Best New Releases, August 23: Fontaines D.C., Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, and more
Pretty soon we’ll be immersed in the fall release season, and while we’re not quite there yet, it’s starting to feel a bit like we are. The list of new releases today is longer and more overwhelming—and loaded with amazing music—than it has been over the past month or so, and it’s only going to grow more overwhelming from here. Among this week’s best new releases are the long-awaited return of a troubadour duo, a harrowing industrial metal album, another standout release from a prolific rapper, a reissue of a long out-of-print dream pop gem and more.
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Fontaines D.C. – Romance
Fontaines D.C. have been moving at an accelerated rate over the past five years, adding more depth to their post-punk songwriting on career highlights like 2022’s Skinty Fia. Their follow-up to that album, Romance, is our Album of the Week, and it finds the group building bigger alt-rock hooks into their increasingly powerful songwriting. In our review, Virginia Croft said, “While all of their albums have been eloquent in their own right, Romance shines in a new way as the band incorporates harsher riffs, like on “Desire,” and a shoegaze-influenced layer of instrumentals on “Sundowner.”
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings – Woodland
Longtime musical partners Gillian Welch & David Rawlings haven’t released a new album of all original material in over a decade, their excellent 2011 release The Harrow and the Harvest followed by a box set of unreleased archival material and a set of covers, 2020’s All the Good Times. But shortly before that, the duo had to gather up all their masters from being destroyed in a tornado, which lent a certain urgency to them putting their studio to use again. The immediate result of that is Woodland, an album of new songs that finds Welch and Rawlings’ Americana as immediate and gorgeous as it’s ever sounded, mesmerizing folk laced with a touch of grit. We’ll have more on this one soon.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Uniform – American Standard
Four years after 2020’s Shame and just a year following the band’s awesome collaborative album with Boris, industrial metal outfit Uniform return with American Standard, their most harrowing album to date. In our review of their latest, Michael Pementel said, “American Standard is a brilliant achievement for Uniform: a heart-wrenching work that isn’t just the finest album to come from the band, it also represents what metal is capable of at its best.”
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Illuminati Hotties – Power
Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin is equal parts studio pro and idiosyncratic wildcard, which has always made her records a lot of fun to listen to. But on her latest, she dials back the latter a little bit in favor of a more focused set of power pop. In our review of the album, Elliot Burr said, “while Let Me Do One More was also humorously titled, it showed a more straightforward songcraft that’s now been made bigger, softer, more joyful and somber alike on Power: the closest to a consistent package the band has delivered.”
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)
Ka – The Thief Next to Jesus
Brownsville, Brooklyn emcee Ka has built up an ample body of work of hazy, gritty, introspective rap records written around a central motif—chess, Greek mythology, education and so on. Where he previously invoked the Old Testament on Descendants of Cain, his latest goes New Testament, with a series of darkly haunting tracks featuring gospel samples and intricate lyrical parables (and a lot of reflections on the hypocrisy of white Christians). As with any of his albums, it’ll take a few listens to untangle all the details, but from the opening sermon of “Bread, Wine, Body, Blood,” it’s an incredible listen.
Listen/Buy: BrownsvilleKa.com
The Softies – The Bed I Made
Twee pop legends The Softies became underground icons on the strength of ’90s-era indie records such as It’s Love and Winter Pageant. Now, for the first time in more than 20 years, Rose Melberg and Jen Sbraiga release a brand new album as The Softies, featuring 14 songs rife with jangly guitar, gorgeous vocal harmonies, reverb and songs of love and longing. It’s the best kind of back-to-basics comeback, where all that matters is how good the songs are. (Answer: Very.)
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Spirit of the Beehive – You’ll Have to Lose Something
Spirit of the Beehive delivered a disorienting hallucination of an album with 2021’s Entertainment, Death, and the trip still hasn’t faded on its follow-up, which pairs woozy psych-pop with lyrics that reflect loss and disillusion. In our review of the album, Virginia Croft said, “By confronting their own personal experiences and losses, they’re able to dive deeper into new, and inevitable, landscapes of sound.”
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Nicole Miglis – Myopia
Nicole Miglis, vocalist of dreamy synth-pop group Hundred Waters, makes her solo debut with Myopia, a set of songs that feels connected to the electronic pulses and rich atmosphere of her critically acclaimed band but with an even more diverse array of sounds. Early single “All I See Is You” draws more from a classic pop waltz while “Sleep All Day” layers samples of strings into a glitching ballad, and “Autograph” aims for soaring pop glory. It’s a stellar debut from a familiar voice who has opened up a door into new worlds of musical exploration.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd – The Moon and the Melodies
In 1986, Cocteau Twins released two albums. One was the group’s stunningly chilly, drum-free album Victorialand. The other was a full-length collaboration with ambient composer Harold Budd, The Moon and The Melodies, which is in large part an ambient album itself. It features a handful of proper Cocteau Twins-style dream pop songs, like the standout opener “Sea, Swallow Me,” though by and large this is a more soundscape-driven piece of work, fascinatingly abstract and consistently gorgeous, as usual. It’s perhaps a slightly unorthodox entry in the Cocteau Twins catalog, but the music is wonderfully immersive, and now that it’s finally back in print on vinyl, ripe for a late-night revisit.
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
