Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - 11 October (2024)

.On the forthcoming album, BABii flexes her Björk-level aptitude and penchant for deep world building as she enters something akin to Dante’s Inferno, exploring the origins of violence and criminality and how hell relates to the real world. Each song corresponds to a separate sin and comes with a villainous criminal attached. These include hooligans, gargoyles, goblins, and a Trash Spirit Clown named Tito Von Bricabrac. All existing in the fantastical Nevaworld, a futuristic hellscape that the album exists in. Through this creative exercise, BABii asks challenging questions about what pushes people to transgress while also exploring her personal relationships with those who society deems unwanted or unacceptable. In the past few years BABii has radically changed the way she writes her captivating, boundary-pushing songs. Daredevil 2000 is a continuation of the vulnerable and conceptual writing style she began with 2022 collaborative mixtape Screamer, a journey that has cemented her as one of future-pop’s most exciting artists to keep an eye on in 2024.

Caroline Says' haunting new album, The Lucky One, is a poignant exploration of how the ghosts of past relationships linger, sometimes holding more sway over our hearts and minds than our current connections. We revisit these ghosts through evocative landscapes of our memories - hometown bars, road trips, and late-night swims. Through a series of fractured and persistent memories these songs capture the bittersweet realization that the past, though imperfect, can sometimes be a more comforting and meaningful companion than the present.Opening track, "The Lucky One," confronts death's role in shaping our memories head-on, as it ponders the way death freezes a person in time, forcing us to confront the complexities of grief and it's lasting impact on our relationship with the one we lost. Other tracks delve into the complexities of relationships that naturally grow apart as life takes us in different directions. For example, "Faded and Golden" reflects on the bittersweet nature of reunions with old friends, where the idealized memories of youth can clash with the realities of the present. Then, "Actors" takes this a step further, acknowledging the influence of perception and desire in friendships, and the idea that in many ways "all friendships are imaginary friendships," as it confronts the disappointment of inauthentic connections, and the facades we sometimes put on in relationships.A thread of self-discovery/analysis is also present throughout the album. "Palm Reader" explores our yearning for sincerity and certainty, both in the predictions of a fortune teller and in the fleeting encounters of daily life. Conversely, "Like We Do" celebrates youthful innocence, while also touching on the subjectivity of memory, with the line "who remembers it best and who remembers it right..." highlighting how two people can experience the same event, yet hold vastly different recollections of the details."Roses" began when Caroline was looking through her grandma's collection of commemorative Kentucky Derby glasses, each one etched with the name of a winner. The song delves into the story of "Sunday Silence," the horse that won the year Caroline was born. Researching the horse's journey from near-Triple Crown glory to retirement in Japan sparked a metaphor - a pressured being (the horse) desperately trying to please but ultimately disappointing. The owners eventually selling the horse becomes a relatable symbol of unmet expectations, and the sting of falling short despite our best efforts.Album closer, "Something Good," revisits Caroline's Alabama childhood. Lost on a recent trip to Birmingham, unable to find the familiar path to a riverside hangout, the experience becomes a powerful metaphor; we can't always retrace the paths in our memories, but those memories, however unreliable, continue to shape us. In the end, The Lucky One celebrates this enduring power, acknowledging how past relationships and experiences, even those lost to the haze of time, continue to inform the stories we tell ourselves, and the way we navigate the present.

Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets it's namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile's music is a poignant reminder of that shift-a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by it's cold and cruel power systems.Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile's signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band's shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album's core theme of violence. Melded into the band's twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album's ten tracks. Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band's first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg (Uniform) capturing and further amplifying the quartet's unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.While Chat Pile's debut album was plenty disturbing with it's B-movie-inspired interpretation of a "real American horror story", what the band depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from it's visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one's mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality.

The music of LA-based Sudanese-American artist Dua Saleh (they/them) explores the inner self and the world at large. With their long-awaited full-length debut, a collection of R&B-infused electronic indie-pop songs titled I SHOULD CALL THEM, they portray the spiritual power, resilience, and joy of love. Equal parts imaginative and lived-through, it's a statement record only Saleh could make. Now squarely at the helm of their first LP - guests include Ambré, Gallant, serpentwithfeet, and Sid Sriram - Saleh shapes their most vulnerable work to date, an apocalyptic narrative informed by environmental anxieties and their experiences as a lover, holding personal truth and hope amidst chaos. "It's important for me to heal by being fully myself," says Saleh, referring to the outsized role identity and gender expression play in their process. "I am being honest with myself with this record, this is my story."

The Ouroborus - that is, the icon of the snake or dragon eating its own tail - appears to some a statement of the brutality of nature. To others of a Gnostic disposition it symbolises the duality of the divine and earthly in mankind. But most commonly, it’s taken simply to mean the endless cycles of death and rebirth that characterise life on this planet. As such, it’s an image that looms large in the world of Goat, the ever-mysterious and endlessly revivifying collective whose latest album marks another adventure above and beyond this particular plane of reality. This may be a band that has named albums both Requiem and Oh Death, yet this eponymous salvo proves yet again that transcendence and metamorphosis are their watchwords. Goat sees this ever-unpredictable outfit summoning rhythmically-driven rituals in unmistakable, uplifting and scintillating style, equally adept at igniting dancefloors and expanding minds. ‘One More Death’ and ‘Goatbrain’ are spectacular curtain-raisers, embodying a hedonistic spirit driven by incisive funk and possessed by merciless fuzz/wah-drenched guitar. Yet elsewhere, the band’s love of hip hop is the fuel for the end-credits-epic album closer ‘Ourobourus’ which marries infectious chant to breathless Lalo Schifrin-style breakbeat action. And which also means ultimately, like the titular oldest allegorical symbol in alchemy, we’re right back where we started. As Brad Dourif’s character Hazel Moates intones in the 1979 movie Wiseblood, “Where you come from is gone; where you thought you were going weren’t never there. And where you are ain’t no good unless you can get away from it”; in Goat’s eternal now of renewal and revelation, there’s never been a more potent means of escape.

After the genre-bending Paradigmes (2021) and the Spanish escapade Teatro Lucido (2022), French neo-psych ensemble La Femme continue their world tour with Rock Machine, their first album entirely written in English. Composed over the past few years during various tours around the world, this new LP has been strongly inspired by the succession of dates in the USA, Canada, South America, Australia, and the encounters that ensued.Led by Marlon Magnée and Sacha Got for more than 10 years, La Femme has created it's own movement, inspired by loads of different music genres including new wave, rock, electro, punk, and more. On Rock Machine, the band returns to the new wave and synthwave roots of their acclaimed first LP Psycho Tropical Berlin ("Machine"), which they mix with an Anglo-Saxon rock sound from the 80s/90s ("Rock"). This album is an ode to rock 'n roll's effectiveness and timelessness, but also an ode to love and despair. With Rock Machine, La Femme continues to develop a universe beyond trends with their own sound and aesthetics. In addition to rock and synthwave sounds (of which lead single "Clover Paradise" is the perfect example), there's still electro ("Sweet Babe"), surf music ("Ciao Paris!"), disco with a UK punk twist ("My Generation"), and even elements of western. "Venus" is a marvelous mix between The Velvet Underground and The Mamas and the Papas, while "Love is Over" sounds like a "Madchester" single from the Hacienda time. The list of influences is long but always unique and coherent.

With two solo efforts under his belt and sold out headline tours in the rearview, iconic frontman, instrumentalist, and “one of rock’s finest vocalists” (KERRANG!), MYLES KENNEDY (Alter Bridge, Slash ft. Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators), is guided by a sense of keenly honed intuition on his third full-length album, The Art of Letting Go.The album follows 2021’s acclaimed The Ides of March, which notched a total of four #1 debuts across three countries, topping the US Top Current Hard Music Chart, the UK Official Rock & Metal Chart and Official Independent Album Chart, and Canada’s Hard Music Albums Chart.

"The album as a place to visit, look around, explore, and travel through … It's also a type of diary, or a moving sonic photo album, representing Traveling Excellently, physically, emotionally, dimensionally. All of these recordings are made from my living collection of samples interpreted and played with my guitar. I use the guitar as a sampler and synth controller, allowing me to make anything my "instrument." I have a microphone in my set-up, and when I'm playing with a group, or in an environment, I point the mic at the band or sound source, and if something happens that I want to play, I record it, and drop it into the sampler. The sample maps across the fretboard, and I can play it at any pitch and speed, effectively making anything that makes sound, my instrument. All possible realities are available. "

Born out of her time on the road, Samara Joy took her touring band into legendary Van Gelder Studios in February of 2024. This record, appropriately entitled Portrait, is a collection of standards (as well as one original) and features her singular voice, alongside arrangements from this tight-knit young group. The recording tells the story of the community she's created with a new generation of young players and is evocative of the energy of her incredible live show.

Here comes No Obligation, the second full-length release from The Linda Lindas further advances their unironic, joyful, and exciting trajectory of mashing up L.A. punk with alt-rock, garage rock, power pop, new wave, rock en español. No Obligation was written and recorded by the band during spring breaks, winter breaks, and long weekends (Lucia and Eloise are still in high school, Mila just finished middle school, and Bela is patiently waiting for them to get done with it already) and was produced by Carlos de la Garza (Paramore, Best Coast, Bleached). Known for their incredible musicianship and live performances, the band who has shared stages with and opened for Paramore, Japanese Breakfast, Jawbreaker, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, are about to embark on a massive two-month tour across America with Green Day. Look for headlining shows at small clubs in between-including a sold-out gig at the famously DIY Gilman Street in Berkeley. The new album, No Obligation, is out on October 11. No obligations. No expectations. No limits for The Linda Lindas.

Australian minimalist-jazz trio The Necks' 20th studio album, Bleed, explores a sublime language of stillness. With a single, 42-minute composition, The Necks masterfully express the unspeakable beauty of decay and space in yet another totally distinct entry in a vast and stunning body of work.

Following up on the global success of their album “Let The Bad Times Roll,” legendary So-Cal punk group The Offspring release their 11th album SUPERCHARGED. Produced by Bob Rock, the record continues the band's legacy with some of their best songwriting to date and unmatched musical energy.

Spiral In A Straight Line was recorded with legendary producer Ross Robinson (At The Drive-In, Korn, Glassjaw) and features guest appearances from Julien Baker and Lou Barlow.

Across Tucker Zimmerman’s over 50-year career, the Belgium-based/US-born octogenarian folk singer-songwriter has maintained a level of obscurity, earning a reputation as one of American folk music’s most underrated talents. His discography – a gorgeous collection of records that explore his wide range of influences, from 12-bar blues to full-band rock concertos and classical piano compositions – is a deeply personal sonic memoir; a tribute to the people, experiences, and sounds that have shaped his life. Over the years Zimmerman has received praise from contemporaries such as 4AD labelmate and collaborator, Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker (“Tucker Zimmerman is one of the greatest songwriters of all time”), and even David Bowie, who called Zimmerman “too qualified for folk” and placed his debut 1969 record Ten Songs on his list of 25 favorite albums for Vanity Fair. In the spirit of celebrating his past, opening up his world to more audiences, and continuing to build his legacy, Zimmerman resurfaces with Dance of Love, his 11th studio album and 4AD debut. Produced by Big Thief; listeners will find meaningful friendships, hard-but-valuable lessons, worldly experience, and ultimately, lots of love.