paste, Aquarium Drunkard and others.

Peggy Gou has ascended from underground sensation to global icon by sticking to her own unwavering vision, becoming one of the most in-demand electronic musicians and DJs in the world. Having performed to over a million people worldwide in 2023, the self-managed South Korean-born, Berlin-based producer and artist has blazed her own trail as the first Korean DJ to play Berghain, the first female DJ to headline Ushuaïa Ibiza, and the first woman in over 20 years to appear within the Top 10 of DJ Mag’s annual Top 100 list. Since 2016, she’s forged a singular blend of club music that’s as forward-thinking as it is nostalgic, finding her global breakthrough with 2018’s Once EP, which birthed hits like “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane),” and “Han Jan.” An essential tastemaker, she runs her music and design label Gudu, through which she issued her 2019 critically acclaimed Moment EP, designs her Kirin and Peggy Goods fashion lines, and sold out her own London Pleasure Gardens festival for four consecutive years. 2024 will see her biggest ever headline London show when she performs to 25,000 people in August She’s collaborated with everyone from house legend Maurice Fulton (2020’s “Jigoo”) to South Korean counterculture hero OHHYUK (2021’s “Nabi”), and was enlisted for a 2022 remix of Kylie Minogue’s iconic “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” Referred to as “the world’s hippest DJ” by The Guardian, Gou has graced the cover of Vogue Germany, Vanity Fair Italia, GQ Middle East and Korea, Harper’s Bazaar Malaysia, and others, while boasting collaborations with Louis Vuitton, Hyundai, Ray Ban, Samsung, and Authentic Beauty Concept.

What Is Not Strange? is the first full-length album by Los Angeles-based composer Tashi Wada in over five years, comprising his most far-reaching and impassioned music to date. Written and recorded over a period that encompassed the death of his father and the birth of his daughter, the album sees Wada reflecting inward to explore broad narratives-being alive, mortality, finding one's place in the world-through new modes of ecstatic, song-based expression. While the denser forms, stark contrasts, and overt surreality may carry a different weight than Wada's earlier work, which elicited perceptual effects with minimal means, the heart of What Is Not Strange? is still in experimentation and unforeseen outcomes.