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.
Brittany Howard: What Now
Relationship blues, healing, making sense of self-sabotaging patterns in friendships and romance are all explored through a jazzy, upbeat, audacious and vulnerable lens on What Now. The album is trimmed of subcutaneous sound, rounding out at just under 38-and-a-half minutes. Brittany Howard is here for a good time, not a long time, and bluesy earworms like “Prove It To You” and “Power To Undo” get under your skin, fizzle in your bloodstream and get your toes tapping and then, as cleanly as they began, wrap up neatly. There’s a confidence and vulnerability Howard fearlessly reveals on this album, which is more adventurous and riskier than Jaime. The Prince-inspired, funk-infused “Prove It To You,” with its brilliant, unabashed, funky soul, finds Howard contrasting the album’s soundscape by dialing back the drama, which is especially noticeable on closing track, “Every Color In Blue.” When Howard made her home in a spacious Nashville cottage just prior to the pandemic hitting, the garage became a space for collecting vintage recording gear and the ghosts of past greats, like James Brown, lurk within the buzzy guitar and buoyant bass in What Now. Contrasted with the nostalgic blues and funk of the 1970s is a glimmer of contemporary New Age elements—think bells, crystals, tarot, psychic energies and astrology. What Now addresses big themes—love, life and destruction—and, in places, it delivers a massive, eclectic sound. —Cat Woods [Read our full review and cover story]
Chelsea Wolfe: She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She
This theme of rebirth mirrors the album’s story as much as Chelsea Wolfe’s own musical journey. She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She perfectly blends her back catalog, reflecting on her cyclical life journey throughout and reviving the best genre influences from her past efforts. This cherry-picked combination finds her occupying an inky swell of electro-pop with flourishes of her heavier works—Hiss Spun and Abyss. Each track exists as an individual grave—a memento mori of Wolfe’s past let go through the music she makes. You might be trapped in the graveyard, but the memories remain buried, only allowing you to reflect on the changes you’ve made. As industrial as it is spiritual, Wolfe’s particular brand of trip-hop finds the perfect blend between the carnal and the mystical. She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She finds Chelsea Wolfe at her most creative while reviving her particular, audacious and revered brand of dark storytelling. Every piece of the record finds a way to tie into the themes at its core while still pushing Wolfe’s own sound forward in earnest. Without her intoxicating vocal prowess, the nuance of torment laced in each line would be lost—and she holds an extraordinary dynamic power in the space between hope and despair. There’s no mistaking that Wolfe’s subconscious is a labyrinth we are all trying to map a path through, but listeners will be happy getting stuck in the shadowy corners for now. —Olivia Abercrombie [Read our full review and feature]
David Nance & Mowed Sound: David Nance & Mowed Sound
David Nance, a Nebraska singer-songwriter as prolific as he is brilliant, has, miraculously, crafted his finest work to date on his Third Man Records debut. David Nance & Mowed Sound is an ensemble affair, calling on folks like James Schroeder, Dereck Higgins and Kevin Donahue to fill out the sound, which arrives like a mirage of country tunes built in an off-the-grid Midwest garage. The raucous, loose “Mock the Hours” will go down, when 2024 rings out, as one of the very best album openers of the year, while “Tumbleweed” slows it down and flutters like a Wild West standoff. “Side Eyed Sam” wanders while “Tergiversation” makes percussion the headlining act. But it’s Nance’s vocals carry the album near and far, as he cuts through noise and mangled riffs to craft a sound that is not so much retro as it is sublime and fine-tuned. David Nance & Mowed Sound is a measure of hard-earned and well-worn chemistry, and Nance makes good on his reputation as the best hit-maker you can’t put a finger on. —Matt Mitchell
Declan McKenna: What Happened to the Beach?
If you’re a Declan McKenna fan hoping for an album like What Do You Think About the Car? or Zeros, you’re out of luck. The English glam-rock singer-songwriter is exploring a new sound on his highly-anticipated third album, What Happened To The Beach?, and the project comes four years after his sophomore LP—following a string of singles that hinted at his new laid-back, synthetic approach, one of which was featured in Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell’s rom-com, Anyone But You. The album leans further into groovy beats rather than alt-rock, but it pulls from similar influences as his previous albums, such as The Waterboys, Bob Dylan, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles and David Bowie. When the second single, “Nothing Works,” was released last September, I listened to it nonstop—on the way to work, to the grocery store, even to accompany trips to the basement on laundry days. The track is a bottlerocket of energy, with an infectious chorus that transfers from the speaker directly into your body, lending itself to dancing free of self-judgment. “Nothing Works” is certainly one of the album’s standout tracks, and I was disappointed by the lack of other standouts on the album. A few other songs out of all 16 come to mind: “Mulholland’s Dinner and Wine,” “Elevator Hum,” “Mezzanine,” “Breath of Light,” and “I Write The News.” —Alyssa Goldberg [Read our full review and feature]
Ducks Ltd.: Harm’s Way
Harm’s Way is frenetic and warm, seamless yet meticulous. Tom McGreevy and Evan Lewis wrote the album while on tour opening for bands like Nation of Language and Archers of Loaf, and the bustling, spacious instrumentation mirrors that period of travel and of new stages in new cities. Recalling the work Ducks Ltd. did on their 2021 LP Modern Fiction, McGreevy and Lewis are unabashedly content with recycling licks and offering no solutions to the anguish they sing about. They aren’t making nihilistic music, instead engaging with stories that tug on hope yet don’t ignore the dreariness of it all. And it can be easy to overlook that push-and-pull, given that Harm’s Way lingers in its own jitteriness and wants you to feel first, think next. It’s what makes songs like The Smiths’s “This Charming Man” or Orange Juice’s “Rip It Up” timeless, this propulsive, aching urge to play fast, sing about being bruised and, most of all, juxtapose thrashing, explosive tempos with tender, sugary octaves. Harm’s Way is an album about cyclicality written during a cyclical tour spent nursing cross-country exhaustion. Ducks Ltd.’s approach to heaviness sticks out like a sore thumb, as if they intentionally want you to remember that, at its jangly, syrupy core, Harm’s Way is a sad album with no conclusion other than it’s dark outside all the time. They’ve earned this record and these tracks, and their attention to repurposing riffs runs deeper than McGreevy’s vocals or Lewis’ shredding: When you strip away all of the language and percussion and catchiness of Harm’s Way, the sorrow we’re left with sounds the same. —MM [Read our full review]
Madi Diaz: Weird Faith
Weird Faith is an album that feels like a purposeful underlining of Madi Diaz’s recent successes. If History of a Feeling was the mess of emotions, Weird Faith is the cool-headed exhale. Uplifted by healthier relationships and a hopeful outlook, Diaz stands in her healing. There is, however, a tinge of anxiety that never seems to leave her. The opener, “Same Risk,” is a powerful, vulnerable negotiation with a partner about the inherent power dynamic between them. She seeks reassurance; her nervous energy is palpable: “Do you think this could ruin your life? / Cause I can see it ruining mine,” Diaz sings. Just a few songs later she offers up what may as well be a more grown-up rebuttal to History of a Feeling’s “Think of Me.” That song was marked by the feeling of betrayal and hurt, venom sprayed at a cheating ex and his new partner. Here, on “Girlfriend,” Diaz instead extends grace—addressing her new boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, she is honest about the insecurities she feels and empathizes with this woman’s pain. Musically, “Girlfriend” and “Same Risk” highlight the way that Weird Faith deviates ever so slightly from Diaz’s winning formula. The focus remains squarely on her, but there are new, more considered dynamic changes. Songs reach higher, more cathartic heights, but they do so without a gradual build. Instead, the peak is sudden; they seem to float effortlessly off the ground. Weird Faith is not only an album trying to bolster Diaz’s success; it often feels like it’s trying to expand on it, as she makes clear attempts at widening her reach. —Eric Bennett [Read our full review]
Pouty: Forgot About Me
On Pouty’s debut full-length, Forgot About Me, Rachel Gagliardi surrounds her maturing soul with blazing power pop. With a bright, pointed voice and crunchy backing band—which was made in part with musicians and friends from the Philly DIY scene (the album was produced by Evan Bernard and Chris Baglivo of Philly alt-rock band The Superweaks)—Pouty’s music can be both sickeningly sweet and spitefully scorching. On album opener “Salty,” she taunts an unknown assailant who could very well be her current self: “I bet you almost forgot about me,” she sings, her voice diving into a stormy chorus and raging with acceptance. “I’m not embarrassed I can even accept it / The better part of it,” she continues, as if to underscore a newfound authority. Forgot About Me is full of these big lyrical pronouncements, lending the music an expansive soundscape despite how fuzzy the songs can get. “The Big Stage,” punctuated by a winding bassline and heavy power chords, plays a bit like a Nickelodeon theme song with its cheesy big dream themes. —Rachel Saywitz [Read our full review]
Other Notable New Album Releases This Week: Amiture: Mother Engine; Helado Negro: Phasor; Itasca: Imitation of War; Kelela: Rave:N, the Remixes; Little Simz: Drop 7 EP; Loving: Any Light; Mk.gee: Two Star and the Dream Police; Pylon Reenactment Society: Magnet Factory; Sonic Youth: Walls Have Ears
