Notable Releases of the Week (4/24)

As faithful BrooklynVegan readers and podcast listeners may know, Andrew is currently taking some time away to take care of his new baby. He still wrote a bunch of this week’s NR, but not as much as usual, so we did our best to fill you in on what you need to know about the others. Stay tuned for his return, and…

This week Coachella wrapped up with a second, even more guest-filled weekend, plus we got the announcement of a new Quicksand album and much more. Hear us talk about this week’s news and new albums and classic albums from Weezer and Neutral Milk Hotel on today’s episode of BV Weekly.

We highlight twelve albums below, and Bill discusses nine more in Indie Basement, including The Reds Pinks & Purples, Doug Gillard, Gia Margaret, Carla dal Forno, and White Fence. In addition to those, this week’s honorable mentions include Metric, Angélique Kidjo, Meghan Trainor, Death Lens, Pearl, Noah Kahan, Cadence Weapon, Gay Meat, The Amity Affliction, Atreyu, Adam Schatz, Julia Cumming (Sunflower Bean), Hrishikesh Hirway (Song Exploder), Angelo De Augustine, Ringo Starr, big long sun, Jump Source, bleood, Jason Aldean, Kehlani, Lolo Zouaï, Loukeman, Mikaela Davis, Pearla, April + VISTA, City of the Sun, Tempers, White Denim, Adam Schatz, the Vomit Forth EP, the Sepultura EP, the first of the two-volume live Glen Hansard album, the expanded edition of Mina Tindle’s Compass Rosa, the james K remix album, and the Weezer box set.

Read on for our picks, and listen to 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?

Portrayal of Guilt – …Beginning of the End (Run For Cover)
The already-impossible-to-define Portrayal of Guilt just got even harder to define, with elements of industrial, nu metal, and hip hop tossed into their usual black/death/screamo blend.

Portrayal of Guilt are always unpredictably changing things up, but they’ve really done it this time. Even with a catalog that ranges from screamo to black/death metal to orchestral music, few could’ve predicted the 180 that PoG pull on …Beginning of the End. It finds them embracing industrial, nu metal, trip hop, and hip hop (with help from Houston rapper Slim Guerilla), while still finding time for all the black metal/death metal/screamo/hardcore that you expect from this band. They’ve got vicious, caustic shrieks abound, as well as a newly-unveiled knack for glistening clean vocals. Portrayal of Guilt have never sounded like this before, and yet somehow this feels like a total natural place for them to go.

Bad Operation – Everything Must Go (Bad Time/Community)
The “New Tone” ska pioneers are finally back 5+ years after their instant-classic debut with a second album.

It’s been over five years since members of Fatter Than Albert, The Flaming Tsunamis, All People, and others formed Bad Operation, released their instant-classic debut album, and coined the phrase “New Tone” that went on to become shorthand for the entire new generation of ska bands, and now they’re finally back with a second album. (In between, they also released a split with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones/Avoid One Thing’s Joe Gittleman.) Everything Must Go has got an interpolation of Operation Ivy’s “Knowledge” on opening track “Chokehold,” a tender ballad (“Simple Melody”), some harder rock riffs (“Rodeo”), and plenty of songs that pick right up where the debut left off, fusing 2 Tone’s influence with fresh, urgent new ideas. True to ska roots, Everything Must Go is danceable, catchy, and sociopolitically conscious in equal measure.

Miss Grit – Under My Umbrella (Mute)
A less conceptual but no less refined second full length from the art-rock artist.

Margaret Sohn stuck to a detailed concept with their first LP as Miss Grit, 2023’s Follow the Cyborg, but for the follow-up they tried instead to channel the feeling of playing live. “I tried not to edit too much or force a moment to happen,” they say, adding, “it feels truer to myself, and more of a representation of what is actually coming out of me.” Aron Kobayashi Ritch and Preston Fulks (Momma), Sae Heum Han (mmph), Margaux, Eva Liu and Luciano (mui zyu), and Zachary Mezzo (Catcher) all feature on it, and Sohn’s art-rock sound is as refined and compelling as ever. They told Treble Zine, “I actually went into it trying to make a pretty minimalistic album in terms of the instrumental. Obviously, it changes when you’re writing it. Maybe I was just able to embrace the maximalist stuff it has in there. There’s less peeling back or restraining.” [BrooklynVegan Staff]

Friko – Something Worth Waiting For (ATO)
The Chicago indie rockers worked with John Congleton for their sophomore LP

Friko’s knack for making catchy, anthemic indie rock is well on display on their 2024 debut Where we’ve been, Where we go from here, and they’ve only honed it further on Something Worth Waiting For. It was recorded with an expanded lineup, with David Fuller and Korgan Robb joining Niko Kapetan and Bailey Minzenberger (original bassist Luke Stamos left in 2023), and produced by John Congleton. “On our first record we were much more involved in the technical aspect of everything, but this time John made it clear that he wanted us to just come in and do our thing,” Minzenberger says. “I think that allowed us to let go in a way that we never had before, and because of that we captured something very raw.” [BrooklynVegan Staff]

OOIOO / Lightning Bolt  – THE HORIZON SPIRALS / THE HORIZON VIRAL (Thrill Jockey)
A percussion-heavy split from a pair of veteran noise experimentalists.

Two veteran experimental noise bands, Rhode Island duo Lightning Bolt and Japan’s OOIOO, have teamed up for this split EP, that also coincides with a West Coast tour. OOIOO’s two lengthy songs follow 2014’s Gamel, this time using gamelans made out of iron as the prominent instrument. The five Lightning Bolt songs are arranged as a single suite, meant to be played all together. While created with each other in mind, OOIOO and Lightning Bolt’s individual styles — both percussion heavy — are as distinctive as ever. [Bill Pearis]

The Saddest Landscape – Alone With Heaven (Iodine)
The screamo veterans are at the peaks of their powers on their first album in 10 years, with help from Julien Baker, Into It. Over It., and Touché Amoré’s Jeremy Bolm.

The screamo scene has gone through all kinds of peaks, valleys, and waves since Saddest Landscape formed nearly 25 years ago, and TSL have been constants throughout all of it. They’re a staple of multiple eras, not tied to one era in particular, and though they’ve never really had a big breakthrough, they’re loved by a lot of artists who did. Three of those artists lend their voices to the first Saddest Landscape album in 10 years, Alone With Heaven: Touché Amoré’s Jeremy Bolm, Into It. Over It.’s Evan Weiss, and Julien Baker. Features like those could help this long-awaited comeback album be someone’s introduction to the veteran band, and they’re not just well-picked co-signs; every feature is a standout moment. Jeremy Bolm lends a verse to “Hold Until It Hurts” that fits seamlessly and reminds you that TSL helped pave the way for the big moment that Touché and their peers had in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Evan injects a welcome melodic counterpoint into “Where Angels Ascend.” And Julien Baker is not just the biggest name but also the biggest presence, with towering contributions to “The Invisible Hurt,” a 7-minute epic that feels like a true meeting of the minds between these two artists. And if Alone With Heaven is in fact your introduction to the band, it’s a fine place to start. Outside of the marquee guests, TSL give it their all on this massive musical undertaking. There’s screamo devastation, post-rock grandeur, metallic abrasion, and melodic beauty. There are gradual builds and tightly-knit interludes, all worked into a masterfully-sequenced album that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

Get our exclusive “Where Angels Ascend” vinyl variant of Alone With Heaven, limited to 100 copies, in the BV shop.

Foo Fighters – Your Favorite Toy (Roswell/RCA)
The long-running stadium rockstars unleash their inner punks on their rawest, garagiest album in years.

Foo Fighters followed the tragic death of their longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins with one of their most powerful albums, 2023’s But Here We Are (which Dave Grohl drummed on), and their next chapter finds them in even more fiery territory. Dave Grohl likes to remind the world that he and his Foo Fighters bandmates are still punk kids at heart, and Your Favorite Toy is the most that a new Foo Fighters album has sounded that way in quite some time. It’s the rawest, garagiest Foos album since 2011’s Wasting Light, and it finds them leaning into formative influences like The Stooges and The Sonics more loudly than any Foos record. It’s loose and unfussy and imperfect, and to get an album like this from stadium rockstars is genuinely refreshing.

Failure – Location Lost (Arduous Records / Virgin)
Some of the most different-sounding music yet from the spacey alternative rock band, moody, slow-moving, and atmospheric.

Failure got a boost in recognition years after their 1997 breakup when the spacey alternative rock band’s ’96 album Fantastic Planet became a massive influence on heavy shoegaze, but their now-12-year-long reunion has had nothing to do with nostalgia. Location Lost is their fourth album since reuniting in 2014 (one more than the amount of albums they released during their initial run), and none of these albums have been an attempt to recreate or capitalize on anything they did in the ’90s. And Location Lost is some of the most different-sounding Failure music yet. It’s a little shoegazy, but it’s definitely not heavy. Instead, this is moody, atmospheric, slow-moving rock music that provides a dreary soundtrack for the near-death experiences that some of the songwriting is about. (The band also cites The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees as influences on this one, and there’s a case to be made that Location Lost is Failure’s most goth album yet.) Location Lost also has one very special treat: guest vocals on “The Rising Skyline” from someone who’s sung Failure’s praises for decades, Hayley Williams. Paramore covered “Stuck On You” when they were just starting out, Failure vocalist Ken Andrews then mixed and played on Paramore’s self-titled 2013 album, and now Hayley herself teams up with the band for a Failure song like no other.

At The Gates – The Ghost Of A Future Dead (Century Media)
The Swedish melodic death metal pioneers give it all they’ve got one last time.

The Ghost Of A Future Dead is bittersweet. It’s At The Gates’ last album with vocalist Tomas Lindberg, who died of cancer at age 52 this past September, but it’s also a fresh restart. It marks the return of lead guitarist/songwriter Anders Björler, reuniting the same lineup that recorded the landmark 1995 album Slaughter of the Soul (and their great 2014 reunion album At War with Reality), and it approaches the classic, massively influential At The Gates sound with revitalized ferocity. For the uninitiated, At The Gates helped pioneer Swedish melodic death metal in the ’90s, and they also ended up influencing just about every major band in the following decade’s American metalcore boom. It only takes one listen to Slaughter of the Soul to realize how much music it paved the way for, and that album sounds just as immortal today as it did over 30 years ago. On The Ghost Of A Future Dead, At The Gates sound just as powerful. Tomas was forced to record his vocals for the album in one day–the day before he went into surgery–and maybe that has something to do with how fired-up it all sounds. Having Anders’ unparalleled arsenal of riffs at their disposal again clearly didn’t hurt either. This is the sound of a band giving it all they’ve got one last time, and it’s as inspiring as it is heartbreaking to see Tomas going out on such a high note.

Terror – Still Suffer (Flatspot)
No-frills, ass-kicking hardcore from true lifers of the genre.

Very few bands in hardcore, a genre fueled by youth and filled with short-lived bands, can claim to have the lifer status that Terror have. As they release their ninth album of a 24-years-and-counting career, they still seem as fresh and urgent as any of the genre’s hungriest young bands. Their last album (2022’s Pain Into Power) was one of their best and most widely-loved records, and Still Suffer picks right up where it left off. Like its predecessor, Still Suffer was produced by former guitarist Todd Jones (also of Nails and the newly-reunited Carry On), and the chemistry that Todd has with the rest of Terror is undeniable. (There’s also additional production from Taylor Young and mixing by Jon Markson, two people whose studio work has shaped so much of the current hardcore scene.) These are no-frills, ass-kicking, anthemic hardcore songs that feel built to unite every type of hardcore fan. Guest vocals from Hot Water Music‘s Chuck Ragan, Mindforce‘s Jay Peta, God’s Hate‘s Brody King, and King Nine‘s Dan Seely only make Still Suffer even more of a blast than it would’ve been without them.

Fatboi Sharif & Child Actor – Crayola Circles (Backwoodz Studioz)
The first-ever collaboration from the prolific NJ rapper and producer great..

The experimental NJ rapper Fatboi Sharif is very prolific and rarely predictable. After putting out three projects in 2025, he now returns with his first of 2026: a full-length collaboration with the great producer Child Actor, who’s recently done full albums with Cavalier, Deniro Farrar, August Fanon, and others.

Florry – Smells Like… Florry Live As Hell (Dear Life)
After releasing one of last year’s best indie-country albums, Florry are back with a live album that’s equally loose and locked-in.

Lo-fi country rockers Florry released their liveliest album yet with last year’s great Sounds Like… Florry, and now they’ve released something even livelier: a live album, Smells Like… Florry Live As Hell. The 10 electric full-band songs were recorded across various fall 2025 headlining shows in support of Sounds Like…, and the album also features three acoustic recordings from 2023-2024 shows, plus a cover of NRBQ’s “Things to You” recorded earlier this year as a bonus track and a cover of Wilco’s A.M. track “Passenger Side” with Kurt Vile recorded in 2024 as a cassette-only bonus track. In the spirit of classic live albums by Florry forebears like Crazy Horse and the Grateful Dead, Smells Like is equally loose and locked-in. It captures the chemistry, energy, and spontaneity that a great band like Florry brings to a room of sweaty people who are ready to give that energy right back. As Aaron Dowdy (of fellow lo-fi country rockers Fust) writes in the album bio, “Maybe that is why this record is called Smells Like… rather than Sounds Like…: because what a LIVE album catches is not just sound, not just the setlist, but the air around the songs—the burning rubber on I-90, beer-stained tour clothes in green rooms, tour candy sweating in the van walls, the final scream in ‘Movie,’ the sweetest ‘thanks y’all’ after the wreckage of ‘Truck.’”

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Doug Gillard, Season 2, and Widget.

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.