The Grammys are this Sunday, so we’ve had far more top 40-type music on our minds than usual lately in preparation—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Our new album streaming roundup, however, runs the usual gamut of releases both ballyhooed (Valerie June’s new album, a Perfume Genius remix LP) and entirely unexpected (Harmony Woods’ Graceful Rage, new Grouplove). This New Music Friday’s 10 albums (one of which is actually an EP) you can least afford to miss are coming after the jump.
Allie Crow Buckley: Moonlit and Devious
Allie Crow Buckley’s debut album Moonlit and Devious is intricate and powerful, her haunting melodies swirling around a heavy soundscape. Album opener “Nothing Sacred” makes a big first impression, with a blown-out bass carving out the song’s low end. Gnarly, fuzzy guitar licks embellish the singer’s alto stylings, making for a gripping listen. The album’s titular single shows Buckley’s talent as a songwriter and poet, with inventive verses like “Aloof and ambiguous / You deprive me of the sentiment / I love how you let me spin / Circles around you, dip in arabesque.” “Moonlit and Devious” also utilizes a subtle organ sound to add a huge, cinematic feel to the dark track. —Carli Scolforo
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Baby Boys: Threesome
St. Paul, Minnesota-based trio Baby Boys, featuring producers and multi-instrumentalists Caleb Hinz (Happy Children), Jake Luppen (Lupin, Hippo Campus) and Nathan Stocker (brotherkenzie, Hippo Campus), have released their debut album Threesome on Grand Jury Records. The band’s “genre-bending mischief-pop” first caught our attention via “Kinky Toe,” the lead track from their 2019 debut EP I’m Set—we praised the song as “euphoric and unexpected all the way through.” The band keep that same “yes to everything” energy on Threesome, delivering off-kilter art-pop likely to connect with fans of Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors. Baby Boys’ youthful fearlessness is a cheery reminder that we’re all just figuring things out as we go, and can best do so with open minds. —Scott Russell
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DJ Muggs the Black Goat: Dies Occidendum
Originally conceived as the soundtrack to an unreleased film, Dies Occidendum is legendary hip-hop producer DJ Muggs’ (Cypress Hill, Soul Assassins) debut album under his new Black Goat moniker. The all-instrumental Sacred Bones release finds the three-time Grammy nominee at his most menacingly cinematic, interweaving ominous film audio with gothic trap beats (“The Chosen One,” “Anointed”), grimy rock riffs (“Incantation,” “Nigrum Mortem”—”Black Death” in Latin) and eerie ambient drone (“Alphabet of Desire”). And like The Witch before it, which also features a devilish black goat, Dies Occidendum ends with the sounds of a fire crackling in the night on “Transmogrification” (shout out to Calvin & Hobbes!), a sinister aural image, indeed. This album is a front-to-back blast, even at its most legitimately unsettling, and it’s a testament to DJ Muggs’ decade-spanning talent and longevity that he’s still making such compelling, sonically sumptous music. —Scott Russell
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Grouplove: This Is This
Exactly one year after their 2020 album Healer, Grouplove have surprise-released their fifth studio album This is This. The group never fails to supply some solid, feel-good indie-pop tracks, even as they lyrically confront their darker feelings. An album produced over a year in the pandemic, This is This finds the band becoming antsy and frustrated on “Deadline”: “Everybody’s got a place they like to go / I’ll never never never make it on my own / I get the feeling that you wanna lose control / And you know I’ll go there with you.” Grouplove slow down a bit on the nostalgic “Oxygen Swimming” and surprisingly heartfelt “Shake That Ass,” but those who prefer their high-energy coming-of-age hits can find songs of a similar feather ,in “Scratch” and “Just What You Want,” which features Surfbort’s Dani Miller. —Carli Scolforo
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Harmony Woods: Graceful Rage
Philadelphia’s Harmony Woods surprise-released a new album, Graceful Rage, on Friday. Produced by Bartees Strange, the newest LP follows 2019’s Make Yourself at Home. Power courses through Harmony Woods’ latest creation, an album that songwriter Sofia Verbilla describes in a statement as “a record about confronting the emotional rubble that this trauma leaves in its wake.” Verbilla lyrically explores the great disappointment of having a personal idol fall from grace in your mind’s eye, and the rush of emotions that follows. Standout tracks include the haunting and raw ballad “Easy,” which opens with chamber choir-esque layered vocalizations from Verbilla. The impassioned pop-punk of “God’s Gift to Women” is particularly scathing, with notable one-liners like “You’re not the person the world person the world pretend you are” and “I watch the skeletons fall / this is your wrecking ball.” Potent and gripping, Graceful Rage is an apt name for a record that so masterfully turns Verbilla’s bitterness into a work of art. —Carli Scolforo
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The Horrors: Lout EP
The Horrors’ EP Lout is a quick listen at only three tracks, and it doesn’t waste a second of fuzzy, thrashing sound. Lout is the British band’s first release of new music since 2017’s V, and is a chaotic and addicting outpouring of noise. From the pulsating synths on “Org” to the driving distorted guitar on the title track, The Horrors take no breaks from their intense, high-energy creation on their latest release. —Carli Scolforo
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Perfume Genius: Immediately Remixes
Not content to have released one of 2020’s best albums in Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) has released Immediately Remixes, a full-length rework of his acclaimed fifth album. The companion album features the LP’s original sequencing, with remixes courtesy of an impressive cast: Jaakko Eino Kaleivi, A. G. Cook, Jim-E Stack, Planningtorock, Jenny Hval, Initial Talk, Boy Harsher, Nídia, Danny L Harle, Westerman, Actress, Koreless and Katie Dey each contribute, in that order. “I’m very honored to have all these incredible musicians rework these songs,” Hadreas said in a statement. “I felt personally remixed listening to their versions, hearing the spirit of my song completely transformed was very magical. Each one feels like a little portal to a fucked up shared world.” —Scott Russell
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Really From: Really From
You won’t hear anything else quite like Really From today—the Boston-based quartet, formerly known as People Like You, mark their new era with this release, a challenging fusion of math-rock, emo, jazz, folk and ambient styles. Michi Tassey (keys, synth bass) and Chris Lee-Rodriguez (guitar) lead the band, singing in tandem to pose “thematic questions concerned with intergenerational trauma, tokenism and immigrant parenthood,” as a press release summarizes. Really From’s band name alludes to a question its mixed-race members are often asked—”Where are you really from?”—as if that place couldn’t possibly be here. (The band thumb their noses at that close-minded notion across the album, including on “I Live Here Now” and “I’m From Here.”) As such, Really From’s nuanced, uncompromising instrumentation, rounded out by trumpeter Matt Hull and drummer Sander Bryce (I Kill Giants), is the ideal representation of the ideas that define their songwriting: If at first it strikes you as unfamiliar, listen closer, and you’ll hear what makes it universal. “My laugh’s made like yours / Hearty at its core,” Lee-Rodriguez sings on “Quirk,” a common-sense call for compassion and acceptance that demands to be heard. —Scott Russell
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The Underground Youth: The Falling
The Underground Youth’s The Falling is the band’s first album since 2019’s Montage Images of Lust & Fear. Frontman Craig Dyer’s deep, moody, monotonous vocalizations a la Orville Peck are at the forefront of the The Falling’s sound, backed by an ever-present acoustic guitar. The album’s opening title track is suspenseful and biblical, hypnotically inviting the listener in with a dark charm. Other standout tracks include the poetic, harmonica-infused “Vergiss Mich Nicht” and “Cabinet of Curiosities,” a love song vaguely evocative of a Spaghetti Western. —Carli Scolforo
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Valerie June: The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers
Tennessee-born singer/songwriter Valerie June “takes the dreamer’s path” on her first new album since 2017’s The Order of Time, expanding the scope of her already-nuanced folk/soul stylings to incorporate elements of funk, pop and psychedelia—adding a touch of the cosmic to her Americana. June, who co-produced her new record alongside Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys, John Legend), wastes no time in setting its tone, opening with three-song suite “Stay” / “Meditation” / “You and I,” and drawing inspiration elsewhere from the likes of Afrobeat giant Fela Kuti and David Bowie collaborator Tony Visconti. “With this record, it finally became clear why I have this dream of making music. It’s not for earthly reasons of wanting to be awarded or to win anybody’s love—it’s because dreaming keeps me inquisitive and keeps me on that path of learning what I have to share with the world,” said June in a statement. “When we allow ourselves to dream like we did when we were kids, it ignites the light that we all have within us and helps us to have a sort of magic about the way we live.” —Scott Russell
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