Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - 25 October (2024)

Recorded with producer Nick Launay at Foo Fighters' 606 Studios in Los Angeles, on the same desk that captured Nirvana's Nevermind and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, the latest Amyl and The Sniffers album is their most diverse yet. It stretches from classic punk to the glammy strut of hit single "U Should Not Be Doing That" to the stormy balladry of "Big Dreams" to pugnacious punk of "Jerkin." The Sniffers are back and back with a vengeance - bigger, brighter, smarter and sharper in every way. Cartoon Black Edition - black vinyl in single pocket jacket with printed sleeve and 11x17 poster.

Anna McClellan’s childhood summers were spent in front of the TV, cementing a love of narrative that would later reveal itself through songwriting. By seventeen, Anna McClellan was performing original songs in her hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. Her debut album, Fire Flames, garnered attention and earned her an opening slot on a Frankie Cosmos tour, setting the stage for her subsequently adored albums, 2018’s Yes and No and I saw first light, released in late 2020. Now, with her forthcoming fourth album Electric Bouquet, McClellan crafts a musical journey that unfolds like one of her cherished television series. Each track is an episode, chronicling the past four years of her life – navigating electrician school, a cross-country move, and relationships gone sour. Electric Bouquet showcases McClellan's ability to transform life's myriad experiences into captivating musical stories. Recorded in multiple sessions in Baltimore, MD and Omaha and co-produced with long-time collaborator Ryan McKeever and Another Recording Company Studios engineer Adam Roberts, Electric Bouquet shifts seamlessly between piano-driven melodies and guitar-anchored anthems, each song a miniature universe slowly opening unto itself.

“Christmas is constant,” says Ben Folds. “Allowing you to take stock of what’s different, to understand who you are and all the ways you’ve grown and changed.” That notion lies at the heart of Folds’ brilliantly titled new holiday collection, Sleigher. Built on an eclectic mix of originals and reimagined classics, the album examines the passage of time through the lens of Christmas, reflecting on memory, loss, and longing as it explores the variety of ways the yuletide season marks the chapters of our lives. The songs are playful here, full of humor and cheer, but they’re also laced with an inescapable sense of melancholy, a looming darkness that always seems to hover around the periphery of those late December nights. Folds’ performances, meanwhile, flirt with the standards while stretching the boundaries of tradition, at times offering up flashes of Vince Guaraldi and Burt Bacharach while still remaining true to Folds’ singularly virtuosic brand of off-kilter indie pop. The result is not so much a Ben Folds Christmas record as it is a Ben Folds record set at Christmas, a meditation on the inexorable turning of the calendar and our ever changing selves as observed at the most wonderful—and challenging—time of the year.

Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023 provides the first-ever comprehensive career retrospective to fully explore the depth and breadth of Bryan Ferry as a solo artist. It brings together for the first time his classic output with Island Records, Polydor, Virgin/EG, and BMG, and brings the story right up to date, spanning a period of over 50 years. Featuring 20 tracks that provide the perfect entry point for people who are curious about Bryan Ferry's music and offers a wider perspective to those who are familiar

The original score for Ken Burns’s new two-part documentary, LEONARDO da VINCI, with new compositions by Caroline Shaw, is available via Nonesuch Records on October 25, 2024; the documentary airs on November 18 and 19 at 8pm ET on PBS, PBS.org, and the PBS App. The album features performances by the composer’s longtime collaborators Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion, and Roomful of Teeth as well as John Patitucci. Shaw wrote and recorded new music for LEONARDO da VINCI, marking the first time a Ken Burns film has featured an entirely original score.LEONARDO da VINCI is directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon. The film, which explores the life and work of the fifteenth century polymath Leonardo da Vinci, is Burns’s first non-American subject. It also marks a significant change in the team’s filmmaking style, which includes using split screens with images, video, and sound from different periods to further contextualize Leonardo’s art and scientific explorations. LEONARDO da VINCI looks at how the artist influenced and inspired future generations, and it finds in his soaring imagination and profound intellect the foundation for a conversation we are still having today: what is our relationship with nature and what does it mean to be human?“No single person can speak to our collective effort to understand the world and ourselves,” said Ken Burns. “But Leonardo had a unique genius for inquiry, aided by his extraordinary skills as an artist and scientist, that helps us better understand the natural world that we are part of and to appreciate more fully what it means to be alive and human.”“To help give depth and dimension to Leonardo’s inner life, and to carry our viewers on his personal journey, we enlisted the composer Caroline Shaw,” McMahon says in the album’s liner note. “Caroline’s existing body of music—joyful, daring, at times transcendent, and wholly unique—seemed to speak directly to Leonardo, a seeking soul who, 500 years after his death, can come across as strikingly modern. A fully original score, we believed, would add crucial connective tissue to areas where the record of Leonardo’s life is thin and it’s possible to briefly lose his trail. The music Caroline created is dynamic, enthralling and filled with wonder.“This soundtrack is a testament to the inspired efforts of Jennifer Dunnington, who marshaled it into being, the brilliant musicians and vocalists who, with the help of Alex Venguer, Neal Shaw, Colton Dodd and Tim Marchiafava, made it soar, and most of allCaroline Shaw, who might be Leonardo’s soulmate from across time,” he continues. “With her help, the Leonardo who emerges is no wizard shrouded in mystery, but a prideful, obsessive, at times lonely or flustered, occasionally ecstatic, and, in the end, content man who is in ways both modern and thoroughly of his time.”“As we set out to explore Leonardo’s life, we realized that while he was very much a man of his time, he was also interested in something more universal,” said Sarah Burns. “Leonardo was uniquely focused on finding connections throughout nature, something that strikes us as very modern today, but which of course has a long history.”

Listening to Fashion Club's self-produced second album ALove You Cannot Shake feels like being caught in the crossfireof a profound beam of light. You can't help but feel bothenlivened and exposed as it's aberrant synth lines, artful stringsand disfigured guitars swell into larger-than-life crescendos,which evoke a divine yet probing spotlight.Pascal Stevenson, the Los Angeles-based musician behindFashion Club, likens the experience of hearing A Love YouCannot Shake to staring into the sun, and though the recordwasn't written with religion in mind, it's heavenly sonics andemotional sagacity also make it feel like a prophetic encounter.The album was shaped by Stevenson's gender transition andsobriety journey and parses her fluid emotions surroundingthese events and other personal trials and tribulations. But asmuch as it's a dialogue between Stevenson's current andformer selves, it's also an invitation for listeners to join her inthe work of discarding bitterness and re-centering hope,especially when such efforts feel futile. Musically, A Love YouCannot Shake is an unshackling of expectations, asStevenson's previous stint as bassist in the L.A. post-punkoutfit Moaning and her first record as Fashion Club, 2022'sScrutiny, didn't necessarily reflect the full range of her taste,which includes ambient, pop, classical and dance music, orembody her sensitive tenderness and femininity.A Love You Cannot Shake also thrives on a fluid sonic palette.The album's magnetic immersiveness hinges on it's strangedynamic shifts, jagged production and ambitious songstructures with parts that don't repeat-choices influenced byher love of left-field electro-pop and her classical musicbackground. While Stevenson handled most of theinstrumentals on Scrutiny, this LP is much more collaborative,featuring an array of contributors who lent strings, piano, pedalsteel and more. Plus, this album boasts country harmoniesfrom Perfume Genius ("Forget"), high-pitched coos from JaySom ("Ghost") and gauzy whispers from Julie Byrne ("RottenMind"). Stevenson's vocal evolution is also on display with thisrecord, embracing a softer delivery that's more reflective of herpersonality and identity

One of the universal experiences of life on Earth is staring, neck craned, at the cosmos. The vastness of one's internal life meets the vastness of space, and in that moment those perspectives fuse in a state of wonder and curiosity. Space As An Instrument, the new album by French artist and musician Félicia Atkinson, invites listeners to explore the phantasmic landscapes created in such transformative encounters, when the mind is open and receptive to it's environment. Like being absorbed by the immensity of the night sky, this music dilates the imagination and helps us to sit comfortably in the mystery of the ineffable. We are guided through Space As An Instrument by the piano, it's a linear story told through restrained, iterative melodies that become entwined with the sounds at the music's margins - a wisp of electronics, a pinprick of an enunciated consonant. They were recorded on Atkinson's phone, which was placed next to the keys, or behind her, with the sound of the room bleeding through to give a sense of the place and time of the encounter. She describes these sessions as meetings where she and the piano commune to co-create these spiraling phrases and vaporous dissonances moment by moment. Complicating this dynamic is the presence of digital pianos, which exist in the surreal space of diodes and LED displays. They act as avatars of their three-dimensional counterparts: nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. Still, the inhabited world of people, water, and wind can be heard throughout Space As An Instrument. Often these recordings are integrated into the backdrop of electronics, or reduced to the sound of movements whose physical forms are obscured: the microphone straining against a forceful gust on "Sorry," arhythmic footsteps traversing an invisible terrain on "Pensées Magiques." These field recordings take us to the brink of synesthetic experience, allowing us to glimpse with our ear the topography of the imagination. But Atkinson's music resists any kind of singular perspective on the scene, or any distinct conclusion. "It doesn't explain anything," she says, "but it translates the way I perceive it, somehow." Atkinson is a polymath by nature, engrossed in a variety of daily artistic practices that nourish one another. In her garden, she performs the slow work of cross-species relationship building, cultivating an ideal space for introspection and further creation; many of the album's vocal and electronic elements were recorded there. Poetry, which she prizes for it's capacity to render the everyday tools of meaning-making more enigmatic, becomes folded into the music as well. She paints as often as time allows. One personal limitation Atkinson finds in painting, the rendering of perspective, has become one of her music's defining characteristics. The vantage point of the listener is slippery and undefined, with sounds at once appearing gigantic and minuscule, distant and immediate. Félicia Atkinson says her music exists "on the verge of understanding and not understanding," which often precludes such literal interpretations. But in that nebulous space there is humility and openness, and perhaps enough empathy to understand the consciousness of a massive, frozen chunk of water. With the listener's perspective diffused into many different vantage points, how might that, too, become a vehicle for the development of compassion? As we listen, we encounter the wisdom that there is meaning not just in the experience of the sublime, that radical juxtaposition of limitlessness and intimacy, but also in the continuum of countless individuals that have taken the same journey.

Fievel Is Glauque's debut album for Fat Possum is the record the band always wanted to make but were unable until now. Beautifully recorded, 26 musicians all giving virtuosic performances. This is a stunner. Already critically adorned, Rong Weicknes, is Fievel Is Glauque's greatest achievement yet. An album where the hypnotic rhythms of Stereolab meet the sophisticated jazz-rock of Steely Dan. Ethereal vocals float over lush, intricate arrangements that blend electronic textures with jazz grooves. A landscape of nostalgia and innovation, where every note is meticulously crafted to create a captivating sonic tapestry. This album embodies a perfect fusion of avant-pop sensibilities and timeless musical craftsmanship.

Green Day’s seventh studio album American Idiot was released in September 2004 and has since sold over 23 million copies worldwide. The album is a punk rock opera masterpiece that won the Best Rock Album at the 2005 Grammy Awards©. Five hit singles were released from the album: “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, “Holiday”, “Wake Me Up When September Ends”, “Jesus of Suburbia”, and the title track, “American Idiot”. Limited Edition Super Deluxe Box Sets (vinyl and CD), to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of this legendary album. The CD Super Deluxe contains 4 CDs which feature the original album and also includes 15 unreleased demos, a 15-song 2004 concert from Irving Plaza, NYC (9 songs previously unreleased), and 14 tracks that were released as B-Sides and bonus tracks. The box set is completed with two Blu-rays that feature the film “Heart Like A Hand Grenade”, 35 minutes of Green Day live at the BBC, and a new, unreleased documentary: “20 Years of American Idiot” plus a 48-page book, an enamel pin set, sticker sheet, and cloth patch.

Halsey’s fifth studio album The Great Impersonator is due out on Columbia Records on October 25th. In this confessional, concept album, Halsey explores who she would be as an artist and a person if she existed throughout different decades.

Katie Gavin's debut What A Relief taps into theunguarded self-possession and homespun popsensibility of singers like Alanis Morissette, Fiona Appleand Ani DiFranco, and uses their tenacity as a north starfor Gavin's own trek towards self-discovery. "This recordspans a lot of my life - it's about having a really deepdesire for connection, but also encountering all theobstacles that stood in my way to be able to achieve that,patterns of isolation or even boredom with the real workof love" they say.Written over the course of seven years, What A Reliefcomprises a set of songs that Gavin always loved butwhich "had something in them" that she and herbandmates felt didn't quite fit within the universe theywere trying to cultivate with MUNA. Many of them werewritten on acoustic guitar, and are rooted in "a style ofmusic that's very much in my blood, and natural for me,"as typified by the Women & Songs CDs that Gavin loves,which compiled music by artists like Tracy Chapman, ToriAmos and Sarah McLachlan.That openness of spirit is the overwhelming character ofWhat A Relief, an album that's refreshing in it'swillingness to accept people as they come, even as itremains in dogged pursuit of a life that's kinder, wiserand more loving. Gavin's explorations of desire andintimacy feel time-worn and necessary - songs thatmight teach a generation if not how to live, exactly, thenat least how to look within oneself for guidance abouthow to move forward.

PATTERNS is the 15-song follow-up to Kelsea Ballerini’s GRAMMY-nominated ROLLING UP THE WELCOME MAT. Again teaming with producer/songwriter Alysa Vanderheym, the 30-year-old multiple Country Music Association award winner has delivered a song cycle that embodies the next chapter in a life completely embraced. Beyond her “Cowboys Cry Too” duet with Alternative sensation Noah Kahan, she explores what it means to move on, fall in love, stay in love, hate love, exhale love - and face her own patterns, good and bad. Written with Vanderheym, Songwriter Hall of Fame inductee Hillary Lindsey, Songwriter of the Year GRAMMY nominee Jessie Jo Dillon and Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild, Welcome Mat’s vulnerable intimacy is met with some of the most intoxicating melodies that reach across genres. Atmospheric, sunny, rhythmic and whispered, PATTERNS balances self-discovery with an album one can blissfully surrender to.

Grammy nominated Laura Marling is back with her eighth studio album Patterns in Repeat. Now eight albums and 15 years into her career as one of the most acclaimed, prolific and respected songwriters of her generation (Grammy and Mercury Nominated and Brit award winning) Patterns in Repeat was written following the birth of her daughter in 2023 and finds Laura reflecting on her motherhood experience as well as more broadly diving deeper into her reckoning with the ideas and behaviours we pass down through family over generations.

A serendipitous conversation brought the project to life. Moot! allowed the group to re-appreciate the recording process, using a combination of live recording and studio techniques. The album spans psych, alternative rock and post-punk mixed with their signature electronics and sampling practice. The record was made as an experiment, to be enjoyed, not as spectacle.

35 years since their groundbreaking platinum-certified album Doolittle catapulted the band into the UK Top Ten, and 20 years since their celebrated reformation at Coachella, Pixies are deep into their second act, and in the midst of a creative purple patch. The Night The Zombies Came is Pixies’ tenth album, if you count their classic 1987 4AD mini-LP, Come On Pilgrim, and first new music since 2022’s acclaimed Doggerel LP. 13 new songs that find Pixies looking ahead to the most cinematic record of their career. Druidism, apocalyptic shopping malls, mediaeval themed restaurants, 12th century poetic form, surf rock, gargoyles, bog people, and the distinctive dry drum sound of 1970s-era Fleetwood Mac are just some of the disparate wonders that inform the new songs. The Night The Zombies Came will be released via BMG..

Early in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll's title character quickly loses all sense of self after obeying an EAT ME and a DRINK ME. “Who in the world am I?” she wonders. “Ah, that's the great puzzle.” Pom Pom Squad’s Mia Berrin has had that question tumbling around her head too—due to the endless feedback and expectations since releasing her sublime debut album ‘Death of a Cheerleader’ in 2021, rather than any enchanted cake. “Receiving attention, negative or positive, left me feeling very fragmented, constantly thinking about other people’s perceptions,” Berrin says. “At a certain point I felt like I couldn’t even control my own reflection. All these different versions of me were swimming around in people’s heads and on the internet, eclipsing the real me.” And on Pom Pom Squad’s sophomore LP, aptly titled ‘Mirror Starts Moving Without Me’, Berrin traverses the hall of mirrors to celebrate the true self at the heart.

Sophie Allison has always written candidly about her life, making Soccer Mommy one of indie rock's most interesting and beloved artists of the last decade. On Evergreen, Allison is again writing about her life but life's different these days. Since 2022's Sometimes, Forever, Allison experienced a profound and personal loss. New songs emerged, unflinching reflections on what she was feeling. She wanted them to sound that way too, as true to the demos as possible. Nothing overindulgent, everything

Big Hand—in reference to the constant moving of time on a clock—can gather a sense of anxiety, excitement, hope and hopelessness. In a more literal sense, a big hand can pack a punch, swell, break and recover. The St. Louis hardcore-punk band, Squint render their perspective through their debut album, Big Hand, by a summation of decades of influences of punk, hardcore, alternative and art-rock. With the collaboration of producer Jon Markson (Samiam, Drain, The Story So Far) and much touring, Squint has developed their sound & presence to their fullest potential. A track like “Sunshine” demonstrates Squint’s core identity—fuzzy hardcore with a catchy melody inspired by mid-late 80s punk/hardcore like Rites of Spring, Hüsker Dü and Black Flag—however, Squint dive much further into the well of 90s alternative rock with songs like “Magic” and “Half Asleep” which pull in many cues from bands like Pixies to Third Eye Blind and Everclear. Building on top of the Squint’s ringing guitar melodies, they’ve crafted larger choruses than before, while still staying true to their core. Lyrically, vocalist Brennen Wilkinson poetically exhibits his frustrations with time and growth while facing obstacles that result in getting stuck in the same routines—it’s a constant push and pull of progression and regression. Wilkinson’s distinctive voice is shouted on each song, expressed in angst, but also hope. In the closing, self-titled track, “Big Hand”, Squint builds on a slow tempo to fast hook, and lyrics shift from a sense of emptiness to an aspiration to take back control of time—or the Big Hand.

The new album from Tears For Fears, Songs For A Nervous Planet, features four new studio tracks plus live recordings of Tears For Fears on tour and at their best. The album features live performances of hit songs like "Shout," "Head Over Heels," "Everybody Wants To Rule The World," "Mad World" and more. Spanning all eras of the band from The Hurting to The Tipping Point and beyond, this record takes you on the incomparable sonic journey that is a Tears For Fears live show and their career to date.

Longing. Heartbreak. Levity. Joy. Being filled with love for all things. All of these sensations flow at once through Canadian singer-songwriter Tess Parks’ new album, Pomegranate. Re-establishing Parks as the consummate artist-observer against a swirling nouveau-delic backdrop, her third solo album arrives via Fuzz Club and was produced by multi-instrumentalist and close collaborator Ruari Meehan, who shared mixing duties with Grammy-nominated engineer Mikko Gordon (The Smile, Gaz Coombes, Arcade Fire).

Welcome to Strawberry Hotel. Here, gleaming tensile techno forms clean, straight lines while scratchy acoustic guitars scuff up edges to produce ghostly audio. Poetry is snatched from the overhead, removed from the overheard; words borrowed from the ether are spun into dizzying new shapes, sometimes reappearing in new settings, twisted back to front, side to side. Each track a very different room - some soundtracked by little more than metronomic kick drum and robotic voice, others deep in layer upon layer of melody and euphoric noise - and each room unmistakably, uniquely Underworld. The only advice from Underworld’s Rick Smith and Karl Hyde upon entering: “Please don’t shuffle.” Strawberry Hotel features the singles and the colour red and denver luna, as well as new release Black Poppies - a celestial love song, a hymn to the universe and to boundless, positive change. Ambient and beatless, Black Poppies is a celebration of full dancefloors and the beauty of life itself.