Grammys, shmammys. Whether you agree or not that Sunday’s annual award shindig actually constitutes Music’s Biggest Night, I can tell you this for sure: It’s definitely not being followed by Music’s Biggest Week For New Music. Truth be told, it’s pretty quiet out there. But not completely silent, as the six-pack of upcoming titles below proves handily. From Brittany Howard and Madi Diaz to Sonic Youth and a Clash tribute, here are your plays of the week:
Madi Diaz
Weird Faith
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “On her last album, History Of A Feeling, Madi Diaz confronted the dissolution of a long relationship and a nuanced breakup. “Writing that record was like throwing a dart at an emotional dart board,” she says. “I was trying to get closer to the bullseye of the core of what I was feeling with no goal other than processing my own grief.” Though it was scary to put those feelings out there for mass consumption, Diaz found the process of bringing the record on tour strangely healing. On Weird Faith, Diaz once again examines a romantic partnership, but this time, her songs are about falling for someone and the endless self-questioning a new relationship inspires. “After being really burned by love — maybe relentlessly burned by it — the album is about being brave and trying again. Doing it differently,” she says. “It’s in our nature to try to be brave like that. You see the car crash coming. Maybe it won’t happen, but you’re bracing for it anyway.” In the throes of new love, she repeatedly encountered the same questions: “Am I ready for this? Can I do this? Can I trust myself to know the good from the bad?”
Ducks Ltd.
Harm’s Way
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Ducks Ltd. make inviting and frenetic guitar pop for when life feels overwhelming. While the band’s songs are ostensibly breezy, a palpable anxiety boils underneath that communicates something deeper about everyday existence. On their latest album Harm’s Way, the Toronto duo of Tom McGreevy and Evan Lewis hone in on interpersonal and societal collapses, urban decay, and the near-impossibility of keeping a level head when everything around you seems to be falling apart. “They’re songs about struggling,” says singer and lyricist McGreevy (who also plays bass and rhythm guitar). “About watching people I care for suffer, and trying to figure out how to be there for them. And about the strain of living in the world when it feels like it’s ready to collapse.” Even with its often dark subject matter, Harm’s Way is Ducks Ltd.’s most vividly rendered and collaborative collection yet. It’s an undeniable evolution for the band, not just in how these songs soar, but in their entire writing and recording processes.”
Helado Negro
Phasor
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Phasor is Robert Carlos Lange’s tightest collection — deep, atmospheric, meticulously executed. It’s aligned with 2019’s This Is How You Smile, which found him incorporating more upfront drums and bass and focused grooves. His 2021 album, Far In, focused on being in quarantine — talking to your mother through Zoom instead of across a room. Phasor, in turn, is a homage to going outside again. It’s a returning-to-life record, remembering what the sun feels like and letting it warm your skin. Some of the seeds for Phasor were planted in 2019 on Lange’s 39th birthday after a five-hour visit to Salvatore Matirano’s SAL MAR machine at the University of Illinois. The machine is a complex synthesizer that creates music generatively with a vintage super computer brain and analog oscillators. It can create an infinite amount of possibilities in sound sequences. “I was enthralled by it,” Lange recalls. “It gave me special insight into what stimulates me. This pursuit of constant curiosity in process and outcome. The songs are the fruit, but I love what’s under the dirt. The unseen magical process. I don’t want everybody to see it because not everyone cares to see it. Some of us just want the fruit. I do. But I want to grow the fruit, too.”
Brittany Howard
What Now
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “There’s a double meaning to the title of What Now, the revelatory new album from singer-songwriter Brittany Howard. “With the world we’re living in now, it feels like we’re all just trying to hang onto our souls,” says the Nashville-based musician and frontwoman for four-time Grammy-winning Alabama Shakes. “Everything seems to be getting more extreme and everyone keeps wondering, ‘What now? What’s next?’ By the same coin, the only constant on this record is you never know what’s going to happen next: every song is its own aquarium, its own little miniature world built around whatever I was feeling and thinking at the time.” With five Grammy wins and 16 nominations, Howard follows up her massively acclaimed solo debut Jaime — a 2019 LP that landed on multiple best-of-the-year lists — with What Now, drawing an immense and indelible power from endless unpredictability. Over the course of its 12 tracks, Howard brings her singular musicality to a shapeshifting sound encompassing everything from psychedelia and dance music to dream-pop and avant-jazz—a fitting backdrop for an album whose lyrics shift from unbridled outpouring to incisive yet radically idealistic commentary on the state of the human condition. At turns galvanizing, cathartic, and wildly soul-expanding, the result is a monumental step forward for one of the most essential artists of our time.”
Sonic Youth
Walls Have Ears
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Culled from three 1985 gigs in the U.K. during a transitional and transcendent time in the band’s story, Sonic Youth’s Walls Have Ears appeared as a two-LP set in 1986, not just a live album but an artful tapestry full of live experimentation with songs, between-song tape segues, darkness, humor and audio verité on par with elements of side B of Master Dik to come later. With a bit of complexity to the situation of the release itself. Deleted as quickly as it appeared, it’s now issued for the first time officially under the band’s auspices. The first two sides are massive, cavernous, with newly drafted drummer Steve Shelley in tow taking on past tunes and unveiling Expressway To Yr Skull in glorious form. They tear it up especially on one trash-fi excerpt of Blood On Brighton Beach (actually Making the Nature Scene) from a legendary outdoor gig where Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo’s guitars treble-blast dissonant shockwaves over the black-stoned beach of Quadrophenia fame. The record’s second slab spotlights an April 1985 pre-Shelley gig supporting Nick Cave at London’s Hammersmith Palais and was one of the final appearances live of Bob Bert. This document remains an essential representation of some lean and mean years of the quartet’s throttling march out into the world.”
Various Artists
Hearts & Minds & Crooked Beats: Songs Of The Clash
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “People can change anything they want to, and that means anything in the world,” said Joe Strummer. Benefiting the International Rescue Committee, the compilation Hearts & Minds & Crooked Beats invites bands and visual artists to create work inspired by The Clash and celebrating their music and human rights message. The album features tracks from The Dandy Warhols, Teke::Teke, Mirah, Smokey Brights, Sean Barna, The Gotobeds, Big League, Labasheeda, Julia Massey of Warren Dunes and The Rust and The Fury.”
