Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - 14 March (2025)

Produced by Graham Sutton (Bark Psychosis, These New Puritans) and Bambara, Birthmarks is New York band Bambara's fifth, and best, studio album. A wild, musically adventurous suite of songs that follows a host of lost characters caught in a multi-generational cycle of love, violence and rebirth. Recorded in the UK and the band's NYC studio, Birthmark shows the band exploring new musical territory with even more focus on production and atmosphere while maintaining the noir core of what they've perfected since their debut. The album features a wide range of instrumentation, with vocal contributions from friends Emma Acs (Crack Cloud), Bria Salmena, Madeline Johnston (Midwife), sax by Jeff Tobias (A. Savage), harp by Marilu Donavon (LEYA) and more. World-building both lyrically and sonically has always been Bambara's specialty, and with Birthmarks the world has never felt so vast.

Lonesome Drifter is the new album from GRAMMY Award-nominated artist Charley Crockett. Crockett co-produced the album alongside multi-GRAMMY Award-winning musician and producer Shooter Jennings. Over the course of just 10 days, they cut 12 tracks live at the legendary Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. Crockett's Island Records debut is a culmination of all that has come before, with the same unapologetic spirit, die-hard work ethic, and no-nonsense honesty that has driven his artistry across his 14 previous studio albums. In the end, Lonesome Drifter takes stock of Charley's road in the rearview as it paves a path into the future. Available on 180g black vinyl housed in a printed inner sleeve.

Last fall, when Circuit des Yeux (aka CdY, aka Haley Fohr) released the stand-alone single “God Dick,” she described the song as a passage leading from the past toward things to come. “It served a chrysalis function,” she wrote of the track, which morphs between orchestral grandeur and shuddering electronic percussion. Fohr called it, “A love banshee bursting through porcelain skin one hair at a time until, finally, the beast within is fully on display.” Out March 14th, 'Halo On The Inside' is the product of that metamorphosis. It is the butterfly and the beast – a rhapsodic, hedonistic, dance floor-adjacent, pagan-friendly, horns-adorning wall of sound and emotion. Halo on the Inside finds CdY renewed, recombinant, and thrillingly alien. A Chicago based musician, composer, and multidisciplinary artist, Fohr’s work defies easy categorization. It has encompassed critically acclaimed albums, free-form improvisation, painting, audio visual installations, and large ensemble compositions. She has performed in an anechoic chamber (a room with no echo), written for a 50-piece children’s choir, and plunged from a rooftop (under the supervision of a stunt-coordinator). There’s shock in metamorphosis, 'Halo On The Inside' tells us, but there’s also levity and beauty. A moment of seclusion and dislocation yielding to rebirth and ominous beauty.

Coheed and Cambria presents their forthcoming album, The Father of Make Believe, out via Virgin Music Group. The new full-length marks the 10th studio album from the New York band and continues the narrative of The Amory Wars / Vaxis universe, following their 2022 album, Vaxis Act II: A Window of the Waking Mind. 

Liverpool-based four piece Courting's new album Lust for Life, Or: 'How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story', is centered around duality. The intention is to bring together everything Courting have created thus far into a succinct, direct, record. Each song on the album is 'twinned', with another, existing within the same type of world. Take for example the opening and closing bookends of the record, both featuring the same string melody but with the first serving as an orchestral introduction, and the second as a speeding dance punk track. The aim is clear as Courting balance the indie and pop songwriting of their previous records with their most experimental moments, each detail more refined than the last time.

On of Montreal's seminal album The Sunlandic Twins, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Barnes followed up their 2004 Polyvinyl debut, Satanic Panic in the Attic, with what became the band's most commercially successful album to date. Originally released in April 2005, The Sunlandic Twins marked a significant turning point for of Montreal, showcasing Barnes' evolving songwriting and a shift towards a more electronic and dance-oriented sound. The album's vibrant blend of synth-pop and psych rock helped cement it's status as a fan favorite and a defining moment in the band's career. Iconic tracks like "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games" and "The Party's Crashing Us" became some of the most beloved songs in the band's extensive catalog.To celebrate the album's 20th anniversary, Polyvinyl is thrilled to announce a special edition reissue. Lovingly remastered by Glenn Schick, with a half-speed vinyl master by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios, The Sunlandic Twins (20th Anniversary Edition) features the original 13-track album along with a treasure trove of bonus material from the era, including previously unreleased tracks and rarities that offer a deeper glimpse into the creative process behind this mesmerizing record.The Sunlandic Twins set Kevin Barnes on a path to becoming one of the most influential songwriters in independent pop music. The album's success paved the way for more critically acclaimed releases, numerous late-night TV appearances-including The Late Show with David Letterman and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon-and brilliant collaborations with artists such as Solange, Janelle Monáe, and Jon Brion. Of Montreal went on to perform across the globe, gracing festival stages at Coachella, Sasquatch!, Pitchfork Music Festival, and beyond, while also amassing hundreds of millions of streams worldwide.

‘Moonlight Concessions’ goes back to basics, a return for Throwing Muses to their esoteric off-kilter best courtesy of Kristin’s pin-sharp sketches and their suitably abrasive musical arrangements. The album follows their acclaimed ‘Sun Racket’ from 2020, a heady set filled with tough and tender tales spiked with surreal imagery. Produced by Kristin Hersh at Steve Rizzo's Stable Sound Studio in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, ‘Moonlight Concessions’ is a collection of snippets from everyday life writ large - think Raymond Carver Short Cuts, overheard conversations, recounted happenings and telling one-liners, all sewed together to illustrate the times as they slowly mature, fully peppered with original Muses’ vim and vigour. ‘Drugstore Drastic’ is a kerbside soliloquy caught en route to a more alluring rendezvous. Built on a brisk acoustic strum with a guitar sub-melody underpinning proceedings, it’s an unfolding tale of social awareness from a blurred sub-conscious. ‘Summer Of Love’ began as a bet with a guy for a dollar that revolved around the idea that the seasons don’t change us. The album opener, it’s a haunting baroque overture, bowed and brooding. ‘Libretto’s strings offset the acoustic ambience, the hot and cold of longing at the very heart of it, a thematic driver filed with warmth in a safe haven lubricated by tequila. Written in the differing South Coast environs of The Gulf Of Mexico and Southern California, ‘Moonlight Concessions’ pulls from the star clusters that light both, generating optimism and hope in varying degrees. Hersh explains, “In New Orleans the stars look greenish-blue, as it’s below sea level and swamp-lit. But on Moonlight Beach, they glow icy white. All these songs were written in these two glowy places, which helped our sonic technique find itself.”

Across a remarkable run of releases in barely half a decade, London's Loraine James has established her identity through a blend of refined composition, gritty experimentation, and unpredictable, intricate electronic programming. While titles released under her given name on Hyperdub tend toward IDM-influenced, vocal-heavy collaborations, James reserves her Ghostly International-signed alias, Whatever the Weather, for an inward gaze that explores innate "emotional temperature" and environment (shown in degree-based track titling). Her second full-length is a markedly warmer outing compared to it's predecessor, as signaled by the shift from LP1's arctic cover photo to LP2's desert climes. Common to both albums is the mastering work of friend and collaborator Josh Eustis (aka Telefon Tel Aviv), who lends his keen ear to James' complexities to craft a strikingly three-dimensional sonic experience. Flowing from hypnotic atmospheres to mottled rhythms to processed collages of diaristic field recordings, Whatever the Weather II is a compelling union of organic and human elements from one of electronic music's most imaginative talents.The lead single and closing track to Whatever the Weather's (Loraine James) new LP, "12°C", drifts from bustling human spaces into a concrete groove, weaving melody and texture into a truly unusual, soul-stirring fullness. In it's final moments, a languid acoustic guitar and gentle, finger-tapped beat join her pitch-shifted voice. Whatever the Weather II is full of such passages, where formal composition appears like a film in negative, and conventions are upturned with wit, intelligence, and skill.