Notable Releases of the Week (9/5)

It’s been a shorter work week (due to Labor Day) but still a very busy one in the music world. The NYC-area was just graced with some of the biggest shows of the year, including Oasis, Nine Inch Nails, and System Of A Down, all three of which we discussed on today’s episode of BV Weekly, and on top of that: Radiohead are back, Portishead are sort of briefly back, and Morrissey is selling The Smiths (or something). And that’s just a little bit of all this week’s music news. Plus, we took the beginning of September as an opportunity to tell you about the albums we’re anticipating this fall.

As for new albums, I highlight six below and Bill tackles five more in Indie Basement, including Saint Etienne, Suede, Ivy, Shame, and Dancer. On top of those, this week’s honorable mentions include Justin Bieber, Cut Copy, Mydreamfever (aka Parannoul), Max Richter, Modern Life is War, Titanic (Mabe Fratti & I la Católica), Boy Commandos (Fucked Up), Curtis Harding, Frost Children, Orcutt Shelley Miller (Harry Pussy, Sonic Youth, Comets On Fire), Ritual Mass, Faetooth, Fime, G Flip, Tchotchke, Harold López-Nussa, Brian Dunne, El Michels Affair (ft. Clairo, Shintaro Sakamoto, Florence Adooni, Rogê), James K, Lucretia Dalt, Street Eaters, No Peeling, Collapsing Scenery, blessthefall, Okkyung Lee, Hasard, Esoctrilihum, Elmiene, Gwenifer Raymond, Pickle Darling, Will Orchard, SAADI, JayWood, grandson, Emil Friis, Tom Odell, Shrunken Elvis, Tamar Berk, BlankFor.ms, John Butler, SG Lewis, Lynyn, Ambush, Flur, Cool Whip, Sons Of Sevilla, Will Linley, Weval, Alexei Shishkin, Yoni Mayraz, Ghostwoman, aespa, Mike Reid & Joe Henry, Grant-Lee Phillips, Anne Murray, Glenn Hughes (ex-Deep Purple, Black Sabbath), Rob Thomas, the Urban Sprawl EP, the Whitmer Thomas EP, the Bodyweb EP, the Iglooghost EP, the Fan Club EP, the Point Break 2 EP, the Belmont EP, the SCayos EP, the Sophia Stel EP, the Don’t Sink Twice EP, Hot Chip’s best-of, Joni Mitchell’s Joni’s Jazz box, the reissue of Dirty On Purpose’s Hallelujah Sirens, the 25th anniversary edition of Slipknot’s self-titled debut album, and Run For Cover’s Jason Molina tribute album (ft. MJ Lenderman, Friendship, Hand Habits, Teen Suicide & more).

Read on for my picks and listen to today’s episode of BV Weekly for more new music and music news. What’s your favorite release of the week?

Big Thief – Double Infinity (4AD)
With a standout assist from Laraaji, Big Thief narrow their focus on this art rock-leaning LP.

Coming off of a sprawling, freeform double album that’s basically Big Thief’s White Album, the group have narrowed their focus for their new LP, Double Infinity. And if you wondered if Big Thief would capitalize on the indie-country boom that they helped inspire, they definitely did not. If anything, Double Infinity is their least country-sounding album in a while. On this tight, nine-song LP, the shapeshifting band’s art rock side comes more to the forefront than ever, mixed pretty evenly with their gentle folky side. Its most standout song is a six-minute collaboration with new age legend Laraaji called “Grandmother” that’s powered by a hook that could double as the album’s mission statement: “We are made of love/We are also made of pain. Gonna turn it all into rock and roll.” One person who isn’t on the album is original bassist Max Oleartchik, who parted ways with the band for “interpersonal reasons.” In his place is the band’s current live bassist Joshua Crumbly, along with five other guest instrumentalists (Mikel Patrick Avery, Mikey Buishas, Jon Nellen, Adam Brisbin, Caleb Michel) and three backing vocalists (Hannah Cohen, June McDoom, and Alena Spanger). Together with Big Thief’s current core trio of Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek and James Krivchenia, they’ve come out with an album that’s as beautiful, intricate, and unpredictable as anything Big Thief have ever done.

David Byrne – Who Is the Sky? (Matador)
The former Talking Heads leader taps Hayley Williams, St. Vincent, a chamber ensemble, a Miley Cyrus/Harry Styles producer, and more for an album of whimsical, kaleidoscopic pop.

There’s a song on the new David Byrne album called “The Avant Garde” where he describes the avant-garde as a place that’s “deceptively weighty” and “profoundly absurd” and that “doesn’t mean shit” before crooning, “I wanna go there!” Musically speaking, it’s a whimsical, acid-trip pop song that matches perfectly with Who Is the Sky?‘s kaleidoscopic album artwork, and the song as a whole taps into the dichotomy that has defined David Byrne for most of the former Talking Heads singer’s career. His very existence basically asks: why should “weird music” and “pop music” be two different things? That question at least implicitly informs the majority of Who Is the Sky?, an album powered by love, joy, and blissful pop music, all filtered through one of the most deeply strange minds of the last half-century of popular music. He made the album with New York chamber ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra, modern mainstream pop producer Kid Harpoon (Miley Cyrus, Harry Styles), and the percussionists from two different Thom Yorke bands: Tom Skinner (of The Smile) and Mauro Refosco (of Atoms For Peace, as well as David Byrne’s last album American Utopia). He also brought in guest vocals from his now-longtime collaborator St. Vincent and his more recent collaborator Hayley Williams of Paramore. It’s a wonderfully weird crew that makes perfect sense for a David Byrne album, and the results sound like no other artist in the world. Afro-Caribbean polyrhythms, orchestral string arrangements, oddball lyrical sentiments, and David’s unmistakable voice all come together for a collection of songs that very often scratches the same itch as Remain In Light and Speaking In Tongues. We’re almost 50 years removed from those albums, and David Byrne still audibly has the same artistic hunger he had back then. Despite noticeably inspiring hundreds if not thousands of other well-known musicians, still nobody sounds like David Byrne, and his formula is still so timeless that he can perform one of his classics with one of Gen Z’s biggest pop stars to her fanbase and it works. When the aforementioned Paramore released a cover of that same song last year, they breathed new life into it without changing it up much at all. All of these things speak to how relevant David Byrne is to modern pop culture, and it shouldn’t be taken for granted that his own new music fits right in with this whole phenomenon.

Fleshwater – 2000: In Search of the Endless Sky (Closed Casket Activities)
The shoegaze/grunge/post-hardcore fusionists sound even bigger, louder, and more in sync than they did on their great debut LP.

What seemingly started as a side project of the Boston metalcore band Vein.fm has blossomed into one of the most prominent bands of the whole shoegaze/grunge/post-hardcore crossover thing that’s been going on. Building off the strength of their 2022 debut LP We’re Not Here To Be Loved, Fleshwater really sound like they’re swinging for the fences on their sophomore LP 2000: In Search of the Endless Sky. Down to its extremely Y2K album title, this album sounds like something that would’ve had a hit all over the MTV2 Rock Countdown in the early aughts. Marisa Shirar and Anthony DiDio have found even greater chemistry as dual vocalists than they had on the debut, and both are now belting it loud enough to reach the cheap seats in the arenas they just played on tour with Deftones, whose own excellent new album makes for a great double feature with the new Fleshwater. Like Deftones themselves, Fleshwater know that heavy, shoegazy rock music hits even harder with big choruses to pop out of all the haze.

Shallowater – God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars (self-released)
The Texas band follow their sleeper hit debut LP with an even stronger offering of slowcore, shoegaze, emo, and country.

Shallowater call themselves “West Texas dirtgaze,” a catchy and fitting descriptor for what’s basically a mix of slowcore, shoegaze, emo, and country. On their sophomore album God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars, which follows their sleeper hit debut album There Is A Well, I hear echoes of anything from Sunny Day Real Estate to Slint to Codeine to Songs: Ohia to the new crop of indie-country bands. And in fact, this one was produced by go-to indie-country producer Alex Farrar (Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, etc). It also features a collaboration (album closer “All My Love”) with fingerstyle guitarist and fellow West Texan Hayden Pedigo, who recently released his own acclaimed new album and who’s gearing up for a collaborative album with Chat Pile. The songs are slow and dirgey and they’re built to creep up on you and gradually seep into your brain–instant satisfaction is not something that Shallowater seem interested in. They’re also full of raw emotion and passion; the Sunny Day Real Estate comparison comes through in the way singer/guitarist Blake Skipper’s pained delivery can sound like that of a young Jeremy Enigk, and that’s not a comparison I’d make lightly. Just like those soaring moments on Diary, God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars is ethereal and heart-wrenching all at once.

La Dispute – No One Was Driving the Car (Epitaph)
The Michigan post-hardcore greats return as ambitious as ever on their cinematic new album–their first in six years.

The literary, progressive post-hardcore band La Dispute have found inspiration for their epic albums in everything from the Asian folktale The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl to Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, and this latest one was inspired by Paul Schrader’s 2017 psychological thriller First Reformed, an apocalyptic film that touches on the climate crisis and other worldly concerns. La Dispute vocalist Jordan Dreyer says it “feels even more urgent and important than it did when it was released.” (The album title, however, comes from a quote from a police officer that vocalist Jordan read in an article about a lethal self-driving Tesla crash.) That feeling of urgency is probably not unrelated to the recent pandemic, which this is La Dispute’s first album since. True to its cinematic inspiration, this is a story-driven concept album that’s broken up into five acts, and the music is as ambitious as the lyrical concept. It’s a melting pot of shouted post-hardcore, pensive spoken word, atmospheric art rock, proggy structures, full-stack riffage, and folky interludes–about as classic La Dispute as it gets.

We’ve got an exclusive tri-color vinyl variant of this album available now in the BV shop.

Georgia Maq – God’s Favourite (1000 Rats)
The Camp Cope leader’s new folk/country-leaning EP has all the elements we’ve long loved about her music: powerful vocals, keen melodic instincts, and moving lyricism.

Los Angeles-via-Australia artist Georgia Maq was making acoustic singer/songwriter material before she formed Camp Cope with Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich and Sarah Thompson, but her first solo album, 2019’s Pleaser, has a very different sound: lo-fi bedroom synthpop. After Camp Cope broke up in 2023, Georgia moved to Los Angeles and started working with producer Daniel Fox, her main collaborator on God’s Favourite. It brings her back to the more acoustic sound of her earlier solo material, but it’s not totally unadorned. Electric guitar, piano, and horns accent these songs, but the real stars of the show are Georgia’s powerful vocals, keen melodic instincts, and moving lyricism. The soaring “Pay Per View” and “Mercy & Grace” should immediately appeal to Camp Cope fans, and “Slightly Below the Middle” incorporates some of the twangy sounds they were working with on their last album, 2018’s Running with the Hurricane. This isn’t a lost Camp Cope album, though, and these songs feel more personal than ever. They’re also a very welcome first look into her musical life beyond the band, hopefully with much more to come. [Amanda Hatfield]

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Saint Etienne, Suede, Ivy, Shame, and Dancer.

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 the BV interview podcast.

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