As I may have suggested earlier, this week (and/or Apr. 3 specifically) really isn't one for people like me, since presumably "people like me" are all waiting for Record Store Day. There's only one album coming out tomorrow that I'm genuinely enthusiastic about, and that's (as mentioned above) the new deary album, Birding. It's all about birds!
Maybe they'd rather not have people point it out all the time, but basically they sound like the Cocteau Twins, they look like the Cocteau Twins, and they'd probably smell like the Cocteau Twins too if we could get close enough to have a good sniff. I'm sure they'll eventually get tired of the comparisons and change it up a little bit, but this is their first full-length album, so let's not make a lot of unreasonable demands at this stage. (The other two we have listed on BEA are six-track EPs.)
I'm tempted to not even mention anything else, but I endeavor to be inclusive:
Wax Head, Gnat: This was actually released on Wednesday; they're a psych-punk band from Manchester, this is their first album, and they're very lo-fi and garagey. I enjoy stuff like this, but you have to be in the right mood for it.
Lavalove, Tan Lines: This is an almost-all-girl pop-punk band from Los Angeles (they have a male drummer, the rest are women) that I really like — their songs are great, but they are very, very cheesy, to an almost parody-like extent. Be warned!
Joe Pernice, Sunny, I Was Wrong: I totally missed the listening party and the title track isn't one of the three preview tunes, so I don't know who Sunny is or what Joe was wrong about, but knowing him, it was probably super-devastating.
Arlo Parks, Ambiguous Desire: This will probably be the "big album" of the week along with Thundercat. I love her voice, but the music's not really in my wheelhouse, you might say. I'll just leave it there, I think?
Bruce Hornsby, Indigo Park: I met him in person once. He seemed like a nice guy...
Kronos Quartet, Glorious Mahalia: This is kind of cool — apparently they assembled some old "archival audio" of Mahalia Jackson singing some stuff and recorded some contemporary-classical backing tracks for it all. Maybe you're not down with the concept, but if you are, it sounds really good, actually.
SUNN O))), sunn O))): It's their tenth studio LP, and obviously these guys occupy a rather small niche audience-wise, but I've never particularly disliked them. All I can say is that the two tracks (out of six) that they let out for pre-release here don't exactly have much "hit single" potential. And by "much," of course I mean "any."
The Shits, Diet of Worms: This is actually a pretty good punk album if you can get past their insistence on scatological, well, everything. I have a sneaking suspicion that even the cover art was done with, well, you know... scatalogical art supplies, let's just say.
Pranatricks, Infiniteness: This came out today; it's a guy from British Columbia who bills himself as "psych-folk," but I think he's selling himself short — this is a straight-up post-punk album with some decently interesting stuff on it. He's not a great singer, but he's not bad, either. If you like the Asteroid No.4 (one of my favorite bands!), you might like this too...? Hopefully we'll get a new Asteroids album later this year and I'll forget all about it, but for now...
Pigeon, Outtanational: This band has been referred to as "Electropunk-funk" and "Afrodisco," which isn't wrong. It's good dance music, still not "my thing," but it's been that sort of week.
Hiding Places, The Secret to Good Living: Kind of a southern Americana-ish indie-rock band with a somewhat disenchanted-sounding female singer. They're okay, but I don't think they're named after the Billy Woods album.
Gentilesky, Dream: This is a 4-piece post-punk guitar band from Italy that really takes that "angular" label seriously. I like it! Most people probably won't, though.
How to See Know and Fall, Ecologies: I'm not sure how to describe these guys, but the Bandcamp page says they're "combining intricate hybrid percussion with shimmering synth lines and ambient textures," and gosh darn-it, that's good enough for me.
Next week will be even slimmer pickin's than this week due to RSD, but there's supposed to be a new Sparkler album, which is nice. (They're sort of like a My Bloody Valentine tribute band, except they do originals.) One of the songs you can hear now, "Postal," sounds enough like Slowdive's "Star Roving" to be potentially lawsuit-worthy, but at least they have good taste in what they lift...?
Finally, looking a couple weeks past RSD, they've just announced a new Noveller album, for May 1! Life just keeps getting better! 😄
You all need to listen, this one's mandatory. Maybe a bit more "singer-songwriter" than previous stuff, but it still has their character. But where it previously felt like all the irregular moves were dodging something, creating a residual vigilance, this one feels like it moves because it wants to. There's a peace to it. Extremely good.
I did hear this one though, and it's some great hip hop. Every track has a different producer so the sound gets varied, sometimes it goes really far out with effects on the vocals but its never so far out that it feels totally different from the grounded ones
Loose ends, missed drops and surprise drops from last week (in order of how I would rank them):
Makthaverskan, Glass and Bones: This album was practically a revelation — I'd never heard of them, but they're a post-punk guitar band from Sweden with a great (female, of course) singer, and damn, they're really good! (They need a new logo, though — I might have overlooked them in the past because I thought they were a black-metal band.) This is their fifth album, which I guess means I have four more albums to listen to now.
Robber Robber, Two Wheels Move the Soul: And here's another surprisingly good post-punk guitar band with a great female singer whom I might have ignored in the past due to an inappropriately-metalish band logo. It's weird that both this and the Makthaverskan LP would come out on the same day, but maybe there's a special management company for post-punk guitar bands with misleading logos that makes these kinds of decisions.
U2, Easter Lily EP: This was a legitimate surprise drop, though it wasn't as much of a surprise as it might have been because they did the same thing with their Days of Ash EP in February. The stuff on EP is more like what we've been used to from them ever since the Joshua Tree days, but that doesn't mean the other one is better. However, I do think the other one had a bit more... panache? I believe that's the right word.
The Bevis Frond, Horrorful Heights: These guys recently had some lineup changes and their sound (if not their songcraft) has significantly improved, I'd say largely because of it. Unfortunately, my main problem with this band, namely Nick Salomon's voice, is something they're never going to change — it's his band, after all. There are many good tracks on this album, and it may even be their best record of the 21st century, but if I try to listen to more than three or four of them in succession I just have to turn it off. Anyway, this wasn't a surprise drop — they originally scheduled this for January and then postponed, and then didn't announce the new date until it was practically upon us.
Spaceport, Cut the Lake: Nice, well-made guitar-pop album. I'm not saying it lacks energy, but it could use a bit more noise and distortion — you know, for the kids! Also, with a name like "Spaceport" you expect something more spacey than this.
Angine de Poitrine, Vol. II: I assume everybody has heard of these guys by now, but if you haven't, then I'll just post one of their videos below. You should definitely check it out, because it's certainly something you don't see every day. (Unless you work in a polka-dot factory.) All I would say is that high-level technical virtuosity combined with extremely weird costumes doesn't automatically lead to music that I actually want to listen to for more than, say, five minutes or so without stopping, but at least it gets people talking about them. These days, that's half the battle! Maybe more than half.
I would also commend this set of reviews from BrooklynVegan.com, covering several of the aforementioned albums in considerably more detail.
[*]Angine de Poitrine, Vol. II: I assume everybody has heard of these guys by now, but if you haven't, then I'll just post one of their videos below. You should definitely check it out, because it's certainly something you don't see every day. (Unless you work in a polka-dot factory.) All I would say is that high-level technical virtuosity combined with extremely weird costumes doesn't automatically lead to music that I actually want to listen to for more than, say, five minutes or so without stopping, but at least it gets people talking about them. These days, that's half the battle! Maybe more than half.[/list]
I was positively flailing. I did NOT want to admit that my arch-nemesis, the nefarious MJ, was right. That this would be the week that I would have no new albums to look forward to come Friday morning. I searched both Pitchfork's and Metacritic's slate of upcoming album releases in vain. All seemed loss. April 10th would be my bane. And then, behold, I remembered. My champion as a wee lad - Metal - would surely not fail me. Surely, the Metal Gods themselves would avail me of that vile unbeliever MJ! Alas, via YouTube site of BangerTV, the Metal Gods brought favor to their ever faithful servant with a righteous and triumphant Melodic Death Metal album by the likes of Inferi that will surely be gracing the higher echelons of my Metal '26 End-Of-Year list. Rejoice! A welcome discovery indeed. Blessed be the Metal Gods!!! 🤘 😈
What April 10th, 2026 release do YOU have your ears & heart set on when midnight strikes?! 🔭👀
Oh and as far as other known names go, you've got Lone, WU LYF, Squarepusher (tho speaking as a fan I gotta say this one seems real bad), Gnod, Alex Zhang Hungtai, and a collaboration from Félicia Atkinson & Christina Vantzou
I was positively flailing. I did NOT want to admit that my arch-nemesis, the nefarious MJ, was right. That this would be the week that I would have no new albums to look forward to come Friday morning. I searched both Pitchfork's and Metacritic's slate of upcoming album releases in vain. All seemed loss. April 10th would be my bane. And then, behold, I remembered. My champion as a wee lad - Metal - would surely not fail me. Surely, the Metal Gods themselves would avail me of that vile unbeliever MJ! Alas, via YouTube site of BangerTV, the Metal Gods brought favor to their ever faithful servant with a righteous and triumphant Melodic Death Metal album by the likes of Inferi that will surely be gracing the higher echelons of my Metal '26 End-Of-Year list. Rejoice! A welcome discovery indeed. Blessed be the Metal Gods!!! 🤘 😈
Somehow I always end up being everybody's arch-nemesis. How does that happen? I'm a nice guy! I hardly ever spoil other people's diabolical master plans to take over the world. Okay, maybe a couple of times. Today.
Anyway, I'd never heard of Inferi, which is the Italian word for "Underworld," but their name reminds me of Injera, the spongey bread you get at Ethiopian restaurants, so they must be good. And now that I have heard of them, I have to say, I really like their album covers — very Lovecraftian, and of course anything with a giant eyeball on it is cool as far as I'm concerned! However, I did say early on that I'm not a metal guy, and I also didn't actually say there was "nothing" coming out this week — in fact, there was a surprise drop today from Australian post-rockers International Karate, which might end up being my pick-of-the-week if the new Sparkler and Cathedral Bells albums aren't as good as the preview tracks currently indicate. Also, there are new LPs from semi-famous people including Joe Jackson, Jessie Ware, and Richard Barbieri (who used to play keyboards for Japan).
Sparkler, Glidewinder: As mentioned earlier, this is an MBV-style shoegaze band from San Diego, and this is their second full-length LP. (I really liked their first one, and this sounds like it's going to be quite a bit better, so...)
Cathedral Bells, Parallel Dreams: More of a nugaze/dreampop band, this time from Los Angeles. What can I say, I'm a sucker for stuff like this, even though they don't have a female singer. Maybe they can get Loreena McKennitt, since she also made an album called "Parallel Dreams," except she's well over twice their age. (And she's from Canada!)
International Karate, Lifetime as a Beginner: A complete surprise, as there was no pre-announcement (that I'm aware of) and they hadn't made an album in 20 years. In the meantime, another band called "International Karate" formed in Minneapolis, so that's nice. The name-squatters haven't make a big splash though, so maybe the confusion level won't ruin this band's comeback attempt. Actually, it probably will.
Sugar Horse, Not a Sound in Heaven: Post-punk/doomgaze band from Bristol, UK. No preview tracks at all for this album, but their previous work has been fairly... compelling? Also, if you get on a horse and find out it's made of sugar, you should get off the horse.
Spoils, Mile Wide Inch Deep: All-women band from Cincinnati who sort of remind me of Warpaint, but with more verve and energy. This one could be a real sleeper!
Komana, A.I. Lust: Art-punk solo act from France (not to be confused with the bands of the same name from Ireland and Belgium). Cool record, but don't expect any cute/catchy singalongs... Also, this one might not qualify for BEA yet as it appears to exist only on Bandcamp, at least for now.
Lime Garden, Maybe Not Tonight: Indiepop group from Brighton — a bit like Charli XCX meets Wet Leg, though maybe not quite as transgressive. (I might just be imagining that.) There could be some hit potential on this one, and as an added bonus, their name should help remind gardeners that lime should occasionally be applied to vegetable beds to reduce soil acidity!
Wavering, The Inexplicable Valley of Lights: This is a doomgaze act from Connecticut, which makes sense if you've ever been to Connecticut.
The Wulongs, FACH: All-female tweepunk trio from Japan. My expectations aren't super-high for this one, but they could surprise me. It's happened before...
Iguana Death Cult, Guns Out: Punk (mostly) band from The Netherlands; normally I like bands like this, but I'm not so sure I like the vocals with these guys? Maybe I'm just looking for something to needlessly criticize here.
Richard Barbieri, Hauntings: No previews on this whatsoever, just an "Official Trailer," but recent releases from him have basically been ambient vaporwave stuff with occasional trip-hoppishness. The title suggests he's going for a more spooky vibe this time, and the trailer suggests there could be some upbeat stuff in there too, but we'll see soon enough. Ambient vaporwave fans don't scare easily.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
