On to this week’s smashers! After years of writing, wandering and starting over, The Lemonheads return with Love Chant: a bold, melodic reaffirmation of one of alternative rock’s most distinctive voices. Evan Dando’s relocation to Brazil, where much of the album was recorded, has offered a chance to reset, reconnect and finally bring these songs into focus. The result is a record that sounds both fresh and familiar: rooted in the hallmarks of The Lemonheads’ best work yet expanded by years of lived experience and new surroundings.
Brandi Carlile is back with her eighth studio album, her first solo project in four years. After pouring herself into collaborations with musical icons and legends, the multi-Grammy Award-winning songwriter is looking inward, reflecting backward and, ultimately, returning home on her brand-new album, Returning to Myself. The ten-song collection is produced by Andrew Watt, Carlile, Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon.
Circa Waves’ new album was both terrifying and liberating to write, serving as a powerful coping mechanism to help process frontman Kieran Shudall’s near-death experience from a blocked aorta. And the results, on Death & Love, are quite simply stunning: harking back to the sounds and themes that made Shudall want to play guitar in the first place, this is an incredibly powerful snapshot in time – a reflection on a moment of true terror and the joy of coming through the other side. It’s a brave and remarkable next step for a band in the finest form of their career.
Chimehours is a collaborative project of Beck Goldsmith and Jon Dix in which they can express their shared love for folk horror, ghost stories and the supernatural. The concept for Underneath the Earth took shape after a candlelit reading of Max Porter’s ‘Lanny’ one Burns Night. Inspired by ethereal minimalism, retro cinema and folk narratives, Chimehours craft a sonic palette incorporating drones, drums and gritty guitars merging with woodwind, strings and vocal textures that resist clear linearity.
What if a song could feel like a moment you never want to end, even though you know it must? This duality exists at the heart of Stay Here Where It’s Warm, the debut album from Toronto duo Babygirl. Meticulously built, it’s a gently devastating record about fleeting intimacy, emotional refuge and learning to let go. Babygirl – Kiki Frances and Cameron Bright – makes bittersweet pop rock that has already amassed over 50 million streams.
Our release of the week is We Were Just Here, on which Dundalk’s Just Mustard surge out from the shadows with a sound that leans toward light and euphoria. Their signature elements remain intact – warped guitars, cavernous low ends, twisted sound design – but this time the noise is channelled into something warmer and more melodic. Inspired by club spaces and physical joy, the songs strive for immediacy and feeling. Katie Ball’s vocals rise higher in the mix, capturing a conflicted pursuit of happiness that she describes as “trying to feel euphoric, but at a cost.”
Click on an image to order your copy.