There are more than 120 albums, EPs and singles being released next week. And I’m not even listing all the Record Store Day releases, which you can find here. Mark your calendars and pre-order your favourites — but don’t blame me if things change at the last minute:
TOP ALBUMS
Broken Social Scene
Let’s Try the After Vol. 2
THE PRESS RELEASE: “The theme is to continue,” says BSS co-founder Kevin Drew. “Sickness, suicide, uprise, love, death, betrayal, hurt, joy, sex, communication, battles and divisions … Let’s just get to their after and start building again. How do we do it within the isolation of self prescribe empty popularity? How does the ego revolt? How does the heart win? Can it? Maybe after we will find out.”
Chemical Brothers
No Geography
THE PRESS RELEASE: “At some point during the recording of No Geography, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons pushed the reset button. It began with the construction of a studio within a studio – a tiny makeshift room that housed the kind of kit they’d previously used to record the bulk of their first two albums; equipment that had sat gathering (freestyle) dust in Tom’s attic for the last twenty years. That experimental space offered a freedom and the chance to create music and tell their own story in a way they hadn’t done for years.Wherever possible, things were done differently. Randomness and jagged edges were encouraged and songs were built around vocal samples; voices were wound tightly into music that Tom and Ed found themselves following wherever it led them. Snatches of dialogue from the late ’60s experimental Dial-A-Poem project were chosen that reflected the mood in the studio.”
Flaming Lips
King’s Mouth
THE PRESS RELEASE: “The Flaming Lips’ 15th studio album King’s Mouth will feature The Clash’s Mick Jones and arrive exclusively on Record Store Day. The band will issue just 4,000 copies of the LP, which will be pressed on gold vinyl and will only be available at participating independent record stores. Another version of the album won’t hit the marketplace until July. King’s Mouth follows The Flaming Lips’ 2017 album, Oczy Mlody. The album is also just one aspect of a much larger project from the Flaming Lips and frontman Wayne Coyne. The music on King’s Mouth parallels that in Coyne’s immersive art installation of the same name, in which viewers crawl into a large metallic head to experience a music-driven LED light show. The new album will also be accompanied by a book, King’s Mouth: Immerse Heap Trip Fantasy Experience, which Coyne wrote and illustrated. “The King’s Mouth immersive/child-like qualities are born from the same spark and womb as The Flaming Lips live performances,” Coyne said of the overall project. “The King’s Mouth adventure was made for humans of all sizes, ages, cultures, and religions.”
Glen Hansard
This Wild Willing
THE PRESS RELEASE: “Those who have followed Glen Hansard’s career since his Academy Award winning turn in the film Once will have witnessed one artistic arc: the journey of a Dublin busker who cut his teeth on the greats – Dylan, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen – and followed the path of the troubadour to great effect. But there is another thread running through Hansard’s musicianship; in his decades as lead singer of Irish stalwarts The Frames, rock and folk ambitions coexisted with moments of strangeness, intimacy, and stillness. Now, Hansard has announced This Wild Willing, his fourth full-length album and a collection of songs that follows this second path, where he marries the sonic inventiveness of the best of his work in The Frames with the discipline he has found as a songwriter in his solo career.”
Norah Jones
Begin Again
THE PRESS RELEASE: “Begin Again gathers seven eclectic songs that Jones has recorded over the past year with collaborators including Jeff Tweedy. Last year, following the 2016 release of her acclaimed album Day Breaks—and the extensive promotional campaign and world tour that accompanied it—Jones quietly returned to the studio with the sole intent of following her muse down creative pathways without any expectations or boundaries. Reveling in the joy and spontaneity of music-making with a true spirit of openness, Jones got together with various friends for brief, largely-improvised sessions to collaborate and experiment. “I felt inspired to record and try different things,” Jones says, adding that the idea was to make it “quick and fun and easy and low-pressure. It’s a great way to collaborate with other people. Just a day or 3 in the studio and that’s it. I try to go in with a few clips of voice memo ideas to have a jumping off point,” she explains. “With each session the little ideas were definitely with those particular musicians in mind, but the hope is to always create in the moment and with each session there were songs that came out of nothing. I was very open and had no real expectations as far as direction, but each session has exceeded my expectations. It’s been so fun and I feel very inspired right now and love all the different directions this is going.”
Anderson .Paak
Ventura
THE PRESS RELEASE: “Growing up in Oxnard gave me the grit and the church to find this voice of mine. One town over I went further and found my depth. The duality of each place inspired me greatly and from that I made two albums at the exact same time but held one back because that would have been too many songs to perform live for you all! I like ending things on an even number so welcome to Ventura.”
THE COMPLETE LIST
All Tvvins | Just to Exist
All Your Sisters | Trust Ruins
Astrid | Fall, Stand, Dance
Asuna & Jan Jelinek | Signals Bulletin
Band of Skulls | Love Is All You Love
Dani Bander | Blackout
Bars Of Gold | Shelters
Chuck Ba$$ | The Moonshine EP
Beat Music | Beat Music! Beat Music! Beat Music!
Bibio | Ribbons
Big Business | The Beast You Are
Big Search | Slow Fascination
Izzy Bizu | Glita
Black Flower | Future Flora
Broken Social Scene | Let’s Try the After Vol. 2
Andy Black | The Ghost of Ohio
BTS | Map of the Soul: Persona
Budos Band | V
Emma Bunton | My Happy Place
T Bone Burnett | The Invisible Light: Acoustic Space
Dylan Cartlidge | Monsters Under The Bed
Ben Chatwin | Altered Signals
Chemical Brothers | No Geography
Cracked Machine | The Call of the Void
The Cradle | The Glare Of Success
Culture | The Nighthawk Recordings
Darkened Nocturn Slaughtercult | Mardom
Diesear | BloodRed Inferno
Sara Dufour | Sara Dufour
Escort | City Life
Melissa Etheridge | The Medicine Show
Jackie Evancho | The Debut
Bill Evans | Evans in England
Luc Ferrari | Music Promenade / Unheimlich Schön
Flaming Lips | King’s Mouth
Fontaines D.C. | Dogrel
Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds | Wait And Return
Wyndham Garnett | A Fistful of Stars
Tim Gartland | Satisfied
The Gluts | Dengue Fever Hypnotic
Danny Gokey | Haven’t Seen It Yet
Gone Cosmic | Sideways In Time
Sarah Haras | Fire
Pearl Harbor & The Explosions | Pearl Harbor & The Explosions Deluxe
Glen Hansard | This Wild Willing
Dave Hause | Kick
Thomas Henley | Epoque EP
Bruce Hornsby | Absolute Zero
Dominique Hudson | Última Danza
Inter Arma | Sulphur English
David J | Thoughts and Prayers
Cris Jacobs | Color Where You Are
Norah Jones | Begin Again
Junodream | Terrible Things That Could Happen EP
Damian Jurado | In The Shape of a Storm
Kap Bambino | Dust, Fierce, Forever
Karenn | Kind of Green
Ketzer | Cloud Collider
Kottonmouth Kings | Most Wanted Highs
Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper | A Star Is Born Soundtrack
Régis Renouard Larivière | Contrée
Leisure Society | Arrivals & Departures
Aaron Lewis | State I’m In
Lloyd | Black Haze
Logos | Imperial Flood
Lone Justice | Live at the Palomino, 1983
Lowly | Hifalutin
LSD (Labrinth, Sia, Diplo) | LSD
Richard Luke | Glass Island
Reese McHenry | No Dados
Melby | VCR
Missio | The Darker The Weather // The Better The Man
MONKEY3 | Sphere
Wes Montgomery | Back on Indiana Avenue
My Son The Hurricane | Ride The Bullet
Mystery Skulls | Back to Life
Native Harrow | Happier Now
Nekrasov | Lust of Consciousness
Robert Nelson | Nul n’est roé en son roya
Numenorean | Adore
Odonis Odonis | Reaction EP
1The9 | TBA
Anderson .Paak | Ventura
Graham Parker | Squeezing Out Sparks: Solo Acoustic 40th Anniversary
Pixel Grip | Heavy Handed
Praa | Praa
Dennis Quaid | Out of the Box Vinyl
Eli “Paperboy” Reed | 99 Cent Dreams
Eric Reed | Everybody Gets The Blues
Emily Reo | Only You Can See It
Jess Ribeiro | Love Hate
Riff Raff | Pink Pythōn
Las Robertas | Together Outrageously EP
Saxsyndrum | Second Nature
Shovels & Rope | By Blood
Silverstein | Redux: The First 10 Years
Slo | Solace
The Social Experiment | Intellexual
Juan María Solare | These Simple Moments
Tom Speight | Collide
Adam Stafford | The Acid Bothy
Streetheart | Life. Legacy. Music.
Tellavision | Add Land
Roza Terenzi | Let’s Ride
Theia | Not Your Princess
Theories | Vessel
Through The Noise | Dualism
Thrush Hermit | Clayton Park Vinyl
Tryer | Ei Kuole Koskaan
Bonnie Tyler | Between the Earth and the Stars
Various Artists | Poppies: Assorted Finery from the First Psychedelic Age
Various Artists | I Don’t Like the Way This World’s A-Treatin’ Me
Walking On Cars | Colours
John Paul White | The Hurting Kind
Marty Willson-Piper | Hanging Out in Heaven
Craig Xen | I Wish Heaven Had Visiting Hours
Sebastián Yatra | Fantasia
Yours Truly | Afterglow EP
Renata Zeiguer | Faraway Business
Zvi | Deer Pink
