BrooklynVegan turned 20 this week! We hoped for nicer weather in NYC for our birthday, but at least we’ve got some great new albums to listen to this week. Our trusty Bill Pearis is over in Norway at Øyafestivalen at the moment, but he phoned home to tell us about the new OSEES and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard albums in Indie Basement, and I’ve got six albums to tell you about below.

On top of those, this week’s honorable mentions include Ryuichi Sakamoto, Polo G, Latto, Benny the Butcher, Big Sean, Asake, J Balvin, Kali Uchis, Cloud Cult, Beabadoobee, Destroy Boys, Mamaleek, Milton Nascimento & Esperanza Spalding, Belong, And So I Watch You From Afar, Nova Charisma (Hail the Sun, Stolas, etc), Logic, Four Year Strong, Neek Bucks, Louis Cole, Chlöe, NIKI, Fulci, Maxwell Stern (Signals Midwest), Hell Beach, Mal Not Bad, Amos Lee, Quivers, The Dead Tongues, Peter Cat Recording Co., Mushroomhead, Google Earth, the Everyone Asked About You EP, the Torres & Fruit Bats EP, the Common Sage EP, the Phonte EP, the 16 Underground EP, and the Justin Townes Earle unreleased material & rarities album.

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

MAVI – Shadowbox (Mavi 4 Mayor)
The North Carolina rapper opens up on his most devastating album yet

It’s time to stop calling MAVI “abstract rap.” The term perfectly described his 2019 debut project Let the Sun Talk, but MAVI got increasingly direct over the years, and Shadowbox is not only his most personal, honest album yet; it’s some of the most personal, honest music I’ve heard all year. He opens up about the death of a loved one, a breakup, mental health, alcoholism, and family issues, and he speaks plainly and bluntly without ever relying on clichés. There’s a subtle melodic quality to the way he raps, and his delivery is so expressive that the pain in his voice is always palpable. He has one guest singer (Malaya on “Open Waters”) and handles all the rapping himself, over an array of soundscapes (from an array of producers) that range from jazzy to dancey to orchestral to neck-snapping boom bap to glitched-out bliss. Whether or not you think it’s the best MAVI album yet, it’s definitely the most musically varied and the most devastating. And there’s nothing abstract about it.

Oso Oso – Life Till Bones (Yunahon)
The Long Island band move further into power/jangle pop territory on their deceptively bright fifth album

Oso Oso’s last album Sore Thumb was one of the most beautiful records they’ve ever made, and it wasn’t even the album they originally intended to release. Band leader Jade Lilitri had just finished demoing the album with his cousin/collaborator Tavish Maloney when Tavish suddenly passed away, and Jade decided to not touch the album and release it as is. If you didn’t know the story, you’d never know you were technically listening to “demos,” and I wonder if that turn of events inspired the way Jade approached its followup Life Till Bones. Having made 2019’s Basking In The Glow with the veteran producer/engineer combo of Mike Sapone (who also mixed Sore Thumb) and Brett Romnes, Jade returned to his longtime collaborator Billy Mannino (who co-produced the Sore Thumb demos-turned-album and produced Oso’s 2017 breakthrough album The Yunahon Mixtape) for Life Till Bones. It sounds looser and freer than Basking In The Glow, just like Sore Thumb did, and it also goes further into the power pop and jangle pop territory that Oso began exploring on Sore Thumb. Having written these songs after the tragedy that altered Sore Thumb‘s release, there’s melancholy in Jade’s lyricism but you might not guess it from listening. These are Oso Oso’s lightest, brightest, snappiest songs yet, with echoes of everything from ’90s Gin Blossoms (“All of My Love)” to late aughts Phoenix (“That’s What Time Does”). It’s a pretty far cry from the rippin’ emo-punk that Oso were making nearly a decade ago, but it’s also distinctly an Oso Oso album. Even when Jade wears some of his influences on his sleeve, nobody does it like he does.

Parannoul – Sky Hundred (self-released)
The enigmatic South Korean artist delivers another gorgeous blend of shoegaze, post-rock, glitch pop, and emo on this surprise new album

Nothing about South Korean artist Parannoul is typical. We still don’t know the name of the person behind the project, they barely play shows and have never toured outside of South Korea, and they surprise-released their new album Sky Hundred on a Saturday, the same day they were playing a rare set at a festival in South Korea with Jack White, Kim Gordon, Turnstile, Sepultura, and Ride. What is known–and widely agreed upon–though, is that Parannoul’s music is goosebump-inducing and beautiful. Sky Hundred is the first proper Parannoul album since last year’s excellent Sky Hundred, and it also follows a 2023 live album that was recorded at their first-ever full concert and Scattersun, this past June’s collaborative album with internet rap collective Fax Gang. Picking up where After the Magic left off, Sky Hundred is a seamless fusion of shoegaze, post-rock, glitch pop, and emo, and all of it’s so beautiful and transportive that you don’t need to understand the Korean lyrics to feel totally moved by it.

Fucked Up – Another Day (Merge)
The ripping, fast-paced ‘Another Day’ is the shortest Fucked Up album and comes just one year after their last

One of the things I liked about seeing Fucked Up on a bill with Gorilla Biscuits and Cold World last fall is that it was a reminder that, beyond the rock operas and the 20-minute psychedelic songs, Fucked Up are also still a really good hardcore band. There’s a time and a place for both, but it had been a long time since Fucked Up released a concise hardcore album, so it felt refreshing when they veered more in that direction on last year’s One Day. And now, closing their shortest gap between albums yet, they deliver Another Day, which is even more of a fast-paced, rippin’ album than One Day and also Fucked Up’s shortest proper full-length album yet. The title implies a connection to One Day, but this isn’t an outtakes record or even from the same sessions. It was recorded a few months after One Day, and Fucked Up have said that they were inspired by that album’s impulsive urgency (which was recorded remotely with each member coming up with their parts and recording them in one day) while making this one. It reminds me of the band I saw on that Gorilla Biscuits show, ripping through oldies-but-goodies like “Police” and “Baiting the Public,” but it also reminds me of how far Fucked Up have come over the years. The comforting juxtaposition between the big, triumphant melodies on this album and Damian Abraham’s ever-throat-shredding bark is something that Fucked Up have been honing for two decades, and there’s still nobody else who does it like them.

Ravyn Lenae – Bird’s Eye (Atlantic)
The Chicago R&B singer delivers a genre-busting sophomore album that proves she’s capable of much more than her breakthrough debut let on

Right from the groove that powers album opener “Genius,” Ravyn Lenae lets you know that her anticipated sophomore album Bird’s Eye is no repeat of its great predecessor Hypnos. The airy, ethereal R&B and IDM-infused electronics that defined Hypnos are still plentiful on Bird’s Eye, but there’s also vintage reggae (“Candy”), the countrified closer “Days,” and louder, bolder songs like “Love Me Not” and “1 of 1” that throw it back to the days of Y2K-era hitmakers like Mary J. Blige and TLC. It’s easy to draw parallels to the boundary-busting R&B of Ravyn’s past tourmate SZA, and just as SZA’s done multiple times, Bird’s Eye finds Ravyn breaking out of her shell and proving that she’s capable of much more than she initially let on. As nice as the comfortingly familiar moments on Bird’s Eye are, it’s the unpredictable ones that’ll stick with you the most.

Larry June – Doing It For Me (EMPIRE)

The extremely prolific West Coast rapper Larry June has literally released at least a dozen projects in the 2020s alone, and why slow down when you’re still making records as good as Doing It For Me? With no guests, it finds the San Francisco native embracing the kinds of psychedelic soul and funk samples that have fueled West Coast rap since the G-Funk era, and this record sounds even hazier and more laid-back than some of Larry’s most 420-friendly forebears. Larry’s got a calm, cool, and commanding delivery that’s just as smooth as the production, even when his lyricism is dripping with venom.

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including OSEES, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, and more.

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.

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.

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