Notable Releases of the Week (2/13)

This is by far the biggest release week of the year so far. Amanda and I highlight 12 new releases below, and Bill tackles another five in Indie Basement, including Cardinals, Luke Temple & The Cascading Moms, The Paranoid Style, the Wall of Voodoo 1983 demos collection, and the expanded reissue of Velocity Girl’s ¡Simpatico!. And in addition to these reviews, Dave and I talked a lot about all this new music on today’s episode of BV Weekly.

On top of the 17 records we highlighted today on BV, this week’s honorable mentions include Mumford & Sons, Gogol Bordello , Mariachi El Bronx, Colin Stetson/Greg Fox/Trevor Dunn, Good Sleepy, Feng, Danny L Harle, PONY, The Nude Party, The Hellacopters, Tyler Halverson, Hoaxed, Giallo, joyride!, The Lone Bellow, The Infamous Stringdusters, Felsmann + Tiley, femtanyl, Congratulations, Yellow Days, Middleman, August Pontheir, Ásgeir, Wet Tuna, Brent Faiyaz, Chet Faker, Story of the Year, the Dream Fatigue EP, the It Happened One Night EP, Huggy Bear’s 1992 & 1993 Peel Sessions, and the soundtrack to Steph Curry’s film debut GOAT.

Read on for my picks, and stream the new episode of BV Weekly wherever you listen to podcasts for more of this week’s new music and music news. What’s your favorite release of the week?

Converge – Love Is Not Enough (Epitaph/Deathwish)
The first proper Converge album in 9 years is also the fastest Converge album since the band’s whiplash-inducing early 2000s era.

How do Converge do it? I should probably start this review with something a little less hyperbolic, but Love Is Not Enough is the kind of album that makes you throw restraint out the window. Converge have been a band for over 35 years, they’ve had the same lineup for nearly 27 years, and on their new album Love Is Not Enough they sound as hungry as they did in their early days. This isn’t even “aging gracefully”; it’s defying the concept of aging altogether.

There were moments on their last two proper albums (2012’s All We Love We Leave Behind and 2017’s The Dusk in Us) that Converge dipped their toes into the kind of slower post-metal territory that tends to signify grizzled elder statesman status in the world of heavy music, and they dove even deeper into it on their 2021 Bloodmoon album with Chelsea Wolfe. I’m sure much of the Converge fanbase would agree that it would be a totally acceptable and even welcome thing for Converge to fully embrace their Old Man Era on Love Is Not Enough, but Converge didn’t do that. Instead, they made a record that proves that fast, energetic, aggressive music is something you can age within rather than out of. Love Is Not Enough is one high-speed chaotic hardcore ripper after the next, with more than half of its 10 songs clocking in at under 3 minutes apiece. It’s the fastest Converge record since 2004’s You Fail Me, and it has me feeling just as excited about Converge in 2026 as I’ve felt… well, every other year they released a new album. Some albums you love because they come from a band so wide-eyed that it feels like nothing can hinder their boundless ambition, and some albums you love because they come from a band so seasoned that they’re truly masters of their craft. Without any exaggeration, Love Is Not Enough is both.

Charli XCX – Wuthering Heights (Atlantic)
The followup to ‘Brat’ finds Charli embracing her love of art pop and the avant-garde. It’s a soundtrack/companion to the new film of the same name, but it’s also a concept album that stands tall on its own.

After altering her career and the pop music landscape forever with 2024’s Brat, Charli XCX said she’d probably be taking a break from music, and then she said her next record “will probably be a flop, which I’m down for to be honest.” These are understandable statements to make given how high the expectations for a Brat followup would be, so what did Charli do? She ventured outside of music without actually taking a break from it, and when it did come to releasing a new record, she skirted around the concept of a “followup to Brat.” She ramped up her film career earlier this year with The Moment, and now she releases a soundtrack/companion album for a different film, Wuthering Heights, an adaptation of the 1847 Emily Brontë novel of the same name, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. It’s not the score to Wuthering Heights (that’s by Anthony Willis), and some of the songs definitely appear in the film but I’m not currently sure if all of them do (probably not). Charli also didn’t score The Moment; her frequent collaborator A.G. Cook did. If Charli’s goal was to leave her fans and critics too confused to be disappointed that Wuthering Heights is her first album since Brat, she succeeded.

And your categorization of this album may vary, but I am sticking with calling it Charli’s first album since Brat. It’s an entire 12-song, 35-minute album that stands on its own, whether you’ve seen the film or not (I have not). Every track is a full-blown song with Charli singing; nothing is film score type work. Charli even called it a “concept album.” Adding to all the mystique, this is by far the most experimental album Charli XCX has ever released. It features The Velvet Underground’s John Cale and the elusive Sky Ferreira, and this is an album for the Charli XCX fans who got excited when Charli talked about how influential The Velvet Underground & Nico is. With all the dark, eerie string arrangements, it kind of sounds like a cross between Dead Can Dance and Kate Bush, and not just because Kate Bush’s debut single was also named after and inspired by Wuthering Heights the book. It also embraces these influences in a way that only Charli XCX could do. There are a few Brat-like electronic pop moments, and even the “least pop” moments sound distinctly like Charli. The artsy and the avant-garde have long been in her DNA, but she’s never embraced that side of her as fully as she does here. It feels like a gift to Charli’s own inner art rock weirdo, and a gift to the art rock weirdos who already like Charli XCX too.

Worm – Necropalace (Century Media)
The most over-the-top, attention-grabbing metal album in recent memory has arrived.

The last we heard from Florida metal band Worm was on their 2023 split with Dream Unending, Starpath, a split that’s now going to go down as one of the most pivotal moments of their career. Their half of that split saw Worm branching out from their death-doom roots into a gothy mix of extreme metal and arena rock that sounded kinda like Tribulation, and their new album (and Century Media debut) Necropalace is a full-length exploration of that same terrain. The album has six proper songs (and a short intro track), and each one is a mini epic of its own. None are shorter than seven minutes and the closing track (which features veteran shredder Marty Friedman) is over 14. It’s got prog excursions, black/death metal ferocity, classic heavy metal pomp, horror flick camp, and all kinds of twists and turns that can’t be easily summed up by namedropping subgenres. It’s equal parts catchy, heavy, mind-bending, and even patently ridiculous, and it’s an album that’ll steal your attention whether you’re a metalhead or not.

Jill Scott – To Whom This May Concern (Human Re Sources/The Orchard)
The veteran neo-soul great does what she does best on her first album in 11 years, with help from Tierra Whack, JID, Ab-Soul, DJ Premier, and others.

The last time we heard from Jill Scott, she was revisiting her classic 2000 debut album Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds Vol. 1 on a (belated-due-to-COVID) 20th anniversary tour, a tour that doubled as a reminder of how timeless Jill’s music has always been. When she arrived in the early 2000s as part of the era’s neo-soul movement, her powerhouse pipes received comparisons to pioneering soul singers like Minnie Riperton and Marvin Gaye, and channelling the past helped Jill Scott change the future. In the years since, she’s been acknowledged as an influence on artists like SZA, Tyler the Creator, and Jazmine Sullivan. Frank Ocean and Beyoncé have shown love to her as well. On her new album To Whom This May Concern, which follows 2015’s Woman, some of the artists from the last couple generations that Jill paved the way for are right here beside her. Rappers JID and Ab-Soul rise to the occasion with verses that Jill should be proud to have, and one of the album’s very best songs is “Norf Side,” a collaboration with Tierra Whack. Over a beat from boom bam pioneer DJ Premier, Jill shows off her own rapping prowess before Tierra does the same, and they make for a dynamic multi-generational duo. Outside of the features, Jill does what she does best, bringing her massive voice to a batch of songs that bridge the gap between vintage soul and hip hop R&B.

Angel Du$t – Cold 2 The Touch (Run For Cover)
The ever-evolving Angel Du$t sound like their truest selves on this energized LP.

Angel Du$t are one of those bands whose whole mission makes more and more sense as they go on. After going through multiple lineup and music genre changes, they came out with an album that felt like a culmination of everything they’d ever done (2023’s Brand New Soul), and now they hone in on that culmination even further with their Run For Cover debut, Cold 2 The Touch. This one does mark yet another lineup change–with new drummer Nick Lewis and guitarist Jim Carroll (the latter of Suicide File, Hope Conspiracy, American Nightmare, and more), plus guest vocals from American Nightmare/Cold Cave’s Wes Eisold, Restraining Order’s Patrick Cozens, Frank Carter, and Twitching Tongues/Deadbody’s Taylor Young–but it’s also the second album in a row with guitarist Steve Marino and bassist Zechariah Ghostribe, and you can tell that bandleader Justice Tripp’s chemistry with those two has gotten even stronger. Justice called it “the most collaborative Angel Du$t record,” and he talked a lot about how collaborative Brand New Soul was too. Angel Du$t will always be Justice’s project, but he clearly wants his bandmates to bring their own flair and ideas–on this album, Jim Carroll’s shredding is impossible to miss. Cold 2 The Touch also reunites AD with Brian McTernan, producer of their 2014 debut album A.D., and maybe that’s why this one feels a little more like early Angel Du$t than Brand New Soul does. In those early days, Angel Du$t–who shared members with Turnstile at the time–were in the process of shaping a new type of melody-driven post-hardcore that Angel Du$t and Turnstile helped bring to prominence by the late 2010s, and Cold 2 The Touch is cut from that exact, very appealing cloth.

Dropkick Murphys & Haywire – New England Forever (Dummy Luck Music/PIAS)
Two Boston-area punk bands from two different generations come together on a tour-only split LP that sounds like one cohesive whole.

Political outspokenness, fast no-frills songs, camaraderie–it’s all present on the new split LP from Dropkick Murphys and Haywire, two punk bands from different generations who both call the Boston area home, and who kicked off a tour together earlier this week. At the moment, the merch tables on that tour are the only place you can get this record.

New England Forever isn’t just two well-matched halves; it’s the kind of split that finds two bands working together to make it feel like one cohesive whole. Each half features a collaboration from both bands, a cover of the other band, and two original songs. On DKM’s side, Haywire assists on “Citizen I.C.E.,” a reworking of DKM’s 2005 song “Citizen C.I.A.” that takes aim at the fascist immigration enforcement that’s become the United States’ most widely-protested domestic issue. It’s not the only anti-ICE protest song released in the past month, but it just might be the most furious. DKM also offer up two new rippers (“Only the Strong” and “Solidarity”) that lean into the band’s hardcore and street punk side and work perfectly on a split with Haywire, and then they cover Haywire’s “Always By My Side” (from last year’s split EP with No Guard), and that’s actually the catchiest, most anthemic song that DKM contribute. If the more popular Dropkick Murphys’ fanbase didn’t realize that Haywire are writing some of the best punk singalongs around, maybe now they will.

Haywire’s side kicks off with the title track, “New England Forever,” another rousing anthem that features Dropkick Murphys and feels like it could be a fan favorite from either band. Then we get the sweetly melodic Oi! punk of “Hang Up the Telephone,” the gritty floor-punching hardcore of “The Henchmen,” and a cover of a grade A Dropkick Murphys anthem, “The Boys Are Back.” If you came into this split as a fan of just one of these bands, you’ll be a fan of both by the time it’s over. And the timing couldn’t be better; Haywire are one of the most exciting newer punk bands and they’re on a historic rise right now, and Dropkick Murphys have lately been more fired-up than they’ve been in years. On New England Forever, DKM sound as urgent as they did 25-30 years ago, and Haywire sound even more ready to take over the world than they did last year.

Remember Sports – The Refrigerator (Get Better Records)
The Philly-via-Ohio band’s first record in five years is their best yet, with a batch of songs that range from earthy indie-country to punk rippers.

Remember Sports sounded like they were on the cusp of something with 2021’s great Like A Stone, an album that branched out from the band’s indie-punk roots into something grander without abandoning their sense of raw charm. Then singer/guitarist Carmen Perry went for something soft and folkier on her 2025 debut solo album Eyes Like A Mirror, and now Remember Sports finally return with an album that sounds like the explosion to Like A Stone‘s cracking crust. Some of those folkier tendencies of Eyes Like A Mirror get worked into Remember Sports’ usual fuzzed-out indie rock, making for moments that are right up there with the latest Ratboys and Wednesday records. At the same time, Remember Sports haven’t lost their punk edge–they’ve got some real rippers on this record. It’s the best of both worlds, Remember Sports’ best yet, and an album that anyone into the breeding ground between punk, indie, and Americana cannot be sleeping on.

Honor Choir – Modes of Transport EP (Sunday Drive)
If you’ve ever wished for Box Car Racer to come back, you might wanna hear this debut EP from OKC post-hardcore band Honor Choir.

Christian Nichols of OKC band Honor Choir said the initial mission statement for the band was to write “what I would imagine a follow-up to the Box Car Racer record would sound like,” and with recent single “Satellite Receiver,” they released what might be the most Box Car Racer-y (and untitled blink-y) song I’ve ever heard from an artist not named Tom DeLonge. The influence was obvious, but it’s a side of Tom’s songwriting that’s rarely replicated compared to the oft-imitated pop punk of Dude Ranch and Enema of the State, and Honor Choir did it exceedingly well. “Satellite Receiver” is now one of five songs on Honor Choir’s debut EP Modes of Transport, and it’s not the only time on this EP that Honor Choir offer up Box Car Racer vibes, but they don’t come off like a worship band either. Honor Choir also cite bands like Rival Schools, Hey Mercedes, and Far as influences, and you can hear all of those and other early 2000s post-hardcore deep cuts coming through. You can also hear HC’s own personality. Even when they’re wearing their influences on their sleeves, they bring something to the table that those influences never brought.

Ransom, Boldy James & Nicholas Craven – Salvation for the Wicked (Momentum)
Having separately released multiple projects produced by Nicholas Craven, boom bap revivalists Ransom and Boldy James now come together with him on a joint effort.

Detroit rapper Boldy James and Jersey City rapper Ransom are both prolific staples of the current boom bap revival, they both have multiple projects with Montreal producer Nicholas Craven, and now all three of them have a short-but-sweet new project together. Both Boldy James and Ransom are often at their best over Craven’s lush, sample-based production, and this project is no exception. All three of them have a ton of chemistry, with Ransom and Boldy finishing each other’s sentences with gritty bars that remain locked in to Craven’s gorgeous instrumentals.

hemlocke springs – the apple tree under the sea (AWAL)
The alt-pop artist’s debut LP is a concept album about her journey to self discovery amidst a religious upbringing, and it’s also a (re)introduction to her vivid, colorful world.

hemlocke springs, the moniker of North Carolina artist Isimeme Udu, tasted TikTok virality with her second single, 2022’s “girlfriend.” Even in that light and frothy synth-pop confection, signs of her unique voice and personality were evident, and she’s only honed in on both since then. Her debut LP is a concept album about her journey to self discovery amidst a religious upbringing, and it’s also a (re)introduction to her vivid, colorful world, and a showcase of her tremendous range. She leaps between bold synth-pop on “the beginning of the end” and “w-w-w-w-w,” sinister whimsy on “head, shoulders, knees and ankles,” lush chorale harmonies on “moses,” soaring art-pop balladry on “sever the blight,” retro-futuristic grooves on “sense(is),” ’00s-inspired R&B on “set me free,” and cathartic pop bliss on “be the girl!” She takes inspiration from artists like Kate Bush, Prince, Lady Gaga, and Chappell Roan (who she opened for last year) along the way, but she really makes all those styles her own, building them out with her elaborate lyricism that’s populated by the likes of Snow White, ruffians and angels, a 73 year old man awaiting his child bride, and El Shaddai. hemlocke’s world contains beauty and danger, and visiting it an absolute thrill. [Amanda Hatfield]

Sarah Kinsley – Fleeting (A Verve Forecast/Fontana)
This week’s other great alt-pop offering is a lush ode to yearning.

After a series of self-produced EPs, Sarah Kinsley’s debut full length, 2024’s Escaper, was her first release with a co-producer, John Congleton. For her new EP Fleeting, she worked again with a co-producer, this time her friend Jake Aron. She described it to Genius as “Bright. Punchy. Irresistibly dynamic. Shimmering. Gateway to synth heaven,” and I’d also call it a lush ode to yearning. From “Lonely Touch,” which was inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, to “Truth in Pursuit,” with its opening lines of “if only baby you were mine,” the day-before-Valentine’s Day release date feels well timed. In addition to the more energetic synth-pop, the two ballads, “Reverie” and “After All” are definite standouts, both recalling a little of the romantic melancholy of Lana Del Rey. As much as Kinsley excels at maximalism, her turns towards the more intimate are just as memorable. [A.H.]

The Beach Boys – We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years (Brother/Capitol)
A new ’70s-era box set from The Beach Boys unearths the sessions for Brian Wilson’s lost cult classic ‘Adult/Child,’ solo piano demos, and more.

The Beach Boys have been unearthing and remastering material from their oft-overlooked ’70s years with a series of new box sets, and today we get We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years, which gives their 1977 cult classic The Beach Boys Love You a nice remaster and includes lots of outtakes and alternate takes from ’74 to ’77. The biggest treat, though, is that this box marks the closest we’ve ever gotten to an official release of The Beach Boys’ previously-bootlegged “lost” album Adult/Child, which was intended as the followup to Love You but shelved. Similar to The Beach Boys’ most famous lost album, Smile, the band had done their fair share of public promotion for Adult/Child at the time but ultimately cancelled its release, and given the album’s eccentric nature, many believe that people in Brian Wilson’s orbit doubted its commercial viability and pushed to shelve it. Love You, which was originally intended to be a Brian solo album, was already performing poorly, and in Adult/Child‘s place, The Beach Boys released M.I.U Album, a slickly-produced, negatively-reviewed album that Brian played a much smaller role in than its predecessor.

But as Love You became a cult classic, celebrated for its innovative use of synthesizers, the legend of Adult/Child grew. Adult/Child was written by Brian with crooners like Frank Sinatra in mind and features some heavily orchestrated songs, but it also has the raw intimacy of the proto-bedroom pop albums that Brian was responsible for in the post-Smile years. It might be the only album to be categorized on Wikipedia as both “outsider” and “big band.” It has everything from showtunesy schmaltz (“Life Is For The Living”) to haunted balladry (“It’s Over Now”) to a song about how fun it is to watch baseball that could’ve only come from the childlike mind of the then-35-year-old Brian Wilson. It’s not hard to see why a major label in 1977 would cancel its release, but it’s a treat that we finally get an official release of the album’s sessions now. It’s one of the most delightfully strange records in Brian’s catalog, and that’s really saying something.

Also a treat: the We Gotta Groove box includes the 1976 solo piano demos that Brian recorded for his bandmates of future Love You and Adult/Child material. It should go without saying that it’s always a treat to hear Brian as stripped-back as this, especially on a song like the aforementioned “It’s Over Now,” which is even more goosebump-inducing in this format.

—

Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Cardinals, Luke Temple & The Cascading Moms, The Paranoid Style, the Wall of Voodoo 1983 demos collection, and the expanded reissue of Velocity Girl‘s ¡Simpatico!.

Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases and Indie Basement archives.

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

Pick up the BrooklynVegan x Alexisonfire special edition 80-page magazine, which tells the career-spanning story of Alexisonfire and comes on its own or paired with our new exclusive AOF box set and/or individual reissues, in the BV shop. Also pick up the new Glassjaw box set & book, created in part with BrooklynVegan, and browse the BrooklynVegan shop for more exclusive vinyl, including several of the albums talked about above.