Today’s New Music Friday features Paste’s highest rated new album of 2021 so far, The Weather Station’s Ignorance, plus several other records worth your attention. This week brings new albums from Austin’s self-described “regret pop” band Sun June, Japanese indie artist Nana Yamato, celebrated composer and film director John Carpenter (perhaps best known for the Halloween franchise) and many more. Scroll down for 10 essential albums out today.
Black Country, New Road: For the first time
Born of the same South London scene that’s produced the likes of black midi, PVA and Squid, white-hot septet Black Country, New Road found their band name using a random Wikipedia page generator. With singles like 2019’s “Athens, France” and “Sunglasses,” and last year’s “Science Fair,” the U.K. up-and-comers are growing and changing before our eyes. On their debut album For the first time, frontman Isaac Wood’s hypnotic speak-singing shifts subtly away from “speak” and towards “sing” on the album, so as to more effectively meld with the band’s mercurial instrumental outbursts. Their thunderous post-punk, spiked with discordant jazz, feels both explosively raw and carefully, ingeniously crafted. —Scott Russell
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Foo Fighters: Medicine at Midnight
Three decades into an illustrious career, Foo Fighters have made it clear that the consummate musicianship synonymous with their catalogue is well-deserved. The band’s chemistry has always been explosive and disarmingly clever; Dave Grohl maneuvers projects with the kind of cinematic dexterity his contemporaries wish they could execute. And as expected, the biggest Foo Fighters hits have consistently showcased this. The band’s 2014 HBO documentary miniseries Sonic Highways (which commemorated their 20-year anniversary and eighth studio album of the same name) provided a level of intimacy we are rarely privy to. Their 2015 “Break a Leg” tour was a testament to how seriously Foo Fighters take their craft despite the unforeseen obstacles—like Grohl’s fall from a stadium stage in Sweden—that were thrown their way. Grohl’s 2018 two-part mini documentary Play zeroed in on his multifaceted nature (he plays seven different instruments live during his 23-minute song) as he expresses his never-ending quest to further his lifelong passion. The group’s 10th album, Medicine at Midnight, is not so much an attempt at reinvention as it is a powerful love letter to their artistry. —Candace McDuffie
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John Carpenter: Lost Themes III: Alive After Death
Acclaimed composer and director John Carpenter—best known for various horror and sci-fi flicks from the ‘70s and ‘80s, like Halloween, Dark Star, Christine and The Thing—has released his first non-soundtrack album in almost five years. Titled Lost Themes III: Alive After Death, and out now via Sacred Bones, this album is the follow-up to 2015’s Lost Themes and 2016’s Lost Themes II. In 2017, Carpenter also released Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998, a collection of re-recordings of his best known film score themes. This new 10-track album features Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies (Carpenter’s son and godson, respectively), who also composed and performed on previous Lost Themes releases. “We begin with a theme, a bass line, a pad, something that sounds good and will lead us to the next layer,” John Carpenter says of their process. “We then just keep adding on from there. We understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, how to communicate without words, and the process is easier now than it was in the beginning. We’ve matured.” —Lizzie Manno
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Nana Yamato: Before Sunrise
The world inside Tokyo artist Nana Yamato’s new album, Before Sunrise is, at once, carefully curated and full of possibility. The singer/songwriter previously released seven-inch records as ANNA, and has now put out her debut LP under her own name, an album of young adult melancholy that harnesses solitude for creative fuel. Yamato paints with various electro-pop and indie rock hues, cultivating an intriguing swath of dreamy lo-fi that’s out of step with the sounds you might expect from an album with those signifiers. Her soft, layered vocals twirl around chunky beats, scratchy guitars, whimsical synths and the occasional brass, and you can feel each of these colors seeping into the nooks and crannies of your mind. —Lizzie Manno
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Sarah Mary Chadwick: Me And Ennui Are Friends, Baby
On New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based singer/songwriter Sarah Mary Chadwick’s previous effort, 2020’s Please Daddy, if you were feeling fragile, you could almost insulate yourself from her painfully honest songwriting, training your focus only on, say, the soaring horns on “When Will Death Come,” the blues-rock boogie of “Let’s Fight,” or the wistfully jazzy flute of “The Heart and Its Double.” But there’s no hiding from the broken heart of Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby—Chadwick fully embraces emotional catharsis, stripping her songs back to solo piano and vocals only, and you have no choice but to follow suit. Just as she worked wonders on a 147-year-old pipe organ for her 2019 record The Queen Who Stole the Sky, Chadwick crafts an album of untold power not in spite of her focus on one instrument, but because of it. With Please Daddy’s diffuse textures out of the equation, the songwriter can only take a fearless inventory of her interior turmoil, turning a truly harrowing series of events—after the deaths of her father and a close friend, and the dissolution of a long-term relationship, Chadwick attempted to take her own life in 2019, just weeks before the Ennui sessions began—into an album that will knock your heart on its ass. Chadwick’s unusual vocal delivery and unsparing, darkly funny songwriting combine to make Ennui’s stark sensibility unforgettable, and Chadwick never flinches, wondering of her struggles at one point, “Is it all for this song? / If it is, is that wrong?” It will take all of your inner fortitude to answer her. —Scott Russell
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The Staves: Good Woman
Emily, Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor, that is English indie-folk trio The Staves, first came to prominence opening for folk acts including The Civil Wars and Bon Iver, moving audiences with little more than Jessica’s guitar and their artfully tangled vocal harmonies. Their classic folk sound has fluctuated some since their 2012 debut Dead & Born & Grown, of course, but never has it undergone the sort of transformation brought about on Good Woman, the trio’s first new album in six years. Together with indie producer extraordinaire John Congleton (Phoebe Bridgers, St. Vincent, Angel Olsen), The Staves embrace electronic sounds and adventurous arrangements on these songs, as if making a conscious effort to demolish any preconceived notions about their music. Good Woman opens with its title track, a microcosm for the record as a whole that uses their distinctive group vocals as a jumping-off point—punchy drums, washed-out guitars and openhearted lyrics steadily push the song into psych-tinged, electro-pop thumper territory, signaling the start of a bold new era for The Staves. Even the songs that feel familiar manage to surprise and delight along those same lines, building to consistently enthralling peaks beyond what this band previously seemed capable of. —Scott Russell
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Sun June: Somewhere
Sun June’s brand of spacious, country-tinged rock songs feels like a gentle, caressing breeze. Their second album Somewhere, out now via Run For Cover Records and Keeled Scales, compliments the twinkling lights of the city and the magnificence of bucolic solitude alike—these songs would echo wonderfully in virtually any backdrop. Laura Colwell’s voice has a timeless veneer, and Somewhere communicates the lasting sentiment that for better or worse, nothing lasts forever. —Lizzie Manno
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TV Priest: Uppers
Are you burnt out from all the talky U.K. post-punk bands coming out of the woodwork? If so, fair enough. But if not, here’s another band that does that thing quite well. At its heart, the debut album from TV Priest, Uppers, runs on the exhilaration of their rhythms and Charlie Drinkwater’s distinctly irreverent vocals. Channeling the surreal, monochrome chug of Protomartyr and the ugly barks of IDLES, TV Priest represent the less funky, less sharp end of post-punk, and instead opt for smog-like guitars and vein-popping vocals. They’re not the sharpest tool in the shed, but when they get things fully revved up, you’ll have a hard time resisting the tug into their rowdy funhouse. —Lizzie Manno
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Various Artists: EARBUDZ Volume One
To celebrate the two-year anniversary of No Earbuds, which is home to artists like Bartees Strange, Dogleg and Queen of Jeans, the music PR and artist development company has released a Bandcamp-exclusive compilation titled EARBUDZ Volume One. The 20-song tracklist features various No Earbuds artists covering each other. The compilation features artists like Future Teens, Caracara, Church Girls, Into It. Over It., Hit Like a Girl and more. All proceeds will benefit The Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit dedicated to cannabis-related criminal justice reform. Today (Feb. 5), Bandcamp is waiving fees, so consider purchasing the compilation on its release date to help raise more money for a good cause. “I’ve been a fan of the work LPP does for a long time,” No Earbuds founder Jamie Coletta says. “We shouldn’t be able to buy cannabis at spots that look like the Apple Store while people are still in prison for the same thing. I was moved when I learned the story of Way Quoe Long and knew I had to come up with a way to help.” —Lizzie Manno
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The Weather Station: Ignorance
Ignorance, the fifth and best album by The Weather Station, is the kind of album that arrives in the middle of an artist’s discography and marks a clear, penetrating break with everything that came before it. Think The Dreaming, or Kaputt: abrupt stylistic leaps that subvert and explode whatever category the artist previously seemed to occupy. In The Weather Station’s case, that category was folk music. For more than a decade, the Canadian band—led by singer and former child actor Tamara Lindeman—specialized in delicate indie-folk, rooted in fingerpicked guitars and light, rustling percussion. 2015’s Loyalty and 2017’s self-titled follow-up enlarged the band’s sonic range and empathetic lyrics, but still operated within the folk tradition. Ignorance is a departure. More specifically, this album is a stunningly assured plunge into a sleek, buzzing jazz-pop wilderness. Lindeman’s guiding impulse here is rhythm: interlocking polyrhythms (“Robber”), hi-hats that rattle and hiss like gently persistent metronomes (“Wear,” “Separated”), even some outright four-on-the-floor beats, which spring to life on the sparkly disco-pop of “Parking Lot” and “Heart.” —Zach Schonfeld
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