Today’s New Music Friday is full of various indie, punk and folk delights. We received new albums from jangly favorites Kiwi Jr., folk-tinged rockers Typhoon, emo upstarts Camp Trash, indie-pop trio Palberta and many more. Scroll down for a rundown of seven notable and compelling albums out this week, as curated by the Paste music team.
Camp Trash: Downtiming
If you came of age (or just kept getting older) loving the likes of Saves the Day, The Get Up Kids or even The All-American Rejects, you’ll feel right at home with Florida quartet Camp Trash, whose sticky pop-punk sound makes quite a first impression on Downtiming, out now via Count Your Lucky Stars. It took all of one single (excellent EP closer “Weird Carolina”) for the band to announce themselves as an emo-revival act worth keeping tabs on, assuming the mantle by way of warm, relentless hooky guitars and Bryan Gorman’s bright vocals, which evoke the same kind of small-town yearning (“Sitting out on your front porch in some Midwestern suburb / Cracks in the cement measure / No warmth ahead / Since you left”) that has long run through the subgenre’s veins. Millennial nostalgia is just one of Camp Trash’s dimensions, as acoustic downshift “Potomino” helps to show, and Downtiming is exactly the sort of EP that will have listeners clamoring for a full-length. —Scott Russell
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Kiwi Jr: Cooler Returns
Toronto four-piece Kiwi have returned with the follow-up to 2020’s Football Money, which Paste praised for their “beautifully jangling guitars” and “rumpled vocal harmonies,” while drawing comparisons to bands like Pavement, The Clean and The Strokes. Now signed to Sub Pop for their second full-length, Cooler Returns, Kiwi Jr. are still light and agile, basking in the sunlight as their vivid guitar work and straightforward vocals do the talking. They love a good hook as much as they love a charismatic, illuminating one-liner. —Lizzie Manno
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Lande Hekt: Going to Hell
Lande Hekt, Bristol, U.K. musician and lead singer of Muncie Girls, has arrived with her debut solo album Going to Hell, out now via Get Better Records. The album was recorded last February when Hekt was on tour in Australia, and it addresses her newfound comfort and acceptance of her sexuality. “I internalised a lot of that [heteronormative] culture for a long time and it wasn’t until I found myself surrounded by Queer and trans people and friends, that I realised I could live happily in a way that felt right,” Hekt says. The album may be a personal breakthrough, but its compassionate, candid storytelling also makes it a collective triumph, with tender, hook-filled folk-punk as a vehicle for her catharsis. —Lizzie Manno
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Madeline Kenney: Summer Quarter
Bay Area singer-songwriter Madeline Kenney released her new EP Summer Quarter today (Jan. 22) via Carpark Records. Kenney self-produced Summer Quarter, recording the tracks in her Oakland home, and directed the music video for the EP’s second track “Wasted Time,” premiering exclusively at Paste today. The four-song EP comes after Kenney’s tour in support of her album Sucker’s Lunch was canceled due to the global pandemic. In her time off, Kenney has explored her interest in experimental production, using otherworldly synths to provide a dreamy quality as she lyrically ponders the challenges of being an artist. —Carli Scolforo
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Palberta: Palberta 5000
The most interesting thing about Palberta’s new album Palberta5000 is most certainly the transformation of this New York City trio from relentlessly noisy, DIY post-punk heroes into an archetypal indie-pop band, albeit one with a backburnered proclivity for chaos and razor-sharp edges framing its soft, sweet center. But the most amazing thing about Palberta5000 is that Palberta—Ani Ivry-Block, Lily Konigsberg and Nina Ryser, who are known to take turns on bass, drums and guitar—effectively captured that transformation in a four-day recording session at the Hudson Valley studio of engineer Matt Labozza, who also worked on the Philly band Palm’s 2018 art-rock banger Rock Island. Four days! In just four days, Palberta made the biggest leap of its already productive and distinctive life, and turned out an album that both honors the band’s past and turns a corner toward a bright future. —Ben Salmon
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Typhoon: Sympathetic Magic
Portland indie rockers Typhoon surprise released a new album today, Sympathetic Magic, which was written and recorded during the pandemic. It’s an album steeped in reverence towards one’s own presence, struggling to come to terms with the totality of life, but also fascinated by the quest for its essence: “You’re a child watching her mother / hover over an electric stove / In the warmth and from this angle / You feel it click into place like a key in the door / That in a million years this moment / however unremarkable / it will never be repeated / And that’s the closest you came / to being able to explain / that you do somehow exist.” Alongside Kyle Morton’s dusty voice and the band’s soft, string-laden folk-rock, they also try to make sense of our collective despair, but rather than address it in real-world terms, they try to get to the root of our psyche: “Don’t ever wonder why / everybody wants to die from time to time / It’s better not to ask / Don’t shake the nest, don’t speak the lie / Because it’s always been agreed / through some ancient alchemy / that the public secret it secretes that life is worth living / And it has to be.” Each song contains artful glimpses that take place in the shadows and in passing, whether it’s dried paint on a door frame, a sink full of dirty dishes, or time withering away like a persimmon rind. Its standout track, the penultimate “Masochist Ball,” has such a nurturing, sweeping grandiosity that it can even—if only temporarily—subside loneliness, as you can imagine the regal theater where such a song might exist, packed with people similarly enraptured by its glow. Sympathetic Magic appeals to both our desire for heartwarming, acutely detailed scenes and the untangling of complex emotions that can nag at a person if left unaddressed for too long. —Lizzie Manno
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Yung: Ongoing Dispute
Danish rockers Yung arrived with their debut album, A Youthful Dream, in 2016, and it was filled with punk-laced guitar pop, simultaneously scruffy and sharp, and often life-affirming. Now back with their follow-up, Ongoing Dispute, they sound like they’ve been emotionally tested, and are now out to prove something. Their new LP is, at times, tense, as they try to make sense of where they are and where they’re going, but its unexpectedly intricate riffs and fits of rip-roaring joy both cut through and complement that emotional tension. They’re most exuberant and captivating on “Unresolver,” a big-hearted track wrapped in stylish post-punk, jangly indie and explosive, warped garage rock. —Lizzie Manno
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