Paste is the place to kick off each and every New Music Friday. We follow our regular roundups of the best new songs by highlighting the most compelling new records you need to hear. Find the best new albums of the week below, from priority picks to honorable mentions.
Ben Seretan: Allora
Allora begins in a place of rapture, as the eight-minute “New Air” blisters through the frequencies like a Sonic Youth breakdown, before giving way to flutters of chord surfing. A three-minute introduction of noise, fragmented soloing and anticipation becomes a sensory overload, until Seretan plugs an onslaught of imagery into a heat-seeking missile of rock ‘n’ roll. “Cough drops and bumblebees in syrup / Bare feet resting on the window / When we drove to San Diego / We swam in every flooded valley,” he sings. It’s poetry wedged between hard-nosed, chameleonic guitar postures. Seretan is the kind of musician who isn’t afraid to keep you on your toes. The music he makes flutters between color—shape-shifting between indie rock, experimental and gauzy, metallic, spell-binding chatter. Allora is a special body of work for how it presents grief through intervals of intensity and delicacy. The penultimate song “Free” is eight minutes long and holds less than 30 words, but that brevity becomes a token of sentimentality taking shape as a silent smile. “We were laughing without making any sound,” Seretan sings. “I sat on the uneven ground.” A chaotic segue of piercing, squeaking horns sound like nails on a chalkboard behind him, as he yelps “Were it that I was free? Ah, free.” And then, without flinching, the arrangement returns to normal—cascading into a face-melting guitar solo finale that ruptures like a bruise flanking softness. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full review]
Clothing: From Memory
The debut album from Dawn of Midi’s Aakaash Israni and Cookies’ Ben Sterling, From Memory establishes Clothing as an electronic duo worth hanging onto. Working with vocalists like Amber Coffman, Elliott Skinner, L’Rain and Anna Wise, Israni and Sterling make bouncy, scattered instrumentation rich, rising and beautiful beneath the pillowy, feathering vocals of From Memory’s guest singers. On “Kingdom,” Dirty Projectors’ Coffman crescendos her voice over accented and free-flowing beats, creating a rich blend of sound. The arrangement sharply shifts from moments of condensed sound to sparse vulnerable intersections. Coffman sings, “Now all I have is this silence,” amidst the bending and jolting rhythm of the instrumentation. “Kingdom” evolves sharply throughout its runtime and intrigues further with every listen. On “Still Point,” the Californians enlist L’Rain to lead a spacious, atmospheric ballad with her measured yet commanding vocals. It may be, as L’Rain herself says, a long way down to the bottom, but she sings this hook as though she’s floating on air—the thinning strings, scattered percussion and outstretched layers of vocal harmonies orbiting her voice as the center of the track’s solar system, “the still point of a turning wheel.” Here’s to hoping that From Memory isn’t just a one-off. —Grace Ann Natanawan & Grace Robins-Somerville
Crack Cloud: Red Mile
Crack Cloud’s third album, Red Mile, flew under the radar all summer despite singles like “Blue Kite” and “The Medium” being absolutely stunning teasers. The Calgary band—which is sometimes a septet and sometimes an ennead, depending on what press photo you’re looking at—would have taken over the world in 1982, given the sheer velocity of their snarling post-punk, which is often set aglow by a rapture of pristine, synth-driven dream pop. An album like Red Mile lands somewhere in-between Strawberry Switchblade and Public Image Ltd., and a song like “The Medium” is euphoric at every turn—leveraging a no frills attitude into a pillow of daydreamy, choral harmonizing, with verses that poke fun at the very genre Crack Cloud partially embraces (““The rejects came along in the name of punk rock / Borne from a nihilistic, self-imposed schlock / Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, blah, blah, blah, boah”). There’s a string arrangement near the song’s end that capsizes the chaos with an extra juxtaposition of sweetness and UK-inspired growls. And on songs like “Lack of Lack,” “Ballad of Billy” and “Epitaph,” Crack Cloud take up chameleonic costumes of industrial, rollicking, gutteral and smiling pop. There are even some vocals that sound like Syd Barrett in there. The whole album is delightfully earnest even in its kiss-offs. —MM
Cults: To the Ghosts
The latest LP from longtime NYC duo Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion, To the Ghosts is Cults at the top of their game. Indie producer stalwart John Congleton mixed the record, while the band co-produced it with Shane Stoneback and tapped Heba Kadry to mix it. It’s been four years since we last heard from Cults, when Host came along as their then-best. To the Ghosts upends that watermark, though, and tracks like “Left My Keys,” “Eat it Cold” and “Crybaby” are some of the best synth-pop songs of the year so far—arriving, at times, in a sharp juxtaposition of industrialized and bubblegum-hued. “Crybaby” is especially catchy, and Cults even stopped by the Paste Studios at Ilegal Mezcal to do a rendition of it for us earlier this year. Watch the duo’s full session here. —MM
Robber Robber: Wild Guess
Wild Guess is a gorgeous assembly of curiosity, with tracks like “Sea or War” propelling doggedly forward like a six-foot wave of anticipation, and the funky undulating intrigue of “Backup Plan” flecked with Will Krulak’s biting riffs accenting a uniquely asymmetrical drum pattern from Zack James. “Dial Tone” lives in the realm of punky noise rock while maintaining a healthy amount of eccentricity from the unsettling wailing guitar to Nina Cates’s persistently frustrated tone venting about chasing connections. The playful “How We Ball” brings a bit of Blondie into the mix and, even in Cates’s delivery, some Le Tigre—but it maintains that Robber Robber individuality with its zoomed-out, unpredictable song structure. Naming their debut Wild Guess is an expert way to categorize their sound. It’s not stuck in a generic box but instead is an experiment in blending noises that feel correct in the world of Robber Robber. The chaos is the formula. Similar to how they named themselves, Robber Robber’s music follows a similar impulse-driven energy—Cate and James looking for things that excites them and pushes their shared musical expertise forward. The aptly titled Wild Guess is an enthralling exercise of tension and release driven, first and foremost, by the pair’s interest in playing around with what it means to relieve that tension and what happens when you don’t. —Olivia Abercrombie [Read our full feature]
Sinai Vessel: I SING
For I SING, Caleb Cordes sounds unburdened by pretense but overburdened by the rest of what it takes to exist. He’s plagued by envy for the born-rich and their brilliant homes on “Laughing” and interpersonal letdowns on “Birthday,” delivered in rhythmically and stylistically conversational English. On “Birthday,” especially, you feel like you’re along for the ride: “Have breakfast out at some cafe / Where the conversation strained / Here and so soon gone away / Not much to say.” Cordes isn’t just a singer; he’s a storyteller, and whether it’s over minimalist bossa nova or pedal-steel inflected capital-C country, the narrative maintains the spotlight. Cordes doesn’t just sing on I SING. He also serves as co-producer alongside Bennett Littlejohn, whose touches on records by Molly Drag, claire rousay and Hovvdy have an unmistakable smoothness that give songwriters room to roam. The guitars on “Country Mile” feel propulsive but not rushed, the drums on “Window Blue” feel punctuated but not sharp, the outro on “Attack” feels huge but not over-the-top. Everyone involved with I SING knows how to suss out the happy medium in every production choice without careening towards what’s generic. Even moves that feel like timeless singer-songwriter folk tricks feel bespoke, indicative of an album carefully balanced between novelty and familiarity. It’s as if I SING has always been a part of Sinai Vessel’s canon and that of indie rock at large. —Devon Chodzin [Read our full review and full feature]
Wand: Vertigo
The question of where Wand ends and Cory Hanson begins (and vice-versa) is more complex than you might initially believe. Hanson’s work with his longtime band evokes an era of rock ‘n’ roll that rarely gets its due in the 21st century. On Vertigo—their first album together in five years—the Los Angeles group wades through riffing, slow-burn swells of warm emotion and sprawling runtimes. Songs like “Help Desk” and “JJ” grow into delicate yet grandiose arrangements of piano, orchestral strings and subtle percussion. Hanson’s emotive vocals softly ease their way through the track, nestling into a melancholic pace that beautifully fuses with the instrumentation. “Help Desk” especially wanders at its own pace, creating a spacious and swirling atmosphere of sound. Not quite the ZZ Top-meets-Guitar Hero attitude of Hanson’s 2023 solo album Western Cum, Vertigo boasts rich, expansive songs draped in a tangible pensiveness that you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere but here. Even when Wand settles into their riff-heavy roots on a song like “Smile,” it sounds far more ornate than it should. That’s where the magic is, in how Wand have never considered a life as a one-trick pony. If you want to hear an album that is rid of angles and takes a new direction at every turn, Vertigo could be the eight-song outing that changes your life. —GN
Other Notable New Album Releases This Week: Blur: Live at Wembley Stadium; Ice Spice: Y2K!; Kississippi: damned if i do it for you EP; KMRU: Natur; Nathan Bowles Trio: Are Possible; Porter Robinson: SMILE!; The Red Clay Strays: Made By These Moments