TOKiMONSTA – Eternal Reverie (Young Art)
“Lucky U” typifies the overall soundscape of TOKiMONSTA’s Eternal Reverie: lushly synthesized house and pop hybrids that have the flourish and sheen of contemporary electronic music while subtly harkening back to dance music’s forebearers. Lune Rouge and 2020’s Oasis Nocturno contain mostly uncluttered, conventionally structured pop songs. These albums skirted any studio indulgence that didn’t bolster the guest vocals.
Eternal Reverie keeps the same format – pop songs with guest vocalists – but differs in decisions, blending TOKiMONSTA’s penchant for pop jams with the eccentric touch of her early beats. If there’s any disappointment to be felt, it’s from wanting more of a good thing. There are no duds on Eternal Reverie. – Kyle Cochrun
Hüma Utku – Dracones (Editions Mego)
Hüma Utku’s Dracones begins by locating its listeners in deep space, or perhaps deep waters: we are floating, drifting, surrounded by otherworldly drones and echoes. We hear cosmic resonances–alien life or whale song?–that morph from hums to howls to cries and back over layers of vibrational haze. Voices are distorted, cello strings groan, and an electromagnetic lyre (Mihalis Shammas’s lyraei) shrieks. The life that rises from this futurist strangeness is pure and primeval.
Utku has done something remarkable in tracing her own such journey on the album. It’s innovative for the unpredictability of its sounds and the honesty with which she mediates such a deeply felt period of her life. It’s not for the incurious. Dracones embraces the shadows and the dissonance and is gripping for it. – Adriane Pontecorvo
Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory – Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory (Jagjaguwar)
If this record had been released in the 1990s, gothic music lovers would surely have predicted a great future for this gloomy and wise musician and her mystical band. Just look at Sharon Van Etten’s live performance on Fallon—it’s the 69 Eyes in the flesh! Even the album cover feels like the perfect homage to the Cure‘s Pornography, My Bloody Valentine‘s Isn’t Anything, Slowdive‘s Souvlaki, and other iconic artworks.
The characters of Hua Hsu’s renowned memoir Stay True once expressed the opinion that it’s important to “stay true”: “True to yourself. True to who you might have become.” Van Etten perfectly follows this covenant by preserving her traits even in this new form and extending her sound to one she has always wanted to have but never dared to… until now. – Igor Bannikov
Viagra Boys – Viagr Aboys (Shrimptech)
Viagra Boys crack open their new self-titled album with a howl and a stomp, hurling us right back into the gaping maw of their signature cartoon hellscape—a world as grotesque as it is musically precise, as absurd as it is emotionally intelligent. “Man Made of Meat” sets the tone: part Hieronymus Bosch, part Ren & Stimpy “gross-up” close-up, and, crucially, all in good fun. It’s a gleefully unhinged feat of epic silliness, just as willfully brutal as carefully constructed, and lucky for us, it’s just the beginning.
For all their grotesque spectacle—and whether they mean for us to see it or not—Viagra Boys are far too emotionally attuned to settle for cheap bitterness. Instead, on Viagr Aboys, beneath the grime, the gags, and the chaos, they’re not giving up on meaning. They’re daring us to find it where we least expect it. – Emily Votaw
The Waterboys – Life, Death & Dennis Hopper (Sun)
Although the Waterboys‘ past efforts, This Is the Sea and Fisherman’s Blues, were underpinned by emotional undercurrents, Life, Death & Dennis Hopper goes one step further, concocting a conceptual album detailing the highs, lows, and smirks enjoyed by the eponymous actor. One of the tracks, “Memories of Monterey”, is more of a sound collage than pop, as bandleader Mike Scott utilizes a collection of vocal effects to paint a picture of the end of the 1960s.
Just like Pete Townshend did on Quadrophenia, Scott uses the sleeve notes to set the story for listeners lost between the bellowing riffs and soaring, opaque vocals. Scott’s ambition has resulted in a musical vehicle that’s blindingly good at times, and Life, Dennis & Death Hopper is a singular addition to the Waterboys’ impressive canon. – Eoghan Lyng
Jesse Welles – Middle (Independent)
Chances are, you have never heard of Jesse Welles. If you have, it’s likely because you’ve been pulled into his orbit filled with weekly viral videos and social commentary. If you’re still listening, one can assume your views align with his progressive politics. Even if Welles builds on a history of protest music, he has a way of pointing out imbalances in power, stupidity, and atrocities in a frank and darkly comical manner that feels refreshing.
Middle feels more sophisticated than what listeners have come to expect, especially those seeking alt-country-flavored tunes and not just a man equipped with his guitar and his convictions. Like many of the masters before him (Pete Seeger, Dylan, Neil Young), Welles incorporates history, mythology, and religion with ease, proving he’s not just a songsmith for contemporary times. – Patrick Gill
billy woods – GOLLIWOG (Backwoodz Studios)
On GOLLIWOG, billy woods interrogates every aspect of horror, from the macro to the micro, with an album’s worth of hyper-literate hip-hop, laying out a litany of nightmares and social realism over a tangled thicket of low-down beats and nightside samples. Ragged rundown yards, dead cars, rabid dogs, and daddy longlegs rub shoulders with plague-ridden natives and poison rivers, everything surrounded by the silent dead on “Jumpscare”.
Scarecrows stand in mute witness while AI invokes Stephen King‘s Carrie on “Corinthians”. A heart becomes a voodoo doll on “A Doll Full of Pins”. It’s not an easy listen, but it’s a stunning achievement. Gazing into the abyss is never fun, but it’s necessary if we hope to understand what lives there. billy woods knows, and he’s not afraid to tell us. – J. Simpson
Yeule – Evangelic Girl Is a Gun (Ninja Tune)
With their latest album, Evangelic Girl Is a Gun, Yuele has both feet on the sidewalk. Flirtations, rejections, bipolar leanings, crushes, heartbreaks, all the boons and fallouts of craving and impermanence are present. Lyrically, they may still be trying to reconcile any number of impulses, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, but they’re garbed and psyched for pop primetime.
With Evangelic Girl, Ćmiel completes a trilogy: “orbit” (Glitch Princess), “atmospheric entry” (softscars), and, now, “assimilation”. That said, you can remove the princess from outer space, but you can’t remove outer space from the princess. Yuele has come a long way from their early years traveling distant galaxies. Now a committed earthling, they’ll hopefully never forget where they came from. – John Amen
Derya Yıldırım – Yarın Yoksa (Big Crown)
Derya Yıldırım is no easy artist to pin down, and neither is Yarın Yoksa, the new release from her and Grup Şimşek, the ensemble she leads, comprising keyboardist Graham Mushnik, guitarist and bassist Antonin Voyant, and drummer Helen Wells. With a title meaning “if there is no tomorrow”, it’s devoted to yesteryears and the now.
Born into Hamburg’s sizable Turkish diasporic community, Yıldırım draws on folk songs and themes from her ancestral homeland, as well as her own deeply personal sentiments and experiences of love, loss, and oppression, while weaving together bağlama melodies and funky grooves that offer irresistible retro touches to a gripping album. – Adriane Pontecorvo
zzzahara – Spiral Your Way Out (Lex)
Skateboarding, particularly skate videos, is a good allegory for zzzahara’s music. On the surface, they seem to glide along effortlessly, radiating a cool, calm composure that belies the heat, friction, gravity, and speed that are begging to bring them down. The skate videos that first inspired Jaime to move away from metal and hardcore add further levels of abstraction, artistry, and chill, overlaying the gravity-ignoring, death-defying stunts with funky breakbeats, jangling guitars, experimental camera angles, and lens flares.
Spiral Your Way Out is about making the best of a bad situation, of transforming darkness into light. It’s a bittersweet testament to the spirit of Los Angeles, as residents currently make the best of one of the city’s worst disasters. zzzahara offers a way forward, meeting every grief with a “What, me worry?” shrug while delivering one of the most delicious, addictive, effortlessly cool indie records of the year so far. – J. Simpson