Every Friday, On Vinyl features 88Nine music director Erin Wolf and Lilliput Records co-owner Tanner Musgrove delivering their top picks and a list of this week’s other releases, so the can’t-miss new albums don’t pass you by.
Julia Jacklin, The Gem
“‘The Gem’ felt like a metaphor for the whole process, because a lot of it did feel like digging,” Jacklin said of her newest batch of songs. “I felt like I was almost doing it in the dark, just trusting that I was going to find something.”
As utilitarian (and scary) as the process sounds, the album is already being called “a soaring document of the songwriter’s journey back to herself.” Mid-journey, the Aussie artist manages to travel into sonic chambers not dissimilar to Angel Olsen’s heartwrenching and tender My Woman or Mazzy Star’s melancholic and psychedelic So Tonight That I Might See — but fused together with a jittery glue a la The Velvet Underground.
Leon Bridges, Happiness Anytime
With every single Bridges has offered leading up to today, it feels like it’s been a “kid in the musical candy store” vibe. The songs have offered their own unique and tantalizing danceable appeal, from Afrobeat to disco and soul to South America.
Few artists can write a song more buoyant and yet still aware than Bridges. With production help from Josh Lloyd-Watson and Lydia Kitto (two-thirds of British neo-soul band Jungle), this album doesn’t just set off fireworks; it leads with light.
“For me, happiness is not a feeling that you chase,” Bridges shared ahead of the record’s release. “I want this album to be something that lingers with people and lingers in people’s bones. There’s this feeling that we have to fix the problems of the world; you feel inadequate or it can be debilitating. My role is to be light.”
Blondshell, Violins
N.Y.-born, L.A.-based singer-songwriter Sabrina Teitelbaum returns with some of her most endearingly personal work yet, leaning into growing pains, exploring relationships of every stripe, and growing more aware of the power of her mind and body.
Blondshell creates tender anguish not unlike the late Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries, whose influence has never been more apparent than on Violins. Many of the songs feel as though they could’ve danced on the tracklist of The Cranberries best-known albums. It’s especially true of “Lucky,” in which Teitelbaum marries feelings of cherished memories with grief and existential dread.
If anyone’s seen Blondshell perform (she was just at Milwaukee’s Summerfest), they’ll know that display of roiling emotions are not a simple remake of what’s come from another before her; they’re sourced from a deep well that’s uniquely personal.
Lilliput Records pick: Starcleaner Reunion, Umbrella
There’s a lot of delightful early-aughts retro appeal to the sound of New York-based band Starcleaner Reunion. Led by Jo Roman, they’ve been described as “a retro-futurist mix of Stereolab-inspired indie pop, C86 jangle guitar rock and Brazilian psychedelia.”
On the distortion-laden and synth-centric “Lay on Plastic Moment” from the band’s new album, Roman sifts through old memories in her mind’s eye after returning to a place that now feels unrecognizable. She said the song sprung from “my personal experience of moving back to New York in 2023.”
More of our picks
- Benny Sings, 22 Durnham Dew
- Hermanos Gutiérrez, Los Ojos Del Cóndor
- Joy Oladokun, Hope Is a Heavy Thing
- Kokoroko, Tuff Times Never Last
- Osees, OFF COURSE
- Protomartyr, Hotel Usona
- Tinashe, Popstar
