The first of this week’s smashers comes from UK electronic pop icons Pet Shop Boys, who return with their brand-new studio album, Nonetheless. Produced by James Ford, the music on Nonetheless is both uplifting and reflective, mixing electronics, live instruments and orchestral arrangements. The songs are very melodic and quintessentially Pet Shop Boys with a fresh, open sound, bringing together classic strands of PSB song-writing and moving them in new directions.
The Big Decider comes into view as an album of stark significance to The Zutons. Written against the backdrop of a decade and a half’s worth of lived experience, it is born under the weight of family tragedies, lives lost and created, reality checks, and home truths faced up to and stared down. Wrestled into shape under the kind of steam that only decades-long friendships – with all their messy fall-outs, make-ups, breakdowns and ultimately love – can muster, The Big Decider became the sound of water passing under the bridge, and love for music, love for each other, and love for creating together becoming the most important thing of all.
Charley Crockett released a concept album in 2022 – the critically acclaimed Man From Waco, which Rolling Stone named the second best country album of the year, and which propelled Crockett to new heights and established him as one of the leaders of a sparkling revival of traditional country and folk music. Crockett didn’t set out to make another themed record, but the raw, personal, vivid portraits of a country in transition he was writing ended up being connected after all. As the album unfolds, you begin to understand that a $10 Cowboy is anyone who has hustled to get by, who didn’t fit in, who has slept on other people’s couches or on the street, who has fallen down, got back up, and ventured from home chasing a paying gig or a new start.
Fat White Family are back with the most sophisticated, vital and flamboyant creation of their career. Forgiveness Is Yours, the resplendent fourth album from the cult south-London band, has, like everything they’ve done, pushed them to the limits not only of their creative talent, but of their health, their sanity, their very existence.
Six Organs of Admittance is captured once again, on Time Is Glass, in the intricate tangle of the fretboards, soaring in open skies above. Like lens flare cutting through the speakers, spiderwebs cracking the windshield that holds back all the onrushing reality. Blowing the dust away, cutting a new path for cognition. After 20 years living on the road in different places, guitarist Ben Chasny returned home to Humboldt County – a far country, to some, but still part of the world through which creatures of all kinds move through and contribute to. It was there, where Six Organs had long ago emerged, in the name of everything cycling, of circles that spiral concentrically and remain unbroken, that the new music was conceived.
Our release of the week comes from three-time Grammy-winning iconoclast St. Vincent, who describes the process of fully self-producing her seventh studio album: “I had to walk through the fire with this one alone … I’m obsessed with production … trying to find those six seconds of lightning in a bottle that I could build an entire song around.” All Born Screaming takes listeners on that journey – featuring singles ‘Broken Man’, ‘Flea’ and focus ‘Big Time Nothing’ – with Annie Clark leading a ‘curated group of rippers’ including Dave Grohl, Cate Le Bon and Josh Freese.
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