Today’s New Music Friday is filled with many familiar comforts and some exciting new sounds. We received warm new albums from Bruce Springsteen, Jeff Tweedy and Adrianne Lenker, plus pummeling records from Brutus, Clipping, PUP and much more. Scroll down for 10 essential new albums out today.
1. Adrianne Lenker: songs and instrumentals
Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker released two new albums, songs and instrumentals, via 4AD. “These songs have helped me heal,” Lenker says. “I hope that at least in some small way this music can be a friend to you.” Both albums were written and recorded in April after Big Thief’s March tour was cut short due to coronavirus. —Paris Rosenthal
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2. Bruce Springsteen: Letter to You
There’s something to be said for songs that do exactly what you think they’re going to do, in the best way possible. Bruce Springsteen’s new album is full of them. Letter to You follows fast on the heels of Springsteen’s cinematic 2019 release Western Stars, but while the latter was a solo effort, Springsteen’s latest reassembles an E Street Band in peak form on nine newly written songs and three he’s had kicking around since before his 1973 debut. The musicians recorded the album in just five days last November at Springsteen’s home studio in New Jersey, playing almost everything live to tape—a throwback to the way they used to work. In another break with years of precedent, Springsteen didn’t make demo recordings outlining his rough ideas for musical arrangements. Instead, he played through the songs on an acoustic guitar in the studio, and then he and the band set about arranging and recording them. That more spontaneous approach turns out to have been crucial: By giving the E Street Band full rein to play like, well, the E Street Band, Springsteen ended up with his most E Street-sounding album since Born in the U.S.A.. —Eric R. Danton
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3. Brutus: Live From Ghent
Belgian trio Brutus shared a new live album, Live in Ghent, via Sargent House. It was announced with a live video for “Cemetery,” a track from their 2019 LP Nest, which Paste dubbed “an album of incredible scope and emotional tension.” These live tracks explode with even more energy—raw and unfiltered. The four-minute “Cemetery” is dynamic and relentless, unfurling with metallic instrumentals, and it’s especially impressive watching lead vocalist Stefanie Mannaerts behind the drum kit. —Danielle Chelosky
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4. clipping.: Visions of Bodies Being Burned
Horrorcore trio clipping. (aka actor/rapper Daveed Diggs and producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson) bridge the gap between the bloodcurdling and socially conscious. The group released their latest album, the acclaimed There Existed an Addiction to Blood, last year, and they’ve released another LP, Visions of Bodies Being Burned, via Sub Pop. “Say the Name,” the lead single from their forthcoming album, was inspired by the urban legend of the Candyman, a hook-handed former slave and now ghost who appears if his name is repeated in a mirror. Diggs contextualizes the original narrative with mentions of the war on drugs and the Great Migration, but preserves its chilling tale of love, lust and murder. It also centers on a looped lyric from Geto Boys’ 1991 track “Mind Playing Tricks on Me”: “Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned,” which suits the song perfectly. —Lizzie Manno
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5. Ela Minus: acts of rebellion
As 2018 ended and 2019 began, Ela Minus was putting the finishing touches on what would become the most prescient song of 2020. “We’re afraid we’ll run out of time / To stand up for our rights / You won’t make us stop,” the Brooklyn-via-Bogotá synth savant murmurs invitingly on “megapunk,” which finds a brooding-then-explosive middle ground between New Order and Aphex Twin. Before the song’s final chorus, she becomes even more direct: “You’re choosing to lead us apart, but against all odds,” she warns, “you still won’t make us stop.” As the apex of an album coming out 11 days before the 2020 presidential election, “megapunk” couldn’t be more timely. It’s an uncompromising reminder that if the current president and his cronies attempt the coup they’re all but promising, we need to rise up even if we face threats of violence and jail. It’s also, as the second single and most thrashing entry on an album named acts of rebellion, somewhat of a thesis statement. On her debut LP, Ela Minus explores the role of community in subverting both fascist governments and oppressive everyday expectations. It’s a prophetic, vital message, and it’s wrapped in some of the best electronic and pop music of the year. —Max Freedman
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6. Jeff Tweedy: Love Is the King
In a song on Tweedy’s 2014 album Sukierae, a collaboration between Jeff Tweedy and his drummer son Spencer, the Wilco singer claimed, “I’ve always been low key.” “Always” might be an overstatement, considering the turbulence roiling through some of Wilco’s catalog, but “low-key” is certainly an apt description of his recent work. Jeff Tweedy’s solo albums Warm and Warmer, released in 2018 and 2019, respectively, were mostly hushed affairs, populated with songs you had to lean in close to fully absorb. Tweedy’s latest isn’t likely to blow out your eardrums, either, but Love Is the King is more subtly expansive, and slyly witty, than its two predecessors. There are quiet, folky songs, tunes with a twang and even a couple of compact rockers that showcase Tweedy as a more inventive guitarist than you’d think, given the virtuosic shadow Nels Cline casts in Wilco. —Eric R. Danton
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7. Laura Veirs: My Echo
Throughout Laura Veirs’ career as a renowned recording artist, there have been at least three prominent consistencies in her work. First is her dedication to her craft. Veirs, who lives in Portland, famously writes multiple versions of songs, sometimes numbering a dozen or more, until she believes she has it just right. The result is a catalog of precise and pretty indie-folk-pop tunes that are as lean as they are charming. Second is Veirs’ lyrical love of the natural world. A graduate of Carleton College’s geology program, her 11 albums are littered with lines about fading constellations and fields in bloom, icy streams and windswept trails, thunderclouds and topographic lines, lowland forests, glacial runoff, bears, boulders and branches just out of reach. Every Veirs album is a wide-eyed wander through a vibrant world. The third constant in Veirs’ music career has been Tucker Martine, the Grammy-nominated producer best known for his work with The Decemberists and Bill Frisell. Martine has produced almost all of Veirs’ records — including her 2016 collaboration with Neko Case and k.d. lang — and somewhere along the way, they married and had two children, too. That’s important to know, because Veirs’ new album is framed largely by her divorce from Martine, which the couple announced last November. Written and recorded before the final split, My Echo is like a transmission from inside a disintegrating relationship, heavy with all the hurt and hope and fear and frustration that comes with it. —Ben Salmon
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8. The Mountain Goats: Getting Into Knives
Recorded within a single week with microphones purloined from the ruins of The Nashville Network, Getting Into Knives brought the band to Sam Phillips Recording, former haunt of The Cramps as well as Elvis of Tupelo. These two iconic bookends are deeply in keeping with the range of sound on offer. Producer Matt Ross-Spang enlisted the Rev. Charles Hodges, whose Hammond B-3 gave rise to Al Green’s sound as well as the Memphis trumpeter Tom Clary, and there’s a rockabilly feel alongside soul and even country, but no one genre is discernible for long. It’s as if The Mountain Goats contain multitudes and so can you. —David Dark
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9. PUP: This Place Sucks Ass
For PUP, a band whose breakout album begins with the all-time great kickoff line “If this tour doesn’t kill you then I will,” the only thing worse than being trapped on tour for a year is being trapped without the possibility of touring for a year. Innumerable great young bands have seen their touring careers stalled by the pandemic, and PUP is one of them: Instead of seizing the momentum of 2019’s phenomenal Morbid Stuff with another round of shows, the Toronto punk band is trapped at home and getting their aggression out with a characteristically misanthropic EP, This Place Sucks Ass. Titled after a routine tour refrain-turned-pandemic commentary (“at this moment in time, it feels so fucking real—wherever you are, it sucks ass right now,” frontman Stefan Babcock explains), the 17-minute release compresses the band’s infectious feel-bad punk energy into five new ragers and one cover. —Zach Schonfeld
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10. This Is The Kit: Off Off On
Kate Stables announced her next album under the This Is The Kit alias Off Off On with lead single “This Is What You Did,” which features Stables’ signature upbeat banjo, top-knotch vocals and restless, stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Stables describes it as “A bit of a panic attack song,” adding, “The negative voices of other people that are your own voice. Or are they? Hard to say when you’re in this kind of a place. How to get out of this place? Needing to get outside more.” —Ellen Johnson
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