Everyone from Kyle MacLachlan to Danny Brown is having a brat summer, Japandroids are back but also breaking up, Tenacious D is in hot water, and Pitchfork Festival is this weekend. What a week. On top of all that, I highlight five new albums below, Bill tackles five more in Indie Basement, including Beachwood Sparks, Oneida, Lilacs & Champagne, Luke Temple and the Cascading Moms, and Major Murphy.

On top of those, this week’s honorable mentions include Childish Gambino, Dr. Dog, Blxst, Ivan Cornejo, JB Dunckel (of Air), Mourning [A] BLKstar, AJ Lee & Blue Summit, Lava La Rue, GUM (Tame Impala, Pond) & Ambrose Kenny-Smith (King Gizzard), Sammy Kay, Joep Beving & Maarten Vos, Trail of Lies, Gorgon City, BLK ODYSSY, Circus, Occulta Veritas, Rich The Kid, L’Orange, Freeway & Jake One, Curren$y & MonstaBeatz, Total Blue, Her Head’s On Fire (Garrison, Small Brown Bike, etc), Bizhiki (S. Carey, Joe Rainey, Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings), L.C. Franke, Glass Animals, the Mexican Coke EP, the Amindi EP, the CodeName: Rocky EP, the Robin Guthrie EP, the Calling All Captains EP, the Snakehips & Earthgang EP, the RedLee EP, Carson McHone’s covers EP, The Raveonettes’ covers album, and the Saosin live album.

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

Denzel Curry – King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2
Loma Vista

Denzel Curry delivers a long-awaited sequel to a 2012 underground mixtape

Back in his early days in the early 2010s, when he was just a teenager, Denzel Curry released a string of underground mixtapes that helped usher in a new era of murky, psychedelic rap music and helped establish Denzel as an artist that was very worth paying attention to. In the decade-plus since, he’s become a consistent force in the rap world, and now he’s releasing a sequel to one of those underground mixtapes, King of the Mischievous South, Vol. 1. Making a KOTMS sequel was something Denzel originally wanted to do a long time ago (hence titling the first one “Vol. 1”), but he drifted in other directions and abandoned the idea for a while until finally ending up with a batch of distinctly Southern-tinged rap songs that made him realize the time for the sequel was now. Vol. 1 had an overt Three 6 Mafia influence, along with some others like Soulja Slim, DJ Screw, and UGK, but the Denzel Curry of 2024 is beyond being indebted to his influences; at this point, Denzel himself is a pioneer that younger rappers are already looking up to. So instead of returning to form on Vol. 2, he delivers a love letter to the South with all the skill, style, and perspective that he developed in the 12 years since the first installment. The beat choices honor various Southern rap hotbeds, and the guests come from an array of different regions too. After channelling Three 6 Mafia on Vol. 1, he returns to Memphis to recruit three actual members of the Three 6 Mafia family: Juicy J, Project Pat, and Kingpin Skinny Pimp. He also represents Texas (Maxo Kream, That Mexican OT and Mike Dimes), Atlanta (2 Chainz and Kenny Mason), the Carolinas (TiaCorine), and his native Florida (Ski Mask The Slump God and PlayThatBoiZay), and he brings in some non-Southern guests who pull from similar Southern influences, including fellow former Raider Klan member Key Nyata (from Seattle), A$AP Mobsters Rocky and Ferg from New York, and Philly rapper Armani White, plus a hook from West Coast crooner Ty Dolla $ign. It’s as much a variety of regional homages as it is an effective new Denzel Curry project, and it functions as a great record even if you don’t have all the context. Even if KOTMS2 is technically a long-awaited installment of an underground mixtape series, it sounds just as effortlessly grand as Denzel’s official albums.

We’ve got two exclusive vinyl variants of KOTMS2 available in the BV shop, neon orange and translucent highlighter yellow.

Los Campesinos! – All Hell
Heart Swells

The first Los Campesinos! album in seven years is a joyous return, even in its darkest moments

It’s been pretty amazing to watch Los Campesinos! transform from late-aughts buzz band into cult heroes that have been on a path of their own for years. Their natural-yet-unparalleled progression has found them evolving into an indie-twee-emo-baroque-pop collective that really doesn’t sound like anyone else in the world–how many other bands could namedrop The Hotelier, Animal Collective, Have A Nice Life, Earl Sweatshirt, and Steve Roach as influences and have it make as much sense as when Los Campesinos! does it? Probably not many. Those are just five of the 50 artists on their mood board playlist for All Hell, their first album in seven years and first for their own label, Heart Swells. As we’ve come to expect from Los Campesinos!, All Hell is a big, maximalist, delightfully off-kilter record on which emotions run high and string arrangements go up against loud, hard-hitting rock music. There are musical elements on the album that are defiantly out of step with today’s indie rock zeitgeist, but that’s not because Los Campesinos! have stopped paying attention to the world around them. Lyrically, All Hell is full of quips about the increasingly strange and depressing world we live in, up against more personal concerns, like–to quote the band’s own album description–“drinking for fun and drinking for misery, adult acne, and adult friendship.” It’s all delivered in the clever, commanding way that only this band can.

Jessica Boudreaux – The Faster I Run
Pet Club

The former Summer Cannibals leader’s solo debut is her most deeply introspective album yet

Jessica Boudreaux used to front the now-defunct Summer Cannibals, but now she’s gone solo and to say that her solo material is “more personal” would be a massive understatement. Since the last Summer Cannibals record, the world went into and out of a pandemic-induced lockdown, Jessica went through a nearly-three-year-long journey with breast cancer, and she separated from and got back together with her current romantic partner, all of which sets the stage for the songs that became The Faster I Run. “I know a lot more about myself now than I did when I was with Summer Cannibals and it was exciting to write because I suddenly have access to all these different parts of myself that I didn’t before,” she said in the press materials for this album. “Every song was a necessary part of healing, it’s genuinely the most that I have leaned on music to work through things. The whole record reflects on my past through an entirely new lens.”

Jessica wrote, performed, produced, and recorded the album herself at her own Pet Club Studio, other than drums by Ricardo Lagamasino (Lucy Dacus, Mal Blum) and mixing by Hop Along/Algernon Cadwallader guitarist Joe Reinhart, and she also released it herself on her own Pet Club label. It’s a “solo record” in so many senses, though it’s definitely not just one person with a piano or acoustic guitar. Most of The Faster I Run is made up of big, loud, crunchy indie/alt rock songs that sound like a fairly natural progression from Summer Cannibals, and powering these deceptively-feel-good songs are the most deeply introspective lyrics that Jessica’s ever written. Take a song like “Suffering,” where Jessica turns a devastating sentiment into a witty, catchy chorus in a way that sounds like the best Execution of All Things-era Rilo Kiley song never written (“There’s something funny about suffering/Yeah, they say you might be dying but you still gotta eat”). That’s just one line, but it’s indicative of what Jessica achieves time and time again on this album. It makes you think as much as it makes you sing.

JT – City Cinderella
Quality Control/Motown

JT of City Girls goes it alone on her first solo full-length

City Girls appear to be no more, but Yung Miami and JT are staying busy on their own and the latter just put out her first solo full-length release, City Cinderella. It’s billed as a “mixtape” but it’s a major label release with the flow, ambition, and expensive production of a proper album, and it finds JT’s solo career getting right off to a very promising start. The project was prefaced by “OKAY,” an instantly-undeniable aughts-style Southern rap anthem (which samples “Trap or Die” by Jeezy, who also appears on the song’s remix), and the album offers up other thrills like that one while also proving that JT’s got range. She begins City Cinderella on a more somber, introspective note, and her serious songs are as head-turning as her pop-rap bangers and raunchy trap anthems. She’s not immune to reboot culture–the Salt-N-Pepa “Push It” melody that powers “Uncle Al” (which also samples DJ Uncle Al’s “Mix It Up,” hence the name) feels more like an obvious attempt to induce nostalgia than a creative rework–but for the most part, City Cinderella avoids the pitfalls that tend to bog down pop-rap records. Outside of tacking on the Jeezy remix of “OKAY” and having DJ Khaled yell on “Oh,” the project only has two real guests, both of whom are rising female rappers (Stunna Girl and CLIP), and otherwise JT uses her first post-City Girls release to show that she is really is capable of holding it down on her own.

Fatboi Sharif & Duncecap – Psychedelics Wrote The Bible
Fused Arrow

Turn on, tune in, drop out to the new Fatboi Sharif EP

If you thought NJ rapper Fatboi Sharif’s last project sounded out-there and unsettling, strap in. Produced entirely by fellow NJ artist Duncecap, the entire backdrop is an eerie, aural acid trip that sounds more like Silver Apples or Gong than traditional hip hop production, and Sharif’s delivery and lyricism has its third eye open as much as the instrumentals do. This trip only lasts for about 11 minutes, but like any intense psychedelic experience, your sense of time will get totally warped by it anyway.

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Beachwood Sparks, Oneida, Lilacs & Champagne, Luke Temple and the Cascading Moms, and Major Murphy.

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

Looking for a podcast to listen to? Check out our new ‘Best Emo of 2014’ episode ft. Home Is Where vocalist Brandon MacDonald and music critic Drew Beringer.

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.