As of yesterday (June 20), summer is officially here, and for those of us on the East Coast at least, it certainly feels like it. It’s been a stacked June for new albums, and next week is looking pretty loaded as well, but this week is slightly on the slighter side compared to the rest of the month. (Good time to check out one of the nearly-50 albums we’ve reviewed this month already.) Still, there are plenty of good new records to check out this week, seven of which I highlight below.

Bill’s got more in Indie Basement, including O., Rui Gabriel (of Lawn), Moon Diagrams (Deerhunter’s Moses Archuleta, featuring Cindy Lee), Wild Yaks, Rich Ruth, and Been Stellar, and this week’s honorable mentions include Islands, Kehlani, Kittie, Cavalera, Pond, CJ Fly, Nyck Caution, Lola Young, Linda Thompson, Ionnalee, Kate Nash, Joe Gittleman (The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Avoid One Thing), d’Eon, Other Half, Daniel Davies, AyooLii/FearDorian/Polo Perks, Wild Up & Christopher Rountree, Yetsuby, Sis, Alice Ivy, dazegxd, Black Decelerant, Pepe Deluxé, Lava La Rue, Aseethe, Gracie Abrams, Lake Street Dive, Wage War, Dave Alvin & Jimmie Dale, Lawrence, The Mysterines, the Chris Keating (Yeasayer) EP, The Petey EP, the Johanna Samuels EP, the John Glacier EP, the Jahnah Camille EP, the Corrupt Vision/Se Vende split EP, the Jesse Malin live album (ft. HR, Eugene Huz, Tommy Stinson & Catherine Popper), the Lankum live album, Kronos Quartet’s Sun Ra tribute album, the Joni Mitchell box, the Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary edition of From the Mars Hotel + bonus live LP, the deluxe edition of Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans, Noise for Now: Vol. 2 (ft. David Byrne & Devo, The War On Drugs, Courtney Barnett, Julia Jacklin, Faye Webster, Big Freedia & more), and the country music Tom Petty tribute LP (ft. Dolly Parton, Margo Price, Chris Stapleton, Willie Nelson & more).

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

Peso Pluma – Éxodo
Double P

Peso Pluma goes half corridos tumbados, half reggaeton/Latin trap on his new double album, ft. Cardi B, Quavo, Anitta, and more

Last year, Peso Pluma became the posterchild of regional Mexican music’s global takeover, with multiple songs that broke into the US mainstream using nothing more than acoustic Mexican folk instrumentation. He helped spark a somewhat unlikely phenomenon, and it probably didn’t hurt his chances at crossover success that he appeared as a guest on some dancey reggaeton songs as well. You could see the impact of the latter, for example, at his recent GovBall set. As infectious as his acoustic songs are, it was the reggaeton and Latin trap sections of that set that got the New York crowd moving the most. His new double album Éxodo takes a similar approach. Disc one is his trademark corridos tumbados, with all the infectious guitar, horn, and vocal melodies that he’s become best known for, and appearances from fellow regional Mexican acts Eslabon Armado (who he previously worked with on their joint breakout single “Ella Baila Sola”), Junior H, Luis R. Conriquez, Chino Pacas, Ivan Cornejo, Natanael Cano, Gabito Ballesteros, various artists on Pluma’s Double P label, and more. And on disc two, he dives into reggaeton and Latin trap with help from Cardi B, Anitta, Ryan Castro, Quavo, DJ Snake, Rich the Kid, Arcángel, and Kenia Os. It’s a lengthy undertaking that functions as a great snapshot of just about everything Peso Pluma’s capable of, and it’s as savvy as it is artistically rewarding. You get the crossover songs without losing what Pluma was originally known for, and both sides are winning formulas.

The Story So Far – I Want To Disappear
Pure Noise

Pop punk vets return with their first album in six years and keep pushing forward

The Story So Far initially emerged as defenders of post-Enema of the State pop punk, but last we heard from them, on 2018’s Proper Dose, they’d pushed themselves to become something more. It’s still a pop punk album, but it branches off into other genres like dream pop, folk pop, and art rock, and it finds vocalist Parker Cannon exploring topics like mental health and addiction and eschewing stereotypically pop punk themes like unrequited love and infatuation. In the time since then, Parker did time fronting the hardcore-adjacent pop punk band No Pressure, guitarist Kevin Geyer focused on his indie-leaning project Same Side, and original bassist Kelen Capener left the band, but now they’re finally back and they’re continuing to push forward. The prevailing theme on I Want To Disappear is grief, as Parker lost his father to throat cancer in August of 2021, and the music on this record is just as adventurous as its 2018 predecessor. It has the spit-shined pop punk anthems, it has the quieter indie-leaning moments, and it’s a lean record that flies by too quickly to ever accuse of it having filler. It’s a comeback and a maturation that avoids all the pitfalls of “comeback records” and “mature records.” It just sounds like The Story So Far put their heads down, tuned everything else out, and made the record they wanted and needed to make.

Pick up our exclusive orange crush & black butterfly vinyl variant in the BV shop.

Your Old Droog – Movie
self-released

Prolific New York rapper makes a grand statement with his first proper full-length in three years

Brooklyn rapper Your Old Droog is extremely prolific and not always easy to keep up with, but Movie is his first proper full-length album since 2021–17 songs with skits, etc–and it really feels like an album that’s full of intention. Not that there’s anything wrong with firing off seven-song EPs like he did all throughout 2022, but it hits different when the project feels as grand and purposeful as this one does–it’s not called “Movie” for nothing. Over a great selection of ’90s-style boom bap beats from Just Blaze, Madlib, Harry Fraud, Conductor Williams, and more, Droog does what he does best, delivering knockout punchlines, memorable pop culture references, and creative rhymes that could make his heroes shit their pants. Method Man and Denzel Curry show up on recent single “DBZ,” and otherwise Droog holds his own for the entirety of the LP. He talks on Movie about seeing himself as a counter-culture guy, and at this point, it’s pretty tough to deny that he’s reached iconic status within that realm. Underground/counter-cultural rap has changed a lot since Droog stirred up buzz with his debut EP a decade ago, and he’s been a staple the entire time. This year alone he’s had standout guest verses on two of the best new rap albums (Mach-Hommy’s #RICHAXXHAITIAN and Heems’ LAFANDAR), and now he releases one of his most legacy-cementing projects yet.

SUMAC – The Healer
Thrill Jockey

Sludge metal, noise, and free improvisation meet on the latest SUMAC LP

SUMAC had a penchant for freeform improvisation since their first record, but that side of them has become more and more prominent over the years, especially since first collaborating with Japanese artist Keiji Haino in 2018. On their fifth album The Healer, every composition is a lengthy one–two songs hover around the 13-minute mark and the other two are around 25 minutes each–and band leader Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, Mamiffer, etc) mixes his sludge metal riffs and throat-shredding screams with an approach to noise and improvisation that’s closer to Sonic Youth and Swans than it is to most metal bands. The rhythm section of Brian Cook (Russian Circles, Botch, These Arms Are Snakes) and Nick Yacyshyn (Baptists, ex-The Armed) is pulverizing when it needs to be, but everyone in the band knows how and when to tone down the heaviness too. There are long stretches on this album that aren’t “metal” at all, and those moments only make the heavy parts sound even heavier. It’s a hypnotizing, teeth-clenching, 76-minute trip that’s built to get lost in, and it’s so transportive that it almost comes as a shock when that last bit of static finally cuts out.

As a bonus, SUMAC are releasing remixes of two of the songs in July. The Moor Mother remix of “World of Light” is out now, and it uses elements of the 25-minute original to create a four-minute industrial rap song. It’s a completely different beast that’s just as cool as its source material.

Alcest – Les Chants De L’Aurore
Nuclear Blast

Blackgaze pioneers react to these dark times with one of their brightest albums yet

The new SUMAC album and this new Alcest album that are both out today are both technically “post-metal” albums, but they couldn’t sound more different. While the SUMAC LP goes for improvisation and atonal noise, Alcest’s goes for shimmering beauty that’s often closer to shoegaze and post-rock than metal. As the French band’s first album since 2019’s excellent Spiritual Instinct and first since COVID lockdown, Alcest leader Neige wanted to “bring a little bit of light into this world” to counteract the dark times we’ve been living in since the last Alcest album. To do so, he looked inwards instead of outwards, mirroring the approach he says he took on the first Alcest album in 2007. “My inner world is very bright and uplifting,” he says, and adds that the new album is “really about exploring this other world, in the same way that I wrote about it on the first album. The music should be a key to open the door to this other world.” As intended, it’s escapist, surrealist, otherworldly, and heartwrenchingly beautiful. It’s as bright and uplifting as watching the sun come up after pulling an all-nighter, and Neige only raises his voice when the song really calls for it, when it really adds emotional depth. Especially since Alcest’s pioneering style of heavy shoegaze helped pave the way for a lot of what’s going on in the current shoegaze resurgence in the first place, the timing couldn’t be better for them to come back with one of the most purely gorgeous records of their career.

Foreign Hands – What’s Left Unsaid
SharpTone

Foreign Hands perfect their Y2K-style metalcore revival on their anticipated full-length

Y2K-style metalcore revivalists Foreign Hands had a much-deserved breakthrough with their great 2022 EP Bleed The Dream (released via DAZE), but it was later that year when they signed to SharpTone and released the two-song Lucid Noise single that the vision and potential for their next album really started to become clear. Those songs branched out from the rawer Bleed The Dream and fully embraced the more polished, more melodic metalcore that blew up in the 2000s, and Foreign Hands made that style of music sound new and fresh all over again. Now, two years later, the What’s Left Unsaid LP makes very good on the promise of that two-song single. The band aren’t shy about their influences–“the comparisons to Poison The Well are undeniable,” says guitarist/vocalist Jack Beatson–but as on Lucid Noise, Foreign Hands really do make it sound new again. And even in an increasingly large sea of metalcore revivalists, there aren’t many current bands scratching that itch as damn-near-perfectly as Foreign Hands.

Gasket – Babylon
Blue Grape Music

Rising metallic hardcore band offer up a quick, dirty, and thrilling new EP

Gasket are a metallic hardcore band from Baltimore who formed in 2022, released a three-song demo that same year, and then put out their debut EP Dull The Needle this past fall via Blue Grape Music, the new label launched by former Roadrunner Records executives Dave Rath and Cees Wessels that’s also home to Code Orange, Gel, and Spiritual Cramp. Now they’ve followed it with another new EP, Babylon, and it picks right up where its very promising predecessor left off. Throughout the EP, Gasket offer up six caustic, abrasive songs that are heavy as fuck in a way that feels more punk than metal, the same you might say about a band like Cursed or Converge. They’re not reinventing the form but they aren’t blatantly worshipping any of their forebears either. It’s a quick, dirty, and thrilling EP from a new band that’s very worth keeping your eye on.

—

Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including O., Rui Gabriel (of Lawn), Moon Diagrams (of Deerhunter), Rich Ruth, and Wild Yaks.

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.

Pick up the BrooklynVegan x Alexisonfire special edition 80-page magazine, which tells the career-spanning story of Alexisonfire and comes on its own or paired with our new exclusive AOF box set and/or individual reissues, in the BV shop. Also pick up the new Glassjaw box set & book, created in part with BrooklynVegan.

And, if you haven’t already, subscribe to the new BrooklynVegan digital magazine for free! Our first three editions are out now, with cover stars Jessica Pratt, Mannequin Pussy and Paramore.