In this action-packed season of 24, our hero Jack Bauer races against the clock once again to subvert terrorists and save the nation from disaster — by listening to all the great new albums coming out next week. And of course, his faithful computer curmudgeon Chloe O’Brian assists him by streaming all the music and videos to his phone, car radio, watch and various billboards and Jumbotrons while he speeds from record store to record store. Or something like that: It’s late and I’m tired. Here are your plays of the week:
The Minus 5
Oar On, Penelope!
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “What is The Minus 5 in Year 2025? You might well ask! What started off in 1993 as a studio side project (as Young Fresh Fellows were easing up on their typically frenetic activities), it was originally meant to explore the folkier, more dismal side of rock’s palate/pallet. Now 30 years on, it seems to be just another rock band — a band with a rather extensive discography, belying its part-time status. Which is pretty awesome anyway. The new album, Oar On, Penelope!, was in fact recorded in classic Get Back style, gathered in a room (or two), musicians tackling ideas that had not been demoed, or heard, or performed previously — and yet they seemed to be songs, rather instantly upon inception. The core band on this effort is Scott (The Hoople) McCaughey, ever-ready Peter Buck, Linda Pitmon and Kurt Bloch. Debbi Peterson added her golden voice to every song. Plus there are guest appearances by Spencer Tweedy, Patterson Hood and Ed Stasium. Somehow, less thought was put into this record… which is actually an extremely positive development!”
Moonrisers
Harsh & Exciting
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Detroit doom-folk duo Moonrisers — guitarist Libby DeCamp and drummer Adam Schreiber — are about to drop their Dan Auerbach-produced debut album Harsh & Exciting. Recorded in a Nashville house that predates country music, the album is a new and nuanced take on old and earthy musical styles: Folk, blues, jazz, gospel, even cowboy songs. As Moonrisers, DeCamp and Schreiber make music rooted in the past yet engaged with the present. They play instruments with long histories — she has a Slingerland May Bell parlor guitar from the ’30s, he has a 100-year-old calfskin drumkit — and they find inspiration in close readings of late nineteenth-century poets and early twentieth-century naturalists. “It’s an instrumental record, but it reads more like a landscape,” says DeCamp. “There’s a lot of space in it. Nature is at the heart of what we were hearing and what we were trying to convey. And we wanted to connect with that kind of timelessness in nature through our old, rickety instruments.”
Mt. Joy
Hope We Have Fun
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Since forming in 2016, the Philadelphia indie-rock band Mt. Joy — Matt Quinn (vocals, guitar), Sam Cooper (guitar), Jackie Miclau (keys, piano), Sotiris Eliopoulos (drums) and Michael Byrnes (bass) — have put in their 10,000 hours preparing for this very moment. After nearly a decade of touring and recording three critically acclaimed albums (2018’s Mt. Joy, 2020’s Rearrange Us and 2022’s Orange Blood), the five-piece reached new heights in 2024, selling out Madison Square Garden, L.A.’s Greek Theater, Red Rocks Amphitheater and more. Now, Mt. Joy sits on the precipice of another breakthrough year, with the release of their fourth LP, Hope We Have Fun. For Quinn, the record speaks directly to the band’s long journey together — “We’ve all worked incredibly hard together and done ridiculous things in sickness and in health. You just kind of look up and you’re at Madison Square Garden with these people, and it makes you emotional — it feels like something you never could have dreamed. The album is a realization that we pushed ourselves into this crazy world, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. It’s a lot about sticking together in relationships, living a crazy lifestyle and just kinda saying, ‘I hope we have fun.’ ”
Pavement
Pavements Soundtrack
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Compiled by Pavements producer/editor Robert Greene and Pavement, the soundtrack to their band’s new documentary ropes together disparate elements of Perry’s film — dialogue snippets, scenes from the fake Oscar-bait biopic Range Life, and cast recordings from the Slanted! Enchanted! jukebox musical as well as live and rehearsal tapes from the band’s 2021 reunion tour.”
Planning For Burial
It’s Closeness, It’s Easy
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “If Below The House was about returning home, following in the footsteps of your father and joining a union, and leaving behind youth’s wild days, It’s Closeness, It’s Easy embraces what comes next — the weight of all years, the quiet shifts, the reckoning with what remains. This record is many things. It captures the slow drift of time, the unnoticed shifts in a loved one — the creeping changes in mental health, the quiet pull of addiction, the kind of grief that settles in the bones rather than announces itself. At its core, It’s Closeness, It’s Easy is about stepping into middle age and taking stock. It confronts the reality of living with the hand that’s been dealt and searching for meaning in what remains. It speaks to loss — the crushing weight of saying goodbye to a beloved 17 year old cat, the slow-motion grief of watching friends self-destruct, the inescapable passage of time as it bears down on aging parents and the self. But it also reflects the warmth of reconnection, the kind of love that never burns out but instead deepens. The feeling of picking up where things left off, untouched by the years in between.”
Grace Potter
Medicine
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Way back in 2008 — before the Grammy nominations, the steady stream of sold-out tours and critically acclaimed records — Grace Potter holed up in an L.A. studio with producer T Bone Burnett and cut an album unlike any other in her wildly expansive body of work. Made with a crew of musical luminaries, the Burnett-produced LP captured Potter at a moment of profound metamorphosis, then wound up shelved. After joining forces with her former label to unearth those recordings from deep in the vaults, Potter at long last presents the official release of Medicine: A powerhouse album that’s equal parts archival gem and thrilling new addition to her extraordinary catalog. “I remember being in the studio with T Bone and feeling like this was everything I’d been waiting for, and I couldn’t go wrong — it never occurred to me that the album might not get released,” says Potter. “But even though I felt a great urgency to put the record out back then, I’m at peace with the fact that it’s taken this long. I’m at a point where I have a much stronger understanding of what I have to offer the world, and this offering feels like it’s right on time.”
Ty Segall
Possession
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “2025: YOLO. With the quickness, time’s still slipping into the future — so fast at times, you may think the end’s in sight up ahead, or that you’ve outrun the long trail of history behind. All that’s absurd, man. Take it from Ty Segall. He’s been on a few trips around the Sun himself, making records in orbit as he charts his path forward. Modern life is here to stay, but also (to quote an old civil war scribe), everything rocks and nothing dies — so for Possession, Ty’s 16th album, he strikes up the orchestra in his head with an abiding view of some quintessentially American stories, a quest channeled into ten non-stop bangers. A year and a half removed from the trenchant identity opus of his Three Bells song cycle, Ty’s beamed himself out from deep within psychic interiors. Hitting the trail beneath the big skies of our good ol’ frontier empire, he’s on the hunt for new horizons — and it’s frankly astonishing to hear, at this mature point in his discography, the discovery of invigorated new sonics around every bend. That’s simply what Ty does with his music. Here, compulsive rhythm arrangements are joined in battle by sweeping movements of strings and horns that further the charge righteously.”
Alan Sparhawk
With Trampled By Turtles
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “No one can help you build something beautiful quite like those who know you best. Alan Sparhawk knows this well. In his years in Low, he built decades of stirring music with his wife and lifelong creative partner Mimi Parker. In recent years, he has performed around Minnesota with his son Cyrus in Derecho Rhythm Section, a funk band that also frequently features his daughter Hollis on vocals. There’s an irreplaceable naturalism that comes with this kind of dynamic. Those who know you understand you. They love you. They want to help you bring your greatest passions to fruition. And so, it only made sense that Sparhawk would turn to fellow Duluth musicians Trampled By Turtles to realize his latest record. As friends and mentees of Low — taken under Sparhawk and Parker’s wing from their earliest days as a bar band — Trampled By Turtles have performed with Sparhawk countless times over the years. The Duluth ties run deep: “There’s a certain vibe that has to do with underdog syndrome, coming from a small town,” Sparhawk muses. “Some of it is the weird grind and slackness that being at the mercy of Mother Nature puts in you. It humbles you.”
Swans
Birthing
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The material contained in this album was largely developed over the course a year-long Swans tour, during 2023 and 2024, then recorded and further orchestrated and rearranged in the studio,” says Michael Gira of Swans. “In all cases the material began with me sitting in my office with an acoustic guitar, singing and dreaming about what would become of these skeletal songs. I’m blessed to have such a stellar group of musicians to work with live, and through improvisation, endless revisions and an intensity of focus in performance (not to mention endurance), over the course of time the music morphed into what you generally hear on this collection.”
Various Artists
Blonde On A Bum Trip: Original Soundtrack
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “They’re coming! The Hippies! The Acid Heads! Blonde On A Bum Trip is a frank, revealing look at the LSD generation! Instead of using the usual jazzy instrumental library music or generic elevator pop, The Vagrants, The Bit’ A Sweet, and to a much greater extent The E-Types were recruited to propel the film’s lysergic journey. This serves as the first ever soundtrack to this film as well as a doctorate level exploration into The E-Types’ Put The Clock Back On The Wall. 1967 ushered in the Summer of Love and dozens of feature length psychedelic-themed films flooded theaters and drive-ins, opening minds across America. A number of black-and-white LSD films were made in the mid-1960s, yet Blonde On A Bum Trip (1968) stands out as something unique and different. Shot in N.Y.C. entirely in electric shades of gray, this motion picture comes across more like an underground student film and freaky fringe time capsule.”
Whatever…
Into Darker Days
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Cleveland, Ohio’s Whatever… stormed through the ’90s and early 2000s with a relentless barrage of punk rock anthems fueled by disillusionment, isolation, and raw fury. Now, nearly 25 years later, original members Ben Wrecked (vocals/guitar) and Matt Fish (drums) are back, louder and sharper than ever, joined by Brett Moore (guitar) and Peter Woodward (bass/vocals) to resurrect one of the Midwest’s most fierce punk acts. Their latest album, Into Darker Days, marks the band’s first full-length release since 1997’s Youngsters, delivering 12 new tracks that hit with the same melodic urgency and unapologetic edge fans have always loved. Leaning into the existential unrest of today’s world, Whatever… channel decades of frustration into a sound that’s both familiar and freshly ferocious. This isn’t a reunion. It’s a reckoning.”
Yeule
Evangelic Girl Is A Gun
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Yeule, the cyborg alchemist coalescing the soundscapes of glitch-pop electronica, alt rock, and trip-hop. After their breakthrough sophomore album in 2022, Glitch Princess, Nat Ćmiel crystallised their place as alt electronica luminary with their boundary-breaking 2023 album Softscars. With Evangelic Girl Is A Gun, Yeule paints us a picture with divine poise: Fragmented shards of their persona non grata, or “darker side,” pieced together as the painterly fatale who burns through the canvas of post-modernity. With visual artworks captured by artist Vasso Vu, Ćmiel is seen here tethered to their role as a “painter” before performer. Ćmiel paints an homage to the artist’s role — an artist that illuminates the neon glow of an ego death, and the transformative forms of love, immortalising in our physical reality, their dream within all dreams.”
