The Beths have written some of the best power-pop in recent years. The band from Auckland, New Zealand — consisting of Liz Stokes (vocals/guitar), Jonathan Pierce (guitar), Ben Sinclair (bass) and Tristan Deck (drums) — has so far put out three albums of perfectly crafted, insanely catchy guitar music, headed up by Stokes’ conversational and introspective lyricism. It’s been a pretty straightforward formula, and while they’ve gotten better and better, they’ve rarely strayed very far from it.

When I get a hold of Kassi Valazza at her New Orleans apartment, she’s only been home for about 12 hours. She just flew in from Portland, where she lived for most of the past decade, to play a homecoming gig at the famed Laurelthirst Pub. Before that, she was in Australia for three weeks, opening for the folksinger John Craigie. (Valazza didn’t get to meet a koala, like every other band on your Instagram feed seems to when they tour Australia, but she did meet a quokka: “They come right up to you, and you can pet them, and they’re very cute.”) She’s exhausted. That’s the gig.

From a young age, Emma-Jean Thackray always knew she wanted to be an artist — no matter the medium. Speaking on a video chat from a hotel room in Glasgow, she tells me she never wavered in that conviction. “At no point have I ever thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ It was always just like 100% I’m doing this.” Her eyes, framed by thick-framed circular tortoiseshell glasses, are steady with that same certainty.

People like to throw around the phrases “long-awaited” and “highly anticipated” a lot. Sometimes it’s just PR hype speak, sometimes it’s really true. In the case of Black Country, New Road’s new album Forever Howlong, both feel particularly apt. BC,NR have long been one of the more feverishly, cultishly beloved acts to emerge from the free-form UK rock scene that emerged in the late ’10s, and the unpredictable arcs of their career have only heightened the curiosity around each of their next moves.

It has been five long years since the last Perfume Genius album. (This isn’t counting 2022’s Ugly Season, which collected work originally composed as accompaniment for Kate Wallich’s contemporary dance piece The Sun Still Burns Here.) To hear Mike Hadreas tell it, the half-decade gap makes a lot of sense. It wasn’t just extensive touring accompanying Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, an album that had built on breakthroughs and experiments to become Hadreas’ biggest, boldest, most varied work to that point. Amidst all that, he also battled a heavy depression during the pandemic, and the music that we now hear on Glory was wrangling not only with that specific trial but also the ways in which we dwell and contort and spiral over various existential quandaries as we age.

It’s been a good year for power pop. It’s been a shit year for… uh… everything else, but, from Montreal newcomers Prism Shores shimmering their way through sophomore album Out From Underneath to heavy space-rockers Cloakroom channeling a bit of a dystopian Gin Blossoms on their new Last Leg Of The Human Table, at least we’ve had a bright, jangly soundtrack to accompany the end of democracy as we know it (and I don’t feel fine). Speaking of which, R.E.M. — the godfathers of jangle rock themselves — reunited last week for a second time(!) at the 40 Watt in Athens, GA.

The English guitarist, songwriter, and song interpreter Jim Ghedi came to folk music through a side door. He grew up playing in bands and putting on shows at a DIY collective in his native Sheffield, where it was far more common to see an experimental noise gig than an acoustic guitar. A fateful Bert Jansch CD, gifted to Ghedi by an aunt, changed his trajectory. He started to dig into folk-rock groups like Pentangle and Steeleye Span, fingerstyle guitarists like John Fahey, and traditional singers like the Watersons. Before long, he was putting on folk nights at the DIY space.

Porridge Radio’s fourth album, Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me, came from a backdrop of burnout and heartbreak. The London-based band finished up heavy touring on their last album, 2022’s Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky, and frontwoman Dana Margolin was left to confront a painful breakup and a deep exhaustion that came from the vulnerability of constant performance. Margolin began writing these many of these songs as poems, the idea being to remove the places to hide that are built into pop songwriting tropes, making vulnerability and intensity impossible to avoid.

For as confident as Dave Portner and Noah Lennox sound on Sung Tongs, the path to the record may very well have been the most trying time for Animal Collective. “We were a little bit at odds,” Lennox (aka Panda Bear) said of the year leading up to the revered acoustic pivot for the band, which turned 20 earlier this year. “We were hitting it pretty hard. On the Ark tours, the van kept breaking down, and we had to spend a lot of money to fix it up.”

Being a member of one of the defining indie rock bands during the 2010s is a well-deserved confidence booster. A year after the xx released 2017’s I See You, their third album, bandmate and childhood friend Oliver Sim remembered a chat he had with producer Jamie xx about the future when they were teenagers. “I think I’m at peace with the fact that I’m not going to make big waves in the world,” Sim recalled Smith saying. It’s a statement that buzzes with teenage insecurity or foreshadows a cool humility. Whatever the tone, its sentiment was undoubtedly wrong.

Beatrice Laus, or Beabadoobee, started out as an indie-rock wunderkind. She was a 17-year-old Pavement and Elliott Smith superfan when her debut single “Coffee” got her signed to Dirty Hit, the label run by the 1975 manager Jamie Oborne; by the time she released her debut album Fake It Flowers two years later in 2020, she was nominated for a Brit Award and had done heavy touring across Europe and North America. The slightly more experimental follow-up Beatopia in 2022 firmed her place in the upper echelons of singer-songwriter pop; most recently, you may have seen her as one of the handpicked openers for Taylor Swift’s US Eras Tour.

When I’m Called is Jake Xerxes Fussell’s fifth album, but it exists in a stream of musical consciousness that began practically with his birth. Raised by folklorist parents in Columbus, Georgia, the singer and guitarist was inculcated in a social circle that included luminaries like George Mitchell and Art Rosenbaum, the latter of whom took a young Fussell under his wing. Traditional music, folk art, field recording, local history — all were a routine part of his upbringing, as ordinary as little-league baseball or summer camp. “My parents never forced any of that stuff on me,” Fussell is quick to note. “I was just exposed to it.”

Gouge Away songs can feel like the sonic embodiment of a panic attack. Their 2016 debut , Dies blazes with pulverizing hardcore, Christina Michelle screaming at the top of her lungs about animal cruelty while caustic guitars and hyper-speed drumming conjure a discordant whirlwind of only minute-long blasts. Its follow-up, 2018’s Burnt Sugar, instantly set them apart from their clamorous peers. The album’s sound ricochets between brooding grunge and more clean-cut attacks of hardcore; the screeching opener “Only Friend” is an urgent riot, while the unsettling “Ghost” takes its time unfurling into beautiful mayhem. Instead of focusing on social issues, the lyrics turn inward, relaying episodes of dissociation, paranoia, and feeling like drowning, the music ringing with the same intensity as the garbled words.

Last year, Air’s landmark 1998 album Moon Safari turned 25 — and, very fittingly for a band who have never been quite in step with the order of time, Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin are just getting around to celebrating the occasion. In addition to the deluxe edition of Moon Safari out today, which features an extra disc of rarities, the pair — who have been largely defunct as a musical unit for a decade-plus — are currently in the middle of playing the album in full for a series of European tour dates, which are part of a larger outing that will stretch well into the fall and across North America. After plenty of solo projects and scoring excursions, it really does seem like Air are actually back, although for how long remains to be seen.

Back in 2021, the Toronto duo Ducks Ltd. quickly won a lot of people over with the infectious jangle-rock of their debut Modern Fiction. What had begun as something of friends screwing around — Tom McGreevy (vocals/guitar) and Evan Lewis (guitar) trading ideas inspired by bands they both loved — had turned into a real prospect. McGreevy and Lewis subsequently spent a whole lot of time on the road, criss-crossing North America and Europe as songs for a second album began to materialize.

Like many who heard it at a pivotal point in their lives in 2013, Chvrches’ breakthrough debut The Bones Of What You Believe holds a striking place in time for me, but it’s lost none of its luster even as it turns 10 today. The synths and melodies still feel fresh and vibrant, the hooks are still iconic, and frontwoman Lauren Mayberry’s voice still carries just the perfect balance of bright tones and barely concealed melancholy.

Among the artist community, it’s become a tad cliché to cite 2020 and COVID lockdown as being a catalyst for heightened introspection. Nonetheless, lockdown-led navel-gazing was a natural, deeply human response to the pandemic, and not just for creative types. First off, what else was there to do? Second, I once had a therapist who told me about “the frictive wound” — in the psych community, this is ascribed to people who can’t (or won’t) sit still lest they be alone with their thoughts. Keeping incredibly busy is one way we avoid facing life’s hard stuff. A few years ago, Sadie Dupuis had to deal with her own “frictive” wound as Speedy Ortiz were pulled off the road. What she found would inform the contents of Speedy’s new album, Rabbit Rabbit, which is out today.

The first rule of the Armed is: You don’t talk about the Armed.

Andy Shauf wasn’t trying to make another concept album. He was reading the Bible, writing stories from God’s perspective. He was writing songs about small thoughts and asides, imagining a collection of unrelated tracks. It would be called Norm, i.e., a “normal record.” But instead, a character named Norm emerged, and the songs began to move closer to one another. Now, after all, there is another Andy Shauf concept album in the world — but it’s not like the other ones.

A renegade personality can be easy to sell, but it’s not so easy to live. Margo Price knows this better than most. Famously straightforward in interviews – and a self-admitted contrarian — Price tends to be slotted into the Outlaw Country category by journalists, who liken her to genre pillars Tanya Tucker and Emmylou Harris. More contemporarily, Price is often grouped in with contemporary country-music rebels like Angaleena Presley, Nikki Lane, and Sunny Sweeney – women with opinions who may get a symbolic Grammy nod and heaps of critical acclaim but in reality are still fighting to do things their way within the rigid industry framework.

The first time I heard Whitney’s “Golden Days,” I was a sophomore in high school. I don’t know exactly where I was or what I was doing; all I remember was being awash in nostalgia for experiences I hadn’t even encountered yet. The magnificent swelling of Will Miller’s trumpet and Julien Ehrlich’s swooning falsetto as he sang, “Those golden days snuck away from us,” was enough for me to believe they were going to slip away from me too.

Just under two years ago, the Kentucky singer-songwriter S.G. Goodman started to generate buzz around her debut album Old Time Feeling. Produced by fellow Kentuckian Jim James, Old Time Feeling was one of those albums that resisted easy categorization. Its deeply Southern theme and aesthetic might make it easily scan as country, even though it wasn’t. Some songs were rock, and other songs definitely weren’t. Sometimes artists like Goodman now get lumped under the amorphous (and, to some, equally annoying and reductive) term “Americana.” Whatever it was, Goodman had proven herself a striking new voice, offering songs full of heavy emotional reckoning at the same time that they wrangled with people’s stereotypes of the South in an effort to portray a more nuanced portrait of Southern identity.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, the reliable purveyors of gleaming and infectious jangle-rock, are back with a new album. Endless Rooms began life as demos traded between the band’s five members — vocalist/guitarists Joe White, Fran Keaney, and Tom Russo, alongside bassist Joe Russo and drummer Marcel Tussie — during Australia’s strict pandemic lockdowns. When they were able to meet in person, the band convened at a countryside house built by the Russo brothers’ family in the ’70s. There, they began bringing the new tracks to life, but also using the house to find the sound of their latest collection.

In one sense, bands do not make albums like angel in realtime. anymore: earnest arena rock with an indie spirit, artfully conceived but populist as hell. In another sense, no one has ever made an album quite like Gang Of Youths LP3: a story about grief, family, indigenous identity, and a father’s secret life, sewn together from countless musical, emotional, and philosophical threads. People throw around the word “cinematic” a lot when discussing music, but rarely has an album played out so much like a movie, from its sprawling mythology to its steep emotional stakes.

Back in the summer of 2020, the Dublin quintet Silverbacks released their great debut Fad. It was an album full of infectious hooks and addicting guitarwork, coalescing in a sound that was a fusion of various classic strains of indie rock. At the time, you could already imagine Silverbacks taking these songs on the road and winning legions of new fans. That didn’t happen then; like many upstart bands, Silverbacks’ plans went on hold during the pandemic. But they also used that time well. The band — the core songwriting duo of guitarist/vocalist brothers Daniel and Kilian O’Kelly, bassist/vocalist Emma Hanlon, guitarist Peadar Kearney, and drummer Gary Wickham — are prolific enough they were already talking about a sophomore album before Fad was even close to coming out. Now, that sophomore album, Archive Material, has arrived.

Mass Romantic, the incredible first album from the New Pornographers, turned 20 years old last year. For pandemic reasons, the Vancouver-founded power-pop supergroup was not able to properly celebrate that anniversary. This month they’re making up for lost time: A deluxe reissue of Mass Romantic is out this Friday on Matador, and the New Pornos have been playing the album in full at a series of 21st anniversary shows with both Neko Case and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar in tow.

Last year, Nation Of Language released their debut album Introduction, Presence in the middle of May — just in time for frontman Ian Devaney’s thirtieth birthday, and right around the time we were starting to creep out of lockdown and see each other again. This wasn’t the original plan: It had been slated for April, and then pushed back thinking they might still get to play a release show in May. Of course, that didn’t go as planned either. Little of the last year and a half has, and you can only imagine the amount of up-and-coming bands who got cut off at the knees, releasing albums that represented years of hard work and incremental growth and then not being able to tour behind them.

More often than not, the sophomore album represents an inevitable decline from a promising debut. Not so with Snail Mail’s Valentine. It’s the rare second outing that makes that promising debut sound almost flat by comparison, which is saying something considering Lush is sensational — one of the best albums of the 2010s. Lindsey Jordan has nailed the sometimes baffling follow-up to a prodigious debut. Revisiting Lush, I miss all the new textures and tricks that are now in the Snail Mail arsenal. By closing the door on the impassioned, intricate guitar wanderings of her debut, she’s opened onto a world that’s more vivid and precise and still, of course, passionate. She exhibits immaculate restraint throughout Valentine — the highs are high, and the lows sound oh so grand.

It’s a good time to be a LVL UP fan. Though the band broke up in 2018, all three of its principal songwriters have kept going: Mike Caridi co-runs the label Double Double Whammy and has his own project, the Glow; Dave Benton is Trace Mountains, whose new album HOUSE OF CONFUSION is out today; and Nick Corbo has just released his debut full-length as Spirit Was, Heaven’s Just A Cloud. (Greg Rutkin, LVL UP’s drummer, has played with all three of his former bandmate’s new ventures.)

When I ask Brandi Carlile how her day is going, she doesn’t just say “fine” or “good.” She answers with such clear-eyed enthusiasm that I immediately understand why journalists fall all over themselves to impart just how real she is: “Man, it’s been pretty awesome,” Carlile says over the phone. “I just got back down off of two shows at Red Rocks, and I went out yesterday and learned how to drive my new boat. So I’m in pretty good juxtaposition of Gemini energy.”

Stand For Myself is a classic-sounding album about deeply modern concerns. Its appeal is immediate and direct, but its contents are densely layered with musical and philosophical ideas. You can go into Yola’s second album without knowing a thing about its backstory and quickly become convinced you’re hearing one of the year’s finest releases — and then you can read her thoughtful breakdown of the album’s arc and recognize it’s as complex as a graduate thesis or an auteurist feature film.

“Hey, sorry, I have peanut butter toast in my mouth,” Ella Williams, AKA Squirrel Flower, says when she picks up my call in early June. We’re about to dive into Planet (i), her third record, but first I want to clear up where she’s based. Williams was born in Massachusetts, lived in Iowa, and moved to Chicago at some point, but I wasn’t sure if she identified any of these as home.

Stu Mackenzie is calling me from the future — which, frankly, is to be expected. For the past 10 years, his mondo psych-rock band King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard have been hurtling through life as if they activated a 2x speed setting for the universe — always creating, always evolving, always on to the next thing while we’re still making sense of the current one. (It’s entirely possible they’ve completed another album in the time it’s taken you to read this sentence.) However, in this case, Mackenzie’s Zoom call isn’t coming from another dimension, but rather the other side of the international date line: My Thursday 8PM in the EST zone is his Friday 10AM in Melbourne.

“I’m really obsessed with artist’s discographies,” Michelle Zauner says. “Not that I even deign to compare myself to her in any way, but Björk’s catalog is just so perfect to me. An artist’s third album should be a big statement.”

A couple years ago, the UK art-rock quintet Squid started building a ton of buzz in their homeland, thanks to the simultaneous idiosyncrasy and infectiousness of their early singles. They were part of a new generation of exciting English bands, working with Speedy Wunderground’s Dan Carey and pushing the outer limits of contemporary rock music. The well-deserved hype garnered them a record deal with Warp. They’ve been gearing up to release their debut album Bright Green Field for several months now, and today it’s finally here.

A good mix tells a story, and while Leon Vynehall may have gotten his start as a dance music DJ, he’s always been a storyteller at heart. The British producer’s earlier, more club-focused deep house releases, Music For The Uninvited and Rojus (Designed To Dance), were both loose concept records, inspired by cassette mixtapes made by his mother and the mating rituals of birds of paradise, respectively. And in 2018, Vynehall followed this narrative bent to its logical conclusion with his debut full-length Nothing Is Still, a stunningly beautiful album moving past his dancefloor origins to the concert hall to trace his grandparents’ emigration from London to New York in the 1960s.