The first of our six Easter eggs for you is All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, the first new album in nine years from The Libertines. On the album, the quartet of unlikely lads have gathered from their new-found homes in France, Denmark, Margate and London to solder their strongest-ever internal bond and to scale new creative heights, resulting in the best music so far of their extraordinary career.
Khruangbin’s fourth studio album, A La Sala (‘To the Room’ in Spanish), is an exercise in returning in order to go further, and doing so on your own terms. It continues the mystery and sanctity that is the key to how bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald ‘DJ’ Johnson, Jr and guitarist Mark ‘Marko’ Speer approach music. If 2020’s Mordechai, the last studio album Khruangbin made without collaborators, was a party record that enhanced the band’s musical reputation far and wide, then A La Sala is the measured morning after. It’s a gorgeously airy record completed only in the company of the group’s longtime engineer Steve Christensen, with minimal overdubs. It’s a window onto the bounties powering Khruangbin’s vision, a reimagining and refuelling for the long haul ahead. A La Sala scales Khruangbin down to scale up, a creative strategy with the future in mind.
Jane Weaver recalibrates her singular journey through the British musical landscape with Love in Constant Spectacle, her most open-hearted, direct and intimate collection of material yet. The music evokes spectacular imagery and distills the artist’s vision in its purest form, elevating her inimitable sound and poetic vision to new heights. Recapturing the melancholy of her early work while propelling it forward, she sketches scenes as we watch new colours, shapes and languages emerge and fill the frame. Love in Constant Spectacle sees her take measured steps towards a vivid, dreamlike record that offers resolve in the face of life’s inevitability.
Phosphorescent, currently based in Nashville, Tennessee, continues to be a notable indie figurehead and his return after five years is eagerly awaited by fans and critics alike. His 2022 covers album, Full Moon Project, encapsulated his major influences, including The Bee Gees, Bob Dylan and Nina Simone. Phosphorescent is a self-taught producer and a constant seeker, and his new record, Revelator, is a meditation on all that he’s learned about life and all that is still unknown.
Only God Was Above Us, the fifth studio album from Vampire Weekend, is inspired by and infused with the essence of the band’s birthplace, New York City, though recorded all over the world, from New York to Los Angeles to London and Tokyo. The album was produced by Ezra Koenig and long-time collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid. The album’s title is lifted directly from its artwork: a photo taken from a subway graveyard in New Jersey in 1988 by photographer Steven Siegel. Only God Was Above Us includes universal themes ranging from the urge to question the world in which we live and the quest for peace that can only be found through acceptance. The album is in equal parts as direct yet complex as anything the band has ever released, as beautiful and melodic as they’ve ever sounded but also captures them at their grittiest.
Our release of the week is Ohio Players by those multiple Grammy Award-winning natives of Akron, Ohio The Black Keys. Leader Dan Auerbach says: “No matter who we work with, it never feels like we’re sacrificing who we are. It only feels like it adds some special flavour. We just expanded that palette with people we wanted to work with. We were there to support them and their ideas, to do whatever we could to see that moment flourish. But when it came time to finish the album, it was just Pat and me. We’d never worked harder to make a record,” he continues. “It’s never taken us this long to make an album. We took our time and did it right.”
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