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.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy: We Are Together Again
We Are Together Again marks a return to Will Oldham’s self-described “Louisville-first” approach to making music. Whereas last year’s The Purple Bird gave its dues to Nashville country with production from David Ferguson, the Kentucky native revisits his roots for a record that owes its imagination to the adjacent Ohio River and the people who call Louisville their home. That prevailing collectivism is baked into the record’s title, but the communal spirit goes deeper than its name. Even though Oldham made a deliberate choice to center Louisville on 2019’s I Made a Place and 2023’s Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, We Are Together Again feels like his most concerted effort to do so, playing like the final part of a trilogy that pays homage to his origins. At certain points, it’s an outright family affair. Will’s brother, Ned, returns to play bass on a Bonnie “Prince” Billy record for the first time in two decades. Oldham’s cousin, Ryder McNair, contributes string-quartet arrangements, a skill he even lent to blockbuster Ridley Scott films like House of Gucci and Gladiator 2, contributing some cinematic heft. Some of the twang from Oldham’s last outing carries over to his latest release, but McNair’s arrangements make this a strong contender for Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s most symphonic album yet. Granted, it’s not a massive orchestra backing him. Rather, the supplementary strings augment the lived-in, genial atmosphere these songs exude. For an album that emphasizes the sweet, tender qualities of togetherness and community, it’s a welcome, apt embellishment. —Grant Sharples [No Quarter]
Bory: Never Turns to Night
At the vanguard of PNW guitar music is Bory, the solo project of songwriter Brenden Ramirez. His work recalls the pop hooks of the Shins and the thoughtful songcraft of Elliott Smith. Never Turns to Night—the debut release on Ducks Ltd. bandleader Tom McGreevy’s new label Bleak Enterprise—is a totally sticky, emotive rabble-rouser I’ve been listening to all week. “Living Proof” and “We’ll Burn That Bridge When We Get to It” are serious scorchers, and they’re the first two tracks on the album! But “By the Lake” is power-pop perfection on a headphones record full of great tones. Give it five years and we’ll be calling Ramirez one of the best living guitarists. He graduated at the top of his class from Tony Molina’s shredder school. Look, if you’re looking for riffs stacked on top of riffs, or punchy lyricism from a guy who just gets it, Bory’s new joint will brighten every one of your corners. —Matt Mitchell [Bleak Enterprise]
Dutch Interior: It’s Glass EP
Dutch Interior is a Swiss Army knife in band form. They do country-rock, slowcore, shoegaze, and ambient music, and they do all of it very well. It helps, of course, that the band is six guys with different impulses. But their shared chemistry allows those paths to cross seamlessly and curiously, and It’s Glass proves that. Dutch Interior made one of my favorite records last year, Moneyball, but this new EP amplifies all of that record’s gentlest parts. The band calls them “weird little songs,” though I wouldn’t dare label them throwaways. “Ground Scores” is a dainty folk song carrying an airy undertow; “Go Fuck Yourself” casts a swooning piano spell on the ensemble; Noah Kurtz’s fingerpicking on “Play the Song” is contagiously delicate; “Say Anything” swells into compressed, suffocating atmosphere that leaves only splashes of snare drum in the debris. What I’m hinting at is: these guys are incapable of making an uninteresting track, even when they’re stripping back their instruments. I bet this EP sounds great when Dutch Interior plays it in the round. —Matt Mitchell [Fat Possum]
Gregory Uhlmann: Extra Stars
Maybe the greatest disciple of Jeff Parker currently working, Gregory Uhlmann is as underrated as they come. The rock and pop music he plays in Perfume Genius can hang with the best of them, but it’s his improvisational work with Meg Duffy, SML, and Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes that I am always returning to. Uhlmann studied jazz composition in Chicago but his playing style obliterates any strict compartmentalization. I’ve watched him play a couple of times, and the guy walks through portals on stage. His tones and textures lend environments to the music; his improvisations live on within you after they’ve stopped vibrating. His solo debut, Extra Stars, is no different. Music like this rewards the immersive listener. “Back Scratch” is a collage of piano improv and pitch-shifted percussion. “Lucia” streaks through unpredictable timbres. Peculiar, near-impossible string effects filter through Uhlmann’s pedals on “Burnt Toast.” Sometimes I don’t know what to make of his work. Most times, however, I just want to know how he comes up with this stuff. Extra Stars burns bright with irreplicable curiosity. —Matt Mitchell [International Anthem]
Harry Styles: Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally.
Harry Styles’ fourth album, Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally., was inspired by Berghain—the same Berlin club that ROSALÍA used to build pop music’s mystical, erotic future last year—an LCD Soundsystem concert, and the popstar’s residence in Italy. “Ready, Steady, Go!” and “Season 2 Weight Loss” briefly inundate the record with an abundance of key changes, as the former uses thick bass jolts, title repetition, and inside-out vocal clips to sketch an exciting house/techno interplay, but Styles finally finds his groove in the record’s standout middle section. “Taste Back” pairs bubbly synths with drum machines and old-world “ooh-ooh” harmonies. It’s a dynamic pop song with the first foregrounded use of electric guitars, reminding me that this album really could have used Mitch Rowland’s chops. The flowery, spiraling electronics in “The Waiting Game” make for an interesting companion to the stripped-back synthetic drums, while the “tantalize/titillate” wordplay is cheeky and the “You can romanticize your shortcomings, ignore your agency to stop / Write a ballad with the details while skimming off the top” verse is Styles at his most sincere. “Coming Up Roses,” which is the only track on the album written solely by Styles, is dramatic and swooning, layered in colorful plucks and luxuriating strings. Styles’ voice doesn’t quite decorate the song fully, but a 30-person orchestra, co-arranged by Jules Buckley, narrows the gap. The sun-dappled, sore-thumbed track ends on a classical instrumental break that turns playful, oddly (and excellently) channeling Bacharach on a tape that’s otherwise industrial, fluid, and trippy. —Matt Mitchell [Columbia]
Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds: Mutiny After Midnight
Sturgill Simpson and the Dark Clouds are on a country-funk tear in Mutiny After Midnight, as if they cleaned up a Nugs.net recording from one of their many three-hour shows for a wide release. Dickey Betts once tried explaining the difference between the Allman Brothers’ jams and the Grateful Dead’s jams. What he came up with was: the Allmans force the magic to happen, but the Dead wait for the magic to happen. Simpson and his “Reckon Crew” do both, gliding from one song to the next, letting muscular guitar riffs defrost into mirror-ball rhythms and vibe-driven sustains. “Viridescent” and “Situation” both spin out in total disco meltdowns. The conclusion of “Everyone Is Welcome Here” flirts with “Get Lucky” territory until Raw B’s febrile saxophone uncorks.
Recalling the Silver Bullet Band à la Stranger in Town, “Excited Delirium” cuts in with high-speed exploits, snaring slide-guitar rowdies, saxophone convulsions, and fat kick drums in abundance. The tongue-in-cheek “Stay On That” is a high-def sex caper full of funky blasts, joke-book come-ons, and Lowell George-style innuendos like “baby, let me be the banana and you can be the split” and “stay on that D, baby, ‘til you hit that G.” Simpson reaches carnal activation in the orange-white flames of “Situation,” talking about bodies that are “hotter than a brothel in Guam.” And, of course, “Make America Fuk Again” is pure dance-music medicine on steel blades. Mutiny after Midnight is not some No Fences, reach-across-the-aisle sedative, but a look at where country music can go if the right hearts get all the attention. It brings to mind the chicken-fried grooves, CB-radio prose, and backwoods picking that cleared a path for Hank Williams tunes and redneck rock to travel side by side. It’s brand-new music that already sounds like a linchpin of mid-century America. —Matt Mitchell [High Top Mountain/Atlantic]
Natalie Jane Hill: Hopeful Woman
North Carolina wins again, because the new Natalie Jane Hill tape is wonderful. The Asheville folk singer ambles across ten tracks that pay tribute to the small yet choral and wild wonders of the natural world. Hopeful Woman evokes the space and tenderness of Edith Frost, and Hill enlisted Mat Davidson, Austin Vaughn, and Jason Chronis to see those arrangements through. Davidson’s pedal steel on “Never Left Me” wraps a lullaby around Hill’s own, while there’s an overwhelming gentleness to “Lady Pond.” Fiddles pile into the finale of “Blue is the Color of My Sun.” Grace, it seems, is woven into Hill and her writing like a perfect atom. After a melty guitar solo from Dr. Dog’s Scott McMicken on “Oranges,” she reveals what’s worth singing about: “changing and loving and growing and trying.” —Matt Mitchell [Dear Life Records]
OHYUNG: IOWA
IOWA is PC music made “in the box.” OHYUNG used soft synths and contact synths, processing textures through analog tube compressors. Iowa City musician toyaway gave her a cassette player, and she added that to her board gear, allowing her to feed samples through old-tape pop and grit. Lia used a lot of tape-delay emulation, constructing IOWA on her laptop. In the songs, she processes mouth sounds with reverb, having searched the deepest corners of YouTube for community church choir recordings to chop up, distort, stretch, and build out. Subwoofer thuds invade OHYUNG’s pastorals, where terror unpeels in chorale disfigurements: “driftless” soothes before it discombobulates. The ceramics in “nevada” are tinted by a stormy warning. Lia’s pet birds are absent from “dancing parakeets” but a prismatic interplay recreates their conversations. “kiara” spirals through bleared voices. Her disregard for genre on every album reminds me of Arthur Russell. In her sky of prayer on IOWA, Lia unsettles the beauty with music that makes room for harm around her: trans demonization, ICE raids, warmongering, despotism. Why do you think so many artists come to the Midwest’s quiet for answers? There’s truth in these plains. —Matt Mitchell [Self-Released]
Scout Gillett: Tough Touch
There’s a particular kind of wisdom that only sounds right delivered over a slow, boots-on-the-bar honky-tonk sway, and Scout Gillett knows it. “Gonna Change,” from her sophomore album Tough Touch, opens on a truth most songs would treat as tragedy—nothing lasts, not love, not the version of someone you built in your head, not even the grief of losing them—and proceeds to make it sound as comforting as a weighted blanket. Gillett’s voice drifts through warm, unhurried country guitar like smoke through a screen door, airy but deliberate, turning “I’m giving up this dream I had” into something closer to a toast than a concession. And where her earlier singles from this record favored volume and distortion, “Gonna Change” goes the other direction entirely, opening up space for her band to fill with color: Jason Frey’s horns swell in like a second sunset, and Omar Schambacher’s guitar solo in the back half is so beautiful it borders on rude. By the time Gillett arrives at “existing inside the grey where nothing ever stays,” it doesn’t sting. It glows. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Slouch Records]
Shabaka: Of the Earth
After co-founding Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming, racking up a sideman résumé that stretches from Sun Ra Arkestra to André 3000, and then publicly stepping away from the saxophone in 2023 to focus on flutes and production, Shabaka Hutchings arrives at Of the Earth having apparently decided that choosing was never the point. This is the first record where he plays and produces everything himself—sax, flutes, keys, percussion, electronics, beats sketched on portable devices while on the road—and it sounds less like a solo project than a one-man symposium. “Marwa the Mountain” pits scorching sax runs against a rhythm track that sounds like someone discovered a drum kit inside a kitchen drawer; “Step Lightly” builds a pastoral flute arrangement before a drum machine barges in and drags the whole thing downtown; “Call the Power” layers handclaps and bass drones until the floor gives out. And then, on “Go Astray” and “Eyes Lowered,” the man raps (for the first time ever!) with the same rhythmic authority he brings to everything else, sermon-like and unhurried. It’s an album that feels genuinely alive, made by someone who’s been on a longer creative walkabout than most artists could manage in multiple lifetimes—and who sounds, improbably, like he’s just now figuring out where he’s headed. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Shabaka Records]
War Child Records: Help(2)
The charity compilation is, by design, a selfless act—but when it works, it’s also a selfish pleasure, the thrill of stumbling into combinations and contexts that no label A&R would ever greenlight. War Child’s original HELP album nailed that balance in 1995, corralling virtually every Britpop-era name worth knowing into a single day of sessions and raising over a million pounds for children caught in the crossfire of conflict. 31 years later, producer James Ford booked Abbey Road for a week, rang every number in his phone, and assembled HELP(2), a 23-track sequel that’s less Britpop victory lap than post-everything summit meeting. The roster—Arctic Monkeys, Olivia Rodrigo, Fontaines D.C., Big Thief, Depeche Mode, Sampha, Pulp, and on and on—reads like a festival poster you’d assume was fake (too good to be true, and whatnot), and the miracle is how cohesive it sounds. Ford’s production and the communal spirit of the sessions give the record a warm, lived-in throughline even as it ping-pongs between Wet Leg’s uncharacteristically tender “Obvious,” Cameron Winter’s string-laden slow-build nightmare “Warning,” and Pulp going absolutely feral on “Begging for Change,” a psychedelic post-punk freakout that sounds nothing like the band who just made More.
The covers, though, are where the comp really earns its keep. Fontaines D.C. take on Sinéad O’Connor’s “Black Boys on Mopeds” with the kind of quiet fury that reminds you the song hasn’t aged a day and its author didn’t live to see the world prove her right. Beth Gibbons floats through the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” like she’s singing it from inside a church only she can see. Arooj Aftab and Beck turn “Lilac Wine” into some kind of spectral jazz séance. And then there’s Olivia Rodrigo closing the whole thing out with the Magnetic Fields’ “The Book of Love,” delivered with such disarming sincerity that it almost makes you forget how wryly ironic the original was, which might be the highest compliment you can pay a cover. The cause behind all of this is dire and real: nearly one in five children worldwide now live in the shadow of armed conflict, almost double the figure when the first HELP dropped. Buying a record won’t fix that. But HELP(2) makes a persuasive case that getting a few dozen brilliant musicians into a room together, pointed at something bigger than themselves, can still produce music that matters—and not just as charity, but as art that justifies its own existence long after the moment passes. —Casey Epstein-Gross [War Child Records]
waterbaby: Memory Be a Blade
I’m not from Stockholm, so I don’t know how big waterbaby actually is in her homeland. But I do know how big she should be here in America, and the noise around her right now just isn’t loud enough. After signing with Sub Pop two years ago, her EP Foam touted a controlled pocket of dizzying, finger-picked riffs and chic, cheeky melodies. At long last her debut full-length, Memory Be a Blade, has arrived, though she’s been sharing tracks from it since last year, including the fantastic “Beck n Call,” which saunters with boppy piano lines that ornament a circular topline. Strings crest and wash over waterbaby’s cool-as-ever singing and gentle beatboxing. Guest star ttoh adds a “heart on lock” bar to contrast waterbaby’s bubbly, eat-your-heart-out lament, rapping about being “the me with you version of me.” “Beck n Call” is uptempo but never excessively bombastic. Confidence is an ear-worm and, in Memory Be a Blade’s curious tangles of discreet R&B and sunny Y2K pop, waterbaby puts a spell on youuuuuu. —Matt Mitchell [Sub Pop]