It’s been a big week for comeback announcements, with The Blood Brothers, The Dismemberment Plan, Basement, You Blew It!, and LVL UP all announcing returns of various forms, not to mention Orchid finally just played their first shows in 22 years (and you can check out pics, videos, setlist). It’s also a big week for new albums, seven of which I highlight below. Bill tackles more in Bill’s Indie Basement, including Beth Gibbons, Isobel Campbell, SQÜRL, of Montreal, and The Lovely Eggs.

On top of those, this week’s honorable mentions include From Indian Lakes, One Step Closer, Ufomammut, Tzompantli (Xibalba), Slash, Kerry King, John Oates, Guster, Ani DiFranco, New Kids On The Block, Alan Braufman, Candy Apple, Blu, Kamaiyah, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Courtney Bell & Royce Da 5’9″, So Totally, The Co Founder, Matamoska, Cold Hart, The Avett Brothers, Cage the Elephant, Crumb, Guppy, Dog Party, Courtney Bell, Carb On Carb, Extinguish, Sonya Cohen Cramer, So Much Hope, Buried, Kaïa Kater, Zayn, Mountain Movers, Blitzen Trapper, Lucy Rose, Electric Press, Álvaro Díaz, Zero Point Energy, Bootlicker, Marty Friedman, Collective Soul, Little Feat, Wolfacejoeyy, the Spiritual Cramp/White Reaper split, the Night Sins EP, the Loyal to the Grave EP, the Bug Seance EP, the Draag EP, the Sludgeworth 7″, the Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga soundtrack, Alex G’s I Saw the TV Glow score, and A24’s Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute To Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense.

Read on for my picks. What’s your favorite release of the week?

Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft
Darkroom/Interscope

Billie Eilish is in a position like very few others. She’s one of the biggest pop stars in the world, with an upcoming arena tour that includes multiple nights in several major cities, and a new album that’s almost definitely going to debut at No. 1 in multiple countries, and she also continues to make music that’s far more experimental than most people would ever expect from a pop star of her stature. For her third album Hit Me Hard and Soft, she’s gone the no-pre-release-singles route, explicitly positioning Hit Me Hard and Soft as album-oriented art, and the album she’s crafted lives up to the promise that it’s best heard from start to finish. The closest thing it has to a stereotypically radio-friendly song is the ’80s pop-sounding “Birds of a Feather,” though the song that already feels like a hit is “Lunch,” which went viral just from a fan-shot clip of Billie debuting it at a party at Coachella and stirred up even more of a fan frenzy after Billie told Rolling Stone that writing the song helped her fully embrace her attraction to women. (Her words: “I realized I wanted my face in a vagina.”)

With its groovy bassline (and kinda-ska upstrokes), “Lunch” feels like this album’s “Bad Guy” or “Therefore I Am,” and Billie’s three for three on that exact kind of subtle banger. That is not to say that Hit Me Hard and Soft follows a formula though–far from it. Outside of “Bittersuite,” which sounds like a leftover from Happier Than Ever, every song on Hit Me Hard and Soft sounds distinctly like Billie Eilish without rehashing any of her old ideas, and it’s got a good amount of variety throughout its lean 10-song, 44-minute runtime. Her knack for intimate, somber folk music comes through on “Wildflower” and “The Greatest,” the latter of which builds to a suspenseful orchestral rock climax. She expertly transitions from jazz-pop to club beats and vocoder vocals on second-half standout “L’Amour De Ma Vie,” and the clubby vibes continue on “The Diner.” There’s the string-laden ballad “Skinny” that opens the album, and shapeshifting, harder-to-pin-down songs like “Chihiro” and album closer “Blue.” Like her past two albums, the album was made by Billie and her brother Finneas, who are as powerful together as any multi-membered pop songwriting team. As on “Lunch,” love and sex are prevailing themes throughout Hit Me Hard and Soft, along with a couple musings about all the public chatter she’s always dealing with (“Am I acting my age now?/Am I already on the way out?”), and Billie still knows how to write lines that jump out, grab you, and endure.

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Shellac – To All Trains
Touch and Go

We’re still reeling from the shocking news that Steve Albini passed away from a heart attack at age 61 last week, and this week we get what is presumably his final album, To All Trains, the first album in ten years by his long-running band Shellac. As an engineer, Steve was responsible for everything from helping Nirvana, Pixies, and PJ Harvey make their hardest-hitting records to helping Joanna Newsom and Jason Molina make some of their most gorgeous ones, but as a songwriter, he almost always remained loyal to caustic post-hardcore and noise rock. On To All Trains, the sneering vocals and grating instrumentals are as delightfully off-putting as they would’ve been if he made this album in the ’80s or ’90s, and despite Albini’s adjacency to mainstream music, this stuff remains as defiantly underground today as it was 40 years ago. When John Grabski died shortly after his Teeth project releasing its Albini-recorded album The Strain, Steve wrote about feeling inspired by the way John was always looking towards the future as an artist. “When my time comes, I hope I can follow his example,” he said. “I hope when I die I go like John, embroiled in the middle of things, surrounded by people I love, doing the things that matter most. I hope I leave a mountain of shit unfinished, that I have a pan on the stove, a phone call waiting and a pencil in my hand. I hope I’m man enough to be thinking about tomorrow.” I’d say, judging by To All Trains, Steve went out exactly as he’d hoped.

Lip Critic – Hex Dealer
Partisan

The NYC music scene is never gonna be the same it was in the days of affordable dingy apartments and lofts, but whenever someone tries to declare its death, a new band or crop of bands comes along that gives the city new life. In the days since post-COVID concerts returned, there’s been some undeniable energy throughout the city’s local scene, and one band to thank for that is Lip Critic. The band formed just outside of the city in 2019 as students at SUNY Purchase and released an album and two EPs by 2021, and by the time shows started up again, they’d moved to the city and started making a ton of noise here. The reputation they gained as a live act helped ink the band a deal with Partisan Records (IDLES, PJ Harvey), and the energy from their shows also helped inspire the direction of their new album Hex Dealer. “We wanted to write songs that were more direct, yet more extreme and accelerated,” the band told us. “Like some sort of freak pop music you could mosh to.” The new album raises the bar for everything Lip Critic had been working towards, with a mix of industrial, hip hop, punk, hardcore, electronic music and more that’s as catchy as it is loud and abrasive. Alongside other post-COVID breakthrough acts like MSPAINT and fellow NYC band Model/Actriz, Lip Critic recall the early days of bands like Liars and LCD Soundsystem–days when you could’ve actually seen those bands in one of those affordable lofts–and they’d also fit nicely next to anything from Death Grips to Show Me The Body to the aforementioned IDLES (who they did recently open for). It’s music that works in so many different contexts, and it’s exciting to get a band that sounds simultaneously welcoming and antagonizing as effectively as Lip Critic does.

Rapsody – Please Don’t Cry
Jamla/Roc Nation

“Under-appreciated but I’m still the most respected,” raps Rapsody on her fourth proper album Please Don’t Cry, and it’s hard to think of many other rappers who earn that line the way Rapsody does. She’s stolen the show on songs by Kendrick Lamar, Public Enemy, Black Thought, and A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife Dawg, and the list of legends that admire her grows with each passing year, but she’s never really had her own big breakthrough moment. It’s a shame, because she’s already made a few of the strongest rap albums of the last 15 years and Please Don’t Cry is on the same high level as its predecessors. Guests on this one range from veterans like Rapsody’s longtime collaborator Erykah Badu and Lil Wayne to rising rapper Baby Tate to reggae singer Keznamdi to Clair Huxtable herself, Phylicia Rashad. As always, Rapsody stands out next to living legends, and she’s got an arsenal of hard, intricate, incisive bars that would leave at least 80% of any Rolling Loud lineup in the dust. Her last album, Eve, celebrated a long history of Black female icons, but Please Don’t Cry takes a more personal approach. Rapsody opens up about her own life in a more unfiltered way than she ever has, and the results can be just as empowering as her last album. Rapsody gets in much-deserved boasts like the one mentioned earlier, but she’s also honest about the imperfections in her life, and when music is as honest and sincere as Please Don’t Cry is, it’s hard not to feel impacted by it.

Mach-Hommy – #RICHAXXHAITIAN
self-released

Mach-Hommy is insanely prolific, but he hasn’t released a proper solo album since 2021, a year in which he released two solo albums, Pray for Haiti on Griselda Records and the self-released Balens Cho (Hot Candles). That now changes with #RICHAXXHAITIAN, a self-released project that feels as subtly towering as you’d hope from Mach. In what’s become Mach-Hommy’s trademark fashion, the album is rooted in both Mach’s Newark, NJ upbringing and his Haitian heritage, and it includes Vailsburg slang, Haitian Kreyol, and French lullabies worked into Mach’s uniquely fresh version of East Coast rap. Mach brings in likeminded rappers like Black Thought, Roc Marciano, Your Old Droog, and his very frequent collaborator Tha God Fahim, all of whom have the same hard-hitting dedication to boom bap-era bars that he does, and he also successfully steps outside of that zone, like on the electronics-fueled title track with 03 Greedo and Kaytranada.

Gatecreeper – Dark Superstition
Nuclear Blast

Change was in the water on Gatecreeper’s 2021 project An Unexpected Reality, a My War-inspired record that explored the band’s short, fast, grindy side with seven songs on side A and their death-doom side with one 11-minute song on side B, but Gatecreeper considered that more of a detour and not the proper followup to the old school-style death metal of 2019’s Deserted. With Dark Superstition, Gatecreeper have released the album that fully begins a new chapter of their career. This is the first album with the band’s current lineup and band leader Chase Mason says it was the first time that Gatecreeper wrote an album collaboratively as an entire band, and they also made a clear break from “old school-style death metal.” The influence of Swedish melodic death metal has crept into their music before, but on Dark Superstition, it’s a driving force. They brought in an actual Swedish death metal veteran, Fred Estby of Dismember, for some assistance, and they’ve got an arsenal of melodic riffs that have been working perfectly on their ongoing tour with In Flames. (Frequent collaborator Kurt Ballou of Converge returned to engineer and mix.) But Dark Superstition isn’t just a jump from reviving one brand of death metal to another; it’s a seamless fusion of all of Gatecreeper’s influences with a whole lot of originality in the mix too. It’s a melodic death metal album that doesn’t sound like a stereotypical melodic death metal album, and it’s got some of the strongest and most memorable songs of Gatecreeper’s career. The bands of death metal’s latest wave can start to feel interchangeable as more and more emerge with similar takes on the same set of influences, but I can’t imagine listening to Dark Superstition and mistaking Gatecreeper for one of their peers. These songs really hook you and stand out in a way that this already-great band never has before.

For more, Gatecreeper made us a list of their favorite melodic death metal albums.

Pallbearer – Mind Burns Alive
Nuclear Blast

Pallbearer have become one of the best modern metal bands not because they’re one of the heaviest, but because their melodies are some of the most alluring. Even some of their doomiest, sludgiest songs have been catchier than various forms of pop music. Elements of progressive rock and even post-rock have crept into their music along the way, and on Mind Burns Alive, it seems the transition is complete. It’s more a doom-infused prog album than the other way around, overall closer to Pink Floyd than to Black Sabbath. As far as “metal to non-metal” transitions go, Pallbearer’s is one of the most seamless I’ve seen in a while, a natural evolution rather than a drastic pivot. At the core of these songs, the songwriting is as unique to Pallbearer as it was on their breakthrough album Foundations of Burden a decade ago, and Pallbearer’s songwriting remains as sharp as ever. Pallbearer’s ability to hypnotize is in full force on Mind Burns Alive, no matter how doomy or how delicate.

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Beth Gibbons, Isobel Campbell, SQÜRL, of Montreal, and The Lovely Eggs.

Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases archive or scroll down for previous weeks.

Looking for a podcast to listen to? Check out our new episode with Saosin.

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