Every month, Uproxx cultural critic Steven Hyden makes an unranked list of his favorite music-related items released during this period — songs, albums, books, films, you name it.
1. MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks
Boat Songs was an instant classic, and then he put out a concert record with his live backing band The Wind that I liked even more. And now Manning Fireworks arrived as Lenderman’s undeniable “level up” album, even from those previous triumphs. The lyrics are sharper. The music is punchier and more fully realized. The arc from the beginning (the title track, a brutally pretty country dirge with a narrative about a church-bound lothario) to the end (“Bark At The Moon,” which is probably the saddest song written about Guitar Hero) is satisfying but understated, like the album was consciously designed for your 75th listen to be the most mind-blowing.
2. Billy Strings, Highway Prayers
In light of the jam-heavy Live Vol. 1 — my favorite release of 2024 by the 31-year-old king of jam-grass — Highway Prayers feels like code-switching, with Strings deftly transitioning from his most far-out music on record to his most carefully considered. A key to Billy Strings’ popularity is that he’s a musical Rorschach test — he appeals to Americana lovers, bluegrass purists, and jam-band scenesters equally, but often in ways that don’t necessarily overlap. His music is big enough that people can take what they want from it and disregard the rest. Highway Prayers is a record made primarily for the jam-averse portion of the Billy congregation. Even in comparison to previous efforts like 2019’s Home and 2021’s Renewal, which allowed for the occasional lysergic instrumental passage, Highway Prayers sticks mostly to a back-porch, folk-country lane. (The exceptions are two prog-grass instrumentals, “Malfunction Junction” and “Seney Stretch,” as well as the two-part mind-melter “Stratosphere Blues/I Believe In You.”)
3. Nilüfer Yanya, My Method Actor
This impressive British singer-songwriter made me a fan with her 2022 album Painless, in which she rattled off a series of bangers with an enchanting (and familiar) electro-acoustic art rock vibe. To put it in somewhat reductive terms, her best songs sound a lot like Radiohead circa the early aughts. (Honestly, she gives The Smile a run for their money when it comes to making Radiohead-esque jams.) I don’t like her new album quite as much as Painless, but it’s still a worthy follow-up. The quieter and more introspective vibe makes it the In Rainbows to the predecessor’s Hail To The Thief.
4. Father John Misty, “Screamland”
I liked Josh Tillman’s last album, the underrated Chloe And The New 21st Century. But there was no denying that this once-overexposed genius singer-songwriter appeared to be retreating ever further from anything resembling the mainstream of popular music. With this single from the forthcoming Mahashmashana (due Nov. 22), he seems to re-embracing the mix of musical grandness and end-of-the-world sermonizing that marks his most celebrated work. I’ve heard the album, and will refrain from discussing it any further for now. But let’s just say that if you’re looking for some Fear Fun crossed with Pure Comedy, you might be in luck.
5. The War On Drugs, Live Drugs Again
Like 2020’s Live Drugs, Live Drugs Again is a Frankenstein version of a live record, with each track composed of stitched-together moments lifted from countless performances. (I suspect only Granduciel knows exactly the myriad sources from which each song derives.) This approach makes sense coming from a man who assembles music like the rest of us contemplate jigsaw puzzles. Though the purist in me objects to this approach, especially given the number of excellent intact War On Drugs bootlegs just waiting for a sonic upgrade. Of course, when I put on Live Drugs Again, the purist in me is eventually drowned out. This is epic rock ‘n’ roll that manages to top even the titanic Live Drugs, if only because The War On Drugs are that much better as a live band.
6. Trace Mountains, Into The Burning Blue
Speaking of The War On Drugs, Lost In The Dream is practically a genre onto itself for indie bands that aspire to that record’s heartland rock grandeur. Trace Mountains, along with Wild Pink, ranks among the best bands mining this vein. On their fine 2021 effort House Of Confusion, they applied the “uplifting synth-accent rock” vibe to an upstate New York aesthetic, successfully creating music ideally suited for, well, tracing the outlines of mountains in the recesses of your mind. The new Into The Burning Blue feels a little less rustic, but it nevertheless has that quietly exhilarating sense of sweep this kind of music reliably delivers.
7. Seeing Goose and King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard Live
I am interested in both Goose and King Gizzard, and I am interested in Goose and King Gizzard in relation to one another. Because these are two very different bands, and they are good for very different reasons. (I saw them within a week and a half of each other this month and wrote about it.) The former is a quintet from Connecticut, and the latter is a sixpiece from Australia. The former is influenced Phish and aughts-era indie rock, and the latter is influenced by every popular genre of music since approximately 1968. The former has covered the Ghostbusters theme song live, and the latter once put out an album called PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation. The former has been endorsed by Trey Anastasio, and the latter has been endorsed by Trey Anastasio. (Scratch that last one — differentiating jam bands with “endorsed by Trey Anastasio” is like differentiating people with “breathes oxygen.”)
8. Bob Dylan, The 1974 Live Recordings
A sprawling data dump of music, The 1974 Live Recordings collects every known professionally recorded show from Dylan’s mid-’70s tour with The Band, amounting to 431 tracks (all but 14 never before released) spread across 27 discs. This mountain of material attempts to make a small but nevertheless crucial point: The ’74 Tour represented a fascinating crossroads for the musicians in the spotlight. For Dylan, it marked a return to live performance after an extended hiatus, and the beginning of perhaps the most rigorous year-in and year-out tour schedule for any rock star in the past 50 years. For The Band, the tour represented a valedictory moment of triumph just over two years before the original lineup finally folded at The Last Waltz. Together, these men faced a daunting — if not impossible — task: Live up to the most mythologized rock tour of the sixties, the most mythologized decade in all of rock music. The miracle of The 1974 Live Recordings is that it shows, more often than not, they pulled it off.
9. Neil Young, Archives Vol. III: 1976-1987
The most intriguing aspect of Neil Young Archives, Vol. III: 1976-1987 — a massive box set composed of 17 CDs (plus five Blu-Rays containing 11 films in the deluxe edition) — is that it’s not necessarily designed to dissuade you from questioning the sanity of ’80s Neil. On the contrary, it takes a warts and all approach to his most polarizing era, encouraging fans to revisit albums they might have dismissed years ago without quite making the case that they’re “secretly great.” There are gems buried in the mix, but there’s also plenty of misfires that will register as either fascinating or tedious, depending on your level of Neil fandom. (Who are we kidding — if you care about this box set, you are definitely a fanatic.)