Envy "Eunoia"
Soaring past the 30-year mark as a band, Japan’s envy returns with their 8th studio album, Eunoia. Packed with an abyssal emotional depth and an increasingly eclectic (and seemingly inexhaustible) well of ideas, Eunoia is envy’s most efficiently impactful album of their unbelievably lengthy career. A major personnel shift in 2018 threatened the very existence of envy, but it instead inspired enormous growth and reinvigorated the band on their second album together with this new line-up. As founding member and songwriter, Nobukata Kawai, explains: “The concept of creating the album was to honestly face our own powerlessness. Searching for a little hope, and recording the emotions gained from daily life in a diary-like manner. Even without explaining the songs, Tetsu’s lyrics were wonderful and added depth to the piece. It has been six years since the member line-up changed, and the good relationship of trust has been strongly reflected in the work.” envy are an underground institution that has literally inspired entire sub-genres of music. Their creative and cultural influence in undeniable, and their legacy was cemented long ago. The fact that they’re still breaking new ground more than three decades in is a testament to the unique and extraordinary power and pull of envy, and Eunoia emits that power and pull with the natural weight and wonder of a total eclipse.
Dawn Richard & Spencer Zahn "Quiet in a World Full of Noise"
Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn share a common collaborative ethos, a genuine sense of musical curiosity, and a cosmopolitan eagerness to escape the conventions of genre. That shared vision first brought them together on 2022’s Pigments—icy and warm, stripped-down and grand, familiar and otherworldly—and now it has reunited them for Quiet in a World Full of Noise
By turns intimate, soul-baring, spectral, and startling, Quiet in a World Full of Noise blends atmospheric and orchestral soundscapes with mellifluous soul, jazz, and journalistic vocalizing—driving it all home with stark, confessional lyricism. The new album finds Richard at her most raw and exposed. Quiet expands the definitions of what constitutes progressive, avant-garde R&B by rewriting them altogether.
Mother Sun "Meadow 6"
Mother Sun build and inhabit a world of natural influences, revolving art pop and pastoral psychedelia on fourth LP ‘Meadow 6’. The British Columbia based band’s shapeshifting melodies interlock and segway into elements of motorik krautrock, jazz funk, late 60s folk and dreamy power pop on a journey through a vibrant green countryside; down the well into underground tunnels, through the roots of tree, past the busy beehive through rolling wheat fields and beyond.
Recorded over the past few years between stints touring their last record ‘Train of Thought’, the band went into self-production mode during a period of changes in their lives, with each member changing addresses during the album’s unhurried development. Song arrangements evolved on the road and early singles ‘Marbles’, ‘Yellowbee’ and ‘Good Morning’ became staples in the band’s shifting setlist.
An escape is never far away, and ‘Meadow 6’ evokes a sense of location, a new area unlocked on the world map. The artwork compiles film photographs taken on travels in recent years to create a surreal environment. Photos of buildings taken in transit on tours of western Canada perch impossibly on mossy rocks, grain silos on the prairies become part of a leafy cityscape and dandelions grow out of Japanese castles on floating mountains in the sky.
Drug Church "Prude"
From Pure Noise Records:
Drug Church is #1, so why try harder? Truer words may have never been spoken (or emblazoned upon merch that may or may not reference a novelty shirt seen on a 1998 Fatboy Slim album cover). For over a decade, Drug Church have been building a very strong case that they’re the best loud guitar band in the game; their fifth full-length PRUDE–a 28-minute blast of aggression, melody, irreverence, and genuine heart–feels like the undeniable proof. The album is so downright satisfying it tricks you into thinking there’s nothing all that surprising about a difficult-to-pigeonhole punk band from Albany, NY, with a name like Drug Church somehow having a career at all, much less one that would last over 10 years and qualify them as the best band going. But before you start trying to think of who might have them beat (good luck), consider what just might be the key to Drug Church’s unexpected staying power: Don’t take it too seriously.