Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - 9 May (2025)

Composed of 10 new tracks and clocking in at 42 minutes, Pink Elephant is produced by Win Butler, Régine Chassagne and Daniel Lanois. When experienced in its entirety, Pink Elephant invites the listener on a sonic odyssey – a quest for life – that exists within the perception of the individual, a meditation on both darkness and light, the beauty within. The layers of this condensed epic unfold to reveal new dimensions with each successive listen.

With 29 #1s, 11 BILLION streams, 52 million singles & 13 million albums sold, country superstar Blake Shelton, who embarked on his "Friends & Heroes" Tour in early 2025, is releasing his new album, For Recreational Use Only, on May 9. Featuring his lead single "Texas," the Grand Ole Opry member & CMA Entertainer of the Year winner delivers an album that runs the gamut of the human experience, exemplified by "Let Him In Anyway," the powerful preview track that anchored the album announce in March.

Electroacoustic saxophonist, improviser, and composer Cole Pulice traffics in shimmering, otherworldly beauty. On the meditative ambient jazz of Land's End Eternal, Cole adds a welcome new texture with the introduction of the electric guitar, an instrument previously unheard in their music, which took on a central role as a compositional and sonic tool for this record.

Following the 2021 release of Butter Miracle, Suite One, comes the full album - Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets! The album consists of the 4 tracks from Suite One, plus 5 new tracks. Adam Duritz and Counting Crows released Butter Miracle, Suite One in May 2021 to rave reviews. The band also kicked off their first tour since 2018, `The Butter Miracle Tour' from 2021 through 2023, with sell-out performances across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. For more than two decades, the GRAMMY and Academy Award-nominated Counting Crows have enchanted listeners worldwide with their intensely soulful and intricate take on timeless rock n' roll. Exploding onto the scene in 1993 with their multiplatinum breakout album, August and Everything After, the band has gone on to release 7 studio albums, selling more than 20 million records worldwide, and is revered as one of the world's most pre-eminent live touring rock bands.

Deradoorian (Decisive Pink, Dirty Projectors) returns with ‘Ready for Heaven’, dealing with heaven and earth, damnation and salvation. It is a classic forty-minute set of inquisitive pop songs, blessed with a lightness of touch and a sharp focus that can’t help but charm the listener. It conjures up some last, faint afterglow of the old belief that an electronic, programmed beat can smash itself - and you - into another, more egalitarian consciousness. It is a remarkable fact that this bold and open-hearted record is made by one person, working alone. Repeatedly reworking the songs until they were complete is a painstaking process that generated an energy and space where Angel Deradoorian could indulge in the arcana of her artform. “I love the production more than the songwriting. [...] In fact, I don’t even feel like a songwriter at times, I feel like someone who is just inspired by so much music. And I want to try it all out! Like Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Mingus, or ESG and Silver Apples, or making weird krautrock and industrial music. I love dub, and Sly and Robbie. I love the productions of those records and the collective energies released by their creators in the studio. It’s just a weird thing to do it by yourself!” Engaging with past musical glories helps deal with a major theme of this album; the awful nature of the world around us. A lot of the lyrical content deals with the struggle to be a human being in the modern world, and the determination to keep on keeping on. But even when a darker mood informs a track, as with ‘Hell Island’ or ‘Digital Gravestone’, there are arrangements that seduce and hooks that ensnare.

Since delivering their critically lauded debut, See You Around, and standalone singles like "Call My Name" (2020 Grammy winner for Best American Roots Song), I'm With Her have routinely taken time out from their individual careers to dream up songs together. On their long-awaited sophomore LP, Wild and Clear and Blue, the trio now bring their luminous harmonies to a soul-searching body of work about reaching into the past, navigating a chaotic present, and bravely moving forward into the unknown. 

Kali's artistry has always felt otherworldly, ethereal, and elusive. `Sincerely,' represents her most vulnerable and intimate work to date, offering an existential glimpse into the way she romanticizes life and her inner world. The album is a sanctuary, an escape from the chaos, a search for peace, and an act of catharsis. `Sincerely,' is a collection of letters to the world, allowing her fans to witness her at her most exposed as she invites them into her emotional journey.

A dynamic and sublime work rich in emotion and sensitivity, From Where You Came unspools as a series of nocturnal transmissions, altered-state refinements, and vivid stories, rich in vibrant, illuminating qualities. Drawing together 19th century programmatic music, mid-'70s jazz, and her distinctively colourful and multi-dimensional approach to composition that embraces improvisation, Coverdale alloys synthesis with live instrumentation in a genreless yet distinctly identifiable gesture of reconnection with land and body through sound. Approaching composition as a diagnostic methodology to spiritual ends, she conducts emotional resonance like currents of charge, hard-wiring the purely felt into electronic signals. Though written and recorded on several continents, including at the GRM Studio in Paris and the Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm, From Where You Came was completed in rural Ontario, Canada. Featuring contributions from multidisciplinary sound artist and cellist Anne Bourne and Grammy award winning trombone prodigy Kalia Vandever, the album's 11 expansive yet condensed compositions incorporate strings, woodwind, brass, keys, software and modular synthesis, inscribing a musical language that resonates animations with unfiltered, striking clarity. "Anything can have a voice," says Coverdale. "For me, voice is beyond human." Fittingly, it's the artist's own voice that melts into air amidst the enveloping swell of the album's opening prelude: "Everything you know is real," she sings on "Eternity," "I'm sorry, life is beautiful...." As though in response, oscillating vividly between animism and animalism, the album that follows is absolutely brimming with life in all it's stunning complexity. Reckoning with the experience of grief, dislocation, and the pressure of total freedom and independence, Coverdale yields supernatural capacity to transfer tribulation into highly imaginative and inspiring fantasy epics of sound. In the piloted flight of "Daze," wind choruses dance and twirl in ornate punctuated cycles as dissonant portamentos annotate modulatory ascent to soaring heights, gliding and churning across turbulent gails to new pockets of harmonic plateaus, stabilizing periodically through rhythmic gait for rest. It feels like the joy of flight. In other spiritual quests, sound becomes a feat of physics; physical and subterranean, and even destructive, amongst highland drone figures in "Freedom." Sense melancholic restlessness, and desire to overcome in the furtive flurries of energy on "Coming Around," the skittish, tacit, and reluctantly yearning chimes of "Problem of No Name," and the ecstatic, messy-haired catharsis of the drummed sample-based sequences of "Offload Flip."

D R E A M S I C L E marks the highly anticipated 4th studio album from Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Maren Morris, arriving May 9 via Columbia Records. Featuring songs written by Morris with Julia Michaels and Tobias Jesso Jr, plus production by Jack Antonoff and Greg Kurstin, this album is a deeply personal exploration of transformation, resilience, and self-discovery. As Morris describes it, “D R E A M S I C L E takes place in the aftermath of loosening my grip on my personal and professional life. Sweeping through the pits of grief, but never staying too long, and finding the joy in knowing that at my core, I’m still who I am – and that’s pretty f-ing great. D R E A M S I C L E became less about the hard lessons and more about enjoying the bumpy ride and finding people who genuinely want to be on it with you because they love you. It’s about appreciating and respecting the beauty and nuances of life while it’s happening, not after it’s too late.”

The heralded UK band’s first album since 2004 and first for Ipecac Recordings.  Having formed in the late nineteen-nineties and releasing music, if that is what it was, from 2000-2004, Mclusky disbanded soon afterwards in a slow motion farce of not enough drama to get much press off the back of it. Now they are back fuelled initially by spite but now enjoying it too much not to do it, and playing to crowds in the UK, US and Australia which are much bigger - and more hygienically inclined - than in their so-called heyday. So far nobody has complained, except for one guy in Leeds (and he was clearly on ketamine). Now comes a new album - entitled The World is Still Here and So Are We.

Written and produced by PinkPantheress, Fancy That marks a new chapter for PinkPantheress as she embraces a new level of intimacy that seamlessly blends the music she grew up on with the musician’s earworm production. As PinkPantheress steps into her fun and kitsch-y era, one that is rooted in Britsh culture, the 9-track project showcases her signature vocals and genre-blurring production, featuring previously teased ‘Illegal’ alongside the recently released single ‘Tonight’, which offers a glimpse into the unapologetic soundscape she has crafted.

Provoker return with Mausoleum. Refined, ornate and bigger than ever, Mausoleum takes Provoker's shadowy sound to new heights, aided by executive producer Kenny Beats. "Pop on the outside, dark on the inside". Embodied by the garish arcade machine on the cover, the songs on Mausoleum lure listeners in with addictive melodies and slick production, but hold them tight with the tales of heartbreak, loss and revelation within.

Sleep Token returns with Even In Arcadia, their fourth offering and first under RCA Records, set to release on May 9th. This new chapter follows Take Me Back To Eden and continues the unfolding journey, where Sleep Token further intertwines the boundaries of sound and emotion, dissolving into something otherworldly.

"Sun was made for coming out, even though the night is long." Aperture - The Head And The Heart's sixth album and first since signing to Verve Forecast - is the affirming work of a band finding again its shared footing, reaching unimagined levels of camaraderie and mutual risk as one. With every song fortified by the sense of beginning again, Aperture is The Head And The Heart's most vital and poignant album. Featuring tracks like the album's beautifully arcing opener "After the Setting Sun" and the mighty anthem "Arrow," Aperture is a stunning testament to the collaborative work of a band who decided to let in the light, return to their roots, and forge a new path, together as one. 

Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke are set to release their debut album as a duo via Warp Records. Tall Tales showcases Pritchard’s mastery of archaic machines unearthed in synthesizer archives, guiding the music down unexpected and experimental paths. Yorke meanwhile delivers a haunting and expansive vocal performance, evoking Radiohead’s OK Computer-era digital FX while delving into dark, introspective storytelling. Visual collaborator Jonathan Zawada’s artistry enhances the project with his hyperreal environments that juxtapose uneasy landscapes of natural beauty with the brutal aesthetics of a dystopian world.