Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - 4 October (2024)

Sung Tongs is Animal Collective’s fifth studio album originally released in 2004 and features Avey Tare and Panda Bear. For its 20th anniversary, the 2xLP has been pressed on color vinyl for the first time, Canary and Ruby, and is housed in a gatefold jacket. Sung Tongs marked the beginning of a prolific five year period in which Animal Collective went on to release their game-changing albums Feels (2005), Strawberry Jam (2007) and Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009). At the time of Sung Tongs’ release, Rolling Stone called it “one of the more creative and accomplished records you’ll hear this year,” adding, “Their songs cackle with soulful eccentricity while dazzling you with deceptive chops and improvised manipulations.” Pitchfork later named it one of the best albums of the 2000s, raving, “Sung Tongs is an emotionally thrilling record, impossibly giddy and fully-charged with big, raucous enthusiasm: Acoustic strums and wild, flailing voices (including some mind-blowing harmonies by vocalists Avey Tare and Panda Bear) coalesce into something sublimely weird and undeniably beautiful.”

Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition) releases on Oct 4, 2024, celebrating the original album’s 30th anniversary. Written when Aphex Twin (Richard D. James) was in his early 20s, the album gained critical acclaim both upon release and retrospectively (10/10 Pitchfork review, #2 Best Ambient Album of All Time, 4 star Rolling Stone review +more). Aphex Twin and SAW II’s influence continues to grow and take new meaning across generations.

With you in spirit, the fourth Balance and Composure LP, is an arresting, atmospheric collection of melodic post-punk and towering rock. Due out October 4 on long-time collaborator and Grammy-nominated producer Will Yip's Memory Music, it's the band's first LP in eight years, and a thrilling full-length comeback after their four-year hiatus. It thunders and stirs, dipping between beautiful, crystalline arrangements and punishing, earth-shaking climaxes; in between all, a gripping, near-physical tension crackles and growls and grooves, waiting to rip open.It's an intensely self-reflective record for vocalist and guitarist Jon Simmons, an uprooting and examination of the supports on which a life is built. Preemptive grief, wrestling with god and faith, familial responsibility, familial mortality-these are the things Simmons was carrying while writing this material. They're also things he was trying, for better and worse, to avoid-hence the record's title.with you in spirit feels like the work of songwriters reaching new heights, exploring new depths. Sometimes, the record itself feels like a band grappling with it's own avoidance, it's own mortality, and deciding to face these things the only way they know how. Balance and Composure are with us in spirit, yes, but in the flesh, too, for now.

Blood Incantation’s Absolute Elsewhere is unlike anything you’ve ever heard before. At roughly 45 minutes, the two compositions that make up this album are as confounding as they are engaging in their scope, melding the 70's prog leanings of Tangerine Dream (whose Thorsten Quaesching appears on „The Stargate [Tablet II]”) with the deathly intent of Morbid Angel. Absolute Elsewhere, which takes its title from the mid-70's prog collective (best known as a celestial stopover for King Crimson drummer, Bill Bruford), Blood Incantation are leaving the notion of genre behind and writing a new language for extreme music itself.

Upon first listen, two things about Honey are immediately clear: First, it is an entirely new kind of Caribou record. Second, in being an entirely new kind of Caribou record, it is in keeping with Dan Snaith's discography, each new album marked by radical thematic and sonic shifts. Honey is not a departure from the Caribou we've known up to this point but rather the product of a lifetime spent listening to and crafting immaculate pop music. After two intensely personal Caribou albums (Suddenly and the Grammy-nominated Our Love), Snaith now pulls himself away a little in search of music that isn't about any one person and is relatable to everybody. It also brings Snaith's two personas, Caribou and Daphni, closer together than ever before. On Honey, Snaith fuses their strengths into a record that grabs you and moves you like Daphni before it uplifts you like Caribou. Huge dancefloor tracks twinkle and surprise in a way only Snaith's productions can, with a freshness that defines an artist who is too excited by music-making to ever truly settle into any one sound.

Coldplay return with their tenth album, Moon Music. In an effort to reduce waste, the first edition run of Moon Music (both EcoRecord rPET LP and EcoCD) are strictly limited and produced at a higher specification than any future editions. All First Edition EcoRecord rPET LP products are individually numbered. In tandem with Coldplay’s ground-breaking sustainability measures on their current tour - which has so far produced 59% less CO2e emissions than their previous stadium tour - the band have gone to great lengths to make the physical release of Moon Music as sustainable as possible. This will be the world’s first album released as a 140g EcoRecord rPET LP, with each copy containing nine recycled PET-plastic bottles recovered from post-consumer waste. This will prevent the manufacture of more than 25 metric tonnes of virgin plastic, and provide an 85% reduction in manufacturing process CO2 emissions/kg compared to traditional 140g vinyl. Additionally, the band have collaborated with long-time partners The Ocean Cleanup to create an additional format: the Notebook Edition EcoRecord rPET LP. The rPET for this edition comprises 70% river plastic, intercepted by The Ocean Cleanup from the Rio Las Vacas, Guatemala, and prevented from reaching the Gulf of Honduras and the Atlantic Ocean. The CD editions of Moon Music will be the world’s first to be released on EcoCD, created from 90% recycled polycarbonate, sourced from post-consumer waste streams. This will provide at least a 78% CO2/kg emission reduction, and avoid the manufacture of more than five metric tonnes of virgin plastic.

Recital is proud to present an artists’ record from the two giants Richard Hamilton and Dieter Roth. Hamilton (1922-2011) is revered as the father of British Pop Art as both theorist and practitioner, in addition to famously designing the artwork for The Beatles’ White Album. Dieter Roth (1930-1998) was a Swiss German artist who blithely ignored all artistic boundaries and aesthetic dictums. His oeuvre includes hundreds of artist books, almost half a thousand prints, sculptures, multiples and records, all balanced between magnetic playfulness and self-deprecating paranoia. Roth also ran his own record/book press ‘Dieter Roths’ Verlag’ and was a major force in the reckless improvisational music group Selten Gehörte Musik (1973-1979). The two artists most significant collaborations happened between 1976 and 1978, beginning with a series of 74 paintings in which they reworked each other’s art. The paintings were made for an exhibition for dogs (as suggested by the late Marcel Broodthaers, to whom the works were dedicated) in Cadaqués, Spain. Hamilton and Roth then produced the catalogue Collaborations of Ch. Rotham with reproductions of all the paintings alongside four brilliant new collaborative texts. The narrative of the texts sprung from the “fairy story” (Hamilton) quality that emerged from these dog paintings – a hallucinatory tapestry of sausages, gestating giants, Sancho Panza, Don Quixote, and a donkey. Together they gallop, humorous and beautifully absurd, across the wild field of an imaginary seaside backdrop with endless garbled iterations of ever-mutating names riddled with mad typos. For these recordings the individual texts were read by Roth and Hamilton, actor friend Duncan Smith, and a huge cast of British artists for the final play Die Grosse Bockwurst, performed at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1977. The recordings were first released on cassette on the Audio Arts label in 1978, and have now been remastered from the original ¼″ tapes for this double vinyl edition. Also included are two booklets: one is a new essay written for this edition by artist and co-producer Malcolm Green (Red Sphinx, Atlas Press), alongside full reproductions of the Roth / Hamilton collaborative Ch. Rotham texts

For over a decade, Drug Church have been building a very strong case that they’re the best loud guitar band in the game; their fifth full-length Prude – a 28-minute blast of aggression, melody, irreverence, and genuine heart–feels like the undeniable proof. The album is so downright satisfying it tricks you into thinking there’s nothing all that surprising about a difficult-to-pigeonhole punk band from Albany, NY, with a name like Drug Church somehow having a career at all, much less one that would last over 10 years and qualify them as the best band going. But before you start trying to think of who might have them beat (good luck), consider what just might be the key to Drug Church’s unexpected staying power: Don’t take it too seriously.

FINNEAS returns with ‘For Cryin’ Out Loud!’ his second studio album. FINNEAS’ self-produced solo album was born out of a series of live studio sessions in Los Angeles, bringing together some of his closest friends and peers into one room. In contrast to his debut album OPTIMIST, which featured instrumentals written and performed solely by the artist himself, ‘For Cryin’ Out Loud!’ sees FINNEAS expand his creative horizons to a classic studio/band environment, freeing FINNEAS and ultimately resulting in his most uplifting and raw body of work to date. ‘For Cryin’ Out Loud!’ follows the release of his sister Billie Eilish’s third studio album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, which has further cemented him as one of the most critically acclaimed, award-winning producers and songwriters of his generation.

THE PLAIN TRUTH=we drifted through it, arguing.every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom.we sat down together and wrote it in one room,and then sat down in a different room, recording.NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?and then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile.the sun setting above beds of ashwhile we sat together, arguing.the old world order barely pretended to care.this new century will be crueler still.war is coming.don't give up.pick a side.hang on.love.

See You At The Maypole, the sixth full-length album in Half Waif's prolific catalog, is a recognition of personal sadness, and a call to ecstatic togetherness. It's gathering the colors of our spirit, in all it's shades, and making something intricate and remarkable. The ceremonial folk dance performed around a maypole is filled with fauna and flora, with ribbons woven into complex braids incapable of unraveling; these dances are survivals of ancient ritual, honoring the living trees, and the return of Spring and fertility. These patterns-this dance-cannot be completed alone, and so, Half Waif welcomes others to join her, a collective of bleeding color. "We are so much stronger for the colorful experiences we go through," she says. "That's where we find our humanity and find each other." While the seclusion of grief feels infinite, Rose brought the songs to her trusted friend and longtime collaborator of the past decade, Zubin Hensler. The pair worked away from others for Mythopoetics, carefully crafting each note and flourish themselves but something else was needed for See You At The Maypole. To that end, Hensler and Rose welcomed a wealth of players and friends into the world of the record: Jason Burger and Zack Levine on drums and percussion; Josh Marre (Blue Ranger) on guitar; Hannah Epperson and Elena Moon Park on violin; Kristina Teuschler on clarinet; Willem de Koch on trombone; Rebecca El-Saleh on harp; and Spencer Zahn on upright bass. Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Bon Iver) lent his deft mixing skills to many of the tracks, including lead single 'Figurine.' "This wasn't just my story, I wanted to say. It was every story of loss-the loss of a life, the loss of a dream, the loss of trust and hope and faith. A story of finding a way back again," Rose explains. "My own avenue back to the land of the living was through my relationships with people and with the natural world. It only seemed right that these songs would invite those people in to build the very heart of the sound."

Official soundtrack to accompany Joker: Folie A Deux, one of the most anticipated films of a generation. Produced by Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Jason Ruder and executive produced by Todd Phillips, Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Randall Poster and George Drakoulias. Available on translucent red vinyl.

‘Leon’ is the highly anticipated fourth album from Grammy Award-winning recording artist, songwriter, and performer Leon Bridges. With 13 tracks featuring Leon’s signature storytelling and a unique blend of organic genre alchemy, ‘Leon’ is his most poignant, powerful, and personal work to date. He takes fans on a trip through the heart of Ft. Worth he knows best, the things he holds dear, and the people and places that shaped him. Featuring production by Ian Fitchuk (Beyonce, Noah Kahan), Daniel Tashian (Kacey Musgraves), and Tyler Johnson (Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus), Leon describes the album as “somewhat of a self-portrait… I'm excited to share these stories about my home, about nostalgia, about my upbringing, about where I'm from, with all of you. I hope this music brings you back to your roots and your journey.”

Everybody Needs A Hero is the second studio album by Dublin-born Orla Gartland, released via her own label New Friends. Everybody Needs A Hero explores how Gartland shapeshifts through the currents of a long term relationship and works out how to take up space in a postfeminist world. Throughout the record Orla explores the idea of a ‘hero’: someone to look up to, someone to rescue us from ourselves, someone we use to deflect from our own shadow self. A testament to her artistic growth, burgeoning confidence and proud sense of independence, this record is the latest milestone in this self-made talent’s journey. With her career streams nudging towards a quarter of a billion, sold-out tours and festival appearances at Glastonbury and Latitude; to her debut album Woman On The Internet reaching the UK and Irish Top 10 Orla is ready to boldly step into this next chapter of her career.

Maggot Mass, the fifth full-length album by Pharmakon on Sacred Bones Records, marks theproject's return after a five-year hiatus. This album signifies a departure from the original rules andstructures established by Margaret Chardiet for Pharmakon, evolving into a new form. It retainsthe project's experimental roots in power electronics and noise while incorporating industrial andpunk influences.The album stems from a profound disgust with humanity's dysfunctional relationship with theenvironment and other life forms. It explores the loneliness resulting from this broken bond andchallenges us to acknowledge our personal and systemic responsibility.What peace can we make with privilege when the true cost of our comfort is not measured indollars but in death? How can we reconcile with death when we impose the same hierarchicalstructures on it that we do in life? Is life worth living in the isolation of this self-imposed speciesloneliness?Humans often measure worth by accumulation-money, assets, objects-mistaking this for powerand influence. Western heritage dictates a hierarchy, placing humans at the top, separate from thenatural world. This delusion turns bodies into objects, land into property, and people into expendable tools.If our value were instead determined by our contribution to the ecosystem, who could claim thata human is more valuable than a maggot? Maggots recycle death into life, breaking down matterand nourishing new growth. They transform into flies, pollinating plants and sustaining the Earth'sflora. In contrast, humans pollute rather than pollinate, with a select few profiting from exploitation at the expense of biodiversity and the well-being of many.In grappling with grief and loss on both personal and global scales, Margaret sought solace in theidea of rebirth through death, celebrating the beauty of regeneration through decay. However, shehad to confront the stark reality of the disconnection from the earth under oppressive systems. Pharmakon is here imagining a path where the final act is to give back what was received fromcreation, offering our lives and deaths to sustain existence.

Maverick UK producer Kevin Richard Martin (Zonal / Techno Animal / King Midas Sound) joins Relapse for the release of his devastating new double album Machine, his first solo instrumental record as THE BUG. Machine started life as a series of self-released "floor weapons" (to use Martin’s description), landing in installments between 2023 and 2024 on the Bandcamp page of Martin’s own PRESSURE label. And now - always his intention - Martin has collated a single, powerful, unified statement from those EPs. The album detonates apocalyptic dread-tech mutations of crushing intensity, fusing a unique new strain of futuristic dub with deadly deep electronics and killer bass riffs worthy of the heaviest metal. It is, writes Martin, “ice cold and dystopian.” It celebrates “atmospheric pressure, and the joy of full body assaults, via oversized sound systems in undersized club rooms.” Machine also represents the latest metamorphosis of the "Macro Dub Infection" philosophy Martin germinated with the groundbreaking series of compilations he began curating for Virgin Records as early as the mid 90’s. As THE BUG, Martin’s music is formed from an overwhelmingly explosive sub- bass pressure, as relentlessly in-the-red beat production amplifies mutant industrial sound design, fuzzed, expectant crackle, and bleak greyscale harmonics.

The Hard Quartet is a band. But what is a band? A band, perhaps, can be thought of as a body, a corpus, in which physically discrete lifeforms comprise a chimera that shrieks with one voice. In this particular band, which is one of millions in the world today, four players selflessly merge, become musical, and emit rock ‘n’ roll that is familiar but new, warm but icy, melodic but Sphinx-like in its seductive and subtle riddles… essentially, The Hard Quartet has leveled, cultivated, and made lush an entirely new steppe in the ecosystem of guitar-bass-drums-voice agriculture. The Hard Quartet: Emmett Kelly, a songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist best known for his work in The Cairo Gang and The Double, as well as in the company of artists such as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Ty Segall, Rob Mazurek, and many more. Stephen Malkmus, a songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist best known for his work with Pavement, the Jicks, Silver Jews, Straw Dogs, and eponymously. Matt Sweeney, a songwriter, guitarist, producer and vocalist best known for his work with Chavez, Superwolf, his music for Red Dead Redemption 2 and his guitar work in the company of a panoply of artists from Guided by Voices and Cat Power to Johnny Cash and Adele. Jim White, a drummer and songwriter best known for his work with Dirty Three, Xylouris White, eponymously, and with such stalwarts as PJ Harvey, Smog, and Venom P. Stinger.

The Smile – Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons of Kemet’s Tom Skinner – return with their third album ‘Cutouts’. The 10-track album was produced and mixed by Sam Petts-Davies [Frank Ocean 'Blond', Thom Yorke 'Suspiria'], mastered by Sterling Sound’s Greg Calbi and features artwork by Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke. Recorded at Abbey Road Studios, in Oxford and in moments on the road, the tracks feature strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra as well as contemporary UK jazz player Pete Wareham [flute]. Keen-eyed fans will be familiar with a number of tracks that have been debuted live during the band’s 2023 and 2024 tours as well as recognize “Tiptoe”, which was shared as a sneak preview at this year’s Wall of Eyes: on Film events. ‘Cutouts’ follows the band's acclaimed albums, ‘Wall of Eyes’ – released earlier this year – and 2022’s ‘A Light For Attracting Attention’, which was named an AOTY by Pitchfork, Uncut, MOJO, Rough Trade, Billboard, New York Times, Consequence and many more.

The highly anticipated follow-up to Thee Sacred Souls's breakout 2022 self-titled debut, Got A Story To Tell, features 12 all original new songs, a soaring statement of exquisite craftsmanship from this young band from San Diego whose story grows bigger by the day. Recorded and produced by Gabriel Roth at Penrose Recorders, in Daptone’s Riverside, CA studio, and written in the throes of supporting their 2022 album - which was met with significant excitement and major touring that brought them across the world. What swirls together on Got A Story To Tell is an appreciation of decades of soul music, and beyond - a sound and feel that is timeless, lived in, and very much in the now. Album opener “Lucid Girl” champions independent women, set to some of the toughest sounding drums and bass the band has yet to put to tape. “Waiting On The Right Time” slinks with a touch of slow-burning psychedelia. A plea for empathy punctuates “One and the Same,” with Lane singing: “We’re one and the same, I feel one day / We learn to live with each other / In love, not fear / Just for a moment, why can’t we be together.” “On My Mind” is a sweeping orchestration, with Lane navigating the complexities of finding happiness while balancing the good with the bad. The album is punctuated with strings and squelching guitar, trundling piano, pops of conga, horns - it makes for a thrilling, layered listen that rewards with multiple spins.

Composer and guitarist Yasmin Williams releases her new album, Acadia, on October 4, 2024, via Nonesuch Records. The album, her Nonesuch debut and her most sonically expansive work to date, comprises nine original, mostly instrumental, tracks written and produced by Williams, and features her on various guitars, banjo, calabash drum, tap shoes, and kora. Williams is joined on the album by an eclectic cast of collaborators—including Immanuel Wilkins on saxophone, Dom Flemons on rhythm bones, Aoife O’Donovan on vocals, William Tyler on guitar, and many others—creating a folk music that reflects the wide range of musical influences that have inspired her throughout her life. Of the album, Williams says: “Acadia has several meanings: a place of rural peace and pastoral poetry (Italian), a refuge or idyllic place, (Greek and Italian), fertile land (Mi'kmaq), a place of plenty (French) ... all of this relates to the ethos of this album. The songs are seeds I planted, and the seeds grew into the album, Acadia: a place of peace, a place where creativity can blossom, a place where everyone can fit in together and collaborate effectively, a place where the fruits of my own labor in music can fully flourish without judgment or prejudice. One of my visions for this record was to expand the potential for current folk music to encourage collaboration across various genres. Blurring those somewhat arbitrary lines has been a natural tendency for me since I started writing music at twelve years old and Acadia is a full circle moment.”