Notable Releases of the Week (9/12)

13 Mins read

It’s been another busy week in the music world with a lot of ups and downs. Some sad news first: we had to say goodbye to Flipper vocalist Bruce Loose and original Baroness drummer Allen Blickle–two hugely beloved and important figures in alternative and heavy music. We also witnessed the VMA’s, heard about some rumored Coachella headliners, and here in NYC we finally got our taste of the Rilo Kiley reunion. You can hear about that and more on this week’s episode of our BV Weekly podcast.

As for this week’s new music, I highlight eight new albums below and Bill tackles more in Indie Basement, including Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals), Baxter Dury, The Chameleons, Guerilla Toss, Sidney Minsky Sargeant (Working Men’s Club), and The Hidden Cameras. This week’s honorable mentions include Ice Cube, Michael Hurley, Jens Lekman, Sophie Ellis Bextor, Spite House, Liquid Mike, Fruit Bats, Carson McHone, Ho99o9, Ty Dolla $ign, Rafiq Bhatia, Lorna Shore, Korn offshoot Venera (ft. Chelsea Wolfe, FKA twigs & Dis Fig), King Princess, Verses GT (Jacques Green & Nosaj Thing), Josh Ritter, Between the Buried and Me, Silverstein, Siege Column, Der Weg einer Freiheit, Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer, Bass Drum of Death, Matt Maeson, Ruston Kelly, Boyish, Adam Buxton, Asher White, Jade, Cafuné, Teenage Bottlerocket, Nasty C & Blxckie, Joviale, Snuggle, Mark William Lewis, Robin Kester, Rezz, Whitney K, Parcels, Laveda, Leggs, Liim, Courtesy, By a Thread, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Calum Scott, I See Stars, Dance Gavin Dance, Twenty One Pilots, Ed Sheeran, the Selector Dub Narcotic (Calvin Johnson) EP, the Nyx Nyx EP, the Silver Gore EP, the Spinal Tap II: The End Continues soundtrack, the Margaret Glaspy covers and collaborations album, Modeselektor’s DJ-Kicks mix, and the David Bowie box of 2002-2016 material.

Read on for my picks, and check out the new episode of BV Weekly for more of this week’s new music and music news. What’s your favorite release of the week?

Maruja – Pain to Power (Music For Nations)
The rising UK art-jazz-punks follow their recent EP trilogy with their first full-length, a capital-A Album of intense, genre-blurring protest music.

If you put the punk-jazz of side B of The Stooges’ Fun House, the anarchic screeds of early Crass, and the arthouse stylings of Public Image Ltd in a blender, it’d probably sound at least a little like Maruja. For more modern comparisons, the Manchester band are sort of like the bridge between the IDLES/Fontaines DC-led shouty post-punk revival and the art-school ambitions of the black midi/Black Country New Road/Squid-led Windmill Scene, with an exit ramp that takes you right into their home country’s ongoing jazz renaissance. With an on-paper description like that, Maruja run the risk of being too studious or experimental for their own good, but they proved over the course of a recent EP trilogy that their cerebral side is actually outweighed by all the visceral feeling. Now, with their first full-length Pain to Power, they deliver a record even more powerful, genre-bending, and melodically satisfying than their impressive run of EPs. The EPs set the stage for Maruja, but this is their grand introduction.

Talking to NME about the album’s themes, bassist Matt Buonaccorsi said a lot of them “are about seeing so much turmoil, war, corruption, greed, horror through the screens of our phones,” and he also explained how that ties into the album title: “It’s so horrifying to try and take in all of this collective pain. The fact that we can try and turn this pain into power, into action, to come together to protest and form communities and celebrate solidarity and love over division – that’s quite powerful.” His quote gets to the heart of the real world change that great protest music can inspire, and I think anyone from Woody Guthrie to Public Enemy to the aforementioned Crass would have to agree that Pain to Power is the kind of unflinching, uncompromising, empowering protest music that really makes you wanna get out there and use your voice. Harry Wilkinson’s lyrics are mostly shouted, but sometimes softly spoken or tunefully crooned, and they’re full of so much emotion: anger, sadness, pain, confusion, and, at least by the time of album closer “Reconcile,” a glimmer of hope. One trait that Maruja does not share with many of the great protest singers, though, is the decision to use a simplistic musical backdrop that keeps the focus on the words. Instead, Pain to Power is more like post-punk’s answer to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, an album that weaves its rallying cries into a mind-bending, jazz-infused musical odyssey. Pain to Power is all over the place, from the chaos of punk, post-punk, and free jazz to the more meditative side of spiritual jazz and post-rock. Maruja toyed with all of these ingredients across their EP trilogy (including this year’s entirely-jazz Tir na nÓg), and they bring everything together more seamlessly than ever on the LP. Pain to Power finds Maruja fully crafting a full-length album that’s greater than the sum of its parts, that takes you on a musical and lyrical journey from start to finish. And if listening to it makes you as fired-up as Maruja were when they were writing it, they’ll see you in the trenches.

Algernon Cadwallader – Trying Not to Have A Thought (Saddle Creek)
The emo revival OGs do what they do best on their first album in 14 years.

Have you ever tried not to have a thought? If you have, you’ve probably realized that the impossible task usually just makes you have even more thoughts. It’s a widely relatable goal, though, especially when the state of the world and the availability of information makes it harder than ever to arrive at a meditative state. The phrase titles the first album in 14 years by emo revival OGs Algernon Cadwallader, whose singer/bassist Peter Helmis called it a “euphemism” for “meditation and trying to free the mind,” and it explains why some real world shit has seeped into the new album by a band whose most popular song opens with a line about frog spit. It also describes the approach that Algernon Cadwallader took when writing an album that arrives with exponentially more anticipation than any album the band ever released before it. “We have never worried about how we’ll be received,” Helmis told Pitchfork in a recent interview. “In fact, if anything, we’ll steer something in another direction if we think it’s gonna be perceived too well.” Guitarist and in-house producer Joe Reinhart added, “That’s about as far as we go, as pre-meditation is concerned.”

A lot of bands might make claims like that about a reunion/comeback album, but if you know anything about Algernon Cadwallader, you know they’re probably telling the truth. The entire appeal of Algernon Cadwallader during their initial 2005-2012 run was the lack of pre-meditation; on just about every recording and at just about every live show, they followed their first instincts and never seemed to worry about any of the things bands worry about when they’re trying to “make it.” They unabashedly borrowed moves from Cap’n Jazz and other then-out-of-fashion emo bands, and they became just as legendary as their ’90s forebears because their energy was simply undeniable. Now, 12 years after quietly breaking up to little fanfare and three years after returning to the stage to perform for thousands of people, they have a new album that sounds just as free-spirited and un-premeditated as their beloved 2008 debut LP Some Kind of Cadwallader. (It’s also their first album with the same four-piece lineup as that album, as guitarist Colin Mahoney and drummer Nick Tazza are both back for the reunion after leaving the band in 2008.) And whether you saw this band in a basement back in the day or hopped on the Algernon train more recently, it’s hard to imagine wanting this new album to be anything other than exactly what it is. It rejects the commonplace wisdom that endearingly scrappy punk bands should polish things up over time. Instead, it finds Algernon sounding noticeably more mature and reflective within the same carefree model that they instinctually developed in their basement show days. It’s a little cleaner, and it has a little more room for Algernon’s intricate instrumentals to breathe, but mostly it’s just Algernon being Algernon, feeding off of their own energy. As it turns out, that approach worked as well today as it did 15-20 years ago.

Trying Not to Have a Thought by Algernon Cadwallader

Saturdays At Your Place – These Things Happen (Wax Bodega)
The Kalamazoo, Michigan indie/emo band’s sophomore LP is their finest release yet, with subtly ambitious songcraft and hugely catchy choruses that make them damn near undeniable.

Algernon Cadwallader released their first album at a time when you could probably count the amount of well-known current “Midwest emo” bands on two hands, but the subgenre they helped re-popularize is now one of the most prominent underground rock subgenres, and that’s thanks in big part to the countless great newer bands putting their own spin on this now-30+-year-old style of music. One of those bands is Kalamazoo, Michigan’s Saturdays At Your Place, who self-released their debut LP Something Worth Celebrating in 2021 before taking a big leap with 2023’s pivotal Always Cloudy, released on the now-defunct No Sleep label. Now signed to Wax Bodega (Hot Mulligan, Home Is Where, etc), Saturdays At Your Place deliver even further on the promise of Always Cloudy with their expansive sophomore album, These Things Happen. With its heavy use of acoustic/electric guitar hybrids and its youthful singalongs, comparisons to Modern Baseball are inevitable, but SAYP don’t imitate that dearly-missed band so much as they pick up where they left off and put their own stamp on it. These Things Happen feels as fresh in 2025 as You’re Gonna Miss It All did a decade ago, and this band brings a knack for subtly ambitious songcraft and hugely catchy choruses that make them damn near undeniable. The album’s got range–with flashes of mathy Kinsella/Algernon noodling (“Waste Away”), a riff that sounds like prime-era blink-182 (“Cross My Heart”), and some delicate indie-emo-pop moments that could sit comfortably next to Plans-era Death Cab For Cutie (“Forest Bubbles,” “Strawberry”)–and everything is tied together with a finesse that was only hinted at on Always Cloudy. These Things Happen is the sound of a band confidently leveling up and coming into their own, and delivering some of the year’s finest indie, emo, and power pop in the process.

these things happen by saturdays at your place

The Sound of Animals Fighting – The Maiden (Born Losers)
The experimental post-hardcore group are as weird, heavy, ethereal, and unparalleled as ever on their first full-length album in 17 years.

When The Sound of Animals Fighting arrived in the mid 2000s, they seemed untouchable. Their 2005 debut album Tiger and the Duke was unlike almost anything else released before or since, a seamless fusion of aggressive post-hardcore with progressive rock, art rock, and psychedelia that balanced out its heaviest moments with woozy, electronic interludes. The following year’s Lover, the Lord Has Left Us was even weirder. The members’ real identities were hidden by alter-egos like Nightingale, Lynx, Walrus, and Skunk, but it wasn’t long until we collectively realized that most of the core band was in RX Bandits and most of the lead vocals were by Circa Survive/Saosin’s Anthony Green. Members of Finch pitched in for the first album too and some of the softer vocals were by The Autumns’ Matthew Kelly. On the second album, the collective’s rotating lineup expanded to include even more lead vocalists, including Chiodos’ Craig Owens, Good Old War/Days Away’s Keith Goodwin, and improvisational vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, who sung in Sanskrit. Upon that album’s release, they still hadn’t toured or even played live at all, which seemed like a nearly impossible feat anyway. The music itself felt much more like a studio project than a live band, and with at least 12 members who all had other active bands, getting everyone on stage at once seemed like as much of a challenge as transforming these songs for a live environment. By summer of 2006, they finally did play just a small amount of shows that they turned into the 2007 live film We Must Become the Change We Want to See. 2008 brought third album The Ocean and the Sun with the more condensed lineup of Anthony Green + the current/former RX Bandits crew, but still no more live shows happened and the band ended up fading into hiatus.

It wouldn’t have surprised anyone if that’s where The Sound of Animals Fighting’s story ended, but, against most odds, they’ve actually turned into a regular, active band. They went on their first tour in 2014 and they’ve continued to tour every few years since at an increasingly frequent rate. 2022 brought the release of a new EP, Apeshit, and now they’ve released a new full-length album–their first in 17 years–with a fall tour on the way. Their new album The Maiden sounds like classic Sound of Animals Fighting, and 20 years after their mysterious debut hit shelves, there’s still no other band that sounds like this. The Maiden has TSOAF at their most chaotic, with the mind-melting progressive post-hardcore riffs of Matt Embree and Steve Choi, the furious drum patterns of Chris Tsagakis, and the harsh screams and celestial singing of Anthony Green on the title track, “Bangladesh,” and “Lady of the Cosmos.” It also has TSOAF at their most dazed and ethereal, with Anthony Green going full Björk over Matt Embree production on “Kaleidoscope” and Chris Tsagakis production “Kanda,” or with the trap beats and Dido interpolation of Embree and band founder Rich Balling’s “The Horror.” Lead vocals are constantly being traded (between Anthony, Rich, Matt Embree, Matthew Kelly, and Keith Goodwin), genre is constantly being defied, and all the extraordinary levels of experimentation and technical prowess are used to create songs that are extremely listenable. 20 years later, I still don’t know how this band does it, but I’m happy as hell that they still do.

The Maiden by The Sound of Animals Fighting

Kassa Overall – CREAM (Warp)
The latest album from Kassa Overall flips the script on jazz-sourced hip hop samples and transforms seven hip hop classics into sprawling jazz pieces.

One of the many reasons that jazz is having a comeback with younger generations is how often jazz classics have been used as source material for hip hop beats over the course of the past 30+ years. And for that exact reason, it’s been cool to see artists like BadBadNotGood and Robert Glasper taking the opposite approach, turning beloved hip hop beats into instrumental jazz pieces. The latest artist to do so is Kassa Overall, whose original music already blurs the lines between jazz and rap, and whose new album CREAM features jazz renditions of the instrumental from seven rap classics (plus one rendition of the Eddie Harris-penned, Miles Davis-popularized jazz classic “Freedom Jazz Dance”). The album takes its title from its Wu-Tang cover, and also includes interpretations of The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Big Poppa,” Digable Planets “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin But A ‘G’ Thang,” A Tribe Called Quest’s “Check the Rhime,” OutKast’s “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” and Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up,” some of which took their most memorable instrumental elements from classic jazz (or soul or funk or rock), like the Art Blakey song that gave “Rebirth of Slick” its iconic horn lines. Kassa Overall takes these songs and comes out with something that sounds like it could be a classic Blue Note record, with the familiar elements of these hip hop classics intact and plenty of Kassa’s own ideas weaved in. It’s a great way to continue a conversation about the past, present, and future of multiple styles of music, and even without context, it stands on its own as a gripping jazz record.

CREAM by Kassa Overall

Restraining Order – Future Fortune (Blue Grape)
The Massachusetts punks just want to have fun on their third full-length.

If you were happy to hear Fucked Up embrace their old school hardcore side earlier this year, then you might wanna hear the new album from Restraining Order too. They’ve toured with Fucked Up, and the first-wave-’70s-punk-meets-early-hardcore formula of Future Fortune sounds like Fucked Up before they entered their rock opera era. That said, “Time To Go” ends with a psychedelic freakout that suggests maybe Restraining Order have a Chemistry of Common Life in them too. Who knows! For now, as drummer/producer Will Hirst says, “We take this shit seriously, but we hope everyone else has fun with it. We tried to make a catchy rock album, and I think we achieved that.”

Future Fortune by Restraining Order

Die Spitz – Something To Consume (Third Man)
The Austin punks’ first album for Jack White’s label is grungy, garagey, and genre-bending enough to sprinkle in everything from nu metal to shoegaze.

Die Spitz hail from the dusty Austin, Texas punk scene and they cite Nirvana, Mudhoney, PJ Harvey, Pixies, and Black Sabbath as their core influences which should give you a very good idea of the grungy, garagey punk racket that this quartet stirs up. They made enough noise with their first two EPs (2022’s The Revenge of Evangeline and 2023’s Teeth) to catch the attention of Jack White’s Third Man Records, who signed them for their first full-length album, Something To Consume, and they made the album with Will Yip (Turnstile, Title Fight, Mannequin Pussy, etc), who helped them come out with their best-sounding record yet. Will helped sand the edges a bit production-wise, but the performances are as jagged as ever, and the songs range from nu metal (“Sound To No One”) to shoegaze (“Punishers”) with all kinds of gritty punk rippers in between. The band makes it a point to say that they have a fully democratic approach with all four members contributing to the songwriting, and even if they didn’t say it I think you’d pick up on it–you can really hear how this is four people’s ideas constantly working and clashing together in delightfully riotous ways.

Something To Consume by Die Spitz

Iron & Wine and Ben Bridwell – Making Good Time (Black Cricket/Brown)
This EP-length sequel to Iron & Wine and Ben Bridwell’s 2015 covers album is way better than a release like this needs to be.

10 years after Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam and Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell teamed up for the covers album Sing into My Mouth, they’re back with an EP-length sequel. It features somber indie-folk covers of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” Kendrick Lamar & SZA’s “Luther,” Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is,” Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” and boygenius’ “Ketchum, ID,” and while some of those picks might sound a little funny on paper to be covered as indie-folk songs, you can tell that Sam and Ben really love these songs. The whole project is irony-free, and it’s genuinely worth hearing.

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals), Baxter Dury, The Chameleons, Guerilla Toss, Sidney Minsky Sargeant (Working Men’s Club), and The Hidden Cameras.

Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases archive.

Looking for a podcast to listen to? Check out the latest episodes of our weekly music news podcast BV Weekly and our interview podcast The BrooklynVegan Show.

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