10 New Albums to Stream Today
Photos by Darcy Haylor, Christina Schneider, Alysse Gafkjen Music Lists New Albums
With the first week of album releases now under our belt, we’ve now arrived at the second New Music Friday of 2020. We hope you’ve already found a January album to fall in love with, but if you haven’t yet, here’s another chance. Today (Jan. 17) brings new LPs from Georgia indie-pop giants of Montreal, southern rocker Marcus King, Madlib’s new project The Professionals and more. Plus there’s Mac Miller’s long-awaited posthumous album Circles and Bombay Bicycle Club’s first album in six years. Scroll down to sample 10 essential new albums out today.
1. Algiers: There Is No Year
As on 2015’s self-titled debut and its 2017 follow-up, The Underside of Power, Atlanta band Algiers’ latest effort, There Is No Year, is meant to inspire a revolutionary energy, both politically and musically, in the listener. Initially written as an epic poem, lyricist and multi-instrumentalist Franklin James Fisher croons and chants in murky gothic metaphors. There are repeated references to “the sound,” an ominous and threatening representation of revolution that Fisher seems to have lost faith in: “Everything starts to fade / Under the weight of silence,” he sings on “Nothing Bloomed.” The album also pulls from Christian visions of the apocalypse, be it through the invocation of the four horsemen (“There Is No Year”) or a crisis of faith that portends the failure of the revolution (“Wait for the Sound”). —Harry Todd
2. Alice Boman: Dream On
Alice Boman exists in a world of wistful fatalism on her debut album. The songs on Dream On are full of regretful wishes and powerful longings that are usually outweighed by doubts and fears. Even as Boman seeks to revel in the present, the Swedish singer and songwriter is haunted by the certainty flickering at the edges of her consciousness that any bliss she feels will be fleeting, and then vanish forever. Heavy emotions that have a tendency to sink quickly into claustrophobia, but Boman balances the roiling turmoil in her mind with ethereal indie-pop musical arrangements that are calm and measured, almost to the point of serene. The songs unfold in an unhurried way, keyboards seeping in like a ground fog around Boman’s feathery voice. She often sings as though she’s floating in a gauzy dream-world, her voice soft and beseeching on lyrics that swing between despondent and despairingly ardent. —Eric R. Danton
3. Bombay Bicycle Club: Everything Else Has Gone Wrong
This is not a drill: Bombay Bicycle Club are back after a three-year official hiatus. Everything Else Has Gone Wrong is their first release as a group since 2014’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. Along with the album and tour announcements, the band released a playful music video for lead single “Eat, Sleep, Wake (Nothing But You).” —Amanda Gersten
4. Holy Fuck: Deleter
Canadian electronic band Holy Fuck have released their fifth album Deleter. Featuring appearances from Pond’s Nicholas Allbrook and Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, the album spans heady electronica, house music and krautrock. —Lizzie Manno
5. Kiwi Jr.: Football Money
Ask a dozen people to define the term “indie rock” and you’ll probably get a dozen different answers that include word combinations like “Archers of Loaf” and “Foster the People” and “indie rock is dead” and “sir, this is a Wendy’s.” As the term has evolved over the past few decades—from its origins denoting music released by an independent record label to a vague descriptor of a certain kind of sound—it’s no wonder the words have lost much of their meaning. Make no mistake, however: Kiwi Jr. is an indie rock band. You can hear evidence of that all over their fine debut album Football Money, which has been released worldwide by Mint Records. (It came out only in Canada last year.) Someday, other band names will disappear from Kiwi Jr.’s reviews as the quartet further develops its sound. Football Money is evidence they’ve clearly got the ability and the point of view to do exactly that. Until then, they’re working from a world-class playbook. —Ben Salmon
6. Mac Miller: Circles
Mac Miller’s estate posted a heartfelt announcement of the release of Circles, a posthumous album Miller was working at the time of his passing in 2018. The album is meant to be a companion piece to Swimming. Swimming, which was released just a month before Miller’s death, was nominated for best rap album at 2019’s Grammys and was a tribute to L.A.’s alternative-soul scene. —Austin Jones
7. Marcus King: El Dorado
After moving from Greenville, S.C., to Nashville, Marcus King had a lot to process. He and Dan Auerbach wrote 21 tracks for King’s new solo album, El Dorado before cutting that number down to 12, which they recorded at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound over just three days. Maybe that explains the record’s genre fluidity. El Dorado starts with crooning soul and slips into strutting rock, then segues casually into R&B, funk, and all manner of musical modes. Most records that leap from style to style tend to develop identity crises. But King is the throughline on El Dorado: The album functions like a window into who he is as a musician and a man, and chronicles his journey over the years and across state lines, sonically switching gears to fit the needs of individual tracks. Think of El Dorado as King’s declaration of self, and also as his therapy. —Andy Crump
8. Mura Masa: R.Y.C
Grammy-winning producer and British solo artist Mura Masa has shared his second album, R.Y.C, which stands for “Raw Youth Collage.” Featuring guest vocalists like Clairo, slowthai, Tirzah, Georgia and Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell, the album is a genre-defying celebration of youth’s gritty realities. —Lizzie Manno
9. of Montreal: UR FUN
Kevin Barnes, better known as of Montreal’s frontman and founding member, made his last record White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood to depict falling in love with Christina Schneider of Locate S,1, and it appropriately had an intoxicating feeling to it, evoking the best of Animal Collective. If that album made you feel drunk (or, more likely, high) on love, then UR FUN is the dance party after, where you keep moving in order to prevent yourself from getting bored. Barnes intended on making an album comprised of tracks that could all be singles, mostly achieving his goal with catchy electro-pop and his usual psychedelic detours. For the first time in years, he recorded an album on his own, giving us a clearer picture of him as a solo artist. He’s as sonically varied as ever and infectious as all get-out, with the occasional self-indulgent stumble. —Clare Martin
10. The Professionals (Oh No & Madlib): The Professionals
Hip-hop producer extraordinaire and rapper Madlib has teamed up with his younger brother and rapper Oh No to release their self-titled debut album under the name The Professionals. This new LP follows Madlib’s 2019 album with Freddie Gibbs, Bandana, which Paste named one of the 10 Best Hip-Hop Albums of last year. —Lizzie Manno