The week before Labor Day is usually a little slower in the music news world, but not this year. To recap: Oasis are back, Linkin Park are up to something, so is TV on the Radio, and The Smile and Godspeed You! Black Emperor both announced new albums. Sum 41’s Deryck Whibley is, however, not joining Oasis or Linkin Park.

As for this week’s new album reviews, we’ve got a little less than usual, but some very highly-anticipated ones. I highlight four new albums below, and Bill looks at more in Indie Basement, including Seefeel, Ty Segall, Jon Hopkins, Los Bitchos, The Bug Club, Fastbacks, and Yannis & the Yaw (Foals). On top of those, this week’s honorable mentions include Jónsi, Tycho, Laurie Anderson, Juicy J, Fireboy DML, Robert Glasper, Cold Gawd, Enumclaw, Oceanator, Jana Mila, Steve Wynn (The Dream Syndicate), Big Sean, Kehlani, Caleb Caudle, Destroy Lonely, Suburban Eyes (Christie Front Drive, Mineral, Boys Life), Asher Gamedze & The Black Lungs, Curren$y & DJ Fresh, Mozzy, Coco & Clair Clair, The Cactus Blossoms, Bent Knee, Cal In Red, Ellen Reid, Dorothy Carter, Executioner’s Mask, Wintersun, Lia Kohl, Paris Paloma, Wunderhorse, Sean Henry, Mondo Cozmo, Tank and the Bangas, Zedd, John Legend (prod. Sufjan Stevens), the Chelsea Wolfe remixes EP, the Love and Rockets remix EP, the Earthgang & Snakehips EP, the Sex Week EP, the Pronoun EP, RZA’s orchestral ballet score, the Kneecap soundtrack, and Oasis’ 30th anniversary edition of Definitely Maybe.

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

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Wild God (PIAS)
The Bad Seeds are back with their most band-oriented album in over a decade.

Wild God is the first Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album since the band concluded a masterful trilogy with 2019’s Ghosteen (and it also follows Nick Cave and his core Bad Seeds collaborator Warren Ellis’ 2021 duo album Carnage), but in a way, it feels like the Bad Seediest Bad Seeds album since 2013’s Push the Sky Away, the album that kicked off that aforementioned trilogy over a decade ago. Nick explained to NPR‘s Ann Powers that, after his son Arthur died during the making of 2016’s Skeleton Tree, the album started to feel like “too raw a thing [for the band] to be able to find their voices on,” and the impact that Arthur’s death had on Ghosteen made the album “so fragile that no one knew how to do anything on it either.” On Wild God, The Bad Seeds ride again. It’s all there: the groove of Martyn Casey’s basslines, the beating heart of Thomas Wydler’s drums and Jim Sclavunos’ percussion, the swirl of Warren’s orchestral arrangements and the piano/guitar patterns provided by Nick, Warren, and relatively newer Bad Seed George Vjestica. Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood provides some guest bass too, and Flaming Lips collaborator Dave Fridmann mixed. True to Wild God‘s religious nature, a gospel choir fleshes out multiple songs. Suspenseful climaxes are reached, like on the coda of “Conversion,” and more meditative moments exist too, like the textural arrangements of “Joy.” Throughout it all, Nick is a storyteller, a poet, a blues singer, exhibiting the kind of command that only Nick Cave can. There’s suspense, drama, love, pain, spirituality, and a callback to Jubilee Street. He’s a wild god, baby, a wild god!

Nails – Every Bridge Burning (Nuclear Blast)
Todd Jones revamps Nails with a new lineup for a ferocious comeback LP, their first in eight years

Todd Jones has been back with a vengeance lately. After reuniting with his former band Terror to produce and do guest vocals on their killer 2022 LP Pain Into Power, he’s now assembled a new lineup of Nails for the band’s first album in eight years, Every Bridge Burning. (Not to mention he also lent his voice to the new Terminal Nation album.) Now featuring guitarist Shelby Lermo (Ulthar), bassist Andrew Solis (Despise You, Apparition), and drummer Carlos Cruz (Warbringer), Nails may look a little different but their M.O. hasn’t changed. If anything, they only sound even harder. With 10 songs that most clock in around two minutes max, Todd Jones & co trek through the same ferocious mix of grindcore, powerviolence, thrash, and crust/D-beat that made them such a beloved band throughout the early/mid 2010s. It’s not until the doomy three-minute closer “No More Rivers To Cross” that Nails take their foot off the gas in any capacity, and they sound just as nasty when they slow it down as they do when they’re going a mile a minute. Even the trademark production style of longtime collaborator Kurt Ballou of Converge, who Todd calls “such an important ingredient as to how we present our music,” sounds even more crisp than it did on the first three albums. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but no harm in dusting it off, charging it up, and making it look new again.

Doechii – Alligator Bites Never Heal (TDE/Capitol)
TDE’s latest rising star follows up two breakthrough singles with an extensive 19-song project

Florida rapper/singer Doechii has been on the rise since the late 2010s, and that rise has been severely escalating lately. She scored her biggest hit yet in 2023 with the Kodak Black-featuring R&B song “What It Is (Block Boy),” and she turned a lot of heads (including SZA’s) with this year’s even better house/pop/rap fusion “Alter Ego” ft. JT of City Girls. Neither of those songs are on Alligator Bites Never Heal, her new 19-song major label project that she’s calling a “mixtape,” but maybe she’s saving them for something she’ll call an “album.” In any case, Alligator Bites Never Heal is a rich-sounding, multi-faceted project that serves as another great showcase for Doechii’s many talents. She switches it up between trad-rap, airy R&B, and some more modern electronic and trap beats, and she peppers the songs with skits and interludes that serve the project’s larger narrative. At any given moment, she can be found rapping as hard as your favorite ’90s street rapper or sounding as theatrical and charismatic as peak Ludacris and Missy Elliott. If you’re looking for more where “What It Is” came from, she balances out her barrage of bars with a handful of reminders that Doechii can really sing too. At this point, Doechii is actually pretty established and prolific, but Alligator Bites Never Heal gives you the sense that she’s just getting started.

Duster- In Dreams (Numero Group)

Duster are clearly back in it for the long haul. The San Jose slowcore trio returned in 2019 with their self-titled first album in 19 years after their late ’90s/early 2000s albums influenced an increasingly large number of modern indie bands and gradually turned into cult classics, and this comeback run has become longer-lasting and more prolific than their initial run. They followed the self-titled with 2022’s Together, and then surprise-released In Dreams today. It picks up right where the previous LP left off, sounding as gorgeous, spacey, and hypnotic as you’d hope.

Why Bonnie – Wish On The Bone (Fire Talk)

NY-via-Texas singer-songwriter Blair Howerton intended her first full-length album as Why Bonnie, 2022’s 90 in November, to be a country album; for its follow-up, she didn’t have a specific genre in mind, but plenty of country twang works its way into the songs on Wish on the Bone, along with tender folk and crunchy indie rock. “Three Big Moons,” with its soaring refrain of “Houston, we have a problem” is an immediate highlight, and one of the most country-leaning songs on the album; elsewhere, artists like Cat Power, Wednesday, and Land of Talk come to mind. [Amanda Hatfield]

Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Seefeel, Ty Segall, Jon Hopkins, Los Bitchos, The Bug Club, Fastbacks, and Yannis & the Yaw (Foals).

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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