Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - 21 February (2025)

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Basia Bulat doesn’t live in a château. The property at the heart of the songwriter’s new studio album is at once her apartment, her jam-space—and the inside of her head. Basia’s Palace is a place festooned with love and memory, bad wiring; it’s a paradise that comes alive in the wee hours of the night, at a time that’s suited to video games and Leonard Cohen records, when you sit in all that richness, taking in all the mess we inherit. Reuniting with co-producer Mark Lawson, she found herself moving through a dreamworld of whispers, synths and early Eurovision tunes, Cohen’s I’m Your Man and Air’s Moon Safari, her great uncle’s gauzy Maryla Rodowicz LPs. The result feels like an album that was concealed behind the backings of Bulat’s childhood photos—tracks like “My Angel,” where mystery and romance mingle over squelchy synths + drum-machine, with a soaring string arrangement by Drew Jurecka (Dua Lipa, Alvvays), or “Laughter”— which was mixed, like all tracks on the record, by legendary engineer Tucker Martine (Beth Orton, Neko Case, The National)— that takes a quiet domestic scene and sees it build to a deafening sublime. “Disco Polo” is a track Bulat’s been threatening to make forever—a folk-song named for a genre of trashy Polish dance music that was beloved of her father—whereas “Baby,” which took years to finish, makes an elegant dance number out of an oh-too-familiar predicament: “Baby, baby, baby,” Basia sings, “I don’t learn!” At some moments there are shades of Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot’s “Bonnie and Clyde” or Charles Aznavour’s “Emmenez-Moi”; at others it’s the silicon-shiny sweetness of The Cardigans’ “Lovefool” or Air’s Moon Safari. Basia’s Palace is set to be released February 21st, 2025 via Secret City Records.

Way Through is a collaborative album by Toronto musicians Chris Cummings, Joseph Shabason, and Thom Gill (as Cici Arthur). Inspired by moments of discovery in familiar places, the album's title reflects the feeling of uncovering hidden paths in life. Musically, it blends mid-century influences like Jobim and Sinatra, with producer-instrumentalists Shabason and Gill crafting lush, expansive soundscapes. Featuring a 30-piece orchestra led by Owen Pallett, the album brings a grand scale to Cummings' intimate, reflective lyrics.The project began in 2020 when Cummings lost his job and turned to full-time music for the first time in his life. His collaborators tailored the arrangements to showcase his understated vocal delivery against sweeping orchestral backdrops. Songs like "Cartwheels for Coins" and "Prior Times" explore themes of regret and emotional complexity, contrasting the grandeur of the music with Cummings' quiet introspection.Tracks like "Damaged Goods" provide upbeat moments with doo-wop harmonies, while the cinematic closer "No Fight Or Flight" emphasizes the filmic quality of the album. Through it's orchestral richness and deeply personal lyrics, Way Through captures the tension between ambition and realism, offering a poignant reflection on life's unpredictable journey.

Patterson Hood's first solo record in over a decade was born out of a friendship with producer Chris Funk (The Decemberists). The pair would often perform together for fun and during Hood's solo tours", making far-off plans to make a record together. They eventually went into Jackpot Studios in Portland. Many of the songs were composed on piano marking a bigger departure from his work with Drive-By Truckers than prior solo efforts. Guest appearances from Waxahatchee", Wednesday and Lydia Loveless.

The new Pissgrave album Malignant Worthlessness will be unleashed on Profound Lore. This completes the band's trilogy begun with 2015's Suicide Euphoria and it's successor Posthumous Humiliation, culminating in Pissgrave's most punishing, deranged, and blasphemous release yet. Malignant Worthlessness will serve it's purpose as a calamity by unleashing total blight to the modern death metal current. Produced once again by the band's longtime conspirator Arthur Rizk.

This is the first ever album release by cult artist Q Lazzarus. This compilation features the iconic 'Goodbye Horses' alongside a treasure trove of previously unreleased tracks recorded during her time in New York City and London in the Eighties and Nineties. 'Goodbye Horses' first appeared in 1988, via Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob, but it would not become fully lodged into popular consciousness until it infamously materialized again in Demme's The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. It is now a viral song on TikTok and IG. The album comes out in conjunction with the ocumentary film Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus by Eva Aridjis Fuentes.

Hailing from northeast England, Fender is a British songwriter with a penchant for euphoric, hard-hitting guitar anthems. Bursting onto the scene with a BRITs Critics' Choice win in 2018, his first two albums, Hypersonic Missiles (2019) and Seventeen Going Under (2021), both debuted at #1 on the UK chart and earned Platinum status. With over 2 billion global streams, he has headlined stadiums in Newcastle and at major festivals like Reading/Leeds, while also supporting icons like The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen. If?Seventeen Going Under?was his "coming of age" album, People Watching is his next step - colorful stories and observations of everyday characters living their everyday, but often extraordinary, lives. Sam produced People Watching alongside bandmates Dean Thompson and Joe Atkinson over two years, working first in London in 2023 with producer Markus Dravs, and then early in 2024 in Los Angeles with Granduciel.

Endlessly talented sonic nonconformist Saya Gray reveals plans for her debut album SAYA, set for release on February 21, 2025 via Dirty Hit. Since her first project release, the critically-acclaimed 19 MASTERS, only a couple years ago, Saya Gray has become globally defined by the undefinable – an artist whose work is limitless, beguiling, intimate, exhilarating and truly unlike any other musician releasing songs right now. It’s easy to call something “one of one;” it’s harder to live it, breathe it, encapsulate it, and share it with the world: Saya Gray embodies that rarified space and invites everyone in. SAYA finally came after the dissolution of a troubled romantic entanglement; Gray booked a flight to Japan in the fall of 2023. And like a feel-good movie protagonist, Gray detangled herself from the outstanding psychic ties by journeying solo on a cross-country road trip. Moved by the vastness of albums by the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, as well as her Canadian folk forebear, Joni Mitchell, Gray kept an acoustic guitar in the passenger’s seat, just in case inspiration would strike. In recording SAYA, Gray sanded and fine tuned the rough edges of records past into more cohesive works of melodic folk songcraft.

2025 is a milestone year for Silverstein. The post-hardcore giants will not only be celebrating 25 years as a band, but also the release of their ambitious two-part 11th studio album project - the first part titled Antibloom will be released on February 21, 2025. In May of 2024, the band headed to Joshua Tree, CA to fully indulge themselves in the solitude of the desert and begin studio work on their new album. They found themselves so deeply inspired by the atmosphere that they ended up with more songs than could fit on one piece of music - thus birthing the double album concept. "Antibloom is a reference to the desert, the empty vastness, the harshness, something we experienced while making the record. This is not a concept record, the concept was making a record in this space, and while the lyrics/songs are not directly connected in any shape or form, the concept of death or mortality does appear a lot". (Shane Told/Singer)

This eagerly-anticipated third studio album by the Canadian singer Tate McRae, features the singles 'It's OK I'm OK' and '2 Hands'. So Close to What captures 'the journey of growing up when the road ahead feels infinite' and offers an 'introspective exploration of self-discovery, love, and searching for balance' in uncertain times. 

This self-titled work published album by singer-songwriter and master guitarist Ted Lucas has achieved an almost mystical reputation among aficionados and collectors. Ted Lucas is a seamless marriage of moody odes and raga style instrumentals regarded by many to be, simply put, the greatest private press folk/psych album ever recorded. Lucas was a fixturein the Detroit rock scene of the sixties and seventies. His first band, The Spike Drivers, was one of the very first true psych bands, the Motor City’s answer to Jefferson Airplane and The Byrds. Following that band's collapse, Lucas paid bills doing session work with Motown. And there he recorded, in 1972, the demo for Warner Brothers which would become Ted Lucas, released in two private editions in 1975 and known informally to friends and family as The OM Album, after Lucas' own label. The album was released with artwork by the legendary Stanley Mouse originally created for Jimi Hendrix.

Following the universal acclaim for their two first records, The Murder Capital are back with ‘Blindness’, the vividly realised, clear-sightedly ambitious new album. A record that’s momentous and charged with momentum, it’s full of geography – of the mind, and of a Dublin-formed band whose members are now scattered around Ireland, London and Europe – yet bristles with an intense energy. There’s a wider, richer perspective animating The Murder Capital’s new set of songs, brought on from the diverse insights the five members were bringing to the creative process, differing worldviews arising from their literal new positions in the world. Drummer Diarmuid Brennan was living in Berlin, bass player Gabriel “G” Paschal Blake was in Letterkenny, guitarist Cathal “Pump“ Roper was in Donegal, and guitarist Damien “Irv” Tuit and McGovern were in London. The album prioritizes urgency, energy, freshness – all baked into the songs from their earliest incarnations, recorded in LA with the help of Grammy-winning producer John Congleton.

Rooted in love and childhood memoir, Rarely Do I Dream is a triumph of American gothic imagination — where storybook innocence dissolves into a radioactive billow of teenage drifters, drug-addled hustlers, and old-world folklore. Drifting between propulsive electronica and hallucinatory rock songs, Powers’ singular voice always glows front and center as the neon road sign pointing home.