Solid month for new music, but there’s a lot more coming now that we’re into fall, with Suede’s latest dropping today to kick things off. As always, if you can’t see the widget below, you can access the playlist here.
Wolf Alice – White Horses. It’s crazy that my favorite track from Wolf Alice’s latest album, The Clearing, doesn’t feature Ellie Rowsell on lead vocals. She’s on the chorus, but that’s one of the boys doing the verses, and my god does this thing hum. I have such mixed feelings on the record; they’re one of the most interesting bands going now, so the album is all over the place, and I respect the ambition and daring. I just wish there were more bangers here. This song is awesome, so are “Bloom Baby Bloom” and “Bread Butter Tea Sugar.” There are some other highlights. I think closer “The Sofa” – not a tribute to JD Vance – is kind of a snoozer. I’m going to wrestle with this one through the end of the year.
Coroner – Renewal. I don’t usually push metal tracks to the start of the playlist, since I know some of you are here for pretty much everything but the metal stuff, but this is Coroner’s first new song in over 30 years. They never got their due while they were active, commercially at least, but their last two albums were landmarks in the thrash genre, sliding towards progressive thrash and also heralding some of what was about to come on the death metal side of things. It’s incredible that they sound almost exactly as they did on Grin, their final release before their breakup in 1993, which saw them shift hard towards proggier stuff. Their sixth album and first in 32 years, Dissonance Theory, is due out on October 17th.
IDLES – Rabbit Run. IDLES did the soundtrack to the new Darren Aronovsky movie Caught Stealing, and to their credit they mixed things up a bit rather than just writing a bunch of new IDLES tracks. This sounds like a song from a tense, violent action film.
Geese – 100 Horses. I had both this and “Trinidad” on the original playlist, settling on this one because it’s a little more of a conventional rock track, while “Trinidad” sounds almost like a meteor hit the studio mid-song.
Wisp – Serpentine. Wisp is Natalie Liu, a 20- or 21-year-old singer/songwriter who sounds a lot like beabadoobee but with a harder guitar sound. This track, which combines breathy vocals with some crunchy hard-rock music behind it, is from her debut album If Not Winter, which came out last month.
Pynch – Post-Punk/New-Wave. I feel like this song’s title is making fun of me.
Richard Ashcroft – Lovin’ You. Yes, that’s the intro to “Classical Gas,” which is one of the two songs I typically use to warm up when I practice guitar. I can’t decide if I think this track from the former lead singer of The Verve is a clever interpolation of a classic guitar line or just weird derivative stuff from a guy who’s done this to better effect on other tracks.
Automatic – Mercury. The third album, Is It Now?, from this American synth-rock trio is due out on September 26th. Their dark, almost gothic sound definitely hits the nostalgia vibe for me, but it’s more a hint of that early ‘80s sound I love rather than a complete throwback.
Creeper – Blood Magick (It’s a Ritual). I’ve loved most of Creeper’s work since their acclaimed 2020 album Sex, Death & the Infinite Void, but this track, from the forthcoming Sanguivore II: Mistress of Death, might be the campiest thing they’ve done yet. It’s giving hair metal in the wrong way. It’s still catchy, but I’m not sure this is the direction I want them to go in.
Courting – the twins (1969). These prolific British art-punks just put out their second album in fourteen months back in March, and they’re back again with a brand-new single, a very pre-Arctic Monkeys-sounding hard-edged bit of controlled chaos.
HAERTS – The Lie. This is the second single from HAERTS this year after they went dark in the wake of 2021’s Dream Nation; both are slow, piano-driven tunes that highlight Nini Fabi’s vocals, but neither has the incredible energy of their first album, 2014’s HAERTS. I don’t know if that sound just isn’t coming back, but I refuse to give up.
Color Green – Ball and Key (Free). This California quartet sounds like the next descendant in the line that runs from the Grateful Dead through Phish, and while I know there are a lot of pretenders to that throne, at least Color Green sounds great on record, which is more than I can say for a lot of so-called jam bands.
Just Mustard – We Were Just Here. Everyone is shoegaze now. Just Mustard actually does shoegaze, though, at least in terms of the musical style, with waves of sound that create as much of a sensation as they impart any sort of melody. It’s harsh and sometimes dissonant, but that’s what shoegaze originally entailed. This Irish band is more true to the subgenre than some of the original artists still going, like Slowdive and Ride, are in their contemporary music (which, to be clear, I’ve liked very much).
Black Honey – Soak. I’d call this song mid as Black Honey goes; they’ve had better, but I’m grading them against their own previous output there. It’s the title track from their fourth album, which came out while I was on vacation, so I still haven’t listened to it beyond the singles.
Cast feat. P.P. Arnold – Way It’s Gotta Be (Oh Yeah). That is indeed the Britpop band Cast, founded by The La’s bassist John Power, who racked up ten straight top 20 hits in the UK in the 1990s, including the bangers “Sandstorm,” “Alright,” and “Beat Mama.” They put out an album last year that didn’t have the same kind of edge or funk to this track, one of two singles featuring former Ikette (as in Turner) P.P. Arnold. Cast’s next album Yeah Yeah Yeah is due out in January.
The Hives – The Hives Forever Forever the Hives. Never let it be said that Howlin’ Pelle lacked for confidence. This is the title track from the band’s seventh album and second since they re-formed, coming out just a week ago.
clipping. – Forever War. This new track appears on Dead Channel Sky Plus, an expanded version of the trio’s second album that rearranges the existing songs and includes four new ones. “If you ain’t dead yet/you gon be there soon” should a rallying cry.
Bleak Squad – Strange Love. This is the title track from the debut album by this Australian supergroup, which includes Mick Harvey, who played in the Birthday Party, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, and PJ Harvey’s band, as well as three musicians from groups I don’t know. Their sound is atmospheric and dark – I saw one review call them “noir,” and that fits – but I’d best describe it as what I think or hope the upcoming Blondie album would sound like.
Drink the Sea – Rose Crested Sky. Speaking of supergroups, this one has Peter Buck (REM), Barrett Martin (Screaming Trees), Alain Johannes (Eleven, Them Crooked Vultures), and solo artist Duke Garwood. The band plans to release two albums this fall and to tour to support them. A post on REM’s Instagram quoted Martin as saying that this band’s sound will incorporate a lot of world music sounds; I hear some of that here, but this track is more dominated by the off-beat rhythm and what I think are varied time signatures.
Silver Gore – All the Good Men. This British duo formed in 2021 but just released their first music this year with three songs, including this jagged alt-pop number that got stuck in my head for days after I first heard it.
No Joy – Garbage Dream House. No Joy is now a solo project by Canadian guitarist/songwriter Jasamine White-Gluz, whose younger sister Alicia is now the lead singer of Swedish melodic death metal icons Arch Enemy. It’s shoegazey, but with ethereal vocals that push it towards dreampop. Apparently No Joy is playing tonight in Philly at a place I don’t know called Kung Fu Necktie.
Arcadea – Exodus of Gravity. Arcadea is a synth-metal side project of Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor, and far more accessible than almost all of his main act’s output (which I tend to like quite a bit). I had this on the playlist before the news about former Mastodon guitarist Brent Hinds’s sudden death,
Deftones – milk of the Madonna. I’ve never been a huge Deftones fan, although I’m sure I’m also biased by their first few albums as a nu-metal band, including that horrible “Shove It” song that was inescapable when it came out. With the caveat that I haven’t heard a ton of their stuff, this is the catchiest song of theirs I’ve heard.
Cloudkicker – Things You Can’t Change. Cloudkicker is the side project of Ben Sharp, a commercial airline pilot (according to Wikipedia) who releases music on Bandcamp etc. for fun; I’d never heard of him/them until Riley from Thrice posted about the new stuff on Bluesky. This track is instrumental, very post-hardcore (like Thrice) but a little heavier.
Asymmetric Universe – Feather on a Glass. This is some seriously progressive metal, like Animals as Leaders type stuff, from a pair of Italian brothers who handle guitar and bass, combining some very heavy djent-ish metal grooves with melody lines from – I can’t believe I’m saying this – smooth jazz. It’s crazy.
Crypt Sermon – Only Ash and Dust. This Philly-based doom metal band returns with a four-song EP that they describe as an extension of last year’s album The Stygian Rose, with three new tracks and a cover of the title from black metal pioneers Mayhem’s first album, retitled to change the word “Dom” to “Doom.” (Mayhem sucks, as a band and especially as people, to be clear, but they were highly influential on their genre.) The EP’s overall sound is more doom-plus, with some more energy and passages with quicker tempos compared to the LP.