In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on August 30, 2024:
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Wild God
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are back with a new album, Wild God. The follow-up to 2019’s Ghosteen was produced by Cave and Warren Ellis, with mixing by David Fridmann. It was preceded by the singles ‘Frogs’, ‘Long Dark Night’, and the title track. “I hope the album has the effect on listeners that it’s had on me,” Cave said in a statement. “It bursts out of the speaker, and I get swept up with it. It’s a complicated record, but it’s also deeply and joyously infectious. There is never a master plan when we make a record. The records rather reflect back the emotional state of the writers and musicians who played them. Listening to this, I don’t know, it seems we’re happy.” Read our review of Wild God.
Why Bonnie, Wish on the Bone
Why Bonnie have released their new album, Wish on the Bone, via Fire Talk. The follow-up to the band’s 2022 debut 90 in November features the previously unveiled singles ‘Dotted Line’, ‘Fake Out’, ‘Rhyme or Reason’, and ‘Three Big Moons’. Bandleader Blair Howerton co-produced the LP with Jonathan Schenke. “We were trying on musical hats,” Howerton explained. “There’s still some country on this record, but I wasn’t thinking about sticking to one thing. Personal experience of learning to be bolder and more assertive and trusting myself has carried over into my music.”
Seafeel, Everything Squared
Seafeel have returned from a 13-year hiatus with a new album called Everything Squared. Out now via Warp, the 6-track mini-LP was primarily composed by the band’s core duo of Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock, with bassist Shigeru Ishihara – the Japanese producer known as DJ Scotch Egg – playing on two songs. It follows the project’s 2011 self-titled comeback record.
Adriana McCassim, See It Fades
Los Angeles-based, Asheville, NC-raised singer-songwriter Adriana McCassim has unveiled her debut album, See It Fades. Following 2020’s Quiet Sides EP, the album includes the early singles ‘Pretend’ and ‘Tarantula Type’. The record was produced by Ryan Pollie and mixed by Alex Farrar (Snail Mail, Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Indigo De Souza, Angel Olsen). Sharon Van Etten, for whom McCassim opened at a Troubadour show celebrating the 11th anniversary of Tramp, offered this statement in a press release: “She’s a wonderful songwriter with this really beautiful dark, smoky voice. She writes passionate songs that are about connection and love; they’re very romantic and beautiful.”
Coco & Clair Clair, Girl
Coco & Clair Clair have followed up 2022’s SEXY with a new album, Girl. “In the early stages of our writing process we had a running joke about being pregnant with a new album and how this one felt like a baby girl, whereas our last project, SEXY, felt more like a baby boy,” the duo explained in a statement. “We were writing about our relationships, referencing and incorporating lyrics we had written years ago – lyrics previously put aside for being too vulnerable or confessional. We were experimenting with a style of production that felt more refined, polished, intentional, and intimate. We embraced the tension between that new approach and the characteristic qualities that propelled us early on: our resourcefulness, boastfulness, and flamboyance – all virtues of femininity and girlhood as much as they are tropes of masculinity.”
Enumclaw, Home in Another Life
Enumclaw have put out their second album, Home in Another Life, via the band’s new label home, Run for Cover. Ahead of its release, the Tacoma, Washington outfit previewed the follow-up to 2022’s Save the Baby with the tracks ‘Change’ and ‘Not Just Yet’. Enumclaw and Ben Zaid co-produced the 11-song LP, which was recorded in a four-day sprint in Seattle last winter.
Cold Gawd, I’ll Drown on This Earth
I’ll Drown on This Earth is the sophomore full-length by Cold Gawd, a post-hardcore/shoegaze outfit hailing from Rancho Cucamonga, California. Out now on Dais Records, the follow-up to 2022’s God Get Me the Fuck Out of Here was led by the single ‘All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned for a Thing I Cannot Name’. “What I’m trying to say with this song and the whole record,” the band’s Matthew Wainwright said in a statement accompanying the announcement, “was best said by Victoria Legrand when she said to: ‘Trust in yourself and trust in the people that love because those are the people that matter most.’”
Jon Hopkins, RITUAL
Jon Hopkins has released a new album, RITUAL, which follows 2021’s Music for Psychedelic Therapy. Collaborators on the record include ylana, 7RAYS, Ishq, Clark, Emma Smith, Daisy Vatalaro, and Cherif Hashizume. In a statement, Hopkins reflected: “I have no idea what I’m doing when I’m composing. I don’t know where it’s coming from, and I don’t know where it’s going, nor does it seem to matter. I just know when it is finished. So all I can really do is feel my way to the end, then try and retrospectively analyse what might be going on, and try and figure out what its purpose is. What is clear is that this one has the structure of a Ritual. I know what that Ritual is for me, but it will be something different for you. It feels important not to be prescriptive about what this Ritual actually is.”
Jónsi, First Light
Jónsi has returned with a new album, First Light. The follow-up to the Sigur Rós frontman’s 2021 surprise record Obsidian was originally conceived as the score for a video game. In a statement, Jónsi said: “Writing this music at a time of manmade global turmoil and unrest for a video game, I imagined First Light as a momentary fantastical, over-the-top, utopian world where everyone and everything lives together in everlasting peace and harmony — choosing beauty over disorder, hope over fear, our universal divine angel guardians watching over us and connecting us all as one through love, melody, and music.”
Oceanator, Everything Is Love and Death
Oceanator – the project of Brooklyn singer-songwriter Elise Okusami – has a new album out called Everything Is Love and Death. The follow-up to 2022’s Nothing’s Ever Fine finds Okusami working with Grammy-nominated producer Will Yip. “I feel like these songs are honing in on and parsing the same themes as previous records, more settled and clearer,” Okusami remarked. “I’ve gotten better at listening to the rational part of my brain, the understanding that things aren’t going to work. I know better but I’m gonna do it anyway, because everything is love and death.” The singles ‘Get Out’ and ‘Drift Away’ arrived ahead of the release.
Wunderhorse, Midas
Wunderhorse, the band led by former Dead Pretties member Jacob Slater, have dropped a new album titled Midas. The follow-up to their 2022 debut LP Cub was recorded at Minnesota’s Pachyderm Studio with producer Craig Silvey. “When we first went into the studio to make this record, the only thing we were sure about is how we wanted it to sound; very imperfect, very live, very raw; no frills,” Slater said in press materials. “We wanted it to sound like your face is pressed up against the amplifiers, like you’ve been locked inside the bass drum.”
Lia Kohl, Normal Sounds
Chicago-based artist Lia Kohl has unveiled her third full-length, Normal Sounds, via Moon Glyph The follow-up to last year’s The Ceiling Reposes features the previously released tracks ‘Car Alarm, Turn Signal’ and ‘Ignition, Sneakers’. Utilizing field recordings that include grocery checkout beeps, machinery drones, and car noises, the record serves as “a love letter to the mundane sonic world,” according to Kohl, “to the part of my brain that just can’t stop listening to everything, all the time.”
Other albums out today:
Duster, In Dreams; Ty Segall, Love Rudiments; —__–____, Night of Fire; Big Sean, Better Me Than You; Sean Henry, HEAD; Los Bitchos, Talkie Talkie; Laurie Anderson, Amelia; Tycho, INFINITE HEALTH; Nails, Every Bridge Burning; The Bug Club, On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System; John Legend, My Favorite Dream; Destroy Lonely, LOVE LASTS FOREVER; Ohr, Afterglow; Robert Glasper, Code Derivation; RZA, A Ballet Through Mud; Zedd, Telos; Jana Mila, Chameleon; Carlile, Human Human; The Cactus Blossoms, Every Time I Think About You; Ellen Reid, Big Majestic; Yuko Araki, Zenjitsutan 前日譚.