Notable Releases of the Week (7/7) - Pop It Records

It's been a shorter, quieter week due to the Fourth of July, and since summer is here and we're roughly at the midyear mark, we put together a list of our 40 favorite albums of 2023 so far and 42 albums we're anticipating this summer. We also rounded up the best punk, rap, and indie (basement) of June. The holiday also means less new albums out this week than usual, but there are some heavy hitters among the shorter list, including three of the albums we've been most anticipating.

I highlight a total of seven below, Bill tackles the star-studded Nick Drake tribute and the latest from Chris Stamey of The dB's in Indie Basement, and this week's honorable mentions include Little Dragon, Local Natives, 12 Rods, Will Haven, AJ Suede, Tony Allen, Adrian Younge, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Aluna, Gus Dapperton, Dominic Fike, A$AP Twelvyy, African Head Charge, World Peace, Longings (ex-Ampere/Orchid), Sad Park, Snuffed On Sight, Anti-Sapien, Lucki, Reese Laflare, Video Dave + Controller 7, Crisis Sigil (Ada Rook), Lauren Bousfield, K-Lone, Martyr Group, Froglord, The Pink Spiders, Butcher Babies, Grouplove, the Hazing Over EP, the Mercury EP, the Alienator EP, the KennyHoopla EP, the Cult Fiend EP, the Bad History Month EP, the Ivonne Galaz EP, Conway the Machine's Drumwork comp, the Never Broke Again comp, Jim O'Rourke's Hands That Bind score, and the Taylor's Version of Taylor Swift's Speak Now.

Read on for my picks. What's your favorite release of the week?

Julie Byrne - The Greater Wings
Ghostly International

Death is a topic that people have written songs about for centuries, but New York singer/songwriter Julie Byrne's new album The Greater Wings is inextricably linked to grief on a level that even many of the most devastating death songs are not. Julie and her longtime creative partner, friend, and roommate Eric Littmann (who also made music as Steve Sobs and led the Phantom Posse collective) were about halfway into making the album when Eric suddenly died at age 31 in June of 2021. Julie then left the project alone for six months, not working on it at all until she entered the studio in January of 2022 with producer Alex Somers (of Jónsi & Alex/Riceboy Sleeps), who Julie called "the right person to finish the record with," adding, "We worked with intense effort, devotion, and deliberate exploration of how our collaboration with Eric continues, even through death." "It was a really charged experience," Alex said in a New York Times interview with Quinn Moreland. "Every single day, at least one person was in tears."

Julie aims for the album to be "a love letter to my chosen family," and not just exist as a lament of death but also a celebration of life and friendship. She sets these sentiments to a backdrop informed by her signature folk guitar style that also brings in her own piano playing for the first time, a greater emphasis on synths, string arrangements by Jake Falby, and harp played by Marilu Donovan of LEYA (whose 2022 album Eyeline also features Julie Byrne on a song). It's the most varied-sounding album that Julie has ever made, and it may very well be her most gorgeous work on both a sonic and lyrical level. It feels like a triumph and an act of resilience that it even exists at all, let alone sounds this powerful.

PJ Harvey - I Inside the Old Year Dying
Partisan

PJ Harvey says that she and her longtime collaborators John Parish and Flood continue to work together because of a shared goal: "to challenge ourselves and not repeat ourselves." Even if she didn't say it that bluntly, that goal would come across loudly and clearly on I Inside the Old Year Dying, her newest album and first in six years. The album sounds like nothing she's ever released, while also sounding distinctly like PJ Harvey, and it does sound like she's challenging herself and her audience on this often-experimental LP. Her two previous albums, Let England Shake (2011) and The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016), were concerned with macro social/political issues, but for this one PJ wanted to make something more intimate and personal. "There was a real yearning in me to change it back to something really small," she said in press materials for the album, "so it comes down to one person, one wood, a village." She also adds that "the album is about searching, looking - the intensity of first love, and seeking meaning." She says that several of the performances on the album were improvised and recorded the moment they were created, and that process really lends itself to these more meandering, less traditionally structured songs. It's an album that rewards patient and repeat listens; it might not pop out at you right away, but the attention-grabbing moments are plentiful and they gradually reveal themselves.

ANOHNI and the Johnsons - My Back Was a Bridge For You To Cross
Secretly Canadian/Rough Trade

The person pictured on the cover of ANOHNI and the Johnsons' new album is Marsha P. Johnson, the queer rights activist and drag queen that was one of the prominent figures of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, and that ANOHNI named her backing band after nearly 30 years ago. It's fitting, not just because this is ANHOHNI's first album also credited to the Johnsons in 13 years, but also because My Back Was a Bridge For You To Cross is explicitly steeped in the tradition of civil rights era protest music. ANOHNI has called Marvin Gaye's groundbreaking 1971 protest album What's Going On one of the core influences on this album, and you can see and hear that coming through in song titles like "It Must Change," the charged-up lyrical content, and the '70s-soul-style instrumentals. ANOHNI's 2016 predecessor HOPELESSNESS was also politically and socially charged, but as the album title suggested, that album was more of a cry of despair than a call for change. It was also a largely electronic album, and this new album is instead fueled by organic instrumentation, provided by longtime Johnsons Doug Wieselman and Rob Moose, alongside new members Jimmy Hogarth, Leo Abrahams, Chris Vatalaro, and Sam Dixon. Jimmy Hogarth also produced the album and co-wrote parts of it, and--having grown up listening to classic soul and having worked with artists like Amy Winehouse and Tina Turner--he ended up being a perfect collaborator for My Back Was a Bridge For You To Cross. Some of ANOHNI's vocals that you hear on the album were recorded the first time she ever sang them out loud, adding to the urgency that's present throughout the LP. It's great-sounding music, and it's music concerned with real-life activism. It doesn't feel hyperbolic to say that Marvin Gaye and Marsha P. Johnson might both have been proud.

Better Lovers - God Made Me An Animal EP
SharpTone

After the tumultuous breakup of Every Time I Die left vocalist Keith Buckley at odds with his now-former bands, most of the remainder of the band--guitarist Jordan Buckley, bassist Stephen Micciche, drummer Clayton "Goose" Holyoak--continued to write music together for a project they'd eventually call Better Lovers. Guitarist Andy Williams (aka The Butcher) was too busy to get involved (though Jordan said he's always got a spot in the band), and instead they've got recent ETID producer Will Putney (of Fit For An Autopsy and END) handling second guitar. When it came time to look for a vocalist, they sent their instrumental demos to Greg Puciato of the now-defunct Dillinger Escape Plan, who's spent the last few years going in a more alternative rock direction with his solo career, and Greg says hearing those demos helped reignite his love for the kind of fast, chaotic metalcore that both ETID and DEP are best known for. It made him a perfect fit, and the band got to work on a batch of songs that recall various elements of classic ETID and DEP while also sounding like a new beast entirely. They first introduced the world to their fury on their debut single "30 Under 13" in April, and today they surprise-released their debut EP God Made Me An Animal, featuring that song and three others.

The songs are all cut from that same cloth as "30 Under 13"--2000s-style metalcore by a group of musicians who helped define that era and who continue to make some of their best music today. It's a thrill hearing Jordan Buckley's Southern rock-tinged mathcore riffage set against Greg Puciato's feral screams, and the near-constant chaos is also broken up by some genuinely beautiful moments that only add to the short-but-sweet EP's intensity.

Blackbraid - Blackbraid II
self-released

Blackbraid is the black metal project of Sgah’gahsowáh, an indigenous musician from the Adirondacks whose name is is Mohawk for "the witch hawk." His 2022 debut album Blackbraid I turned a lot of heads in the metal world--it impressively landed at #4 on Decibel's year-end list--and he now keeps that momentum going with his second album, Blackbraid II, less than a year later. Sgah’gahsowáh played everything on the album except drums, which were programmed by Neil Schneider, who also recorded, mixed and mastered the album. He takes a lot of cues from traditional black metal, but he's also not afraid of using big, clear production or writing epic, triumphant riffs that often veer closer to classic heavy metal than to the raw black metal underground. He also works in doomy passages and folk instrumentation like acoustic guitars and flutes that only add to the intensity of this 66-minute journey.

Rauw Alejandro - Playa Saturno
Duars Entertainment/Sony Music Latin

Rauw Alejandro has quickly skyrocketed to the top of the Latin music world thanks to his distinct voice, addictive melodies, and a damn-near-effortless ability to fuse old school reggaeton with futuristic electronic pop, and he's been extremely prolific. He's released an album a year since 2020, as well as other miscellaneous releases like this year's great collaborative EP with his fiancée Rosalía. Now he returns with Playa Saturno, which he's referred to as a "spinoff" off last year's Saturno. He does what he does best across this LP, which is full of potential hits (and one actual hit--it ends with his recent Bizarrap collaboration "Baby Hello" that's already racked up over 20 million Spotify plays as of this album's release). He also ropes in an impressively unique cast of guests, including Queen of Reggaeton Ivy Queen, reggaeton veterans Jowell y Randy and Ñejo y Dálmata, Mexican corridos tumbados singer Junior H, and Spanish pop veteran Miguel Bosé. He takes a couple musical detours, with the dance-pop of his aforementioned Bizarrap collab and the full-on reggae of "No Me Sorprende," but as he promised on Instagram (translated by Rolling Stone), "I decided to make this album for the fans of classic and modern reggaetón, especially for my people of PR. 10000% PERREO." As for the album title, it references not just his 2022 album title but also that being on tour "really is like living on Saturn," and with summer arriving, he wanted to make something perfect for the beaches back home in Puerto Rico. And that's exactly what this is: a front-to-back LP of summer jams, 1000% perreo.

Circuit Circuit - Body Songs EP
Dark Trail Records

As Nashville's Circuit Circuit previewed with lead single "Deleted Skin," the whole 20-minute EP is a totally chaotic, discordant record that falls somewhere in the orbit of screamo, mathcore, and sasscore without fitting neatly into any specific subgenre. The band have been co-signed pretty hard by The Callous Daoboys--Daoboys vocalist Carson Pace mastered this EP, the artwork was designed by Daoboys bassist Jackie Buckalew, and it was mixed by Die On Mars engineer Corey Bautista--and I think this would definitely appeal to Daoboys fans. Or to compare them to the classics, picture a mix of Botch, The Locust, and Orchid and you might have an idea. Read more about it here.

Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including the star-studded Nick Drake tribute and the latest from Chris Stamey of The dB's.

Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases archive or scroll down for previous weeks.

Looking for a podcast to listen to? Check out the latest episodes of The BrooklynVegan Show.