Wesley Joseph – Forever Ends Someday (Secretly Canadian)
Wesley Joseph’s debut album, Forever Ends Someday, feels as if it were pulled from the depths of his soul. It’s a product of years of conflict, struggle and hope as he tries to reconcile the distance between his roots in the West Midlands and his artistic aspirations. From the very first note, he establishes himself as an artist with a clear, singular vision on an album that never baulks from the dark side of life and never takes shortcuts. Musically, it fuses fluid electronics, sophisticated soul, and gritty hip-hop on an album that continually enthrals.
This sounds like an album that has been a lifetime in the making. Ultimately, it’s a sweeping and ambitious collection of tracks that serve as a vivid self-portrait of a hugely talented new voice in British music. By boldly articulating his past journey, Wesley Joseph has set the stage for a spectacular future. – Paul Carr
Khun Narin – III (Innovative Leisure)
The psychedelic flow Khun Narin offered on their debut seemed to follow directly from this past, while also sounding wholly original. II (2016) followed suit as a breath of fresh, entrancing air, albeit with more tracks and shorter ones. A full decade later, the painstakingly produced new album III, their first recorded in a formal studio setting, seems like it might finally get this incomparable band the traction it deserves.
III puts every one of their strengths on display. Resplendent and reverb-heavy as ever, the phin (played by Nattapol Soison, known as Bas) takes the melodic lead for the vast majority of the album, sometimes gently rolling, sometimes shredding. Every single track on III is stunning, a testament to the organic nature of the Khun Narin ensemble and the skill of each member that cycles through. In a world where bands are increasingly finding success in being inspired by the sounds of Thai lute-based rock, it seems only fair that Khun Narin should have a chance to enjoy the limelight fully. – Adriane Pontecorvo
Kneecap – Fenian (Heavenly)
In the excellent song “An Rá,” from Kneecap’s extraordinary new album Fenian, the Belfast rap trio mock the supposed gifts of British imperialism—a sardonic inventory of what the Crown left behind—and the joke lands like a brick through a window. Three lads from West Belfast telling centuries of colonial history to fuck off, and they manage to make it sound like the most natural thing in the world. Until this album, they mixed politics with a need for a drink and a smoke, the beats directing listeners to get drunk and stoned while yelling at the Brits to get out.
As they showed in their very funny, if somewhat uneven, 2024 biopic, Kneecap, they are not intellectuals using rap to speak to the kids; they are the kids. Such kids take a little too much MDMA on a random Tuesday night and write about nationalistic harassment by the police while trying to find someone to sleep with. In Fenian, the lads still like a good time, but the album has a different feel. The beats are not as light; the lyrics are not as juvenile. The record hits on a different register than their previous work, and the change has produced something remarkable. – John Lennon
Lemoncello – Perfect Place (Claddagh)
Lemoncello produce a fine mist that floats over their homeland, Ireland, and drifts across the water, reflecting their world and the wider world. “At the edge of the weather,” they sing, representative of their message of living just ahead of your past. Laura Quirke on lead vocals and guitar, and Claire Kinsella on cello and backing vocals, have expanded their sonic ambitions from their 2024 eponymous debut. With new self-assurance, Perfect Place shines through.
The ten songs and 45 minutes of Perfect Place expand this format into a space that sits comfortably at the crossroads of folk, ambient, and even neoclassical. Having enjoyed their debut, I was surprised by the depth and sophistication of their second outing, musically, but especially lyrically. With this record, Lemoncello have achieved a feat of musical alchemy that should, must, bring them a wider audience. – John Alan Urquhart
Lip Critic – Theft World (Partisan)
Lip Critic’s Theft World is a clattering, shellacking of noise with frontman Bret Kaser standing in the centre like a preacher standing on the precipice of sanity. By melding crashing drums and unpredictable electronics, Lip Critic craft a chaotic sonic landscape where guitars are completely obsolete, dropping beats and distorted hooks like crockery falling out of a cupboard. The songs are connected by a litany of down-at-heel, guilt-ridden characters who both accept their fate and rage against its unfairness. The result is a thrillingly paranoid portrait of postmodern hyperreality that demands your absolute attention. – Paul Carr
The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis – Deface the Currency (Impulse!)
The Messthetics, a trio from Washington, DC, are a perfect example of the meaninglessness of genre distinctions in 21st-century creative music. Their fourth album, Deface the Currency—their second with the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis—is an exciting and mature blend of jazz, funk, and rock that puts the hair up on the back of your neck.
The album is titled to suggest defiance, and the musicians are aware that their instrumental music has political resonance at this moment in history. In the opening title track, they come out of the gates not with a written theme but a wailing half-minute of freedom. Soon enough, Lewis’s tenor sax and Pirog’s guitar lock into unison lines that have the speed and clean melodic detail of 1970s jazz fusion. If some of punk’s sense of rebellion was fueled by the fussy progressive-fusion of bands like the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Chick Corea‘s Return to Forever, this track marries Mahavishnu precision to skronky abandon. – Will Layman
Mildred – Fenceline (Memorials of Distinction / Dog Day)
On their debut album, Fenceline, Mildred ramble like your senile grandmother. However, they are not incomprehensible or do not talk in tongues. Rather, they echo David Berman’s off-kilter existentialism and absurdist koans, a poetic commentary on the isolation and malaise of modernity. Furthermore, there are an abundance of non-sequiturs and a focus on inconsequential details, such as taking a VHS to a Goodwill store, when, in fact, it is these occurrences that make a day fill a month of a year; someone has to tell the tale.
Mildred‘s aesthetic is built upon inertia and boredom, like the Basement Tapes—especially “Clothes Line Saga”. Their music crawls backwards to something familiar but strange, strange because it is familiar, like the work of David Lynch—and what is more universally symbolic of quotidian United States than a fenceline? A white picket fence. OK. Yet you get the point. That is to say, the iconography of the United States is so deep that it superimposes itself upon the collective conscience and, thus, the record’s imagery. Then it runs you over like a truck with Mildred steering the wheel. – Jack Walters
Miss Grit – Under My Umbrella (Mute)
Miss Grit is the project of New York-based Korean-American Musician Margaret Sohn. After returning from a particularly gruelling tour for their previous album, Follow the Cyborg, they sought to capture the spontaneous joy of creation. However, post-tour anxieties meant that the music became more personal than they could have ever imagined, with Sohn distancing themselves from the cyborg persona they had created on their debut to reveal something far more visceral and raw.
Under My Umbrella is a singular album that occupies its own time and place. It pulses with intensity and urgency, reminding you of the power of electronic music to lead you down the darkest emotional alleyways. This is futuristic, hallucinatory electronic music from the soul. – Paul Carr
Mitski – Nothing’s About to Happen to Me (Dead Oceans)
On the eighth studio album by singer-songwriter Mitski, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, the isolation of a narrator proves the point that “the action can all be internal”. Expanding on the country and folk influences of her previous record, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, Mitski creates a character who cultivates a rich inner life from the inside of an unkempt house, finding companionship in animals as she mourns the end of a romantic relationship.
Mitski’s 2022 album, Laurel Hell, is named after a deadly thicket found on the Appalachian Trail, a metaphor for the stifling nature of fame. By retreating from the spotlight, both musically and conceptually, on Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, Mitski protects her creativity so she can continue sharing it sustainably. Like the cat on the album’s cover, who stares at the viewer with dark, piercing eyes, Mitski may be reclusive, but she contains enough depth to fill multiple lives. – Matthew Dwyer
Kevin Morby – Little Wide Open (Dead Oceans)
Kevin Morby’s Little Wide Open serves as the final instalment of what was conceived as a trilogy, with Sundowner (2020) and This Is a Photograph (2022) documenting specific aspects of his return to Kansas City. The record is penned as a love letter to the Midwest, but it also celebrates the great expanse of middle America in subtler ways. Morby‘s eighth studio album comes across as his most direct, understated, and poetic work to date. Ultimately, Little Wide Open is a masterpiece of simple and, at times, epic proportions that will linger deep within one’s soul.
The title track sounds less like an opus and more like a meandering reflection; still, every second feels essential. Morby describes feeling overcome in the wide-open space. When the beauty gets to be too much, there’s a very real possibility that one’s heart might explode. Listening to the opening sequence (from “Badlands” through “Javelin”), one might have the same reaction—that rare sensation when one has witnessed too much splendor. If that is your experience, Little Wide Open will have left a lasting impression, a perfect rendering of heaven on earth. – Patrick Gill