The big news in music this week was… Airbnbs? I’m exaggerating, but landmarks for both The Beatles and American Football are now available for anyone to stay a few nights in. Here at BV, we also took a look at 10 punk supergroups doing great stuff right now. And, some of this week’s most upsetting music news: RIP Saint Vitus (but “to be continued…”).

As for this week’s new albums, I highlight seven below and Bill looks at Fontaines D.C., The Softies, Chime School, GIFT, Fake Fruit, Geneva Jacuzzi, and YACHT in Indie Basement. On top of those, this week’s honorable mentions include Cash Cobain, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, illuminati hotties, Nicole Miglis (Hundred Waters), Luh Tyler, PlayThatBoiZay, Lainey Wilson, Body Meat, My Fictions, Myke Towers, M.A.G.S., Kato Hideki & Kramer, Closebye, Luna Li, Zeal and Ardor, Susanna, Nile, Mura Masa, Trae the Truth, Atlas Genius, Gravenoire, Generation of Vipers, Spectral Wound, Amy Allen, Andrew Combs, Ben Katzman, Nervous Eaters, Spring Silver, Brian Gibson (Lightning Bolt), Endon, Smote, Pegg, White Hills, Kishi Bashi, Malice K, Sofi Tukker, Superdestroyer, HAR, Fleshgod Apocalypse, the Wounded Touch/fallfiftyfeet split EP, the Bryce Dessner classical album, Confidence Man’s Fabric mix, the 25th anniversary edition of The Get Up Kids’ Something To Write Home About, and the 20th anniversary edition of Mark Lanegan’s Bubblegum.

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

Spirit of the Beehive – You’ll Have To Lose Something (Saddle Creek)
The Philly experimental trio follow their breakthrough 2021 album with another head-trip

“We wanted to make something intentionally less antagonistic,” says Corey Wichlin of Spirit of the Beehive’s followup to 2021’s excellent Entertainment, Death. But this is still Spirit of the Beehive we’re talking about, so don’t let that fool you into thinking they’ve gone pop or anything. You’ll Have To Lose Something is just as much of a head-trip as its predecessor, a shapeshifting, psychedelic, multi-genre (or just genre-less) affair that’s not meant for passive listening or easily-digestible consumption. Whenever it does bring in a bright, clean hook, it quickly contrasts it with something noisy and unsettling. On opening track “The Disruption,” they bring in Deedee from MSPAINT, whose shouted verse perfectly matches this album’s paranoia. The band’s 2023 EP I’m So Lucky primarily dealt with the end of band members Zack Schwartz and Rivka Ravede’ decade-plus-long romantic relationship, and the band’s new bio calls this new album “a continued meditation on the end of relationships and the unsteadiness that follows.” That unsteadiness is as much reflected in the lyrics as it is in the music itself; You’ll Have To Lose Something often sounds like the sonic equivalent of seasickness, and I mean that in the best way possible.

Ka – The Thief Next To Jesus (Iron Works)
The veteran Brooklyn rapper continues his prolific second act with a soul/gospel-infused meditation on religion, freedom, and life

Since beginning his second act as a solo artist in the late 2000s/2010s, former Natural Elements member Ka has become one of the most prolific and consistently great underground rappers around. Every project he’s release in the past approximately-15 years has been gripping and immersive and The Thief Next To Jesus is no different. Like 2020’s Descendants of Cain, religion is a major theme on this new album, as is the way religion relates to race, freedom, and life itself. Ka remains the type of rapper who favors hushed storytelling over hook-fueled instant satisfaction, though the soul, gospel, and blues samples on this album give it a sense of melodic immediacy that stands out from his other recent records. Like every Ka album, it has a darkly gorgeous exterior and a very deep interior that only fully reveals itself across multiple listens. As always, the time it takes to dive in is worth it.

The album is currently only available as a $20 download on Ka’s website.

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Melt-Banana – 3+5 (A Zap)
The Japanese noise rock vets sound as chaotic as ever on their first album in 11 years

Melt-Banana are 30 years removed from their first album, and 11 years removed from their last album, but time has clearly done nothing to tame this band’s chaos. Picking right up where 2013’s Fetch left off, 3+5 is a high-speed collision of discordant guitars, splatter-paint synths, explosive noise, and Yasuko Onuki’s sugar-high voice. It’s pretty much Melt-Banana doing what they do best, and it’s no small feat that they’ve been churning out such intense music for three decades straight, even if the gaps between albums have gotten a little lengthier lately. At this point, the Melt-Banana train is one you can hop on at any point and still get the full experience. Just be ready for it to go off the rails.

Heems – VEENA LP (Veena Sounds)
The Das Racist / Swet Shop Boys member’s second album in his comeback year of 2024 is also one of his most serious and reflective records yet

When Heems returned in February with LAFANDAR, the Das Racist/Swet Shop Boys member’s first solo album in nine years, he was just getting started. Heems was working on a comeback album called VEENA–which is also the name of his new label/lifestyle brand/digital magazine–when he met producer Lapgan (aka Gaurav Nagpal), and his original plan was to have Lapgan contribute to VEENA. But the two ended up having so much chemistry that they made an entire project together, and that became LAFANDAR. Now, just six months later, he returns with the long-promised VEENA. This one was made with producer Sid Vashi, and it ranges from neck-snapping rap beats to jazz musician Vijay Iyer’s lush piano on “MANTO” to the clattering percussion of “BOURDAIN.” Adding to its wide scope, the album is broken up by voicemail skits from other icons of the South Asian diaspora, including Riz Ahmed, No Doubt’s Tony Kanal, Hasan Minhaj, Yo Yo Honey Singh, Arooj Aftab, Nimes Patel, Poorna Jaganathan, Zoya Akhtar, and more, several of which Heems says were actual voicemails he received. Heems’ goal with the album, according to a press release, was to confront various forms of trauma (generational, familial, complex), and VEENA finds Heems delivering some of his most reflective, serious songs to date. He’s still got his sense of humor intact, but if you’ve still got it in your head that Heems is “joke rap,” this album will erase that once and for all.

Sabrina Carpenter – Short n’ Sweet (Island)
Sabrina Carpenter follows up the breakout success of “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” with her sixth LP

When Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” arrived this past April, it felt like a breath of fresh air. In a sea of pop singers pivoting to Serious, Statement-Making, Album-Oriented Pop, here was a totally unpretentious song that doubled as a reminder of how fun can it be when pop music is, well, fun. Its “that’s that me espresso” hook understood something that the Swedes who wrote so many English-language pop songs in the ’90s and 2000s also understood: that the melody and the sound of the words is so much more important than proper grammar and literal meaning. The lead single from the 25-year-old pop singer’s sixth album Short n’ Sweet, “Espresso” helped turn Sabrina Carpenter into a household name but it’s far from her first success. A decade earlier, she released her first EP and began her role as one of the stars of Disney’s Boy Meets World spinoff Girl Meets World. But, like many teen pop stars before her, her music underwent a transformation as she entered adulthood. She refers to 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send as her first “big girl” album, and says, “When it comes to having full creative control and being a full-fledged adult, I would consider [Short n’ Sweet] a sophomore album.”

Before anyone could call “Espresso” a fluke, Sabrina followed it with “Please Please Please,” a lighter, slower song that ended up being just as infectious and enduring as “Espresso”‘s blissful disco-pop. (It also became her first No. 1 single.) Now, Short n’ Sweet is here in full, and it has a few different sides to it. More effortless fun comes from the Sheryl Crow-esque pop rock of opening track/new single “Taste,” and more featherlight ’80s pop comes from “Good Graces,” “Bad Chem,” and “Juno.” But the album also suggests that maybe the unpretentious/fun vibes of “Espresso” weren’t meant to be as much of an antidote as they seemed; about half of Short n’ Sweet embraces the acoustic guitars and tortured-poet pop of Sabrina’s recent tourmate. (Jack Antonoff is also one of the main co-writer/producers on the album, along with Amy Allen [Harry Styles’ “Adore You”], Julia Michaels [Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” Selena Gomez’s “Lose You to Love Me”], Ian Kirkpatrick [Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now” and “New Rules”], and John Ryan.) My favorite of the non-singles, though, is “Coincidence,” a shambolic campfire folk song that shakes up the album’s otherwise shiny vibes. Of all the songs on Short n’ Sweet, it’s the strongest evidence that Sabrina Carpenter is full of surprises.

Uniform – American Standard (Sacred Bones)
Michael Berdan opens up about a lifelong eating disorder on one of Uniform’s most intense albums yet

“The following songs are about a lifetime of making myself vomit,” Michael Berdan writes in an essay accompanying his band Uniform’s new album American Standard. “They are about the lies I tell myself and the reality of what bulimia nervosa has done to my mind and body. They are about the havoc that my disease has wrought on my personal relationships and the pain it has caused the ones unfortunate enough to love me.”

He adds (and I’m paraphrasing) that opening up about his struggles with an eating disorder is not easy, and that, at 43 years old, making music is one of the few things that’s kept him going and helped him feel better throughout this lifelong struggle. Even if he didn’t say it, the courage and catharsis that fueled this album is evident just from listening; there’s palpable devastation in every single one of Michael’s screams. On the other end of American Standard‘s creation process, Michael’s bandmate Ben Greenberg aimed to craft an “overwhelming and all-encompassing” instrumental soundscape that matched the nature of the lyrics. Nowhere does that goal come across louder and clearer than on the title track, a 21-minute song that opens the album and swirls together sludge metal, prog, hardcore, noise, and more. It’s followed up by three shorter tracks that trek through Godflesh-style industrial metal (“This Is Not A Prayer”), more sludge (“Clemency”), and a closing track that verges on black metal territory (“Permanent Embrace”). American Standard has no lack of Uniform’s trademark chaotic fury, though some of its most head-turning moments are the ones that are almost-shockingly beautiful.

Magdalena Bay – Imaginal Disk (Mom + Pop)
The electro-pop duo keep it varied on their second full-length

After spending some time in a prog band, Tabula Rasa, in high school, Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin did a full about-face and started releasing blissful electro-pop as Magdalena Bay. A handful of EPs, mixtapes, and one great full length, 2021’s Mercurial World, later, their second full-length album is a re-introduction to their wacky, hypercolored world. That includes a backstory that plays out in the music videos, about a character named True getting an upgraded “imaginal disk” implanted in her forehead that’s supposed to give her an “upgraded consciousness.” While some of that makes its way into the lyrics, mostly Imaginal Disk serves as a vehicle for Magdalena Bay to deliver a bunch of maximalist electro-pop bangers. Tenenbaum’s dreamy vocals are a thoroughfare, but they don’t otherwise restrict themselves to any singular sound — opening track “She Looks Like Me” goes from twinkly ethereal synths to boisterous horns and back, while “Image” opens with harsh synths that sound like slamming doors before dipping into a tropical groove. The varied approach coheres into a very fun romp through the duo’s stylized, sci-fi-tinged dreamscape. [Amanda Hatfield]

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Fontaines D.C., The Softies, Chime School, GIFT, Fake Fruit, Geneva Jacuzzi, and YACHT.

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

Looking for a podcast to listen to? Check out our new episode with The Get Up Kids about Something To Write Home About for its 25th anniversary.

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