New releases for 4 February 2022

Our soaraway six, hand-picked from the many new releases out next week, starts with the sixth full-length studio album from Cate Le Bon – her follow-up to 2019’s Mercury-nominated Reward – whose title, Pompeii, suggests a coming apocalypse. However, this metaphor eclipses any dissection of the immediate present, says Le Bon, although this is not to downplay her nod to disorientation induced by the double catastrophe of global pandemic plus climate emergency’s colliding eco-traumas, which resonates all too eerily. What would be your final gesture? she asks.

Give Me The Future is a tribute to humanity in a tech age and reflects on the strangeness of living through times that can feel like science fiction. Exploring both the opportunities of new technology and the dark side of lives lived online, it’s as playful and fun as it is thought-provoking, as dystopian as it is dancefloor-friendly, and as electronic as Bastille have ever been.

Korn changed the world with the release of their self-titled debut – an album that pioneered a genre – while the band’s enduring success points to a larger cultural moment. The Fader notes: “There was an unexpected opening in the pop landscape and Korn articulated a generational coming-of-angst for a claustrophobic, self-surveilled consciousness. Korn became the soundtrack for a generation’s arrival as a snarling, thrashing, systemically restrained freak show.

Time Skiffs’ nine songs are love letters, distress signals, en-plein-air observations, and relaxation hymns, the collected transmissions of four people who have grown into relationships and parenthood and adult worry. But they are rendered with Animal Collective’s singular sense of exploratory wonder: harmonies so rich you want to skydive through their shared air, textures so fascinating you want to decode their sorcery, rhythms so intricate you want to untangle their sources. Here is Animal Collective nearing 20, and still in search of what’s next.

We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power – capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be The Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star.

Our release of the week is Ants From Up There, which follows on almost exactly a year to the day from the release of Black Country, New Road’s acclaimed debut, For The First Time. The new album harnesses the momentum from their debut and manages to strike a skilful balance between feeling like a bold stylistic overhaul of what came before as well as a natural progression.

Black Country, New Road - Ants From Up ThereCate Le Bon - PompeiiBastille - Give Me The FutureKorn - RequiemAnimal Collective - Time SkiffsMitski - Laurel Hell

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