Notable Releases of the Week (9/26)

It’s been another busy week in the music world. Primavera Sound announced its 2026 lineup, Foxing announced their farewell, Chappell Roan finally played her long-awaited NYC shows, Riot Fest happened (with John Stamos and an unexpected Descendents/Hanson collab), and we got exciting new songs/announcements from Danny Brown, Ratboys, and a new collaborative project from Phoenix and Braxe + Falcon called UFOs. To hear us talk more about all of those things, listen to the new episode of BV Weekly.

As for this week’s new albums, Amanda and I teamed up to review eight of them for Notable Releases, and Bill tackles another six in Indie Basement, including Cate Le Bon, Sloan, Stealing Sheep, Fred Armisen, QUAD90, and Automatic. On top of all those, this week’s Notable Releases include Doja Cat, Robert Plant & Saving Grace, Dying Wish, Shiner, White Reaper, Revocation, Daffo, PeelingFlesh, Ytlling Jazz (Peter Bjorn and John), Chester Watson, Bitchin Bajas, Sam Prekop (The Sea and Cake), Sainthood Reps, Thanks! I Hate It, Mariah Carey, Marcus King Band, Molly Nilsson, Rochelle Jordan, Purity Ring, Sydney Sprague, Jay Worthy, Tom Skinner, Cochemea, Emily Yacina, Wednesday Campanella, Human Error Club & Kenny Segal, JJ And The A’s, glaive, Mulatu Astatke, Patrick Watson, Dave Hause, Peezy, PaperRoute Woo, Lady Wray, John Maus, Biffy Clyro, Studio Electrophonique, Crushed, Coach Party, Poptones, Sons, Falle Nioke, Hunny, Mason Lindahl, Night Tapes, Rosa Anschütz, Kathryn Williams, Adam Wright, Wic Whitney, Joy Crookes, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Oliva Dean, Zara Larsson, Colbie Caillat, Hardy, Perrie (Little Mix), the Bright Eyes EP, the Demersal EP, the Los Kurados EP, the Equipment EP, the Clique EP, the Thomas Dollbaum EP, the Grumpy EP, the University EP, the Corey Feldman EP, and the President EP.

Read on for my 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?

Amanda Shires – Nobody’s Girl (ATO)
Written in the aftermath of her divorce from Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires’ new album is her most devastating yet.

“I didn’t set out to make a divorce record,” Amanda Shires says in the self-penned bio for her new album Nobody’s Girl. Her last album of original music, 2022’s Take It Like A Man, was written while Amanda says she “was still fighting for something, writing from inside the hurricane, holding my ground, trying to keep love from slipping away.” It came out about a year before her then-husband Jason Isbell’s Running With Our Eyes Closed documentary, and it tackled some of the same marital struggles that the documentary showed Jason and Amanda working to fix and move past. But fate had other things in mind. They filed for divorce in early 2024, and earlier this year Jason released Foxes in the Snow, a stripped-back solo album that chronicled his divorce and his new relationship. Now Amanda tells her side of the story. “Nobody’s Girl,” she says, “is what came after the wreckage.”

The title, she clarifies, “doesn’t mean I’m unloved… it means stepping out of the story someone else tried to write for me and standing in the one I’m still writing, on my own terms, even when the world makes that feel impossible.” She pinpoints two of the album’s songs as “songs I didn’t think I’d ever write.” One of them is the angry, fired-up blues rock of album centerpiece “Piece of Mind,” and the other is a devastating piano ballad called “The Details.” Its title has a double meaning; it lays out the details of the divorce so bluntly that it feels more like a tell-all than a pop song, but the titular phrase has an even more specific usage in the song itself: “He erases the details and I’m history/No matter how clear I keep the memories/He rewrites them so he can sleep.”

Even outside of those two songs, the entire album finds Amanda opening up about the end of her marriage in no uncertain terms. It’s largely ballad-heavy, giving the space needed to really put her words in the forefront. But the music just so happens to be beautiful too. Produced by Lawrence Rothman (who also helmed Take It Like A Man), it features sweeping string arrangements, melancholic piano and acoustic guitar patterns, and a few tinges of alt-country. It also has a lot of great players on it, including bassist Pino Palladino, drummer Jay Bellerose, former Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit bassist Jimbo Hart, and others. It doesn’t have the singalong moments of albums like Amanda’s 2018 standout LP To The Sunset, but that’s by design. Nobody’s Girl is at its most powerful when you shut up and listen.

Geese – Getting Killed (Partisan/PIAS)
Following the surprise acclaim of singer Cameron Winter’s debut solo album, Geese make yet another unexpected shift of their own on what already feels like their best album yet.

Let’s get this out of the way: Cameron Winter’s voice can be divisive. I didn’t think it was for me at first, and I couldn’t get into his fantastic solo debut, December’s Heavy Metal, when I first heard it, but I returned to it, and eventually something clicked and I was obsessed. With that hurdle cleared, I was perfectly primed to appreciate Geese’s new album Getting Killed, and I don’t think I’m alone. It follows their Strokesy breakthrough album Projector (2021) and their surprisingly jammy 2023 album 3D Country, both of which had their fair share of detractors from indie rock tastemakers, but Getting Killed already seems destined to be one of the most acclaimed indie rock albums of the year, and deservedly so. My initial impression of the album was chaos and cacophony, but things quickly resolved themselves into recognizable shapes, reminding me a little of Radiohead and a little of The Strokes. The band worked with Kenneth Blume (fka Kenny Beats) on production, creating a mass of sounds that can at times feel discordant but all ultimately work so well in creating a rising sense of hysteria. That’s reinforced by the sometimes-surreal, paranoid, and apocalyptic lyrical turns — from the repeated JPEGMAFIA-featuring declarations of “there’s a bomb in my car!” in “Trinidad,” to “there’s a horse on my back” in “Husbands,” to this perfectly nonsensical verse in “100 Horses”: “I saw 100 horses dancing / Maybe 124 / All horses must go dancing / There is only dance music in times of war.” “Taxes,” which may be the closest thing Getting Killed has to an anthemic, relatively straight-ahead rock song, still begins with a repeated “I should burn in hell” before getting to an impassioned refrain of “Doctor, doctor! Heal yourself!” Getting Killed arrives as our shared conception of reality is fractured, probably beyond repair, as our geopolitical landscape is more nightmarish than ever, and more than just about anything I’ve heard lately it really feels like it’s a product of our times. That shouldn’t be a compliment, but it is. [Amanda Hatfield]

The Starting Line – Eternal Youth (Lineage)
The first album in 18 years by the oft-underrated and oft-misunderstood pop punk/emo veterans is both a return to form and a maturation. It sounds like the album they were always destined to make.

Kenny Vasoli was 17 years old when he sang “We got older but we’re still young/We never grew out of this feeling that we won’t give up” on The Starting Line’s biggest hit. Now in his early 40s and over 18 years since the band last released an album, Vasoli (who prefers to go by Ken now) and the rest of The Starting Line’s original lineup are back with a new album that they’re calling Eternal Youth. But don’t let the new album’s title lead you into thinking that The Starting Line have taken the sentiment of their breakthrough single into the same Peter Pan complex territory that’s plagued too many other pop punk bands in their later years. As Vasoli puts it, the goal was to “return to form in a way that doesn’t feel forced” and to make “music that feels youthful without feeling immature.” It’s a concept that I can only imagine came very naturally to The Starting Line, a band who always matured at a faster rate than many fans, peers, critics, and record label executives expected or even wanted them to.

The Starting Line were over the picture-perfect pop punk that their own 2002 debut album Say It Like You Mean It helped popularize even before they released their second record. The band had moved to Geffen Records for their 2005 sophomore LP Based on a True Story (because of an upstream deal that their original label Drive-Thru had with MCA and MCA’s absorption into Geffen), and the people at their new major label told the band they wanted them to write “a Simple Plan record,” as guitarist Matt Watts put it in a 2006 interview with AbsolutePunk, “something more pop sensible and something they could put on the radio right away.” But The Starting Line had no interest in doing so, and instead pushed themselves into rawer, darker, heavier territory that sounded more Clarity than Enema of the State. On songs like “Inspired by the $” and “Ready,” they took direct shots at their label’s wishes.

By the time The Starting Line left Geffen and moved to Virgin for their third and up-until-now final album Direction (2007), it had become overwhelmingly clear that The Starting Line wanted to ditch the emo and pop punk labels for good. The album ranged from Beach Boys-y sunshine pop (“Island”) to tender folk-pop (“Something Left To Give”) to riffy grunge (“Birds”), and it remains one of the most interesting and unexpected albums to come out of the whole aughts-era emo/pop punk boom. But it never fully got its due, and The Starting Line broke up soon after its release, with Vasoli going on to explore proggy post-hardcore in Person L and post-MGMT psych-pop in Vacationer. Even as The Starting Line started playing reunion shows over the years, they never seemed too interested in reliving their pop punk/emo glory days, but they did learn how to re-embrace their roots after making a clean break from them. Nearly a decade after Direction‘s release, The Starting Line returned with a three-song EP called Anyways (2016; Downtown Records), and it found them reconnecting with pop punk and emo without undoing any of the maturation they’d gone through. As Vasoli told Philly Voice ahead of the EP’s release, “I feel like I’ve stepped back far enough that I can really identify with what I liked about pop punk and what I appreciate about it now.”

Those three songs remained The Starting Line’s only new music for nearly another decade, but now they finally return with Eternal Youth, an album that fleshes out the vision of Anyways and takes it to its logical conclusion. This is still the work of a band who worked hard to break free of the stereotypes and stigmas that plagued the scene they were long part of, but it’s also the work of a band who is genuinely excited to embrace the style of music that they originally set out to make. When we recently asked Ken to tell us about other long-awaited comeback albums that he looks up to, he named some artists that are very different from his own band (like The Avalanches and D’Angelo), but he also named two comeback albums from two bands who helped pave the way for the entire emo/pop punk boom that The Starting Line were part of, Lifetime’s 2007 self-titled album and Braid’s 2014 album No Coast. He credited the former with providing a “proof of concept” of what The Starting Line were hoping to do with Eternal Youth, and he says the latter is part of the reason that The Starting Line started working with Will Yip, who became the go-to punk producer of the past 15 years (thanks to work with Title Fight, Turnstile, Mannequin Pussy, and more), and who helped Braid and other veteran bands like mewithoutYou, Quicksand, and Circa Survive make timely comebacks. They first worked together on the Anyways EP and Will returned to the producer’s chair for Eternal Youth, which–in classic Will Yip fashion–sounds like an honest, modern album.

All you have to do is take a quick look at the bands The Starting Line have been touring with to see that they’ve kept their ear to the ground of emo/pop punk’s newer generations, and I think it’s fair to say that they relate to the way the past 15 years of the genre has been filled with bands who reject the commercialism of the era when major labels were scooping up these bands and telling them to write Simple Plan records. All of these factors have helped lead to an album that fits right in with where underground emo and pop punk are at in 2025, and which sounds like an album The Starting Line were always destined to make. It’s more of a straight-up emo/punk record than the varied, genre-defying Direction, and also a noticeably more mature record than Say It Like You Mean It and Based on a True Story. Stylistically, it sounds like an album that could’ve come between BOATS and Direction, but it has a sense of reflection that could only come from leaving the game behind and circling back to it 18 years later with new perspective. Direction is still The Starting Line’s most ambitious record, but Eternal Youth is their most self-assured. It makes sense that it’s the first Starting Line album made without any record label interference–it’s released on the band’s own label, Lineage Recordings. It’s an album by a band who knows exactly who they want to be and exactly how to be it.

Sprints – All That Is Over (Sub Pop)
The Dublin post-punks get bigger, slower, and more self-assured on their sophomore album and Sub Pop debut–and there’s still plenty of energy and rage.

It’s only been one calendar year since Sprints released their debut album Letter To Self, but a lot’s changed for the Dublin post-punk band in that time. Guitarist Colm O’Reilly left the band and was replaced by Zac Stephenson, Sprints signed to Sub Pop in North America, and the band feels a lot more self-assured than they did on their debut, which singer/guitarist Karla Chubb says was held back by “a need to prove myself in a very male-dominated industry.” Now, she adds, “I could not give less of a fuck.” That newfound confidence is very apparent on All That Is Over, which sounds like a much bigger leap from Letter To Self than you might have expected a band to make in less than 24 months. I’m sure I won’t be the first or last person to compare them to fellow Dublin band and very recent tourmates Fontaines D.C., but it reminds me of the jump that Fontaines made between 2019’s Dogrel and 2020’s A Hero’s Death. It sounds to me like All That Is Over was informed by some of the same influences as Letter To Self (PJ Harvey, Pixies, Bauhaus, Fugazi), but it also feels like the whole mission statement of the band has changed. They aren’t just relying on energy and anger, although they still have plenty of both. Instead, some of this album’s most powerful songs are its most slow-burning ones. The production–once again handled by Daniel Fox of Gilla Band–also sounds bigger and more spacious. All That Is Over isn’t just an improvement upon Sprints’ debut; it’s a total reinvention.

Neko Case – Neon Grey Midnight Green (ANTI-)
A lush, beautifully orchestrated turn from the veteran singer-songwriter who gets better and better.

Neko Case’s soaring voice has been moving and delighting people throughout the nearly 30 years of her music career, and the intervening time has dulled none of its luster; if anything, it sounds better than ever in 2025, as she releases her first solo album in seven years. She’s been busy in that time, releasing a memoir and contributing to two albums from The New Pornographers, but Neko is also an artist whose work seems particularly ill-suited for the two-or-three-year album/tour cycle; it’s meticulously detailed, both musically and lyrically, and she produces it herself. She also suffered numerous personal losses in the time since 2018’s Hell-On, and the processing of them formed the bedrock of Neon Grey Midnight Green, which is one of her lushest and most beautiful records yet.

Along with her contributions to The New Pornographers, Neko’s been most closely associated with alt-country and “country noir” over the years, but in reality she’s done everything from drumming in punk bands to collaborating with artists like Nick Cave, The Dodos, and Andrew Bird, and this album bears little resemblance to anything under the country or folk umbrella. It’s beautifully orchestrated, with the PlainsSong Chamber Orchestra joining her on many songs, and she deliberately made sure that the sounds of breaths and rustling sleeves remained in the mix, telling The AV Club, “[With] a lot of production these days, people take out a lot of human breaths. It makes you feel like you’re suffocating listening to it. And I wanted there to be the sound of, you know, the coiling of the muscles, and not just the release of the muscles. Because it’s all part of the sound.” Stirring strings predominate on Neon Grey Midnight Green, but there are also songs like the jazzy “Tomboy Gold,” which has spoken word lyrics from Neko and sounds unlike anything she’s done before. Speaking of lyrics, her’s are always uniquely evocative and associated with the natural world, and that continues to be true here: there’s period blood, horseshoe-shaped bruises, eating the Minotaur, werewolves, spiderwebs, and lots of other beautiful language to untangle. There are also these simple but equally beautiful lines on “Rusy Mountain”: “And now that someone really loves me, I can see that I’m not easy to love.” They’re accompanied by such a tender vocal melody, it tears a little at my heart each time I hear it. That’s the power of Neko’s music: she makes everything sound like an instant classic. We’re lucky to have her. [Amanda Hatfield]

Aren’t We Amphibians – Parade! Parade! (PNWK)
The month of Midwest emo continues with a banger debut LP from San Diego’s Aren’t We Amphibians.

Like I’ve said almost every week for the past month, it’s been an incredible late summer/early fall for Midwest emo, and this week that continues with the debut album from Aren’t We Amphibians, who also put out a song on this year’s essential four-way emo split with awakebutstillinbed, Your Arms Are My Cocoon, and California Cousins. Parade! Parade! has it all: mathy noodling, yelpy hooks, sad trumpets, screamo parts, the words “getting better.” You know from that list what you’re getting yourself into and Parade! Parade! does it very well.

Zelooperz – Dali Ain’t Dead (self-released)
The Detroit rapper’s second project of 2025 is much more varied than his first, touching on trap, chipmunk soul, noise, lo-fi, and more.

The very prolific rapper Zelooperz went for something more trippy and chilled-out than usual on this year’s Real Bad Man-produced Dear Psilocybin, but now he returns with a more varied album, the Dilip-produced Dali Ain’t Dead. It’s largely split between subwoofer-shaking trap and blissful chipunk soul, and it also dives into noisy abstract rap (“Fuck Cigarettes”), R&B balladry (“Describe”), skittering electronics (“I Mac”), and lo-fi indie (“Take Me Im Drugs”). Zack Fox and Paris Texas appear on it, and as always, Zelooperz proves to be an expressive vocalist and a left-field lyricist. If you’re gonna name an album after Salvador Dalí you better be operating in a lane that’s entirely your own and Zelooperz absolutely is.

Jeff Tweedy – Twilight Override (dBpm)
30 years removed from the first Wilco album, bandleader Jeff Tweedy releases a 30-song triple album.

As if 2025 wasn’t already a loaded year for country/indie rock crossover, now we get a 30-song triple album from Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. It’s a lot to take in on one listen, and Jeff himself has acknowleged that. As he wrote in an essay accompanying the album: “To me, any song, no matter the subject matter, can be a point of light and that’s one of the reasons I try and make so many of them. They all have the potential, even the heaviest music on the earth has the potential, to lift someone up.” So even if listening to Twilight Override from start to finish is an undertaking that you just don’t find yourself doing as much as you do with Jeff’s many great albums that require shorter attention spans, maybe the song on this album that lifts you up the most is the one that would’ve gotten cut if he limited this album to the length of a single vinyl LP. Jeff’s been one of the most consistently great songwriters of the past 30 years across indie rock, alternative rock, folk, alt-country, and art rock, and all of that is on display across Twilight Override. It’s easy to take it for granted when an artist is still this prolific after all these years, but it’s better to treasure how much we can still rely on him. As Jeff himself said, “I’ve been doing this for a long time. And I’m not going anywhere.”

—

Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Cate Le Bon, Sloan, Stealing Sheep, Fred Armisen, QUAD90, and Automatic.

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.

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.