UK post-punk quartet Dry Cleaning were a Stereogum Band To Watch back in the day, and they released their sophomore album Stumpwork in 2022. Since then, they’ve been touring hard, and their 2023 EP Swampy had a couple of extra songs from the Stumpwork sessions. Early next year, they’ll release a new album called Secret Love into the world, and they recorded it with producer Cate Le Bon, who just released her own LP Michelangelo Dying last week.

The most harrowing part of a breakup isn’t the moment it happens — it’s the disorienting calm that comes after. Left alone, orbiting oneself. Michelangelo Dying, Cate Le Bon’s seventh studio album, is suspended in this space: “No revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos.” Across these songs, the Welsh musician wades through the dissolution of a relationship using full psychedelic beams of sound not to make sense of the wreckage, but make room for it.

Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week. The eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight. You can hear this week’s picks below and on Stereogum’s Favorite New Music Spotify playlist, which is updated weekly. (An expanded playlist of our new music picks is available to members on Spotify and Apple Music, updated throughout the week.)

At the end of the month, Cate Le Bon is releasing Michelangelo Dying, the follow-up to 2022’s Pompeii. She’s shared a few incredible new singles, including “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)” and “Heaven Is No Feeling.” Today, we get the final preview of the album with the track “About Time.”

Cate Le Bon, who has given us many wondrous albums over the years like 2022’s Pompeii and 2019’s Reward, is releasing her latest project Michelangelo Dying in September. She already released the single “Heaven Is No Feeling,” and today, she’s shared another called “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?”

Pompeii, the last album from psychedelic explorer Cate Le Bon, was one of our favorites of 2022. Since then, Le Bon has collaborated with people like Kurt Vile, Wilco, and St. Vincent. She also produced Horsegirls’s Phonetics On And On, one our favorite albums of this year so far. Now, Le Bon is ready to announce Michelangelo Dying, a new LP of her own.

Horsegirl have a sincere apology: They’re not going to read this article. It’s band code.

Horsegirl’s new Cate Le Bon-produced album Phonetics On And On is out this Friday. We’ve heard a bit of it already, including the singles “2468,” “Julie,” and “Switch Over,” which we thought were quite good. Today, the New York-via-Chicago trio are sharing another good one before the record’s out.

When Horsegirl signed to Matador in 2021, their debut EP Ballroom Dance Scene et cetera (best of Horsegirl) earned the young indie rockers a Band To Watch title, and their 2022 LP Versions Of Modern Performance got them an Album Of The Week honor. Today, the beloved group is announcing its follow-up, Phonetics On And On, produced by Cate Le Bon. The meditative lead single “2468” is out now.

Earlier this month, St. Vincent divulged details about the follow-up to her 2021 album Daddy’s Home, describing it as “urgent and psychotic.” Today, Annie Clark is announcing the LP, entitled All Born Screaming, and sharing the lead single “Broken Man.”

Are you ready for the next era of Annie Clark? A new Mojo feature details the “urgent and psychotic” new St. Vincent album.

Last year, the lackadaisical Philadelphian indie rock prince Kurt Vile released his album (Watch My Moves). Since then, Vile has covered Charli XCX and played live with a whole lot of luminaries. Next month, Vile will release Back To Moon Beach, a new record that he’s calling an EP even though it’s almost an hour long.

Wilco are among my top five favorite musical artists of all time. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot changed the way I hear music forever. I’ve seen them in concert probably more than any other band; I lost count, but it’s got to be pushing 20 concerts at this point. (Yes, I am a 40-year-old Midwestern dad, why do you ask?) So every time they release a new album, I make it a point to weigh in. Today they released their new LP Cousin. All week long I’ve been trying to set aside a few hours to bang out a proper review of the thing, but it didn’t work out. I’ve still got takes, though, so instead of a Premature Evaluation, you get this — an Undercooked Assessment, I guess?

Jeff Tweedy has rarely stopped creating, but the Wilco leader has become exceptionally prolific in his fifties. Since 2017, Tweedy, who’ll turn 56 next month, has authored three books (the third of which, World Within A Song, is dropping in November), released four solo albums, toured relentlessly both with his main band and solo (minus the standard pandemic-era layoff), launched a regularly updated Substack, and — with Ode To Joy and the double-disc Cruel Country — churned out two of the best Wilco albums since their legendary early run. This fall, just a year and change after the sprawling Cruel Country, they’re already releasing another LP.

Devendra Banhart has announced a new album, Flying Wig, which will be out in September. It’s his follow-up to 2019’s Ma. He worked on it with the incredible Cate Le Bon, recording it in a cabin studio in Topanga.

In 2022, we couldn’t agree on anything. That statement probably applies more generally, but in this case, we’re talking about the Stereogum staff and the year’s best music. It’s never easy to put together a list of the year’s best music, especially when you’re dealing with a small crew of passionate writer types. Sometimes, though, a few overwhelming favorites emerge immediately. Sometimes, massive and generation-defining albums announce themselves in obvious fashion. That didn’t really happen this year. Instead, this year’s best albums tended to be passion projects — not just for the musicians who made the records but also for the critics who advocated for those records.

Back in February, Cate Le Bon released Pompeii, one of the best albums of 2022 so far. She’s about to head out on a run of tour dates in support of it, and today she’s shared a new one-off single called “Typical Love.”

Earlier this year, Welsh avant-gardist Cate Le Bon released a great new album, Pompeii — one of the best of 2022 so far, even. At the beginning of the tour, she started performing a cover of John Cale’s “Big White Cloud,” a track off his 1970 solo debut Vintage Violence, but phased it out in favor of a Bill Nelson cover instead. But last night at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, she appropriately broke out that Cale cover once again and video made its way online for the first time.

Even as the music industry attempts, sometimes unsuccessfully, to get back to normal, our collective COVID-era time warp hasn’t really resolved itself here in June 2022. In that sense, it feels especially weird and surprising to be running down the best albums of 2022’s first half right now. (Are we sure it’s not still 2021? Are we sure 2020 even happened?) Even more disorienting, any album scheduled to be released by June 30 was eligible for this list, so some of these records are from the future.

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

It’s been three and a half years since we’ve gotten a new Kurt Vile album. His last, Bottle It In, came out back in October of 2018. He followed that with the Speed, Sound, Lonely KV EP in 2020, and thanks to last year’s news that he’d signed to Verve, we knew another album was in the works. The wait is coming to an end. Kurt Vile’s major label debut is called (Watch My Moves), and it’s out in April.

Over the last two nights, Cate Le Bon has brought her Pompeii tour to New York City. In case our Album Of The Week review last week didn’t clue you in, we’re big fans of Pompeii over here — and I can tell you from personal experience last night that a lot of it is even better live. Le Bon’s been great live before. But the particular mix of Reward and Pompeii material, and the balance between the band capturing the albums’ qualities and turning it into something just slightly more muscular live, made for a particularly excellent show.

Everything sounds like it’s melting. The bass. The horns. The keyboards especially. It’s destabilizing, intriguing, invigorating. It sounds like the artiest, most idiosyncratic new wave hits of the 1980s reflected back in a funhouse mirror. It sounds like going through the looking glass. And it has never sounded better than it does on Pompeii.

Cate Le Bon is releasing a new album, Pompeii, next month, the follow-up to 2019’s excellent Reward. She’s shared two singles from it already, “Running Away” and “Moderation,” and today she’s sharing one more, “Remembering Me,” a burbling groove whose chorus goes: “Upset and out of touch/ Good grief, you missed so much/ Louder than empty rooms/ Face down in heirlooms/ Remembering me.”

Early next year, the great art-pop weirdo Cate Le Bon will release Pompeii, a new album the she and co-producer Samur Khouja reportedly recorded in an “uninterrupted vacuum” in Cardiff. First single “Running Away” impressed us a great deal. Today, Le Bon has shared another track from the album, and it’s a good one, too.

Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week (the eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight). This week’s countdown is below, and you can listen to a playlist of all our 5 Best Songs on Spotify.

Cate Le Bon has been great for a long time, but 2019’s Reward cemented her reputation for greatness. So it is fantastic to learn that Le Bon has a new LP on the way this winter. It’s called Pompeii. Le Bon wrote it mostly on bass and recorded it with co-producer Samur Khouja in an “uninterrupted vacuum” in Cardiff, with exits sealed, giving herself “permission to annihilate identity.” Despite the isolation, there were a few outside contributors patched in from a distance, like Stella Mozgawa on drums and Euan Hinshelwood on sax.

Within the macro tradition that is year-end list season, we at Stereogum have carved out our own micro tradition: Every December, instead of publishing a staff list of the year’s best tracks, we present a bunch of personally selected top-10 lists from our staffers and contributors. So although our rundown of 2019’s best albums represents a hard-argued consensus, the following collection of tunes is deeply personal. No songs are allowed to appear on more than one playlist, but otherwise anything goes. It just feels right to do it this way; think of it as a series of carefully curated mixtapes containing the songs that forged a deep connection with us this year. --Chris DeVille

Every year, the charmingly, quirkily named festival Le Guess Who? takes over Utrecht for a weekend in November, with shows spread out across venues around town and throughout the theater complex TivoliVredenburg. And every year, you can rely on the festival to boast some of the most diverse, surprising, and often revelatory lineups out of any festival that operates on this scale. For its 2019 installment, Le Guess Who? was perhaps more idiosyncratic and adventurous than ever.

Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week (the eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight). This week's countdown is below, and you can listen to a playlist of all our 5 Best Songs on Spotify.

The Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon released her excellent album Reward this year, and that's only one of the great 2019 records she's been involved with. Le Bon also co-produced Deerhunter's most recent album Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? in Marfa, Texas in the spring of 2018. During that same time period, Le Bon and Deerhunter's Bradford Cox were performers in residence at the Marfa Myths festival, a posting that resulted in the two of them also recording a collaborative EP. This fall, about a year and a half after it was recorded, that EP is finally coming out.

Every year since 1992, the British Phonographic Industry and British Association of Record Dealers have awarded the Mercury Prize to the best album out of the UK and Ireland. Recent winners have included Skepta's Konnichiwa in 2016, Sampha's Process in 2017, and Wolf Alice's Visions Of A Life in 2018. And today the 2019 shortlist has been unveiled.

The rain can force us into unexpected places. Sometimes, it’s for the better. Such is the case when I meet Welsh musician and novice furniture maker Cate Le Bon in New York City during a torrential downpour. We take refuge in the Guggenheim, as our expected coffee shop has been overtaken by others also finding a dry escape from the rain.

Cate Le Bon truly cannot stop creating. Since her last album, 2016's Crab Day, she produced Deerhunter's latest album and continued her fruitful collaborative partnership with Tim Presley as Drinks, but she also disappeared for a bit, even if it might not seem like it from an outsider's perspective. A couple years ago, when making music started to feel staid and stale, Le Bon decamped to a house in the Lake District of Cumbria, England and enrolled in an intensive year-long furniture-making course. By night, she played the piano, singing songs into the twilight hours that would eventually turn into her fifth full-length album, Reward, but by day she kept busy learning how to construct tables and chairs.

Pop polymath Cate Le Bon latest album, Reward, is coming out next month. We've heard "Daylight Matters" from it so far, and today the Welsh musician is releasing another track, "Home To You," which is an expansive reflection on what home means.

"Home to you/ Is a neighborhood in the night kitchen/ Home to you/ Is atrocity in the town/ Home to you/ Is an impasse under hallway ceilings," Le Bon sings, bouncing around one of her characteristically baroque arrangements.

Cate Le Bon has kept busy over the last year, producing Deerhunter's latest album and teaming up yet again with Tim Presley on their collaborative project DRINKS. Today, the avant-pop artist is announcing a new solo album, called Reward, the follow-up to 2016's Crab Day.

Deerhunter will release Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? -- the proper follow-up to 2015's Fading Frontier and their first full-length to feature the band's new lineup -- next week. We heard the lead single, "Death In Midsummer,” back in October. The following song, "Element," was among the best new music last month. Today, they share the penultimate track, "Plains."

Deerhunter announced a new album called Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? at the end of October. Recorded in Marfa, Texas and produced by Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, the LP is the band's follow-up to their 2015 LP Fading Frontier, not counting their recent experimental tour-only cassette Double Dream Of Spring.