Home Read News Next Week in Music | Jan. 20-26 • The Short List: 23...

Next Week in Music | Jan. 20-26 • The Short List: 23 Titles You Want to Hear (Part 2)

Iggy, Mogwai, Pentagram, Lucero, Lizzy & more of the poppermost's toppermost.

Well, that escalated quickly. After a couple of slow weeks, the music gods are clearly back up to speed. Not that I’m complaining. Next week’s releases are the makings of a great mixtape — rock, pop, psychedelia, punk, metal, blues, country, live albums, acoustic remakes, take your pick. Best of all: Along with plenty of new albums from familiar names, there are at least half a dozen artists I’ve never heard of before — but need to hear a lot more from right away. Meet your next favourite band below:

 


Mogwai
The Bad Fire

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The arrival of a new Mogwai album — their 11th — is cause for great celebration. The album’s title, The Bad Fire, is a working-class Glaswegian term for Hell. It reflects the difficult time that members of the band were going through. New to the studio was American producer John Congleton, known for his work with Explosions In The Sky, Sigur Rós, John Grant and pretty much everyone between. Congleton’s work can be heard on the album’s three singles. The album opener God Gets You Back sounds like Daft Punk being hunted by My Bloody Valentine, while Fanzine Made Of Flesh sounds like a victory parade for a baby yeti, and Lion Rumpus does actually sound like a lion rumpus. The music of Mogwai is a difficult thing to describe, but an easy thing to experience. At punishing volume, it can annihilate your body, leaving you as little more than a head which should by rights fall helplessly to the ground. Yet the music contains an updraft, a sense of beauty encased in the onslaught. This holds you up, suspended and empowered, reminding you that paradise is your birthright. This is especially true of The Bad Fire. It may have been created in dark conditions, but all that is transcended by the act of four musicians working together here, now, in the moment — the only place where Mogwai exist.”


Ben Nichols & Rick Steff
Lucero Unplugged

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE:Lucero lead singer Ben Nichols and keyboardist Rick Steff spent a day at Matt Ross-Spang’s Southern Grooves studio in Memphis, recording acoustic versions of Lucero songs. Spanning the band’s career, the songs range from some of Lucero’s most popular crowd favorites to more obscure rarities and were all recorded live in the studio featuring grand piano and acoustic guitar. The double album, Lucero Unplugged, presents 20 stripped-down tracks that offer fresh takes on the band’s exceptional catalogue.”


Open Head
What Is Success

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE:Open Head are a four-piece experimental ensemble from Kingston, N.Y. With a taste for the concrete and the spectral, their new album What Is Success sources beauty in brutalist architecture, holography, and the remnants of industrialism that ornament the Hudson Valley landscape. The result is expansive, stratospheric in volume, and brutally material in its punctuation and delivery. Drawing on New York No Wave and the avant-garde history of punk, noise, hip-hop and electronic music, Open Head present a sound that is itself a landscape–immediate, colossal, ruined and essential.”


Pentagram
Lightning In A Bottle

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “You can try if you want — you wouldn’t be the first — but Pentagram are undeniable. More than 50 years on from the first incarnation of the band, through decades of tumult, hard wins and tough losses, the band has cast an influence across doom the likes of which few have ever attained, and as with Candlemass, or Saint Vitus, Trouble or any other ‘legendary’ name you want to drop, modern doom cannot not take the shape it has without them. The singular presence of frontman Bobby Liebling has been the consistent driving factor keeping them going against odds, gods, and, sometimes, better judgment — Pentagram’s history is known almost as much for drama and scandal, the comings and goings of members, sometimes acrimonious, as it is for classic songs. It’s 2024 and Pentagram stand ready for another impossible comeback with another revamped lineup and their 10th studio album Lightning In A Bottle — a record that brings new ideas and perspectives while remaining true to Pentagram’s history in riffs and facebound groove.”


Iggy Pop
Live At Montreux Jazz Festival 2023

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE:Iggy Pop is an avant-garde icon and a punk pioneer. The Montreux Jazz Festival is a boundary-pushing event that brings the best of all musical genres to one gorgeous location every year. Live At Montreux Jazz Festival 2023 captures his dazzling performance that could only happen here. This concert marked Iggy’s third appearance at the 57th edition of Montreux. Backed by a seven-piece band, Iggy breathes new fire into Stooges classics like I Wanna Be Your Dog and T.V. Eye and ignites the adoring crowd with visceral run-throughs of The Passenger and, of course, Lust for Life.”


Dax Riggs
7 Songs For Spiders

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “From the swamps of southern Louisiana comes the apocalyptic folk rock of Dax Riggs: Starting with the teenage death metal of Acidbath on through the gothic Dixie-fried trash rock of Deadboy & The Elephantmen, Dax has opened for artists as diverse as Queens of the Stone Age and Leon Russell. Like Leadbelly with a devil on his back…Outsider music, for your dying radios, in the basement at the end of the world. 7 Songs For Spiders is Riggs’ third solo record and his first release in 15 years. It’s inspired by world music, gospel, hillbilly and proto metal sounds with an undercurrent of rebellious joy.”


Rose City Band
Sol Y Sombra

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE:Rose City Band’s music is sun-kissed timeless country rock whose seemingly effortless momentum carries the joy of its creation without ignoring the darkness pervading our consciousness. Led by guitarist/vocalist Ripley Johnson, the music of Rose City Band is rooted in his love of private press records of the mid-to-late ’70s. The band, in addition to Johnson, features pedal steel guitarist Barry Walker, keyboardist Paul Hasenberg and drummer John Jeffrey, who enmesh a keen sense of rhythmic drive and melody with gentler, sumptuous atmospheres. Sol Y Sombra digs its heels into insatiable grooves, its parade of catchy songs conjuring a sunset drive through an open desert, both a celebration of a sojourn and a reach for the warmth of home. “With Rose City Band, I’m generally trying to make uplifting music, good time music,” says Johnson. “This time I couldn’t avoid the shadow being more of a presence. There’s no getting away from it. The shadow is always there. So, I left it in.”


Thin Lizzy
Acoustic Sessions

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE:The Acoustic Sessions is the future cult album from Thin Lizzy and is essentially their MTV Unplugged, bringing the Lizzy catalog to a new and wider audience. This unique project offers fans a rare opportunity to experience Thin Lizzy’s classic hits like never before, with Lynott’s previously unheard vocals perfectly complemented by Eric Bell’s fresh acoustic arrangements and Brian Downey’s dynamic drumming. Drawing on material from the band’s legendary Decca era, the album presents tracks from their first three albums in an intimate, stripped-down format that will delight both longtime fans and a new generation of listeners. The album includes the first acoustic version of Whiskey in the Jar, the song that propelled Thin Lizzy to international fame. This reinterpretation of a classic hit is a testament to the enduring appeal of Thin Lizzy’s music and offers a new take on their legacy that is both timeless and contemporary.”


Samba Touré
Baarakelaw

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The legendary Mali desert blues artist Samba Touré returns with Baarakelaw (The Workers) — the followup to his highly acclaimed 2021 album BingaBaarakelaw is a vivid mix of traditional northern Malian Songhoy music, blues-rock tracks with psychedelic overtones, ballads and love songs. It weaves the sounds and styles Samba has loved and mastered during his more than three-decade musical journey. The songs deal with a central theme: the trials and tribulations of those who work street jobs in a dusty, bustling West African city like Bamako. Each song is a tribute to those who work small, demanding jobs in a dusty, bustling West African city like Bamako: street water sellers, itinerant tailors, housekeepers employed by families. These jobs are essential factors of social cohesion in Mali (and elsewhere), demonstrating on a daily basis that in a difficult situation, everyone needs each other.”


Vukovi
My God Has Got A Gun

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Scottish alt-metal provocateurs Vukovi return with their latest album My God Has A Gun. The duo of Janine Shilstone and Hamish Reilly are set to level up their game with an album has provoking as the title would suggest. To introduce the band’s next showing, Vukovi have debuted a powerful first preview with the unveiling of the electrifying first single Gungho. Anchored by a commanding performance from Shilstone along with assertive instrumentation and composition from Reilly, the single suggests the band is operating at their creative peak. Shilstone explained how the new single is a strong indicator of what’s to come, “A new chapter of sound is about to unfold. These songs will speak to places we’ve all been, but few have heard.”


Waldo’s Gift
Malcolm’s Law

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “An electrifying new force in the new wave of U.K. experimental music, Bristol trio Waldo’s Gift arrive with their debut album Malcolm’s Law. Led by the brash, technicolour lead single Candifloss, the album is a sizzling, maximalist, impossibly complex guitar record. While Waldo’s Gift have been associated with the U.K. jazz explosion, mainly owing to their focus on improvisation, there are shades here of prog-metal, math-rock, and the more intense ends of Squarepusher or Aphex Twin. Unbelievably, every track is a single live performance, recorded with no overdubs or extras. “We’re all on the limit of what we can physically play,” says drummer James Vine, “and that’s where the fun comes from.”


Young Knives
Landfill

THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Four years have passed since Young Knives’ last studio outing — 2020’s aggressive and philosophical look at humanity’s propensity for hyper-violence, Barbarians — and during this time the band have taken a step to consider the changing of the world around them, their place in it, and the sometimes-futile pursuit of controlling what it is that we leave behind when we’re gone. Fans will pick up on the tongue-in-cheek use of the word Landfill as an album title from a band that emerged during the post-indie-rock revival of the ’00s. But rather than dwelling on the derogatory landfill stick that has sometimes comes to beat them, Young Knives use this coming phase of their career to contemplate the nature of existence and how best to catalogue it through song. As lead singer and guitarist Henry Dartnall puts it, “it’s a record is about letting things go before they are taken from you, including the carefully curated images of ourselves. Embracing everything the world throws at you and not taking it to heart.”