It’s good to be the king. Or at least a king. Especially next week, when King Krule, King Howl and King Size all have music on the way. And they’re not even the top cards in this hand — you’ve also got new albums from Jason Isbell, Janelle Monáe, Jenny Lewis, Dream Wife and more. Here are all the crowning achievements:
The Boo Radleys
Eight
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Marking perhaps their busiest year in 2023, the band are continuing to make up for lost time after being missing from the musical map since 1998. After reuniting in 2021 and releasing their seventh album Keep On With Falling in 2022, The Boo Radleys carry on with the aptly titled Eight. Where last year’s album — joyful in tone yet brooding with heavyweight lyrical themes — came together as an exploration of the isolated ideas of each member, Eight is, according to vocalist and co-songwriter Simon “Sice” Rowbottom, formed of songs recorded “purposefully to appear together on an album. There is also a greater depth of integration, which means that it’s more difficult to tell which member of the band the song originated with.”
Alice Cooper
Killer + School’s Out Deluxe Editions
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Alice Cooper was unstoppable during the 1970s, when the band released four consecutive platinum albums. Rhino will reissue two of those albums — Killer (1971) and School’s Out (1972) — with newly remastered sound, rare recordings, and previously unreleased live performances. Killer Deluxe Edition introduces a newly remastered version of the original release, while the bonus material features alternate takes for You Drive Me Nervous, Under My Wheels and Dead Babies and an unreleased live recording of the band’s performance at Mar Y Sol Pop Festival in Puerto Rico on April 2, 1972. School’s Out Deluxe Edition begins with a newly remastered version of the 1972 original, and contains rarities like the single versions of School’s Out and Gutter Cat vs. The Jets, an alternate version of Alma Mater, an early demo for Elected, and a concert recorded in Miami on May 27, 1972.
The Dead Milkmen
Quaker City Quiet Pills
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “In an era of unparalleled stupidity, political dysfunction, and societal collapse, couldn’t we really use a new Dead Milkmen album? After nearly nine long years, that wish has been granted. This summer, the Dead Milkmen will return with their long-awaited 11th studio album, Quaker City Quiet Pills. Written over the tumultuous three-year span of 2019 to 2022, the album marks the legendary satirical punk band’s first new LP since 2014’s Pretty Music for Pretty People. Fans will be happy to find it steeped in the trademark mix of energized punk hooks, irreverent humor, and biting social commentary that has animated this group since their historic arrival on the punk scene 38 years ago. “To me, it’s like a greatest hits of all our styles put into one album,” says guitarist/vocalist Joe Jack Talcum (aka Joe Genaro). “It checks all the boxes of things that fans have liked about us since our first album. It has political satire. It has the funny lyrics, the simpler punk songs like we started out with. But it also has room for some weird studio fun.”
Dream Wife
Social Lubrication
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The gatekeepers, the so-called legends / Ya boys gonna let the girls play? / Or are they merely ornaments on display?” so states Leech, the bold and explosive first single from Dream Wife’s third album Social Lubrication. It’s a rock-heavy call-to-arms for empathy, in a world still propped up by patriarchal systems and underhand codes of silence. “Empathy is what allows us to collaborate, to build things together and to make things that are larger than the individual,” says bassist Bella Podpadec. “But there is also a lot about modern society that denies us access to that, and teaches us that it’s bad or dangerous.” These themes — exhaustion with the patriarchy, a rejection of the systems built to contain us — simmer and spit throughout Social Lubrication, raising a middle finger to the societal barriers enforced to severe connection, playfulness, curiosity and sexual empowerment. “Music is one of the only forms of people experiencing an emotion together in a visceral, physical, real way,” says guitarist Alice Go. “It’s cathartic to the systemic issues that are being called out across the board in the record. Music isn’t the cure, but it’s the remedy. Calling the record Social Lubrication harks to that. It’s the positive glue that can create solidarity and community.”
Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit
Weathervanes
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “A Jason Isbell record always lands like a decoder ring in the ears and hearts of his audience, a soundtrack to his world and magically to theirs, too. Weathervanes carries the same revelatory power. This is a storyteller at the peak of his craft, observing his fellow wanderers, looking inside and trying to understand, reducing a universe to four minutes. He shrinks life small enough to name the fear and then strip it away, helping his listeners make sense of how two plus two stops equaling four once you reach a certain age — and carry a certain amount of scars.Weathervanes is a collection of grown-up songs: Songs about adult love, about change, about the danger of nostalgia and the interrogation of myths, about cruelty and regret and redemption. Life-and-death songs played for and by grown ass people. Some will make you cry alone in your car and others will make you sing along with thousands of strangers in a big summer pavilion, united in the great miracle of being alive. The record features the rolling thunder of Isbell’s fearsome 400 Unit, who’ve earned a place in the rock ’n’ roll cosmos alongside the greatest backing ensembles, as powerful and essential to the storytelling as The E Street Band or The Wailers.”
King Howl
Homecoming
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “King Howl from Cagliari, Sardinia, play heavy blues: The raw sounds of the blues are filtered by a multitude of different musical influences from stoner rock, ’70s classic rock, funk and punk, in a crossover worked with spontaneity and naturalness. Homecoming represents a new chapter in the stylistic universe of the band, mixing their sound with new compositional and sonic influences. A mix of blues, stoner, psychedelia and classic rock that paints the soundscape of a set in America in the ’60s, a narrative plot that permeates the entire work accompanied by a constant evolution.”
King Krule
Space Heavy
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Archy Marshall announces Space Heavy, the fourth studio album under his King Krule alias. Coming 10 years on from his debut album, Space Heavy presents King Krule at his most articulate; using his years of experience to create a dynamic body of work that reveals something new with every listen. Written from 2020 to 2022, between London and Liverpool, Space Heavy took shape over the course of commutes between the two cities where Marshall was splitting his time. Befitting an album quite literally written on the commute between the two places he called home, Archy found himself fascinated by the notion of “the space between” — the space haunted by dreams of love, touching a narrative of lost connection, losing people and situations to the guillotine of the universe. Once written by Archy, the music was developed by frequent collaborator and producer Dilip Harris and long-time bandmates Ignacio Salvadores (saxophone), George Bass (drums), James Wilson (bass) and Jack Towell (guitar). The result is a 15-track full-length by the musical polymath that inhabits the deepest reaches of the subterranean sonic world that Archy has constructed over the course of his career as King Krule.”
King Size
King Size
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “King Size is the forth LP from King Size. The new record sets a significant new era in both their musical career and life with a blissful, no-nonsense pop-punk inspired sound. Awash with a palpable feeling of nostalgia and bittersweet reflection, King Size deals unapologetically with themes of postmodern existentialism, love, loss and belonging. King Size are a no-nonsense Rock’n’Roll pop-punk four member band from Venice area, Italy. Their sound has been described in many ways but the band’s favourite one is still ‘Chuck Berry wearing a mohawk having a jam session with The Clash.’ ”
Jenny Lewis
Joy’All
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Joy’All, the fifth solo album from Jenny Lewis and the followup to 2019’s critically acclaimed On The Line, finds the singer-songwriter embarking on a new era in a new town. “I started writing some of these songs on the road, pre-pandemic… and then put them aside as the world shut down, and then from my home in Nashville in early 2021, I joined a week-long virtual songwriting workshop with a handful of amazing artists, hosted by Beck,” she explains. “The challenge was to write one song every day for seven days, with guidelines from Beck. The guidelines would be prompts like ‘write a song with 1-4-5 chord progression,’ ‘write a song with only cliches,’ or ‘write in free form style.’ The first song I submitted to the group was Puppy And A Truck.” As the days progressed, the assignments kept coming in and Jenny ended up writing a good portion of Joy’All.”
Lightning Dust
Nostalgia Killer
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “In 2019, Lightning Dust broke up. Not the band — Amber Webber and Joshua Wells, the couple at the core of it, ended their longtime relationship. In the wake of the split, the two musicians realized Lightning Dust was still important to them and decided to stay together as an artistic partnership. The experience made them think about nostalgia as a concept and how this sort of longing for the past can be destructive, cancerous, useless. Webber and Wells reconvened virtually in mid-2020 to work together again as creative comrades, sharing some new ideas by correspondence, stitching together their song fragments into the dramatic arrangements now heard across Lightning Dust’s forthcoming new album, Nostalgia Killer.”
Janelle Monáe
The Age of Pleasure
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “On the heels of her showstopping Met Gala appearance and the release of new single Lipstick Lover, Janelle Monáe announced her hugely anticipated new album, The Age Of Pleasure. Monáe is without question one of the most celebrated artists of the modern era, an eight-time Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter, producer, performer, and fashion icon known worldwide for her inimitable style and visionary sound. With multiple celebrated albums, The Archandroid (2010), The Elecric Lady (2013) and Dirty Computer (2018), acclaimed theatrical and television performances, and her unwavering activism for social justice and the LGBTQIA+ community, Monáe continues to be one of the most compelling and important artists of this generation.”
Teke::Teke
Hagata
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Acclaimed Montreal Japanese psych-rock band Teke::Teke’s upcoming album Hagata is their sophomore effort following 2021’s Shirushi. “Hagata is a very deep word, something present but also something leftover from someone or something no longer there,” vocalist Maya Kuroki explains. “It’s like waking up from a dream, or being connected to the other side of something.” Teke::Teke are intimately familiar with that duality, of splitting reality between past and present, complex melodies and hushed interludes, intense action and lingering response.”
