Khruangbin – Mordechai CD/LP (Dead Oceans)
Khruangbin has always been multilingual, weaving far-flung musical languages like East Asian surf-rock, Persian funk, and Jamaican dub into mellifluous harmony. But on their third album, it’s finally speaking out loud. Mordechai features vocals prominently on nearly every song, a first for the mostly instrumental band. It’s a shift that rewards the risk, reorienting Khruangbin’s transportive sound toward a new sense of emotional directness, without losing the spirit of nomadic wandering that’s always defined it. And it all started with them coming home.

Post Malone – Hollywood’s Bleeding 2xLP (Republic)
Double pink colored vinyl pressing. Post Malone stirs a mix of genres into his own sonic sound that’s both intoxicating and invigorating.

Art Feynman – Half Price At 3:30 LP (Western Vinyl)
Art Feynman (aka accomplished recording artist and producer Luke Temple) stitches art pop, Nigerian highlife, worldbeat, and other lesser-known genres into a musical quilt that displays his unmistakable guile and eccentric songcraft. On his sophomore album Half Price at 3:30 he delivers songs that side-smile while pointing out the emotional sinkholes that whirl beneath the most overlooked, seemingly commonplace scenarios. As effortlessly as he inhabits his Art Feynman character he also slips into the lives of other personalities, both living and fictional. Where previous entries in the Luke Temple discography– including his well-liked former group Here We Go Magic– have utilized organic timbres even while sailing far from the guitar-and-drums shore, Half Price sees him employing drum machines, slightly glossier production, and even autotune with a tasteful balance that suggests these tools have been in his kit all along. The result affectionately evokes guerrilla recording predecessors like Francis Bebey, Arthur Russell, and Haruomi Hosono in musicological detail, yet it’s Temple’s hard-won creative voice that resounds over top of it all facing Half Price forward instead of nostalgically backward.

Ray LaMontagne – Monovision CD/LP (RCA)
The eighth studio album from singer/songwriter, sees Ray not only writing and producing the album once again but also includes added duties of engineering as well as performing all the instruments for the tracks.

The 11 songs on Welcome To Bobby’s Motel don’t just invite you to move your body; they command you to. Fusing reckless, manic energy with painstaking precision, the record is part post-punk, part art-pop, and part dance floor acid trip, hinting at everything from Devo to Gang of Four as it boldly careens through genres and decades. The music is driven by explosive drums and off-kilter guitar riffs that drill themselves into your brain, accented with deep, funky grooves and rousing gang vocals. The production is similarly raw and wild, suggesting an air of anarchy that belies the music’s careful architecture and meticulous construction. The result is an album full of ambitious, complex performances that exude joy and mayhem in equal measure, a collection that’s alternately virtuosic, chaotic, and pure fun. [Limited colored vinyl pressing also available.]

In the week that their eighth studio album, Giants Of All Sizes, became their third consecutive UK #1 album, Elbow played a series of special acoustic shows for select audiences in Leeds, Kingston and Manchester. Combining tracks from the new album with songs from their extensive and ever growing back catalog, the shows offered fans a rare opportunity to see Elbow in small venues, with the recordings emphasizing the special bond that exists between the band and their fanbase.

Caustic Wound – Death Posture CD/LP (Profound Lore)
Pacific Northwest’s Caustic Wound (featuring members of Mortiferum, Cerebral Rot, Fetid, and Magrudergrind) play unrelenting and punishing brutal death-grind that captures the aesthetic and palpitations of the classic old-school era of the genre (not exceeding 1992 of course). Their debut album, Death Posture, which follows their 2018 Grinding Terror demo, sounds like a foul relic that could have been produced in ’88-91, while upholding a powerful, dark, murky yet unyielding production.

Gordi – Our Two Skins CD/LP (Jagjaguwar)
Written in 20 anxious minutes during a lonely plane-ride to an isolated six weeks in Europe, Sophie Payten – the Australian musician known as Gordi – penned “Aeroplane Bathroom”, the Our Two Skins opening track. “It’s like all the adrenaline of the last two months just dropped away and I had a nervous breakdown,” says Payten, “thinking about all these big changes and entering a relationship with a woman. I was seeing my life that I thought was evolving in one direction is now evolving in this other direction.” The song and record open with a question: “Do you see yourself unravelling?” Our Two Skins, Gordi’s sophomore full-length album, chronicles the intense and impossible time Payten spent renegotiating who she is and how she fits in the world, particularly against the backdrop of Australia’s marriage equality vote – something that previously had not personally impacted Payten – and her Catholic upbringing. “It was a devastating way to fall in love with somebody,” she reflects. [Limited colored vinyl pressing also available.]

Redd Kross – Redd Cross CD/LP+MP3 (Merge)
This special 40th anniversary edition of the Red Cross EP, which includes the band’s six-song eponymous debut and adds five contemporaneous extra tracks, is the most comprehensive document to date of the extraordinary birth of Redd Kross. Redd Kross incubated alongside such SoCal luminaries as Black Flag, Descendents, and the Minutemen, and this new 11-song collection-which includes rare and unreleased demos plus a live track recorded in 1979 at The Church, the infamous Black Flag birthplace in Hermosa Beach, CA-puts in proper perspective the McDonald brothers’ contribution, at the ridiculously precocious ages of 12 and 16, to that area’s punk scene.

What’s Your Pleasure? is the fourth album from Jessie Ware. The recording process was a transformative period for Ware and the album sees the influential artist reconnect with her roots, entirely on her own terms. At its core, the album explores themes of femininity, freedom of imagination and escapism.

Archers Of Loaf – Talking Over Talk b/w Cruel Reminder 7”+MP3 (Merge)
“North Carolina indie rock greats Archers of Loaf should have a new record on the way sometime soon, hopefully, and while we wait for details, here’s a new song, ‘Talking Over Talk’, that’s set to slow simmer and makes good use of Eric Bachmann’s smoky pipes.” – Brooklyn Vegan