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.
Fontaines D.C., Dopamine Chamber
The accolades are piling in and piling up for Fontaines D.C.’s. We’ll simply leave you with three of them because they describe things so very neatly:
- “After the surreal technicolour dreams of 'Romance', Fontaines D.C. have landed back on Earth to dissect our fractured reality. The result is something truly special.” (Rolling Stone UK)
- “As Dublin’s finest reach stadium level, album five dives deeper into the extremes of ‘Romance’ for a dark but exhilarating reflection of end times.” (NME)
- “This is a beguiling, endlessly inventive and frequently astonishing fifth LP from a group at increasing ease with being the best band of their generation.” (The Guardian)
While not all reviews are as luminescent, if you’re a Fontaines D.C. fan and not in a mood to gloss over our modern times, Dopamine Chamber should suit you just fine.
Babehoven, I See Them, I See Me
New York State indie folk-rockers Babehoven is the project of Maya Bon and Ryan Albert. On their newest full-length, they enlisted producer to the folk stars Phil Weinrobe — who’s worked with the likes of Big Thief — to help them create an album twang, lots of humor and a certain buoyant sparkliness.
Knowing full well that it was written after Bon’s nine sessions of high-dose ketamine therapy for depression treatment, this is a remarkable piece of work. She described the piecing together of this batch of songs as “writing from the fringes of surreal, associative gray areas born of personal and global traumas.”
With Babehoven, Bon unearths underexplored memories, dreams and lucid reality on songs that join painful experiences to ultimately come away with a feeling of gratitude. With contributions from Sam Evian and Squirrel Flower, among others, I See Them, I See Me is a luminous and human thing that’s both absorbing and an instigator to one’s own potential catharsis.
June McDoom, Follow the Light
Folk singer-songwriter June McDoom grew up in a Jamaican household in South Florida, an existence built on a strong extended family, communal care, bass and harmonics. She eventually found folk music on her own, somewhere between the cast recording of The Sound of Music and Simon and Garfunkel’s contributions to The Graduate.
Nobody around her was listening to it, and her parents even referred to the music that entranced her as “that sleepy music.” McDoom says she didn’t mind her unique musical tastes growing up, as it afforded her the opportunity to truly lean into and fall in love with harmony first — before words, before anything else, as she describes it. You can hear that in her songs, which lean heavily on voice and ethereality.
On Follow the Light, McDoom explores themes of hazy liminal space, with a sound to match. It’s both out of body and familiar, like the warmth on your eyelids that you feel when you turn your face to the sun and drift out of time for the briefest of moments. If she hadn’t taken her own musical path, she may have never gotten to her current destination — one of understated beauty.
Lilliput pick: @, Autosmile
Philly-based Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak are the creative force behind @, whose inventive collabs reimagine the psychedelic folk genre. On Autosmile, they explore adventurous arrangements, dense harmonies and a playful spirit outside of psych folk’s original outlines, earning plenty of praise for going their own way.
Recorded largely at home with a humble collection of equipment and enriched by contributions from close friends on cello, violin and drums, Autosmile transforms these lo-fi methods into something remarkable. It’s lush, immersive and emotionally resonant, balancing darkness and wonder with striking confidence.
More of our picks
- Dummy, do you love the color of the sky?
- Eels, Cookie Happened
- HAAI, DIGITiSE
- Rachel Chinouriri, I think I spoke too soon
- The Avalanches, No Bad Memories
