With December officially here, we and the rest of the music world are fully in year-end list mode, and we’ve posted a lot of lists this week, including from artists we love, major music publications, and streaming-service statistics. Because it’s a new month, that also means we also offered up our picks of the best punk/emo songs and rap albums of November. And just in case you tuned out the internet over the long holiday weekend, I highly recommend checking out the two albums I reviewed last week, Bedsore (especially if you like the new Blood Incantation album) and Hidden Mothers. Also late last week, we celebrated the half-decade mark by looking back on the 50 best punk & emo albums of 2015-2019, otherwise known as the second half of the 2010s. As for the BrooklynVegan staff’s 2024 year-end lists, many of those are coming soon. But first, let’s look at some albums out this week.

I highlight six below, and Bill tackles more in Indie Basement, including Fennesz, Seahawks, the Saint Etienne album (that’s one of the few releases out next week), and the new comp from shoegaze-heavy label Sonic Cathedral. On top of those, this week’s honorable mentions include Angel Olsen’s compilation & covers project, Lucinda Williams’ Beatles covers album, Lauren Mayberry, Cameron Winter (of Goose), Rosé (Blackpink), Kenny Segal & K-the-I???, DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ, Nettspend, White Denim, Rich Amiri, Gleemer, Hepcat & Scientist, Siete7x, Baby Smoove, LUCY (Cooper B. Handy), TV Girl & George Clanton, Bubble Love (Ross From Friends), Lil Tjay, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Termanology & Tek, Drakeo the Ruler, Prowess The Testament, Ruth Goller, Low Harness, The Abruptors, Roddy Ricch, felicita, Out Of/Into (fka Blue Note Quintet), Spanaway (mem Fuming Mouth), the TWICE mini album, the Couplet (You Blew It!, Into It. Over It.) EP, the Dungen EP, the Kassie Krut EP, the Clothing EP, the Dazy EP, the Raised Wrong EP, the Kill Code EP, Interpol’s Live at Third Man Records, The Rolling Stones’ live from 1999 album, the Dua Lipa live album, the Tori Amos live album, the Nils Frahm live album, the Laura Nyro comp, the Will Haven comp, and the Throbbing Gristle box.

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

Shabaka – Possession EP (Impulse!)
A companion EP to one of this year’s best ambient jazz albums, ft. billy woods, ELUCID, Esperanza Spalding, André 3000 & more

Having already released one of this year’s best ambient jazz albums with Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, Shabaka follows that up with a five-song companion EP, Possession. One of the highlights of Perceive Its Beauty was ELUCID rapping over Shabaka’s flute-fueled textures, and he reprises that role on “I’ve Been Listening,” and this time his Armand Hammer partner billy woods is also on a song, “Timepieces.” (Armand Hammer should just make a whole album rapping over ambient jazz. It would sound amazing.) Esperanza Spalding, who played bass on multiple Perceive Its Beauty songs, does some wordless singing on another vocal-oriented highlight, “Cycles of Growth.” Fellow woodwinds enthusiast André 3000 assists Shabaka on the nearly-eight-minute centerpiece “To The Moon.” The music is also thematically and even directly related to the music of Perceive Its Beauty, including the billy woods song, which samples Perceive Its Beauty opener “End of Innocence.” As on the full-length album, the line between the show-stealing guest vocals and the quiet, instrumental moments is something that Shabaka toes expertly.

Red Sun / Bonus – Unnecessary Riffness EP (Wax Bodega)
A super fun, new-gen, Midwest-style emo split EP to cap off the year

One of this year’s most exciting stories in underground emo has been the rise of Red Sun, the Oklahoma City band who won us and several others over with this year’s best buds EP, and then signed to Wax Bodega (Hot Mulligan, Home Is Where, Carly Cosgrove, etc) and continued to level up with recent single “Boomer.” “Boomer” was the lead single of Red Sun’s Wax Bodega debut, a split EP with Florida emo band Bonus that features two songs by each band, and the whole release delivers. Like “Boomer,” Red Sun’s other contribution “Sooner” captures everything this band does well. They love the scrappy, yelpy, noodly vibes of Midwest emo, but they also love crisp, punchy pop-emo, and they do it all on this anthemic song. Bonus scratch a similar itch, with their own fair share of guitar noodling, vocal-strain hooks, and sweaty basement energy coming through on their songs “LASO” and “Chalkzone.”

No Cure – I Hope I Die Here (SharpTone)
A socially-conscious, guest-filled metallic hardcore concept EP that’s full of purpose

Birmingham, Alabama’s No Cure have been making noise in the metallic hardcore underground for a couple years, and today they deliver their first release for SharpTone Records (Better Lovers, Dying Wish, Foreign Hands), an eight-song concept EP called I Hope I Die Here. The band call the EP “a love letter to Alabama and the Southeastern experience,” and each song has a guest (or guest) that the band say “has made an undeniable mark on Alabama hardcore over the years,” adding, “We do not expect you to recognize every name on this record, and that’s the point.” (The guests include members of Yautja, MyChildren MyBride, Bareknuckle, Living Tragedy, Gideon, Wielded Steel, Cold Hard Steel, Wretched Blessing, Beautiful Child of God, and The Slam Brigade.) The band is straightedge, and they have fan fave songs like “No Cure Straight Edge Die Slow Fuck You,” but I Hope I Die Here doesn’t rely on stereotypical straightedge sloganeering and it definitely doesn’t rely on macho hardcore posturing, vengeful breakup songs, or other overdone topics like hating your hometown. “We do not believe the world needs any more [of those] songs,” the band said. What they do sing (or scream) about, in their own words, is “many topics, including what it’s like to grow up under the boot of religion, fraternity culture, the dark side of a beloved landmark, local ecological exploitation, and more.” There’s a lot of purpose to these songs, and you don’t need a lyric sheet to hear it coming through. If you like the brutally-heavy hardcore that Knocked Loose have been bringing to non-metal year-end lists, the Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! lately, you might like this too.

Smino – Maybe In Nirvana (Zero Fatigue)
A lush, personal rap album that Smino shelved back in 2020 and finally released

St. Louis rapper Smino’s new album Maybe In Nirvana comes after 2022’s Luv 4 Rent and 2020’s recorded-in-isolation-during-COVID She Already Decided, but the material was actually recorded before both of those releases. Smino shelved these songs at the time, but decided to release them after more recently returning to them, and it comes out on his own Zero Fatigue label, following a major label stint. Smino told Billboard that he wrote and recorded these songs fresh off the 2019 tour that brought him to Coachella and other major festivals, and he was feeling “full-on rock star” at the time, not “worry[ing] about shit.” He feels like a much different person now (“the pandemic made everybody age 10 years”), but that said, there’s still a lot of maturity and growth in these songs. It’s a rich, lush, melodic rap (and briefly reggae-ish) album with deeply personal themes like familial grief, and it captures a moment in Smino’s life and career that we’re lucky to have immortalized. Ravyn Lenae, Thundercat, and reggie appear on the album, and a massive highlight comes from Texas rap legend Bun B.

Advance Base – Horrible Occurrences (Run For Cover)
Owen Ashworth returns with a bare-bones concept album, inspired by Arthur Russell and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ and set in a fictional town called Richmond

The current wave of bedroom pop would probably look a lot different without the influence of Owen Ashworth, who’s been consistently putting out music since the late ’90s (first as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, now as Advance Base) and also releasing so many other great artists’ records on his label Orindal Records. For just a small sample of his impact, see Dear Life Records’ 2022 tribute album You Were Alone: An Owen Ashworth Almanac, which features covers of Owen’s music by MJ Lenderman & Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman, Pedro the Lion, Dear Nora, Friendship, Bedbug, and more. Owen’s first (non-covers) album in six years, Horrible Occurrences, is out today on Run For Cover, and it’s a home-recorded concept album that takes place in a fictional town called Richmond, which Owen describes as “just this place where all the bad memories live.” It’s a bare-bones album, with just Owen’s hushed voice and vivid, descriptive lyricism atop electronic pianos and synths–sort of a keyboard-driven homage to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, which Owen says partially inspired his decision to record this album on his own, without any guests. Though the town it takes place in is fictional, the emotions within Horrible Occurrences are real. “My songs are always pretty therapeutic for me,” Owen says, “but I had more of my own mental health stuff that I was wrestling with this time. Working through these songs was helpful.”

Along with the release, Owen has made us a list of music that influenced the album, including the aforementioned Nebraska, as well as Arthur Russell’s World of Echo, John Carpenter’s Halloween, blues legends Mississippi John Hurt and Washington Phillips, electronic music pioneer Ruth White, Owen’s recent collaborators Dan Wriggins (of Friendship) and Karima Walker, and a couple non-music items. Owen had a lot to say about how all of this tied into the making of the album–see what he said about each one here.

Apollo Brown & Crimeapple – This, Is Not That (Mello Music Group)
The very prolific NJ rapper Crimeapple gets a lush backdrop from Detroit producer Apollo Brown on his latest LP

There’s a meme you might’ve seen about “getting into your introspective bag, turning to jazz, and making a collab album with The Alchemist,” and then there’s the inevitable backlash to that meme from people reminding the world that The Alchemist isn’t the only producer that rappers can go to when they want to make reflective, jazzy rap albums. I’m not one to put a damper on a good meme, but the music nerd in me agrees: as much as I love The Alchemist, other producers deserve the credit he’s been getting lately, and one of those producers is Apollo Brown. Like Alchemist, a full album produced by Apollo Brown is always going to be a standout, and Hackensack, NJ rapper Crimeapple’s decision to make an album with him did not disappoint. (Other producers who deserve that kind of credit: DJ Muggs, Preservation, and Big Ghost Ltd, all three of whom Crimeapple has released albums with this year alone. This guy is not easy to keep up with.) Even if you haven’t heard one of Crimeapple’s many albums, you may have heard him as a guest on recent albums by rappers like Westside Gunn, Boldy James, or Flee Lord. He’s well-immersed in the current wave of ’90s/East Coast-style boom bap revival, and he’s got a serious knack for tackling smoky, jazzy beats with gritty, street-smart bars. With help from two guests (Willie The Kid and Sonnyjim), he does exactly that on This, Is Not That, and Apollo Brown’s backdrop elevates him in exactly the way Apollo Brown productions are known to do.

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Fennesz, Seahawks, Saint Etienne, and the new comp from shoegaze-heavy label Sonic Cathedral.

Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases archive.

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

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 four editions are out now, with cover stars MJ Lenderman, Jessica Pratt, Mannequin Pussy and Paramore.