Some say music is the food of love. If that’s true, you’ve got an all-you-eat buffet heading your way in time for Valentine’s Day. Feast your eyes and ears on these platters — and don’t forget to save room for dessert:
Ryan Adams
Another Wednesday
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Discover another take on Ryan Adams’ acclaimed 2020 release Wednesdays with this reworked edition of the album. The new collection, curated by Adams, breathes fresh life into the record, offering fans and newcomers a chance to experience the album in a new perspective. Featuring refreshed takes on some of the original track listing, Another Wednesday reinvents the sound and spirit of Wednesdays. The reworked edition includes a selection of thoughtfully chosen cover tracks — paying homage to the music that inspired the original album’s creation.”
Marshall Allen
New Dawn
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Two days after his 100th birthday, Marshall Allen started recording New Dawn, his debut solo album. A member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra since 1958, Allen assumed leadership of the band in 1995. Throughout his nearly 70-year career, Allen has never released a solo album under his own name, and yet, instead of capping such a legendary output, New Dawn seems to herald a new beginning. A love letter to spacetime, it channels a century of musical intelligence into seven tracks, showing Allen at his most protean — freely moving from relaxed, transdimensional palettes to bluesy big band and beyond. Though greatly informed by the philosophy of Ra and his Saturnian teachings — traverse jazz’s traditions, dig deep into spiritual geographies — New Dawn signals Allen as his own singular voice, one that’s swinging and bopping and reflecting into the future, with no sign of stopping.”
The Altons
Heartache in Room 14
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “After several wildly popular singles out on Penrose Records, alongside labelmates Thee Sacred Souls, The Altons gear up to release their debut album on Daptone Records. With lead vocals shared between Adriana Flores and Brian Ponce, the interplay between their unique timbres brings a romantic quality to the music that is absent in many of today’s soul offerings. Steeped with moody ballads, soulful, tejano-kissed duets and Bond-theme psychedelia, Heartache In Room 14 is poised to be an essential album of 2025.”
Califone
The Villager’s Companion
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Like a passenger riding shotgun on a road trip, The Villagers Companion offers its own unique perspective and story to tell. Featuring tracks recorded alongside last year’s acclaimed Villagers, TVC captures the miles between the start and destination — the faded gas station pit stops, the plastic saint statue stuck to the dashboard for safe travels or luck. It embodies the essence of the journey without the burden of driving — the experience of the ride itself. The album takes us through the heart of Califone’s magic: reverb-drenched piano chords, electronic whirs, and layers of experimental noise. Guided by Tim Rutili’s abstract, fragmented lyrics — both strange and familiar — delivered through his warm, well-worn vocals, it creates an experience as evocative as it is haunting.”
Crazy Lixx
Thrill Of The Bite
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Crazy Lixx are a Swedish heavy metal / hair metal / hard rock band from Malmö, Sweden. Known for their energetic performances, catchy hooks, and an unapologetic revival of the glam metal sound from the late ’80s, Crazy Lixx have become a flagship of the New Wave of Swedish Sleaze Metal. The band draws inspiration from acts like Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, Alice Cooper, Ratt, Skid Row and Guns N’ Roses, creating a perfect blend of melodic hard rock with modern production values and a keen eye for ’80s and ’90s nostalgia. Thrill Of The Bite features tracks that highlight Crazy Lixx’s ability to make the most of their nostalgic, sleaze-metal roots, drawing inspiration from the flamboyant heavy metal and movies of that era alike.”
Richard Dawson
End Of The Middle
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The title of Richard Dawson’s new album End Of The Middle is a suitably slippery contradiction, one that invites multiple interpretations: Middle-aging? Middle-class? The middle-point of Dawson’s career? The centre of a record? Centrism in general? Polarisation? The possibility of having a balanced discussion about anything? Stuck in the middle with you? Middle England? Middling songwriting? End Of The Middle is a wonkily beautiful peer into the workings of the family unit, perhaps several generations of the same family: “I wanted this record to be small-scale and very domestic”, Dawson explains, “to be stripped back, stark and naked, and let the lyrics and melodies speak for themselves and for the people in the songs.” By paring things right back what is revealed is a suite of remarkably poised, oddly elegant, beautiful music.”
Art d’Ecco
Serene Demon
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Does life have meaning or a purpose? What distinguishes good from evil? Do individuals enjoy free will or is destiny preordained? Critical thinkers — Sartre, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky — have pondered such questions for centuries. Serene Demon dispatches them in under 39 minutes, reflecting Art d’Ecco’s singular focus on his fourth album: “I was determined, in an almost monomaniacal way, to prove that I can do something different.” One need only to listen to the title track to recognize his success. Composing Serene Demon required two months’ time and deep reserves of creativity. The premise may seem straightforward (“it’s literally an existentialist and a true believer walk into a bar and debate”) but the execution is anything but, incorporating four distinct sections, a fluid tempo, and a myriad of tone colors as it veers between intimate and epic moments across seven and a half minutes. Likewise, the song’s succinct lyrics belie the enormity of its subject matter. “I’ve always been fascinated with the seduction of evil that lurks within us, and not just the archetype of the angel and the devil on each shoulder.” Evil can take many forms: self doubt, imposter syndrome, the unrelenting darkness of depression and anxiety. Yet out of this miasma, d’Ecco emerges triumphant. “That song is the most challenging thing I’ve ever written.”
Doves
Constellations For The Lonely
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Doves return with their first new music in over four years, reclaiming territory all their own with the stormy euphoria of Renegade. Jimi Goodwin and Andy and Jez Williams’ winding path to a sixth album reaches that milestone with the 10-track Constellations For The Lonely. Signing off their last chapter with the release of their third U.K. chart-topping album, 2020’s boundary-pushing The Universal Want, the release of the first single Renegade concluded a patchwork of writing and recording sessions that began in the same year. Reading from the same page on their new single’s sense of dystopian drama, all three Doves’ own sense of change, uncertainty and determination pervades the intricate, Goodwin-fronted collage of cinematic sound.”
Peter Dreams & Moonriivr
Peter Dreams & Moonriivr
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Together, Peter Dreams and Moonriivr create music that taps into a deeper, instinctive level of the unconscious mind. Their sound, a blend of twisted doo-wop and post-punk, feels like a psychic cold plunge, recasting one of alternative rock’s most recognizable voices. Not so much unleashed as untangled, this debut album explores the innermost depths. The songs bring to the surface dramatic events — brushes with death, life-altering moments, and everyday cataclysms — experiences too cataclysmic or euphoric to comfortably reside at the front of the mind. The deeper you dig, the closer you get to the light. An artful and instinctive exploration, July Talk frontman Peter Dreimanis’ first solo endeavor emerges from a dizzying mix of anticipation, hesitation, and introspection as the future unfolds.”
Horsegirl
Phonetics On And On
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “There is something about the bitter cold in Chicago that unites the city in January — and the two weeks in 2024 that Horsegirl spent recording Phonetics On and On were some of the coldest days in Chicago that year. With the heating off in Wilco’s studio The Loft to avoid sound interference, the band was bundled in multiple sweaters and sitting on their hands between takes. Working closely with musician/producer Cate Le Bon (Deerhunter, Kurt Vile, Wilco), Horsegirl found focus and intimacy in the studio that can only arise when it’s simply too cold to step outside. Abandoning the heavy saturation and character studies of Versions of Modern Performance, Le Bon leads them into new, bright, clear, sonic territories that highlight the inventive nature of these new songs. After playing together for four years, Horsegirl explore the limits of the trio configuration within Phonetics On and On — what if instead of filling out songs with distortion, they utilized the expanse that the three of them didn’t occupy? This question seems to be the motivating force behind the record, and the songs are a testament to experimenting with space and texture while maintaining a pop song at the core. New tools help bring this world to life; violins, synths, and gamelan tiles are all woven into the record with complete effect.”
Kestrels
Better Wonder
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Kestrels project has been nesting in Chad Peck’s mind since he was a kid in Nova Scotia, watching in awe as local punk bands released grungy cassette tapes to the young masses. While he didn’t enter the fray then, he did spend hours practising guitar at his kitchen table, and lived on a steady diet of The Beach Boys, Ash, Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins. Peck finally took the plunge into the music scene in 2005, when he used a small grant to start his own label, mostly to put out his own music (with a shouty, post-punk affair called The Medium Mood) and hawk local bands. Kestrels’ self-titled release dropped in 2016. Peck started working on the songs that would become Kestrels’ fifth album almost a decade ago; half of the tracks came from a scrapped solo album. He began composing in earnest, though, in the spring of 2021, secreted away in his house in the country. “It’s a nighttime record riddled with anxiety written during a weird time,” he says. “I had lived alone in the woods most of my adult life and I loved that lifestyle in a lot of ways. But during that time period there was so much change and tumult and those feelings of insanity at three in the morning. I was trying to capture it in a murky, uncomfortable sound.”
Gary Louris
Dark Country
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Over the last three decades, singer, songwriter, guitarist and producer Gary Louris has built a deeply compelling body of music whose artistry and integrity has won the loyalty of an international audience and the respect of both critics and his peers. Best known for his seminal work with The Jayhawks, he is one of the most acclaimed musicians to come out of Minnesota’s vibrant rock scene. But after meeting his wife and moving with her to a small town outside of Montreal, Louris found the inspiration for his third solo album Dark Country. “It is a love letter to my wife Steph, plain and simple. It was written and recorded in my little studio in our home in the mountains of Quebec,” says Louris. The result is an album that is front-to-back the most romantic of Louris’ career. He elaborates, “It is the most intimate and straight forward record I have ever made. Period. Just me in a room with my songs and you the listener. I am not typically an autobiographical lyricist but these songs are as literal as can be… all directed to my love.”
Manic Street Preachers
Critical Thinking
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Manic Street Preachers’ 15th studio album Critical Thinking celebrates conflicting ideas colliding, with unflinchingly soul-searching lyrics meeting some of the most head-on, addictive melodies the band have ever recorded. Says the Manics’ Nicky Wire: “This is a record of opposites colliding — of dialectics trying to find a path of resolution. While the music has an effervescence and an elegiac uplift, most of the words deal with the cold analysis of the self, the exception being the three lyrics by James (Dean Bradfield) which look for and hopefully find answers in people, their memories, language and beliefs. The music is energised and at times euphoric. Recording could sometimes be sporadic and isolated, at other times we played live in a band setting, again the opposites making sense with each other. There are crises at the heart of these songs. They are microcosms of skepticism and suspicion, the drive to the internal seems inevitable — start with yourself, maybe the rest will follow.”
Mantar
Post Apocalyptic Depression
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Mantar’s 2022 LP, Pain Is Forever and This Is The End, saw the German duo bring a sonic richness to their madly heavy, blackened death-punk grooves. The record added smoother, calmer, more harmonic textures to Mantar’s expanding palette. But on 2024’s Post Apocalyptic Depression, Mantar smash the palette and punch a hole in the canvas. “We wanted to do EVERYTHING different from the last album,” affirms Hanno. “The last album was very produced. A huge sounding record, clean production. Display of power. That was what we wanted and felt at that time. Now we are trying to destroy what we’ve built up with the last album. There is a certain beauty in disappointing people’s expectations.” The ethos is clear from the first words Hanno uses to describe the recording process: “Quick and dirty. We didn’t even bring our own gear to the studio, and just used the equipment that we would find there. There was zero planning involved in the making of this album. We wanted to keep it as primitive as possible. We were more bold this time and literally cut any shit off the songs that we didn’t think was necessary. I think you can hear that playing these new songs is more fun. I feel very connected with my punk roots on this album. Very punk rock production and next to our first album definitely the most raw sounding one.”
