This week's album and EP releases
Here's a list of a lot of things that came out in this past week, including many which are set to release on Friday. Of course, there's no way to be completely comprehensive with this and I avoided including things where information was too lacking, so feel free to mention anything that isn't on here that you think is worth mentioning. Beyond that, if you have any thoughts of any of these albums, it would be great to hear them :)
(oh and don't bully me for the genre tags, a lot of these things have very limited resources available and I couldn't individually listen to everything and determine what fits best, so I'm pulling from third parties and an artist's past work a lot of the time)
American Football - American Football (Midwest Emo)
Andrew Bird - My Finest Work Yet (Chamber Pop, Singer/Songwriter)
Anteros - When We Land (Indie Pop)
Aoratos - Gods Without Name (Black Metal)
Apparat - LP5 (Techno)
Aubrey Logan - Where The Sunshine Is Expensive (Vocal Jazz)
Avey Tare - Cows on Hourglass Pond (Neo-Psychedelia, Psychedelic Folk)
Bad Suns - Mystic Truth (Alternative Rock, Indie Pop)
Ballout - T.I. (Drill)
Battle Beast - No More Hollywood Endings (Heavy Metal, Power Metal)
Bill MacKay - Fountain Fire (Folk Rock)
Blue Angels - Sue EP (Ambient Folk)
Bonnie Tyler - Between The Earth And The Stars (Pop Rock)
Brian Carpenter’s Beat Circus - These Wicked Things (Avant Prog, Dark Cabaret)
Brim Liski - Duels (Shoegaze, Electronica)
Cellar Darling - The Spell (Folk Metal)
Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah - Ancestral Recall (Jazz Fusion)
Crows - Silver Tongues (Post Punk)
Dean Lewis - A Place We Knew (Singer-Songwriter, Pop)
Delta Heavy - Only in Dreams (Drumstep)
Dominanz - Let The Death Enter (Death Metal)
Donna Grantis (of 3rdEyeGirl) - Diamonds & Dynamite (Hard Rock)
Dos Monos - Dos City (Experimental Hip Hop)
Emily Wells - This World Is Too ____ For You (Chamber Pop)
Everglow - Arrival of Everglow (K-Pop, Dance-Pop)
Ex Hex - It's Real (Power Pop, Alternative Rock)
Extortionist - Sever the Cord (Deathcore)
Famous Dex - Wave Creator (Trap Rap, Pop Rap)
Flora Cash - Press (Indie Folk)
Flume - Hi This Is Flume (Wonky)
Fred Everything - Long Way Home (Deep House)
From Sorrow to Serenity - Reclaim (Deathcore, Groove Metal, Metalcore)
Heize - She's Fine (K-Pop, Contemporary R&B)
Ian Daniel Kehoe - Secret Republic (Pop)
Ibibio Sound Machine - Doko Mien (Afro-Funk)
Jayda G - Significant Changes (Deep House)
Jenny Lewis - On the Line (Pop Rock, Indie Pop)
Jeon Se Woon - Plus Minus Zero (K-Pop)
Johnny Booth - Firsthand Accounts (Metalcore)
Kevin Garrett - Hoax (Singer-Songwriter)
La Casa Azul - La Gran Esfera (Bubblegum, Indie Pop)
La Dispute - Panorama (Emo)
Lafawndah - Ancestor Boy (Alternative R&B, Art Pop)
Lambchop - This (is what I wanted to tell you) (Sophisti-Pop, Art Pop)
Leiva - Nuclear (Pop)
Lil Xan - Heartbreak Soldiers pt. 2 (Trap Rap, Emo Rap)
Lil Yee - Live 4 It, Die 4 It EP (West Coast Hip Hop)
Lucy Rose - No Words Left (Singer/Songwriter, Contemporary Folk)
Luther Dickinson And Sisters Of The Strawberry Moon - Solstice (Southern Rock, Blues)
Mary Lattimore And Mac McCaughan (of Superchunk) - New Rain Duets (Electroacoustic)
Matt Anderson - Halfway Home By Morning (Blues)
Maverick Sabre - When I Wake Up (Neo-Soul)
Mayfield - Careless Love (Post-Hardcore)
Meridian - Margin of Error (Heavy Metal)
Momoland - Show Me (K-Pop, Dance-Pop)
NAV - Bad Habits (Alternative R&B, Trap Rap, Pop Rap)
Niggght - Violent Delicacy EP (Doom Metal, Blues)
Nilüfer Yanya - Miss Universe (Indie Pop, Indie Rock)
No Win - Downey (Indie Rock, Power Pop)
Obsidian Sea - Strangers (Progressive Rock)
Orville Peck - Pony (Singer/Songwriter, Alt-Country)
Parting Gift - Ensom (Alternative Rock)
PnB Rock - TrapStar Turnt PopStar (Trap Rap)
Problem Daughter - Grow Up Trash (Pop Punk)
Queen Key - Eat My Pussy Again (Trap Rap)
RPWL - Tales From Outer Space (Progressive Rock)
Rachael Sage - PseudoMyopia (Singer Songwriter)
Red Sun Rising - Peel EP (Post Grunge)
Rich the Kid - The World Is Yours 2 (Trap Rap, Southern Hip Hop)
Ritual Howls - Rendered Armor (Gothic Country, Gothic Rock, Post-Punk)
Robin Trower - Coming Closer To Day (Blues Rock)
Ruth B - Maybe I'll Find You Again (Singer/Songwriter)
Sermon - Birth of the Marvellous (Alternative Metal, Progressive Rock)
Shawn James - The Dark & The Light (Contemporary Rock)
Shlohmo - The End (Electronic)
Sleep In. - The Stars On Your Ceiling (Emo)
Sleeper - The Modern Age (Britpop)
Slow Caves - Falling (Indie Rock)
Spiral Stairs (Pavement’s Scott Kannberg) - We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized (Alternative Rock)
Stillhound - Stillhound (House, Indie Rock)
Strand of Oaks - Eraserland (Indie Folk, Indie Rock)
Suzi Wu - Error 404 EP (Indie Pop)
Taali - I Am Here (Art Pop)
Tamaryn - Dreaming The Dark (Synth Pop, Dream Pop)
Terry Allen And The Panhandle Mystery Band - Pedal Steal + Four Corners (Singer Songwriter)
The Flaying - Angry, Undead (Death Metal)
These New Puritans - Inside The Rose (Art Pop, Darkwave)
They Hate Change - Clearwater EP (Experimental Hip Hop)
Trevor Daniel - Restless (Pop Rap, Emo Rap)
Truth Corroded - Bloodlands (Thrash Metal, Death Metal)
Tyson Meade - Robbing The Nuclear Family (Indie Rock)
VAV - Thrilla Killa (K-Pop, Dance-Pop, Electropop)
Vendredi sur mer - Premiers émois (Electropop, French Pop)
Wallows - Nothing Happens (Indie Rock, Indie Pop)
We Show Up On Radar - Zanzibar Whip Coral (Indie Pop)
Wild Belle - Everybody One of a Kind (Pop Reggae, Indie Pop)
Yawners - Just Calm Down (Indie Rock)
Yerin Baek - Our Love Is Great (K-Pop)
Thanks - what do you use as a source for this? Sometimes I just want to look through a list of new releases easily but Google Music doesn't really support it (I miss Rdio), and I haven't found a great site for it.
It's the very first one on your list, but I'm pretty excited about the new American Football album and will definitely be listening to that one first thing tomorrow. They released the track Uncomfortably Numb a couple of months ago and I've listened to it a lot, looking forward to hearing the rest of the album.
I didn't know about the new Sleep In. album, but I enjoyed their Settling album, so I'll have to give the new one a shot as well.
A friend and I are working together and mostly pulling from places like the monthly list on Genius and the weekly list on uproxx, but we're also going to throw in anything that catches our eye from other music sites and communities like RYM and some Discord servers we frequent. Any proper list you find will usually have a pretty limited scope or if it's meant to try and be more comprehensive, there's bound to be a bunch of rereleases, special editions, and the like clogging it up that we filter out. We also aren't trying to keep out small acts (a lot of these are pretty much entirely irrelevant), but we also try to take out obvious self-promotion that sneaks its way onto the Genius list.
The sources often only have just artist and release names, so I'm hoping adding genres at least makes it a little more approachable and useful.
Not at all. Pulling the album titles from a few sources could reasonably be automated, I'm sure, but filtering out the things that we do and finding suitable genre tags has to be done manually anyway, as there's a lot of individual judgement calls that need to be made. If something isn't on Bandcamp and doesn't already have votes on rym, chances are most sources won't get more specific than "Rock/Pop" and clog it up with useless info.
Anything that could easily be automated is not a significant part of the work.
Oh, very cool, thanks for all the work involved in putting it together then!
I used to spend some time every week on Rdio going through their New Releases page and trying out random albums/artists that caught my eye. It's interesting how you can start to recognize what genre/style a lot of albums will probably be based on the style of their album art, a lot of types of music tend to lean towards really distinctive types of art as well.
Google Music's New Releases page is almost totally useless though. Half of the "albums" are singles with no indication, there are ones that stay on there for weeks or months, etc. The "Recommended new releases" it tries to suggest to me work okay sometimes, but it has a very limited number of slots and often wastes a few of them on garbage like "Top 100 Breakfast Songs" (actual album it's recommending to me right now). It's very common for me to find out that I missed a release I would have liked, because it would rather recommend garbage like that than new albums from artists I've listened to heavily.
Similar situation for me with Shlohmo's long anticipated new album, The End. He released 2 tracks from it on SoundCloud a few months ago and I even pre-ordered it on Bandcamp based on their strength, which is super rare for me... but it paid off, it's a great album (been listening to it for the last hour or so since it released!). His last album, Dark Red, is absolutely amazing too though, so it was a pretty safe bet this new one would be as well.
Depending on your favoured genres /r/indieheads on Reddit is a good source. They have a "New Music Friday" thread that I think will overlap this one by quite a lot.
Have you thought about making a playlist somewhere (spotify/youtube) for the list? I think it would be good to have this all together.
While I support the idea, that would probably be a lot of work since some of these albums aren't released quite yet and AFAIK they are not all are available on a single unified streaming platform. E.g. Shlohmo's The End only released on bandcamp a few hours ago.
edit: It might be possible to script its creation using song.link though, since the first few I checked were at least listed there:
American Football - American Football (Midwest Emo)
Andrew Bird - My Finest Work Yet
Anteros - When We Land
Aoratos - Gods Without Name
p.s. I really wish song.link supported bandcamp though, since that's where I buy the vast majority of my music. :(
I've been waiting for the new Donna Grantis album "Diamonds & Dynamite" for months now. And after my first listen, I must say that I'm not disappointed! In fact, I'm hugely impressed.
It's understandable if you just went "Donna who?". This is labelled as her first solo album, but strictly speaking it's neither her first nor really solo (it is an album, though!). Her first full release was "Suites" back in 2012 under the Donna Grantis Electric Band title. But what she's best known for, and how she also came to my attention, is for playing guitar in Prince's last band (2014-2016), the 3rdEyeGirl. They were a brilliant band live, and also put out one album, Plectrumelectrum. The title track to that album was actually written by Donna, not Prince.
When I listen to "Diamonds & Dynamite" today, I hear a lot of Prince in it. In fact, if someone had handed these tracks to me and said that they are unreleased songs from Prince's fusion jazz experiments, say from the early 2000s, I would probably not question it one bit.
But having said that, "Diamonds & Dynamite" is not a Prince-wannabe project. It is an album that very much has its own identity. Like I said, I'm hugely impressed by what Donna and her band (with a guest appearance from Pearl Jam's Mike McCready) have put together here. It is complex, it is groovy, and it is extremely competent.
Anyway, thanks so much for this list! Once I've played this through a couple of more times, I'll dive into some of the others on your list. I actually keep checking new albums weekly from various sources, but it would be absolutely wonderful to have an authoritative weekly listing somewhere.
Also, and please take this in the most unbullying way possible: your post labels Donna's album as "hard rock", but it really isn't. I would say it's a funky jazz-rock fusion album.
The Orville Peck album is a really unique and interesting old school country album. Reminiscent of 50's Elvis in places - or Roy Orbison. Haven't heard much quite like this in modern music.
Thanks for the heads-up! I really like this one, and it's pretty much exactly how you described it. A great find.
A couple weeks back I saw that Battle Beast got confirmed for a festival I'm going to. Having heard the name before, but not knowing much about them I gave them a listen. Been looking forward to "No More Hollywood Endings" since then, and it did turn out pretty good!
I got to eavesdrop on a podcast taping with that Luther Dickinson group last week. Great band with Any Helm on vocals (and drums!). Really looking forward to that album.