Spring: a new season, a new outlook, a new schedule for watering your houseplants. In short, a new you—and a new release schedule to help you find it. This quarter, find salvation in indie-rock with the audacious returns of Perfume Genius, Japanese Breakfast, Yeule, and Car Seat Headrest; find transcendence in art-pop with magisterial outings from Jenny Hval, Bon Iver, and These New Puritans; and find comfort in the presence of one-man rap subscription service Boldy James, who has two records below but will probably announce another before we go to press. Throw a house party for the return of Lil Wayne and a garage party for the return of Welsh hardcore dons Mclusky; throw your headphones into a river before new Jane Remover scrambles your brain forever. Soothe your anxiety over murmurs of Radiohead activity by plunging into electronic veteran Mark Pritchard’s new full-length with Thom Yorke; ramp that anxiety up again with a sinister sci-fi concept album from the unstoppable billy woods. Those seeking a quieter season can bask in a mini Boygenius reunion on Lucy Dacus’ new one, and Julien Baker has an album, too, having teamed with Torres for a country record borne of a decade-old dream. And, finally, keep dreaming that Lorde, Lana Del Rey, A$AP Rocky, Clipse, and LCD Soundsystem will release their long-trailed albums this quarter, too.
Addison Rae
For someone who was doing TikTok dances on Jimmy Fallon less than five years ago, Addison Rae has achieved something arguably more impressive than success: coolness. Now, through a combination of canny collaborations (Charli XCX, Arca), hip creative direction, and bulletproof singles, her forthcoming debut album (still untitled and speculative) has all the potential to cement Rae’s status among the pop prestige.
–Walden Green
A$AP Rocky: Don’t Be Dumb
A$AP Rocky had planned to release Don’t Be Dumb on August 30, but his Testing follow-up has been indefinitely delayed. As we wait for the Harlem rapper’s first project since 2018, he has released the songs “Highjack” (featuring Jessica Pratt!) and “Ruby Rosary.”
–Matthew Strauss
Aya: Hexed!
That’s Aya’s real mouth on the cover of Hexed!, and those are real worms writhing around inside. On her orally-fixated sophomore album and proper follow-up to 2021’s Im Hole, the London-based producer inhabits a dentist’s office nightmare of her own creation, as she vomits up harrowing, fragmented tales of coming out and getting clean. But propulsive lead single “Off to the Esso” also flexes the four years Aya has spent further honing her craft as a DJ—a fitting calling card for a house of horrors that’s as thrilling as it is terrifying. Enter if you dare.
–Walden Green
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Barker: Stochastic Drift
Barker’s second album emerged from a string of “significant and unpredictable events” in the revered British producer’s life, including the pandemic that left him “unemployed and stuck at home for an indefinite amount of time,” he said in press materials. That period of instability prompted him to embrace uncertainty and craft the songs of puckish melody, amorphous percussion, and ambient adventurism that make up Stochastic Drift. “I wanted to explore the link between my internal and external realities, between the chaos of the time and how that was manifesting in my music and ideas,” he said of the album. “It’s a transition between lots of shifting realities, describing a process in a window of time that was full of change.”
–Jazz Monroe
billy woods: Golliwog
On his first album since the scintillating Kenny Segal collaboration Maps, billy woods embarks on a science fiction–inspired odyssey alongside several producers who have long specialized in future-shock hip-hop—the likes of the Alchemist, El-P, and, once again, Segal. Of the title, woods explained, “When I was nine years old I wrote a story about an evil golliwog. My mother read it and told me it was overly derivative and needed some work. Here we are.” The result, he added, is as much inspired by Ray Bradbury and Toni Morrison as MF Doom, with rappers including Elucid, Cavalier, and Bruiser Wolf along for the ride into the unknown.
–Jazz Monroe
Black Country, New Road: Forever Howlong
The new era of Black Country, New Road began in swift fashion, when the current lineup went ahead with a 2022 tour despite the sudden departure of original singer Isaac Wood. The 2023 album Live at Bush Hall followed, before the band linked up with Arctic Monkeys and Fontaines D.C. producer James Ford for a second run at a studio debut. Unlike Live at Bush Hall, Forever Howlong includes vocals from violinist and Jockstrap maestro Georgia Ellery, who has long belonged to the band’s rotating cast of live vocalists. Check out the singles “Besties” and “Happy Birthday” for a taste of the record’s chamber-pop grandeur and indie-pop joy, then read Ian Cohen’s recent feature “Black Country, New Road Head Into the Unknown.”
–Jazz Monroe
Blondshell: If You Asked for a Picture
In the music of Sabrina Teitelbaum, men are dogs: sometimes cute (as in the music video for “T&A”), sometimes scumbags, but never the main characters. Her forthcoming album as Blondshell, If You Asked for a Picture, even takes its title from Mary Oliver’s 1986 poem “Dogfish.” Featuring “T&A” and the single “What’s Fair,” Teitelbaum’s follow-up to her 2023 self-titled debut is shaping up to be another collection of arena-sized pop rock with an axe to grind and a picture to burn.
–Walden Green
Boldy James & Real Bad Man: Conversational Pieces
Another release in the ongoing Boldy James bombardment is the uber-prolific rapper’s third collaborative LP with California-based producer Real Bad Man. Rumored guests on the sequel to Real Bad Boldy and Killing Nothing include El-P, the Alchemist, and Conway the Machine.
–Jazz Monroe
Boldy James & V Don: Alphabet Highway
It might take an extraterrestrial attack to stop Boldy James from making albums. Alphabet Highway, a collaboration with underground Harlem producer V Don, will be the Michigan rapper’s fourth project of the year (and a fifth, of course, is already due). The musicians previewed their album with “Split the Bill.”
–Matthew Strauss
Bon Iver: SABLE, fABLE
When Justin Vernon shared last year’s SABLE, EP, it felt like a return to the hushed days of For Emma, Forever Ago. It turns out that’s only partly true. Vernon’s forthcoming full-length, SABLE, fABLE, will open with SABLE,’s four sparer tracks—“...,” “Things Behind Things Behind Things,” “S P E Y S I D E,” and “Awards Season”—and continue on with vibrant compositions, inspired by soul, R&B, and the soft rock of the 1970s and early 1980s, as showcased on singles “Everything Is Peaceful Love” and “Walk Home.”
–Walden Green
Broncho: Natural Pleasure
Natural Pleasure is Broncho’s first album since the 2010s run that earned the psychedelic indie-rockers syncs on Girls and the patronage of A-listers like Jack White and Hayley Williams. Six years after Bad Behavior, the Oklahoma four-piece returned, in February, with the Mazzy Star–struck lilt of singles “Imagination” and “Funny”—the latter, said singer Ryan Lindsey, “loosely based on my ability to steal my girlfriends jokes.”
–Jazz Monroe
Car Seat Headrest: The Scholars
The Scholars is the first LP from Car Seat Headrest since 2020’s Making a Door Less Open. Lead singer Will Toledo and his bandmates describe their latest as a rock opera set at the fictional college campus called Parnassus University. Each of the album’s nine songs will focus on a student at the college. Lead single “Gethsemane,” for instance, centers on Rosa, a PU medical student who revives a dead patient by absorbing their pain with supernatural powers.
–Madison Bloom
Chy Cartier: No Bring Ins
Alphonse Pierre once described Chy Cartier as “the coolest rapper in the room,” and the London rapper now has a chance to bring her appeal even wider with debut mixtape No Bring Ins. So far, Cartier has showcased her take on of UK drill with “Different Kettle,” “Not the One,” and “SN.”
–Matthew Strauss
Clipse: Let God Sort Em Out
In 2020, 11 years after fourth album Til the Casket Drops and their subsequent hiatus, Pusha T and No Malice reformed Clipse at their longtime co-producer Pharrell Williams’ Something in the Water festival. Now, after a smattering of shows and murmurs of new music, the influential rap duo is set to return with a full album. Reportedly titled Let God Sort Em Out—per a since-deleted Pusha T Instagram post—that album is finished, entirely Williams-produced, and set for release on Def Jam.
–Jazz Monroe
Cole Pulice: Land’s End Eternal
Cole Pulice will return this year with an album of electroacoustic saxophone compositions. Pulice says of Land’s End Eternal, “There is something of the Bay Area infused in the music of this record, which somehow rests at a waypoint along the overlapping landscapes of electroacoustic composition, prismatic chamber jazz, and contemplative improvisation.”
–Jazz Monroe
David Longstreth, Dirty Projectors & Stargaze: Song of the Earth
David Longstreth and his Dirty Projectors bandmates teamed up with Stargaze and a host of other musicians—including Phil Elverum, Steve Lacy, and Tim Bernandes—for this ambitious new album, which shares not only a name with the Mahler symphony, but also its “themes, feelings, and spirit of dissolved contradiction,” according to Longstreth. The song cycle is the result of a work-in-progress that Longstreth premiered at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, in 2022, with an intro—now the album’s lead single—that relocates the opening of David Wallace-Wells’ book The Uninhabitable Earth. That song, Longstreth elaborated, “is like the Beavis-and-Butthead version of Song of the Earth. It’s stupider and funnier and more insane. It’s got kind of a Gen-X fatalism, and fatalism is one side of the coin.”
–Jazz Monroe
Destroyer: Dan’s Boogie
Indie-rock’s most reliably impish tunesmith collects another catalog of novelistic monologues and surrealist gags on Dan’s Boogie, the follow-up to Labyrinthitis. He led the new Destroyer record with “Bologna,” a Balearic funk odyssey in which he mutters a meta-commentary on the track’s unspooling plot, with the lead part going to Fiver’s Simone Schmidt. “I struggled singing the first and third verses, the most important parts of the song,” Bejar said in a press release. “They needed gravity and grit. The threat of disappearing needed to be real. So I called Simone.” Watch the David Galloway–directed music video before disappearing into the full album.
–Jazz Monroe
DJ Koze: Music Can Hear Us
Seven years after his revelatory Knock Knock, maverick producer DJ Koze returns with Music Can Hear Us, another guidebook of psychedelic journeys into the beating heart of the dancefloor. Out on his own label Pampa—whose beloved 2016 compilation is overdue of follow-up of its own—Music Can Hear Us pairs Koze with a green-room of TBA guests and, on lead single “Pure Love,” the inescapable Damon Albarn.
–Jazz Monroe
Djrum: Under Tangled Silence
Last November, Djrum returned after a five-year break from releasing records with a spectacular new mission statement in the Meaning’s Edge EP. Now, the UK producer and multi-instrumentalist born Felix Manuel has concocted a full-length to showcase his sometimes crude, always dizzying approach to barely danceable dance music. Under Tangled Silence bends between jungle, jazz, acid house, and ambient techno, beckoning us into the glitchy undergrowth with acrobatic piano lines and a sustained, luminescence.
–Jazz Monroe
Florist: Jellywish
Jellywish follows the New York minimalist folk quartet Florist’s self-titled 2022 LP. Emily Sprague and her bandmates shared first single “This Was a Gift” last year, and officially announced the record with “Have Heaven.” “It’s a gentle delivery of something that is really chaotic, confusing, and multifaceted,” Sprague said of the album. “It has this technicolor that’s inspired by our world and also fantasy elements that we can use to escape our world.”
–Madison Bloom
Great Grandpa: Patience, Moonbeam
When Great Grandpa made their full-length debut with Plastic Cough, in 2017, they introduced themselves as a grungy alt-pop band tapping into their Seattle roots. But 2019’s Four of Arrows shifted into a moving blend of indie-rock and emo that showcased the quintet’s softer heart-on-sleeve tendencies. After five long years, Great Grandpa return in a similar vein with Patience, Moonbeam. A bit softer, twangier, and more at peace, the album finds its strength in the comfort of these longtime friends. From the jazzy drums steering the winding single “Doom” to the braggadocious story of prolonged adolescence in “Junior,” Patience, Moonbeam is intuitive, present, and worth the wait.
–Nina Corcoran
The Horrors: Night Life
Nearly a decade later, the Horrors are back. Since the British goth-rock band’s last LP, V, co-founders Faris Badwan, Rhys Webb, and Joshua Hayward replaced their drummer and keyboardist, though, if the singles from Night Life are any indication, their signature sound is very much intact.
–Walden Green
Jane Remover: Revengeseekerz
We don’t yet have a release date for Jane Remover’s Revengeseekerz, but we do have two of its singles: “JRJRJR” and “Dancing With Your Eyes Closed.” The tracks promise more of the singer and producer’s addictive, frenetic, and highly digitized pop music. The album will follow the 2023 Jane Remover album Census Designated and the artist’s Valentine’s Day release under the name Venturing, Ghostholding.
–Matthew Strauss
Japanese Breakfast: For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)
In between adapting her first book, Crying in H Mart, into a screenplay and decamping to South Korea to write more, Michelle Zauner found the time to hole up in a studio and record her latest as Japanese Breakfast. For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) was produced with Blake Mills and includes the singles “Orlando in Love” and “Mega Circuit.”
–Walden Green
Jenny Hval: Iris Silver Mist
Three years after releasing the understated, sweeping movements that comprised Classic Objects, Norwegian interdisciplinary artist Jenny Hval returns with Iris Silver Mist, which takes its name from a popular fragrance made by Maurice Roucel. The 13-track LP was primarily formed and rehearsed in live settings while touring last year, with Hval bringing those qualities into the recording studio to capture “the physical and live elements of music,” without sacrificing the tranquil production that gives so many of Hval’s records their hypnotic calm.
–Nina Corcoran
Julien Baker & Torres: Send a Prayer My Way
In 2016, Julien Baker and Torres finished playing their first show together and promptly decided the natural next step would be to make a country album together. Nearly a decade later, spurred by the success of their 2024 hit “Sugar in the Tank,” they have made good on that pledge. Send a Prayer My Way applies the pair’s piercing empathy and songwriting economy to a modern rendering of the outlaw tradition, packing in heavy-hearted, featherlight lyrics like one from opener “Dirt”: “If you ask how I’ve been doing, I won’t lie/More than half the time I’m only skatin’ by/Waiting for the ice to melt beneath me.”
–Jazz Monroe
Key Glock: Glockaveli
Memphis mainstay Key Glock has been teasing Glockaveli for quite some time, and it’s now slated for an early May release. The longtime independent rapper linked up with Republic Records for his follow-up to 2023’s Glockoma 2. “I feel like I exceeded my goals as an independent artist,” Key Glock explained. “At this point, I’m just working with people that have been operating on the level I already saw myself on. In this next chapter, I’m planning on getting platinum albums and more plaques.” Key Glock has previewed the new album with a collaboration with producer King Wonka called “No Sweat.”
–Matthew Strauss
Lana Del Rey: The Right Person Will Stay
Not every Lana Del Rey album announcement is a serious proposition—here’s looking at you, Rock Candy Sweet and White Hot Forever—but, if The Right Person Will Stay, then so too will the right album. Here’s hoping for at least one song inspired by Del Rey’s new alligator tour guide husband.
–Walden Green
LCD Soundsystem
LCD Soundsystem returned last October with a song called “X-Ray Eyes,” prompting speculation about an American Dream follow-up that was compounded when Primavera festival said, in an email announcing its 2025 lineup, that the band would be coming with “a new album” in tow. Though that statement was retracted, James Murphy conceded shortly afterward that “X-Ray Eyes” was “the first single of what’s shaping up to be a new album.” But, he warned, “don’t ask me when that is, because we’re still working on it.”
–Jazz Monroe
Lil Wayne: Tha Carter VI
Seven years after releasing Tha Carter V, Lil Wayne returns soon with his sixth installment of the long-running album series. The veteran Louisiana rapper has kept details about the project under wraps, staying fairly quiet since announcing the release date early this year. Following Tha Carter V—itself subject to a four-year delay—Lil Wayne has released No Ceilings 3, Funeral, Trust Fund Babies, Tha Fix Before tha VI, and Welcome 2 Collegrove. The rapper issued his first chapter in his Tha Carter series in 2004, followed by Tha Carter II in 2005, Tha Carter III in 2008, and Tha Carter IV in 2011. Revisit Marc Hogan’s piece “Lil Wayne’s Long Road to Tha Carter V.”
–Madison Bloom
Little Simz: Lotus
Little Simz has become a national treasure in the United Kingdom since her Mercury Prize–winning album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. Despite becoming a household name, the London rapper has no intention of watering down her bloody-minded vision on new album Lotus. “Flood,” featuring Obongjayar and Moonchild Sanelly, is a menacing stare-down of a lead single, pairing a minimalist arrangement of live drums and UK jazz rumblings with vocals that build to a rap exorcism.
–Jazz Monroe
Lorde
Details are sparse, but Lorde has been teasing new music since… well, long before she parachuted into Brat Summer. Since a December 2023 post captioned, “Listening to myself,” she has shared this symbol-laden message: “Use the existing tools wherever possible ©𝑳ĿŁု⑷♶ If the tools do not exist you are spiritually obliged to create them © 𝑳ĿŁု⑷♶⚤✬✹❁✰㉗✬✹❁🀥⚭ 𓆝𓃹𓁙.” Make of that what you can!
–Matthew Strauss
Lucy Dacus: Forever Is a Feeling
In the four years since Lucy Dacus’ last album, Home Video, the singer-songwriter adored for simmering hymns has boiled over. Back to going it alone after the stratospheric success of Boygenius, Dacus returns with another unerringly frank lyric sheet, a strings-silvered sound palette, and a packed guest list that includes Hozier, Blake Mills, Bartees Strange, Madison Cunningham, and her sometime bandmates Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker.
–Jazz Monroe
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Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke: Tall Tales
Longtime collaborators Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke have been working on their debut full-length as a duo for years. Now, the Warp mainstay and Radiohead and Smile frontman have readied Tall Tales for a spring release on the former’s home label. They introduced the record with singles “Back in the Game” and “This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice,” both with videos by a shadow third bandmember, visual artist Jonathan Zawada, who also shot the videos, designed the artwork, and appears in the project’s promotional images. A feature film from Zawada, made in tandem with the album, will accompany the release.
–Jazz Monroe
Matt Berninger: Get Sunk
Matt Berninger’s second solo album further expands the National singer’s musical universe to welcome guests including Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy and Ronboy, as well as co-writing from producer Sean O’Brien. Berninger made the Serpentine Prison follow-up after a period of writer’s block in which, he said, “I just got sick of asking myself, ‘Why am I like this?’” Themes include existentialism, sorrow, the melancholy of inanimate objects, and the heaviness of the self. What more can we say? It’s a Matt Berninger album, folks.
–Jazz Monroe
Mclusky: The World Is Still Here and So Are We
Mclusky were practically born into cult adulation when, championed by radio DJ John Peel and a handful of magazine journalists, they burst into the early 2000s rock underground with a string of breakneck punk pingers and, in frontperson Andrew Falkous, a reputation for comic, sardonic observational lyrics. They split in 2005, but the Welsh trio’s brand of acerbic barbs, menacing hooks, and a vaguely Mark E. Smith–indebted pose has gone way up in stock with the waves of British shouter-songwriters that followed Sleaford Mods in the past decade. Mclusky’s formal return—after a string of semi-reunions—feels timely, then, and promisingly undiluted. Come for the nostalgia, stay to find out if songs like “The Competent Horse Thief” and “Kafka-Esque Novelist Franz Kafka” live up to their perfectly Mcluskyist titles.
–Jazz Monroe
Model/Actriz: Pirouette
Model/Actriz keep hurtling into the valley between frenetic post-punk and enveloping body music on Pirouette, the follow-up to their breakout debut Dogsbody. Inspired as much by vocalist Cole Haden’s childhood heroes Britney Spears and Mariah Carey as by industrial goth and techno, the album positions the Brooklyn quartet at the precipice of the rock mainstream, ready to capitalize on their hell-raising concerts and support slots with the likes of Jack White and Interpol.
–Jazz Monroe
Perfume Genius: Glory
With his last Perfume Genius album, Ugly Season, Mike Hadreas conjured a netherworld of vaporous soundscapes and classical curlicues. Glory, its follow-up, is decidedly… not that. Singles “It’s a Mirror” and “No Front Teeth” barge and thrash straight into your nerve center, reminding us that Hadreas is not only a master of rousing indie-pop and tender synth balladry, but also an alt-rock supremo with a taste for the epic. The rest of the album showcases the full Perfume Genius wardrobe, aiming higher and plunging deeper than any of his prior records.
–Jazz Monroe
Rico Nasty: Lethal
Despite all of her evolutions over the years, Rico Nasty has never sacrificed her personality at the expense of a vivid, blunt record. The same holds true for Lethal, her follow-up to 2022’s Las Ruinas and her Fueled by Ramen debut. Fittingly, Rico Nasty is turning the fuzzed-out guitars and crunchy pop even further up this time, with single “Teethsucker (Yea3x)” leading the charge. Lyrically, she may be confronting the trap-pop teen persona she created over a decade ago, but the rapper isn’t axing everything from her past on Lethal—least of all her musical trademarks—in the name of reinvention.
–Nina Corcoran
Roddy Ricch: The Navy Album
The Navy Album—Roddy Ricch’s follow-up to 2022’s Feed tha Streets III—was supposed to land last summer, then December, and then February. Well, now it’s slated for late April. Little is known about the album, though it will feature Ricch’s recent single “Survivor’s Remorse,” which includes a prominent sample of Kelly Clarkson’s 2023 song “Me,” of all things. Guests include Terrace Martin, on “Lonely Road.”
–Madison Bloom
Rosalía
Rosalía began teasing her Motomami follow-up last Halloween, posting a carousel of gory photos featuring a bloodied CD, lodged in her forehead, marked “R4.” She made it semi-official on New Year’s Day, sharing a list of 2024 achievements and 2025 hopes that ended with the Spanish phrase “sacar nuevo disco”—that is, “release new album.” ¡Estamos listos!
–Jazz Monroe
Sparks: Mad!
Ron and Russell Mael advance the quiet Sparks renaissance with Mad!, building on the momentum of the Sparks Brothers documentary and 2023’s Cate Blanchett–assisted The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte with a new suite of maverick pop set pieces. Across the LP, the duo applies its theatrically acerbic sensibility to topics including tattoos, banter, and the rise of influencers.
–Jazz Monroe
These New Puritans: Crooked Wing
The sibling duo of Jack and George Barnett has kept a relatively low profile since leaving its imprint on experimental rock with two of the great British albums of the 2010s, Hidden and Field of Reeds. The Barnetts’ fourth album as These New Puritans, 2019’s Inside the Rose, followed a six-year pause in studio recordings, and, now, after another six, they return with Crooked Wing. On a pair of singles, “Industrial Love Song” and “Bells,” Jack Barnett conjures his trademark mix of fear and wonder amid symphonic largesse, the former featuring Caroline Polachek in a darkly balletic duet.
–Jazz Monroe
Tunde Adebimpe: Thee Black Boltz
Somehow it took Tunde Adebimpe, lead singer of venerated Brooklynites TV on the Radio, two decades to release his proper solo debut. After signing to Sub Pop and sharing “Magnetic,” in late 2024, Adebimpe waited until January to reveal his album’s title and release date, alongside the single “Drop.” Produced with Wilder Zoby and featuring contributions from bandmates Jaleel Bunton and Jahphet Landis, Thee Black Boltz should be worth the wait, with plenty of the doo-wop melodies, buzzing synthesizers, and urgently mesmerizing vocals that made devotees of TV on the Radio fans 20 years ago.
–Walden Green
Ty Segall: Possession
After winding through North America on a solo acoustic tour, Ty Segall once again summons the classic-rock gods for Possession, blending noir storytelling, knees-up hoedowns, and sophistipop harmony in pursuit of an American epic. Segall invited longtime collaborator Matt Yoka to co-write lyrics for the album, with Mikal Cronin joining to arrange strings and horns on the freewheeling single “Fantastic Tomb.”
–Jazz Monroe
The Waterboys: Life, Death and Dennis Hopper
Back in 2020, the Waterboys released a psych-frazzled, highway-cruising rock song named after the great Dennis Hopper. Now, they’ve made an album of it. Life, Death and Dennis Hopper is the British rock veterans’ tribute to the late actor, a record that frontperson Mike Scott described as a song cycle about “a five-movies-a-year character actor” who never lost “the sparkle in his eye or the sense of danger or unpredictability that always gathered around him.” He has assembled an illustrious guest list to tell the story: Fiona Apple, Bruce Springsteen, and Steve Earle all feature.
–Jazz Monroe
William Tyler: Time Indefinite
William Tyler has spent the past a decade and a half mapping his very own universe of cosmic country. Time Indefinite, his first album in six years, expands the Nashville native’s reliquary of acoustic guitar–led instrumentals to cover sprawling themes—in this case, addiction, middle age, loneliness, and neurosis—on a broad canvas where the ambient and ornate converge.
–Jazz Monroe
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Yeule: Evangelic Girl Is a Gun
On their blistering 2023 album, Softscars, Yeule instantly pivoted from a promising bedroom-pop maestro to a new titan of alt-rock, unleashing the tension of their introspective earlier records in a grungy, high-octane purge. Evangelic Girl Is a Gun singles “Skullcrusher” and “Eko” present two prongs of the project’s rapid evolution, the former simmering with industrial goth undercurrents while the latter belies the album’s dual identity as a future-pop powerhouse, with production from the likes of A. G. Cook and Mura Masa.
–Jazz Monroe
YHWH Nailgun: 45 Pounds
YHWH Nailgun forego boundaries on their debut album, in the same way that early iterations of Battles or Palm let their artful math-rock flags fly high. The Brooklyn experimental noise-rock quartet has shared five singles ahead of 45 Pounds’ imminent release—giving listeners a clear vision of what to expect—and each song continues to dress up the LP as a jittery, manic, and trippy record, especially album opener “Penetrator” and the hypnotic single “Sickle Walk.”
–Nina Corcoran
Yung Lean: Jonatan
After a string of deadpan Jonatan Leandoer96 records, Yung Lean is back at large under his original moniker. Jonatan follows his Bladee collaboration Psykos and his Robyn-assisted turn on Charli XCX’s Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat. His Sad Boy compadres Sherman and Gud were in the music video for the baroque happy-hardcore flex “Forever Yung,” and, though album details are thin on the ground, we might expect more features from the extended Drain Gang universe and beyond, after his disparate recent work with the likes of Travis Scott, FKA twigs, and Dean Blunt. This may be a big year for Yung Lean: He is also filming for Romain Gavras’ new film Sacrifice, alongside Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Charli XCX.
–Jazz Monroe
