First Listen: Quarterbacks, ‘Quarterbacks’
With 19 songs in just 22 minutes, Quarterbacks offers pop melodies at punk speed and a reminder that love and hurt needn’t always be rendered at epic scale.
Category: Music
First Listen: John Carpenter, ‘Lost Themes’
The film director is known for composing and performing his own soundtracks. On Lost Themes, he reaches beyond the movies to craft a collection of understandably cinematic-sounding music.
First Listen: Mount Eerie, ‘Sauna’
An arresting, frozen-moment splay of images and emotions, Phil Elverum’s latest album as Mount Eerie feels less like a meditation and more like a slow-motion mauling.
First Listen: Asaf Avidan, ‘Gold Shadow’
The Israeli singer has a compelling, unusual, wholly original voice. On Gold Shadow, his first official release in North America, he writes with passion and poetry.
First Listen: Title Fight, ‘Hyperview’
On its third album, the band doesn’t quite shed its punk roots — at least not entirely — but it does sound like something out of a dream spent underwater.
First Listen: Amason, ‘Sky City’
Never locked to one mood, these vibrant, polished songs convey the spirit of a variety show in concert. But on Sky City, they replicate the intimacy and care of a great mixtape.
First Listen: The Lone Bellow, ‘Then Came The Morning’
The Brooklyn band’s music has always had a larger-than-life flamboyance about it. But on Then Came The Morning, it’s elevated by nuance that ventures frequently and welcomely into grace.
First Listen: Jessica Pratt, ‘On Your Own Love Again’
With little more than a weary sigh, the singer flips the banal into the magical; she makes listeners wonder about the circumstances she describes.
First Listen: Belle And Sebastian, ‘Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance’
The Glaswegian folk-pop band’s ninth album feels light on its feet, but without sacrificing the thoughtful, careful precision for which Stuart Murdoch and his collaborators are known.
First Listen: Until The Ribbon Breaks, ‘A Lesson Unlearnt’
The cinematic full-length debut from British producer Pete Lawrie-Winfield moves from spare piano and voice to moments that simulate the sound of smoldering rubble in a post-apocalyptic world.
First Listen: Viet Cong, ‘Viet Cong’
The band’s frigid, deafening, brutalist post-punk nods toward experimentalism. A massive production, Viet Cong’s self-titled debut culminates in a furious bonfire of rage and release.
First Listen: Sleater-Kinney, ‘No Cities To Love’
The rock trio’s first album since 2005 sounds as fresh and vital as a debut, but also as nuanced and skillful as the work of three players with a decade-long, inimitable rapport betwixt them.
First Listen: Red Baraat, ‘Gaadi Of Truth’
Along with the brass band’s Punjabi roots, you’re likely to hear ’70s-style D.C. go-go beats, hip-hop, funk, trance-inducing South Asian Qawwali sounds and traces of South American cumbia.
First Listen: Dan Mangan + Blacksmith, ‘Club Meds’
On the Vancouver songwriter’s fourth album, he plays with abrupt changes of tone and texture. Carefully conceived instrumental passages expand upon — and sometimes upend — his lyrics.
First Listen: Anonymous 4, ‘1865’
The beloved vocal quartet says goodbye with an all-American album that suits our troubled times. These Civil War and Reconstruction songs help us reflect on what divides us and binds us together.
First Listen: Kat Dahlia, ‘My Garden’
The Cuban-American singer-songwriter’s debut is filled with the fire that comes from being in an abusive relationship. She’s been in love, hurt, scared and angry — but she’s nobody’s fool.
‘Crabs For Christmas’: A Tuneful Baltimore Tradition (Really!)
More than 30 years ago, David DeBoy wrote a hit holiday song about a local delicacy. Its success led to other Baltimore-themed Christmas songs, then to albums and finally to a live show.
First Listen: ‘When I Reach That Heavenly Shore: Unearthly Black Gospel 1926-1936’
They might seem dusty, almost mystical or supernatural, but the vibrant songs on this three-disc set come from a golden age of gospel that set the path for rock ‘n’ roll.
First Listen: PRhyme, ‘PRhyme’
The collaborative project made by rapper Royce Da 5′ 9″ and producer DJ Premier is in actual fact a hardcore rap fan’s dream come true.
First Listen: Ghostface Killah, ’36 Seasons’
A superstar cast made a real life love story — disguised as an action movie — just because.