Spencer Hughes put it best in his write-up on Anjimile three years ago: “He’s just become one of the most exciting new talents in indie rock. So what’s next for him?” Anjimile said it would be “very strange music,” though I wouldn’t characterize You’re Free to Go as “strange.” Instead, it’s an intimate, cathartic folk experience—an airy counterpart to 2023’s The King. Brad Cook’s guiding hand adds noticeable warmth to Anjmile’s already terrific singing. You’re Free to Go lives up to its title, as Anjimile converses with gender (“Waits for Me”) and estrangement (“Exquisite Skeleton”). He faces transphobia in “Ready or Not,” and welcomes Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam into his gentle, reflective world on “Enough.” Anjimile’s light plays to the highs and lows of joy. “Waits for Me” pulls me back in every time when he says, “When I was a little girl, I wanted to be free. When I was a little boy, I wanted to be real.” “Like You Really Mean It” is my favorite song of his thus far, and the back half of You’re Free to Go offers a daring resolution. —Matt Mitchell [4AD]
Cut Worms: Transmitter
Most Cut Worms songs sound like a county fair to me. It’s all twinkling rides, shit-hot air, and skies wearing bubblegum costumes in Max Clarke’s treasure chest of sun-soaked doo-wah-ditties. I go to him when I need a precious reimagination of some American Songbook ideal. An album like Nobody Lives Here Anymore is perfect for that. Plus, his voice sounds good spilling from a car with its top down and he’s from Strongsville, Ohio. Clarke may not be a Rockefeller but his new album, the Jeff Tweedy-produced Transmitter, is the richest he’s ever sounded. It’s him singing on “Windows on the World” while Tweedy dotes on a six-string and Glenn Kotche pounds the snare and pats the ‘rine. The track is a musical misnomer: it’s a catchy and cute tune you could find at the bottom of a cereal box, but the lyrics are as serious as a heart attack. Clarke can see a light-up American Dream about to burn the fuck out. The county fair’s closed for the season. “Caught in space, printed in pain inside the walls of how we were,” he sings while Tweedy’s chords noodle in the margins. “On a clear day, you can see almost forever.” Past lives, ephemera, and plate-glass reflections abound, Clarke knows exactly how this play ends. Charmingly, his two-man band falls in line right behind him and his melty, homespun, cosmic conclusion. “I keep an open mind that we still might meet again,” he says. Shit, I’ll have a piece of that. Where do I sign? —Matt Mitchell [Jagjaguwar]
E L U C I D & Sebb Bash: I Guess U Had to Be There
E L U C I D has always been the harder half of Armand Hammer to pin down. Where billy woods tends to rap in narratives you can follow even when they fracture, E L U C I D free-associates in dense lattices of imagery that reward obsessive re-listening without ever fully resolving. On I Guess U Had to Be There, his first full-length with Swiss producer Sebb Bash, that opacity finally finds its ideal setting. Bash—who earned The Alchemist’s highest praise during the Haram sessions, namechecked alongside Premier and Pete Rock—builds beats with a warm, woozy restraint: string samples shimmering at the edges, snares nudged just off-center, grooves that nod without ever locking down. The extra room pushes E L U C I D in a more rap-forward direction than the psychedelic head-trip of REVELATOR, grounding him in the physical textures of daily life—Home Depot runs, day laborers in parking lots, sticky fingers from breaking up weed—even as the bars spiral skyward. “Coonspeak” loops lo-fi organ with an almost Steve Reich-like insistence before flipping into something soulful; “Equiano” swings on a Shabaka flute line; woods, Estee Nack, and Breeze Brewin all show up and deliver. But it’s closer “Parental Advisory” that stops you cold, for once trading out abstraction for a brutally specific reckoning with the psychic wreckage of childhood corporal punishment and landing like nothing else in his catalog. E L U C I D once said he wonders whether his music belongs to a time that hasn’t revealed itself yet. I Guess U Had to Be There makes a strong case that the rest of us are finally catching up. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Fat Possum]
James Blake: Trying Times
As we’ve come to expect from James Blake, his production choices are lush and refined as ever on Trying Times. The panning synth noise and formant modulations on “Through the High Wire” and the melancholic house pulse on “Rest of Your Life” are both highlights on the album’s more electronically minded latter half. The title track saunters along at a leisurely pace; its lilting guitar arpeggio and muted, acoustic drums provide new textures for Blake’s cooing melisma. “Days Go By” shapeshifts with washes of droning synths, a chopped-up vocal sample, and a snaking flute ostinato, and its propulsive breakbeats give it some momentum as the track takes a trajectory that follows no logic save its own. “Doesn’t Just Happen,” which features British rapper Dave, floats on a plaintive cello melody that’s repurposed with polyphonic synths near the track’s end. Both songs happen to be lyrical highlights, too, each about the intentionality that goes into making your own joy, how finding love requires a willingness to do so. Sequencing them together augments their impact and reveals a dialogue between the two. There are bona fide gems littered throughout the album, serving as concrete reminders of Blake’s singular talent. —Grant Sharples [Good Boy]
Kim Gordon: PLAY ME
Thanks to Kim Gordon’s sly sense of humor, PLAY ME never comes across as Resistance-core pedantry. She manages to trace the committed evils of technocratic fascists while poking fun at what absolute, total losers they are. She begins the album with a list of Spotify-generated playlists (“Play me ‘Rich Popular Girl,’ ‘Villain Mode,’ ‘Jazz in the Background’), highlighting the absurdity of technology attempting to predict our specific emotional states, prescribing feelings through surface-level typing rather than allowing us to dictate them ourselves. “You wanna go to Mars, and then what,” she half-asks, half-taunts on “Subcon”; on “Square Jaw,” she marvels at how butt-ugly Cybertrucks are by comparing them to the song’s namesake. “No hands on the wheel, it’s a steal,” she brags in “No Hands,” referencing the cavalier recklessness of those who hold political office. The album is also her most rhythmic yet. “I get inspired by rhythm more than melody because of my vocal ability—or lack of vocal abilities,” Gordon told me around the release of her sophomore album, The Collective, two years ago. On its follow-up, she leans even harder into those impulses. There’s the aforementioned “Dirty Tech,” a veritable contender for the gnarliest beat on a tracklist brimming with them. The jazzy boom-bap of the opening title track, the crackling low-end of “Subcon,” and the melismatic Auto-Tune of “Black Out” are just a few examples of how the Sonic Youth co-founder manages to toy with textures and cadences in still-fresh ways. The Playboi Carti-meets-“Silver Rocket”-noise is even more prominent on PLAY ME than it was on its predecessor, and it’s a style that suits Gordon incredibly well. On “Post Empire,” she intersperses her figurative musings on how the U.S. government disappears migrants with squealing harmonic feedback, and Raisen imbues the track with sub-bass and 808s designed to rattle even the sturdiest car windows. —Grant Sharples [Matador]
Morgan Nagler: I’ve Got Nothing to Lose, and I’m Losing It
Morgan Nagler has been one of indie rock’s great hidden hands for years—co-writing with Phoebe Bridgers (earning a Grammy nod for “Kyoto”), HAIM, Kim Deal, Margo Price—the kind of behind-the-scenes career that makes other songwriters’ records sound better without most listeners ever learning her name. Before that, she was a child actor whose IMDb page reads like a fever dream of ’90s television; after that, she fronted LA bands Whispertown and Supermoon. So I’ve Got Nothing to Lose, and I’m Losing It isn’t really a debut so much as the moment a career-long detour finally circles back to the main road. The catalyst was a broken engagement in 2024, but the record she and producer Kyle Thomas (King Tuff) built from the wreckage is too restless and too funny to settle for breakup-album catharsis. “Cradle the Pain” opens with a wall of fuzz and a Meg Duffy slide solo that could strip paint, then turns around and tells you to look for flowers in the weeds; “Grassoline” is a country-stomping ode to (literal) weed as coping mechanism that sounds beamed in from ’70s AM radio; “Orange Wine” hides a scalpel-sharp inventory of LA absurdity inside a mid-tempo number you could hum in the shower. The friends-list is absurd—Courtney Barnett, Bethany Cosentino, Allison Crutchfield, Madi Diaz—but nobody big-foots the songs; they all seem content to let Nagler’s voice, conversational and disarmingly intimate, do the steering. The whole thing builds toward a kind of hard-won lightness: not optimism exactly, but the freedom that comes from accepting that smooth sailing was never on the table and deciding to enjoy the weather anyway. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Little Operation Records]
Ora Cogan: Hard Hearted Woman
Ora Cogan making music for Sacred Bones makes sense. The BC-based songwriter’s music is as gothic as it is inviting, and Hard Hearted Woman might be my favorite thing she’s done yet. “Honey” is certainly my new favorite song of hers. Cogan’s palette this time is filled with smoky guitar, pedal steel, fiddle, organs, celestial synths, and big, canyon-y acoustics. But Hard Hearted Woman isn’t a country album. It’s a collection of folk songs that wince, ache, and haunt. Cogan is sometimes sparse but always ornate and always bewitching. The atmosphere in “Believe in the Devil” showers Cogan’s falsetto in dust, while “Love You Better” sounds like Joni Mitchell just saw a ghost. I like Cogan in this mode. —Matt Mitchell [Sacred Bones]
The Black Crowes: A Pound of Feathers
The heart and soul of the Black Crowes, brothers Chris (vocals) and Rich Robinson (guitars), wasted no time getting back in the studio following not just the success of Happiness Bastards, but their first Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nomination last year. The songs that would come to tip the scales on A Pound of Feathers were all written on the spot in Nashville and recorded in a short burst with returning producer Jay Joyce. That urgency and spontaneity are felt right out of the gate as lead single “Profane Prophecy” opens with arena-ready bluster from Rich and soon descends into all manners of merrymaking a flamboyant Chris can concoct. It’s a devilish declaration, complete with cheeky call-and-response, that playfully lets it be known that rebellion, debauchery, and being oneself are still the order of the day. Just as the tension between brothers—the riotous, outspoken Chris and the calm, stoic Rich—sparks so much of the Crowes’ magic, A Pound of Feathers finds a natural balance between raucousness and reflection. A rusty strum in the wee hours of the morning tilts us toward the latter on “Pharmacy Chronicles,” while Chris surmises that it’s the “perfume, champagne, and sin” that so often jog our most joyous memories. “Leave it all behind you,” he urges over plinking country piano. “Let the demons find you.” It might be the most revealing line of the record, one that grants us permission to embrace our imperfect selves rather than suppressing our instincts. Are these moments of letting loose the “masterpieces or the rough cuts?” As a beautiful, hazy solo by Rich lifts up Chris’ emphatic promise that “the good times never end,” we might be inclined to go track down a demon or two of our own. —Matt Melis [Silver Arrow]
The Sophs: GOLDSTAR
The story goes that Ethan Ramon cold-emailed demos to Rough Trade before the band had ever played a show, and Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee signed them on the spot. I keep turning that over because it explains a lot about what the LA six-piece actually sounds like, which is a band that has absolutely no interest in waiting around for permission. GOLDSTAR, their debut, is one of those records where you spend the whole first listen trying to figure out what genre you’re even in. Folk song, then funk, then something that’s basically flamenco-pop-punk, then a near blues drawl. Ramon’s got this quality where he can sing about genuinely messed-up stuff—death wishes, craving validation, intrusive thoughts he probably shouldn’t be airing in public—and make it feel like the most fun you’ve had all week. Hell, a song called “Death in the Family” should not be as catchy as it is. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Rough Trade]