Summer is unofficially here and festival season is in full swing, and this weekend Governors Ball returns to NYC with SZA, The Killers, Post Malone, Peso Pluma, Chappell Roan, Alex G, Sexyy Red, and more taking over Flushing Meadows Corona Park from today (6/7) through Sunday (6/9). On the opposite coast, Goldenvoice will revisit their punk roots with the very cool-looking No Values fest on Saturday (6/8), featuring the Misfits, Social Distortion, Iggy Pop, Turnstile, Power Trip, Bad Religion, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Joyce Manor, Ceremony, The Jesus Lizard, and more. Speaking of The Jesus Lizard, they just announced their first album in 26 years this week, and the new song is very good!

As for this week’s new albums, there’s truly a wealth of new releases worth checking out. I highlight 14 below, and I also highly recommend all five albums that Bill reviews in Indie Basement this week: Peggy Gou, Good Looks, L’Impératrice, Goat Girl, and Marina Allen.

On top of those, this week’s honorable mentions include Eels, Actress, Man Man, H8 Inc, Drip-Fed, Leisure Hour, Ski Mask the Slump God, The Game, 42 Dugg, Orlando Weeks (The Maccabees), Tashi Wada & Julia Holter, JD Pinkus (Butthole Surfers), Beings (Zoh Amba, Steve Gunn, Shahzad Ismaily, Jim White), Bloomsday, Bored At My Grandmas House, Insect Ark, Perennial, Missing Link, Terry Green, All Under Heaven, Hunxho, Rucci, Kairos Creature Club (La Luz, Boytoy), Jesse Daniel, Seasick Steve, Fine, Smerz & GAEA, Margaux, Rose Hotel, FaltyDL, J.P., Bad History Month, Casey MQ, Psychic Graveyard, Nat Harvie, Angélica Garcia, Boycomma, Razor Braids, Alfie Templeman, Murf, Bathe Alone, AURORA, Sissy Misfit, Carly Pearce, Yelawolf, Meghan Trainor, Bon Jovi (including a song with Jason Isbell), the Second Life EP, and the Shygirl remix EP.

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

Candy – It’s Inside You
Relapse

Candy got a little industrial in their hardcore on 2022’s Heaven Is Here, but now they’re all in. Highlights of their new guest-filled album It’s Inside You include “You Will Never Get Me” (with Trapped Under Ice/Angel Du$t vocalist Justice Tripp), “Love Like Snow” (with Fleshwater vocalist MIRSY and LA electronic musician mmph), and perfectly named songs like “Dancing to the Infinite Beat” and “Hypercore,” all of which sound like they could’ve been minor hits during the ’90s industrial boom–especially the strangely infectious “Love Like Snow.” But Candy is still a hardcore band, and even on those songs (two of which get assists from Integrity’s Aaron Melnick and Trash Talk’s David Gagliardi), they sound like one. It’s Inside You makes more of a seamless evolution than a drastic pivot, and it’s got plenty of straight-up metallic hardcore mosh fuel to balance out the more electronics-assisted moments. I compared the genre-blurring on the last album to Full of Hell, but now Candy are starting to remind me more of Ceremony or the aforementioned Angel Du$t, bands with fearless ambition who will always be hardcore even when they’re navigating “non-hardcore” waters.

Charli XCX – Brat
Atlantic

After unabashedly touting her last album Crash as a sellout album, Charli XCX is getting weird again on Brat. But those descriptions are a little too reductive; Charli’s “pop” stuff has always been inventive, boundary-pushing, and ambitious, and her more experimental music has always been pop. That’s very much the case on Brat, which is brightly infectious enough to be on pop radio and also more mold-breaking than a lot of the music that is. It’s a musical melting pot of club beats, futuristic synths, off-kilter sound manipulation, bratty hooks, and a couple ambient indie ballads to break up the danceable maximalism. It’s an album that’s as well-suited for the cerebral art pop crowd as it is for the ravers, and it’s a reminder that those two crowds often exist in tandem. And above all that, it’s just fun, loud, addictive music that stands out from whatever pack you might think to group it with.

SECT – Plagues Upon Plagues
Southern Lord

SECT’s fourth album gets its title from “the literal pandemic, and the metaphorical plague of the political state and the rise of fascism,” but it’s not a protest album. Instead, it’s an album that captures the mournful hopelessness you feel when protesting just seems futile. Vocalist Chris Colohan refers to it as “a funeral rather than a trial.” You can hear in Colohan’s grizzled growls how disappointed he is in humanity, and it’s all set to a sludgy, crusty hardcore backdrop that sounds just as dark and depressing as what Colohan is singing about. It’s some of the most impactful songwriting yet from this supergroup-worthy lineup, and it’s an album that really holds a candle to the members’ multiple canonized projects–Colohan has fronted Cursed, Left For Dead, Ruination, and more over the years; drummer Andy Hurley hails from Fall Out Boy and Racetraitor; and other members have done time in Earth Crisis, Catharsis, Undying, Day of Suffering, and more. (Not to mention Converge’s Kurt Ballou stepped in to mix.) A lot of recent albums have captured the anger, confusion, and unrest that’s been increasingly widespread throughout the first half of the 2020s, but few have captured the utter dread the way this one does.

Umbra Vitae – Light of Death
Deathwish

It’s been seven years since we’ve gotten a proper new Converge album (2017’s The Dusk in Us), but the members have been far from quiet. They released a collaborative album with Chelsea Wolfe in 2021, and vocalist J. Bannon has been simultaneously leading two other bands, Wear Your Wounds and Umbra Vitae. Each band exists on a different end of the Converge universe’s musical spectrum–WYW explores J’s more somber side and Umbra Vitae finds him at his most purely aggressive–but also the more each one evolves, the more they grow to incorporate more and more. On Umbra Vitae’s new sophomore album Light of Death–made with the lineup of Bannon, Mike McKenzie (The Red Chord, Wear Your Wounds, Steve Martin (Twitching Tongues, Wear Your Wounds, ex-Hatebreed), Greg Weeks (The Red Chord, Sexless Marriage), and Jon Rice (Uncle Acid, ex-Job For A Cowboy), and recorded by Bannon’s Converge bandmate Kurt Ballou and Ballou’s frequent in-studio collaborator Zach Weeks–the death metal influences that informed the band’s 2020 debut LP Shadow of Life are very much still present, but there’s more than just that. “Velvet Black” goes into death-doom/gothic metal territory, and they calm things down on parts of “Nature Vs. Nurture” too. The other 90-ish percent of the album is fast, harsh, and heavy, and Umbra Vitae pull from both death metal and hardcore without ever relying on either genre’s clichés. It feels like a disservice to talk about Umbra Vitae as a side project or a supergroup or a band of any particular style. Just like Converge have been for decades, they’re just becoming a great heavy band that forges a path of their own.

Huntsmen – The Dry Land
Prosthetic

Released in March of 2020, Chicago band Huntsmen’s sophomore album Mandala of Fear became one of those breakthrough albums whose momentum was unfortunately affected by the world shutting down for 18 months, and the four years since have only seen the band play a few shows and release a three-song EP (two originals and a CSNY cover). But now, they break their relative silence with a new album that lands with as much of an impact as Mandala of Fear did four years ago. It’s their their first album written entirely collaboratively with co-vocalist Aimee Bueno-Knipe (who joined in 2019), whose soaring, earthy voice makes for an alluring blend with guitarist/vocalist Chris Kang, and it finds the band pushing themselves in a handful of new directions. Their folk rock parts would sit nicely next to Fairport Convention and their increasingly blackened style of sludge metal would sit nicely next to last week’s Thou album, and Huntsmen sound just as intense at their lightest as they do at their heaviest. Bands have been proving that folk rock and heavy metal go very well together since the early ’70s, so it’s not exactly a novel idea, but there’s still something so satisfying about how natural Huntsmen make it sound. You can hear The Dry Land as a great folk rock album, or as a great metal album, because it really is both of those things at once. And if you’ve got a taste for both, you might find that this album scratches an itch that really needs to be scratched more often.

Strand of Oaks – Miracle Focus
Western Vinyl

As Strand of Oaks, Tim Showalter has made primarily-acoustic folk albums and louder full-band rock albums, but he’s never made anything like Miracle Focus before. He made the album after falling in love with meditation, synthesizers, and dancing, and that all comes through in the songwriting. There are meditative ambient pop songs, dancey synthpop songs, retrofuturistic vocoders, and a couple songs where he incorporates his acoustic guitar into this new direction. It’s an album that’s joyful, psychedelic, and unpredictable, and it still feels like a Strand of Oaks album, despite being such a drastic pivot away from the type of instrumentation that Tim is best known for. Tim’s songwriting on this album has the same appeal that it’s always had, it’s just presented in a way that’s a little bit different than usual. Reading the album description that Tim wrote himself, you can tell that he had a lot of fun making Miracle Focus, and it’s a lot of fun to listen to too.

Bonny Light Horseman – Keep Me On Your Mind/See You Free
Jagjaguwar

Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D Johnson (Fruit Bats), and Josh Kaufman’s 2020 self-titled debut album as Bonny Light Horseman put a fresh indie-folk spin on decades- or even centuries-old folk songs and it became a surprise hit that quickly transformed Bonny Light Horseman from a side project into a band that’s now at least as popular as the members’ other projects. 2022’s Rolling Golden Holy found the trio exclusively writing original songs in the same appealing vein as their debut album, and now they’ve done that once again with their Jagjaguwar debut Keep Me On Your Mind/See You Free, a 20-song double album. Much of the album was recorded live with an audience at Ireland’s century-old pub Levis Corner House, and sometimes those audience members added group vocals to the album, but mostly they just gave Anaïs, Eric, Josh, bassist Cameron Ralston, and drummer JT Bates energy to feed off of. It’s a setting that makes a lot of sense for songs like these, songs that are modeled after the pre-recorded music era, the days when you might actually have to encounter someone performing in a pub in order to hear music like this at all. You can picture yourself right there in the room with the band throughout this LP, and the songs have that same lush, timeless, harmony-fueled sound that made the first two albums such winners.

Porcupine – All Is Vapor
New Morality Zine

Chicago/Pittsburgh’s Porcupine follow up a string of EPs, splits, demos, and singles that date back to 2017 with their debut album All Is Vapor, and it already feels safe to say that this is their best release yet. Their chaotic music toes the line between metal and hardcore in a way that brings to mind bands like Converge, Portrayal of Guilt, Full of Hell, and the above-mentioned Candy, and All Is Vapor also finds them exploring some gothy Swans/Daughters-like territory. One of the best songs (“I Am Bound”) is an eight-minute, shapeshifting song that deserves to be called an epic. It’s an intense, towering album that feels so much more ambitious than you might expect from the DIY hardcore scene that Porcupine exist within, and they never let their ambitions get the best of them. It’s not everyday that you hear a debut album in this vein that sounds like it could be the work of seasoned veterans, but Porcupine have done it.

Kaytranada – Timeless
RCA

Kaytranada’s followup to 2019’s Bubba finds the Montreal producer and 15 guest vocalists delivering more of the dance-infused pop, hip hop, funk, and R&B bliss that has come to define Kaytra’s career. We get songs with Tinashe, Dawn Richard, Ravyn Lenae, Thundercat, Channel Tres, Childish Gambino, Anderson. Paak & SiR, PinkPantheress, Mariah the Scientist, Rochelle Jordan, Charlotte Day Wilson, Don Toliver, Durand Bernarr, and Kaytra’s brother Lou Phelps, and all of those guests sound great against Kaytra’s thumping backdrop. It feels like just about any of these songs could follow in the footsteps of “10%” with Kali Uchis or “You’re the One” with Syd as Kaytranada’s next breakout hit, and as an album, Timeless is like a DJ mix that you can just throw on and lose yourself in.

NxWorries – Why Lawd?
Stones Throw

Of the many albums that Anderson .Paak has released on his own or in collaboration with other artists, 2016’s Yes Lawd! from NxWorries (Paak’s duo with producer Knxwledge) remains one of the most enduring. So it’s good news that NxWorries are finally back with their first new album in eight years, Why Lawd?. Paak’s way more of a star now than he was when the first NxWorries album came out, and that star power comes through on Why Lawd?, but for the most part, the album picks up where its sleeper-hit predecessor left off. Knxwledge remains a pro at putting a warped, sometimes-glitchy spin on vintage soul, and Paak’s near-seamless mix of singing and rapping hasn’t lost any of the luster it had on the first NxWorries album. The duo get help from an actual vintage soul singer (The Gap Band’s Charlie Wilson), plus Thundercat, H.E.R., Snoop Dogg, Rae Khalil, and October London, as well as an intro from Dave Chappelle. The most show-stealing moment, though, comes from Earl Sweatshirt, whose verse on “WalkOnBy” reminds you how good he can sound on a soul/R&B song.

The album is out today on physical formats, and it hits streaming next week (6/14).

ShrapKnel & Controller 7 – Nobody Planning To Leave
Backwoodz Studioz

For their third album in four years as ShrapKnel, New York/Philly rappers Curly Castro and PremRock connected with West Coast producer Controller 7, who entirely produced Nobody Planning To Leave, following albums primarily produced by Steel Tipped Dove (Metal Lung) and ELUCID (self-titled). Controller 7 brings a new dimension to the duo’s sound, with tracks that range from spacey psychedelia to clamoring jazz to neck-snapping post-boom bap, and Castro and Prem’s bars are just as dizzying and unpredictable as the beats. Open Mike Eagle, ELUCID, D-Styles (of Beat Junkies), Onry Ozzborn, Lungs, and Breezly Brewin guest.

Tems – Born in the Wild
RCA/Since ’93

Six years, two EPs, and multiple singles since Tems began her rise, the Nigerian pop singer finally releases her long-awaited debut album, Born in the Wild. She went all in, offering up 18 songs in 54+ minutes with appearances from J. Cole and Asake, and it makes good on the promise of her early breakthrough releases. It owes as much to ’90s US R&B and neo-soul as it does to the current Afrobeats craze, and Tems has exactly the kind of airy, soaring voice needed to pull this kind of thing off.

Pedro the Lion – Santa Cruz
Polyvinyl

Since reviving the Pedro the Lion moniker in 2017, David Bazan has been releasing a series of albums that are all named after places he’s lived, with stories based on points of his life that generally coincide with living in those places. He planned it to be a five-album series, and Santa Cruz is the third. It takes place from around the time he turned 13 to around the time he turned 21, the year the first Pedro the Lion EP was released. Throughout these 11 songs, Bazan’s unmistakable somber voice and vivid storytelling style are both in fine form, and he also brings a little more of a synth-fueled vibe to his usual unfussy indie rock style on this one. It’s comforting familiarity with just the right amount of subtle surprises, and another reliably great album from an artist who rarely if ever misses.

Kerosene Heights – LEAVING EP
self-released

Asheville, NC emo band Kerosene Heights’ surprise new four-song EP follows their great 2023 debut LP Southeast of Somewhere (released on No Sleep), and vocalist/guitarist Chance Smith calls it “a reflection on our lives in the last year.” The band have come a long way (and toured a lot) since Southeast of Somewhere was recorded, and you can really hear it in these songs, which are some of their best yet. The “emo revival revival” vibes are strong, and if you miss stuff like You Blew It! and Snowing, don’t miss out on what Kerosene Heights are doing right now. They make it sound as fresh as those bands did 10-15 years ago, and these tight, hooky songs are pretty impossible to deny.

—

Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Peggy Gou, Good Looks, L’Impératrice, Goat Girl, and Marina Allen.

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 two editions are out now, with cover stars Mannequin Pussy and Paramore.