Genre > Rock > Alt & Grunge

Includes A 16-Page Booklet

Arctic Monkeys return with their new album, entitled ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.’ Produced by James Ford and Alex Turner, the album was recorded in Los Angeles, Paris and London.

Lamp Lit Prose will be the ninth release for Dirty Projectors and comes with collaborations from HAIM, Syd, Robin Pecknold, Rostam Batmanglij, Amber Mark, Empress Of and Dear Nora. Lamp Lit Prose was recorded at Ivo Shandor in Los Angeles.

Recorded in two days over the summer at RAK Studios, Last Night All My Dreams Came True is the second official Domino Documents release and has more than fulfilled the Domino Documents aim to capture a band at the height of their powers, recording a selection of their finest songs.

Last Night All My Dreams Came True is a career-spanning collection and features songs from each of Wild Beasts’ studio albums with an emphasis on 2016’s Boy King, their most direct record yet.

Microshift is a record that largely pulls back the dense fug of guitars and Modern Lovers-esque blasts of organ that have become Hookworms’ hallmark, replaced instead by a plethora of electronics and synthesizers. There’s far more to Microshift than just rock band going electronic however; indeed, the fact it’s here at all is a relief after a series of setbacks for the band. Striving through the devastation of MJ’s Suburban Home Studio—not just the rehearsal and recording space of the band, but home to the producer’s livelihood—as well as relationship breakups, family illness and the death of the band’s close friend and live sound engineer, it is perhaps no surprise that this record is one of both defiance and darkness. With it, Hookworms have pulled off a triumph against adversity, a comeback with what they may see as a Microshift, but which is in fact a massive step forward.

Though Aaron largely composes on his own, The House features contributions by Alexander Giannascoli ((Sandy) Alex G), Dev Hynes (Blood Orange), Maya Laner (True Blue, Porches), Kaya Wilkins (Okay Kaya), Bryndon Cook (Starchild & the New Romantic), Cameron Wisch (Cende, Porches), Jason Arce, Bea1991, and his own father, Peter Maine. As with Pool, Aaron brought his recorded work to Chris Coady (Beach House, Slowdive, TV on the Radio), who then mixed The House at his Sunset Sound studio.

“Chamakay is a weightless mid-tempo glide, a stark gem from an artist who’s ready for a star turn.”
- Pitchfork

“The LP’s first single is an absolutely lovely airy midtempo groove”
- Stereogum

Eucalyptus is the new studio album written and produced by Animal Collective’s Avey Tare.

Conceived on Hawaiian mornings, written on a sunlit bedroom afternoon in Los Angeles, practiced in the dark early hours of the California twilight, recommended listening for dawn or dusk.

Recorded by Animal Collective’s Deakin (Josh Dibb), featuring chamber orchestration arranged by Eyvind Kang, and featured vocalists Angel Deradoorian and Jessika Kenney, Eucalyptus is an immersive album length electro acoustic movement through leaves, rocks and dust.

Amid the Rocket recording process, Alex made headlines for catching the attention of Frank Ocean, who asked him to play guitar on his two 2016 albums, Endless and Blonde. More than any stylistic cues, what Alex took from the experience was a newfound confidence in collaboration. Rocket wears this collaborative spirit proudly, and in its numerous contributors presents a restless sense of musical experimentation - effortlessly jumping from distorted sound collage to dreamy folk music to bouncing Americana.

Rocket illustrates a cohesive vision of contemporary American experience; the cast of characters that Alex G inhabits have fun, fall in love, develop obsessions, get in trouble, and—much like rockets themselves—ultimately they burn out. Alex, though, in a collection of songs that’s both his tightest and most adventurous, is poised only for the ascent.

The album features 11 new songs and the Record Store Day single "R U Mine?". Josh Homme, Pete Thomas and Bill Ryder-Jones all make guest appearances on AM as do the words of poet John Cooper Clarke, on the breakout single "I Wanna Be Yours."

A collection of urgent, but disciplined anthems for dancefloor and headphones, Future Politics asks each of us to remember that apocalypse is not an inevitability, but the product of human decision-making. It aims for a world without borders, where human compassion and curiosity drive technological innovation rather than profit, where the necessity of labor is replaced with time for creativity and personal growth, and the terror and destruction wrought by colonialism and white supremacy is recognized as a dark age in human history. The album is radicalism distilled: to galvanic beats, gorgeous, kinetic melodies, and the vulnerable majesty of Stelmanis’s voice. With its steady, propulsive beats and siren-like synth hooks, it’s both an anthem and an ultimatum: we have a duty to imagine better and to imagine big.

This behemoth comprises twenty-two songs (or, as they are more often and unfortunately known in the After Compact Disc—hereafter “ACD” era—tracks). But “double album” is a loaded phrase, right? It implies bloat, prog, and concept. So, let’s stick with “songs.” Big Wheel and Others is a bundle, a bindle, a hay bale, and an oil barrel of songs. Some of the genres that are to be found in varying degrees in the songs on this album are: Road songs, rock songs, folk songs, blues songs, country songs, rhythm and blues songs, skronk non-songs, cinema songs, cult songs, poem songs, jams, and ballads.

It’s brimming with Cass’s singular gift for evocative storytelling, discerning introspection, and heartrending melody delivered through a haze of mystery and romance - and is his most encompassing work to date, a bold new chapter in the myth of this fascinating and singular artist.

Which is where we find Cale at this precise moment, with not just the re-mastered version of one of his most unique and lauded solo records, the 1982 masterpiece Music For A New Society, but a complete new reworking of the album under the title M:FANS, a record that explores the relationship between old and new, in terms of the sound and vision, and Cale’s memories of the experience, in terms of his life, and the recording. M: FANS ends with “Back To The End”, a previously unfinished outtake that Cale rediscovered among the original tapes, whose haunting spectral mood matches anything on the 1982 record. (This version retains Cale’s original vocal and piano while adding viola). Back and forth M:FANS goes, sampling the original, while creating brand new soundscapes, giving Cale the opportunity for closure on one of the most testing eras of his life, and a way to keep moving forward.

Music For A New Society had a fraught birth, to say the least. With Cale having folded his Spy label imprint into Michael Zilkha’s Ze Records, and retired his band for a run of solo concerts, Zilkha proposed an album to capture this new phase. Rising to the challenge – “a very good one” – Cale created a brief for the exercise; to only allow himself the ten days booked in the studio to complete the record, and to only set the tape rolling when he was ready to improvise. Cale once recalled the recording process as, “like method acting. Madness. Excruciating. I just let myself go. It became a kind of therapy, a personal exorcism.” But that fed into the album’s extreme qualities; its nerve-shredding raw intimacy, its fractured, anguished beauty.

“Close Watch” is one of the most radical of M: FANS tracks – it’s now a spectral trance-duet that features Amber Coffman of the Dirty Projectors, a band Cale has long admired. The most straightforward ballad on the original, “Chinese Envoy” is even more radical, “which is so refreshing, I’d done it so many times as a ballad. It’s a happier song the way it is now, but it doesn’t offend the sensibility of the song.” I think the tracks have benefited from being given more attention this time. I was really rushing through things the first time.

In 1982, Music For A New Society sounded exactly like its title: something futuristic, a new kind of songwriting exercise. In 2015, M:FANS is exactly that too, full of electrical crackle and disturbed frequencies, a different kind of dystopian future awaits. John Cale forages on; it’s the only way he knows how.

The album features incredible versions of 'Paris 1919,' 'Dying On The Vine,' 'Chinese Envoy,' cover versions of the Elvis classic 'Heartbreak Hotel,' his devastating treatment of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' and a suite of Dylan Thomas' works 'On A Wedding Anniversary,' 'Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed' and 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.'

For well over a decade, Devonté Hynes has proven himself a virtuoso of versatility, experimenting with almost every conceivable musical genre under a variety of monikers. After moving to New York City in the mid-2000s, Hynes became Blood Orange, plumming the oeuvres of the city’s musical legends to create a singular style of urgent, delicate pop music. Freetown Sound, which follows 2011’s Coastal Grooves and 2013’s breakthrough Cupid Deluxe, builds upon everything Hynes has done as an artist, resulting in the most expansive artistic statement of his career.

Drawing from a deep well of techniques and references, the album unspools like a piece of theater, evoking unexpected communions of moods, voices, and eras. Freetown Sound derives its name from the birthplace of Hynes’ father, the capital of Sierra Leone. Thematically, it is profoundly personal and unapologetically political, touching on issues of race, religion, sex, and sexism over 17 shimmering songs. Each song echoes into another, with leitmotifs carefully stitched throughout, yielding a sound palette that gently recalls elastic funk, slinky R&B, and pure pop, but resisting easy categorization.

For Hynes, the process of self-discovery involved in creating Freetown Sound proved as valuable as the finished product. “This record really tries to say things that I’ve been wanting to express for many years,” he says. “It looks into my childhood and examines who I am at this point in my life. There are so many crazy layers to it that it’s actually quite hard to talk about it, but the record is very reflective of how my brain works. It’s been very interesting for me trying to understand and tie all of these things together. It’s been a way of working through it.”

A newfound creative friction between Thorpe and Fleming proved key to unleashing the unique pop sensibility of Boy King - Fleming’s more visceral experimentation unlocking new dimensions in Thorpe’s own writing. After spending a whole year finessing this new found impetus in East London, the band emerged with a collection of songs ready to take to Dallas, TX and producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Swans, The War on Drugs). Both Thorpe and Fleming credit that trip to Dallas with teasing out the raw power of Boy King.

The raw pop of Boy King’s songs are the perfect foil to Thorpe’s libidinous lyricism: “it became apparent that that guitar almost became the character within the songs, that phallic character, the all-conquering male,” he says. “I’m letting my inner Byron fully out, I thought I’d tucked him away, but he came screaming back like the Incredible Hulk.” Here lies Boy King’s greatest success. Between the slide of prowling aggression and interior darkness, there are glorious, gorgeous moments. It’s yet another incomparable Wild Beasts record; a visceral, sensual and jolting body of work that acts as a remarkable soundtrack to the early 21st century male malaise.

Atlas was recorded over the summer at Wilco’s Chicago recording studio, The Loft, with producer/mixer Tom Schick (Wilco, Rufus Wainwright, Alex Chilton), and while this pairing that looks so good on paper, sounds even better on record! Real Estate kick off the campaign with the dreamy pop single “Talking Backwards,” which was released as a limited edition 7”at the end of February.

Ash & Ice is the follow up to 2011’s critically lauded Blood Pressures and was five years in the making in part due to Jamie Hince’s five hand surgeries, which resulted in him having to re-learn how to play guitar with a permanently damaged finger. It was during Hince’s recuperation from surgery that he first started sketching out what would become the songs for the album. To shake up the writing process, Hince booked a solo trip on the infamous Trans-Siberian Express for inspiration while Alison Mosshart, now residing in Nashville, TN, wrote some of the most affecting, poetically candid lyrics that she ever has, painting word pictures that mine the dangerous terrain between romantic obsession, prophecy and tough love.

Where previous albums had an air of detachment and emotional austerity, underpinned by an uneasy self-awareness and unexpressed anger, the 13 songs on Ash & Ice are more understated, less tempestuous and more affecting because of that, exposing the kind of push-pull you feel when you find yourself in a complicated but all-consuming relationship. Ash & Ice is The Kills at their emotionally charged, arresting best. Prepare to be slayed.