The Struts erupted onto the music scene with their behemoth anthem, “Could’ve Been Me,” introducing the world to their timeless rock sound. With their acclaimed debut Everybody Wants, the British rockers cemented their reputation as a must-see act bringing their energetic tracks alive on stage with larger-than-life performances. Their new album,Pretty Vicious, embodies that raw, raucous nature of their live shows, fusing their arena-size energy into their most honest and exciting songs to date.

As they set to work on their highly awaited sophomore album, Black Pumas broadened their palette to include a dazzling expanse of musical forms: heavenly hybrids of soul and symphonic pop, mind-bending excursions into jazz-funk and psychedelia, starry-eyed love songs that feel dropped from the cosmos. The debut was nominated for 7 Grammys and reached one million album equivalents. Chronicles Of A Diamond arrives as the fullest expression yet of their frenetic creativity and limitless vision.

Misfits & Mistakes: Singles, B-sides & Strays 2007–2023 is Superchunk’s fourth singles compilation, a massive, 4-LP (or 2-CD) collection covering their triumphant return from hiatus. The amount of ground covered within its gorgeous packaging is staggering: 50 songs, 16 of which are on physical media for the first time, sourced from out-of-print releases, digital singles, compilations, and more—a vital piece of the Superchunk canon.

Featuring extensive liner notes by Mac McCaughan (with additional notes from Laura Ballance), Misfits & Mistakes tells the story of each release, from why they chose to cover songs by The Misfits, The Cure, Destiny’s Child, and Bananarama, to working with collaborators like Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee), Jane Wiedlin (The Go-Go’s), Eleanor Friedberger, Damian Abraham (Fucked Up), Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley (Teenage Fanclub), and more!

Mac writes:

Who knew it would take a cartoon hamburger to kick off a new period of activity for Superchunk? When we recorded “Misfits and Mistakes” for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force soundtrack at Overdub Lane in Durham, we also recorded the first version of “Learned to Surf” which gave us an on-ramp for making new music after 8 years of playing sporadic gigs. It also reminded us what we liked about playing Superchunk songs, whether they’re our own or written by our musical heroes.

This collection covers a lot of ground, from heavy touring years to a pandemic where we made singles and an album at home. One difference between this comp and our first three is that this time span completely falls in the digital age; the distance from a final mix to everyone hearing it is shorter than ever. I’ve always liked artists that were prolific—throwing out singles in between albums when you least expect it. A surprise release from your favorite band is one of the few things that can still bring a little excitement to what can seem like an endless deluge of “content” (puke). Hopefully the wild swings between lo & hi fi and originals and covers on this comp still allow for some coherence and, more importantly, convey what’s FUN about this punk rock thing.

The 4-LP set comes packaged in a slipcase with two exclusive 18” x 24” posters, and the 2-CD set includes a full-color 28-page booklet.

Strawberry Shortcake Splash LP (Indie Exclusive). The Menzingers are an absolute institution. The Philadelphia punk legends' multi-decade reputation as road warriors with an unbeatable catalog is cemented as hard truth-and their seventh album, Some Of It Was True, stands as their most immediate-sounding and energetic record to date. The follow-up to 2019's sensational Hello Exile accomplishes the daunting task of capturing the Menzingers' distinctive live energy in the confines of the studio, resulting in a sound that's both rich, raw, and complementary to the group's increasingly prismatic songwriting approach. More than 15 years in, the Menzingers are still holding their listeners square in the immediate present, and Some Of It Was True documents that power in thrilling fashion.

"We wanted to make a fun record and write songs that we wanted to play live, and that's exactly what we did," co-vocalist/guitarist Greg Barnett says "We've always said that we want every album to sound live, but we never recorded an album live before. This was the first time we committed to that idea. We wanted to sound like how our band sounds onstage." Making the process easier: Grammy-nominated producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, the War on Drugs, Waxahatchee), who joined the Menzingers in El Paso's legendary Sonic Ranch studios and lent his incredible ear for raw, immediate sound to help the band achieve Some Of It Was True's in-the-room live feel. "The Menzingers are as real as it gets," Cook says on his time in the studio with the band. "I had an absolute blast working with these guys and was moved to tears many times. They are truly dedicated to artistic growth, and to each other, in ways I found both refreshing and beautiful. I am now a lifer."

Over the course of his career, Sufjan Stevens has blurred distinctions between the major and the minor, between the details that color our existence and the big events that frame our lives. He has turned historical footnotes of States into kaleidoscopic pop, and rendered the immeasurable grief of loss with intimacy and grace.

His new album Javelin—Sufjan’s first solo album of songs since 2020’s The Ascension and his first in full solo singer-songwriter mode since 2015’s Carrie & Lowell—bridges all these approaches. Sufjan uses the quietness of a solitary confession to ask universal questions in songs we can share communally. Accompanying the CD and LP formats of the album is a 48-page book of art and essays. With a series of meticulous collages, cut-up catalog fantasies, puff-paint word clouds, and iterative color fields, Sufjan builds order from seeming chaos and vice versa. And toward the middle of it all are 10 short essays by Sufjan, another window into the process that informed Javelin.

All-new reissue of the critically acclaimed and long-out-of-print 2009 debut solo album from The Black Keys singer and guitarist Dan Auerbach. An intimate and underrated affair with shades of greazy rock & roll, blue-eyed soul, and bluegrass hollers. Reissued with new artwork and pressed from the original master.

Jason Isbell's songs are filled with ghosts. They're haunted by spirits both welcome and unwelcome, by the personal and historical legacies that make us who we are. Nowhere Is this more evident than on his 2013 breakthrough album Southeastern. Isbell offers confessions. reflections. and promises that contront and make communion with those who have come before and remain wIth us still. Its twelve tracks represent an extended meditation on the concept articulated by another celebrated southern storyteller, author William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It isn't even past."

Goodnight, God Bless, I Love U, Delete. presents an enchanting blend of personal reflections and diverse ideas, offering a glimpse into the captivating creative journey of Chino Moreno and Shaun Lopez as ††† (Crosses). Throughout the album, they skillfully craft immersive soundscapes that evoke a profound sense of emotion and empathy, a testament to their close-knit collaboration and enduring friendship over decades. Moreno and Lopez embrace atmospheric electronic textures, adorned with both intricate and minimalistic arrangements, all amplified by Moreno’s mesmerizing vocals. The result is a tour de force which boasts features from EL-P and Robert Smith adding even more depth and richness to the music. The themes explored in Goodnight, God Bless, I Love U, Delete. oscillate between optimism and dark romanticism, showcasing the duo's ability to traverse contrasting emotions and eclectic musical styles delivering a truly magnificent body of work.

This 3LP set on purple smoke vinyl captures the original band lineup of Black Sabbath live from their 1997 reunion tour, and features 16 live performances of their greatest hits remastered from the original source tapes, along with 2 remixed bonus tracks. Indie Retail/D2C exclusive on purple smoke vinyl.

“I’m still learning how to experience joy, how to be free, how to be comfortable in my own skin,” says Jaime Wyatt. “A lot of us grow up feeling like we have to hide who we are just to be accepted, but that comes from a place of fear and judgment. I wrote these songs as a way of letting go of all that, as permission to feel good.”

Feel Good, Wyatt’s extraordinary new album, is more than just a permission slip, though: it’s an invitation. Recorded with Black Pumas’ Adrian Quesada, the record is bold and ecstatic, built on tight, intoxicating grooves that belie the songs’ substantial emotional stakes. Wyatt’s writing is raw and intuitive here, tapping into the deep recesses of her subconscious as she reckons with grief and growth, and her delivery is visceral to match, cutting straight to the bone with equal parts sensitivity and swagger. Taken as a whole, the collection stands as a radical act of creative liberation from an artist already known for pushing limits, a genre-defying work of healing and self-love that tips its cap to everything from Al Green and Otis Redding to Waylon Jennings and Bobbie Gentry in its relentless pursuit of peace and pleasure.

At this point, it is almost impossible to say what makes for a classic Animal Collective album; the standard fluctuates with the weather, your temperament, whatever chemicals may or may not waft through your mind. But from start to finish, first listen to last, Isn’t It Now? absolutely lands as a classic, its mix of playfulness and earnestness, glittery pop and tessellated textures seeming to synthesize and update all that has ever made and still makes this band so compelling. It is experienced and wise, energized and young, the work of four people committed to finding the frontier of a beginner’s mind, together. Recorded, mixed and co-produced by Russell Elevado (D’Angelo, The Roots, Kamasi Washington).

Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what’s truly hers, what can’t be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. “The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” Mitski says. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she’s gone. Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land.

“This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. In this album, which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star.

The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

Wilco’s thirteenth studio album, Cousin, was recorded in the band’s legendary Chicago studio – The Loft – over a period of two years. The ten new tracks are written by band leader Jeff Tweedy and feature musical performances by the longtime lineup of Nels Cline, Mikael Jorgensen, Glenn Kotche, John Stirratt, Pat Sansone and, of course, Tweedy on lead vocals.

After a short detour back into their country-influenced roots via last year’s Cruel Country double album, Cousin sees Wilco back in their more familiar progressive and experimental rock territory. Tweedy’s singular songwriting voice is in full evidence, with lyrics weaving across a variety of topics – from the iconoclastic to the introspective.

Adding a unique and new element to the recording process was the attachment of Welsh singer/songwriter Cate Le Bon as producer – the first time an outsider has been actively involved in a Wilco recording session for more than ten years, since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Le Bon brought her unique musical perspective to the band’s trademark sound and provided them with an inspiring new challenge to push their musical boundaries.

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Joker. J50: The Evolution of The Joker, curated by Steve Miller, highlights 27 previously unreleased demos, live performances, studio outtakes and rehearsals from Miller’s personal archive, including 8 never-before heard songs. Miller also provides narration guiding the “evolution” of the songs from The Joker.

The box set features a lenticular cover, 60-page book with liner notes from both Steve Miller & Anthony DeCurtis, a reproduction of a vintage Joker iron-on and a new Joker lithograph.

Also Available 2CD, Super Deluxe Edition 3LP + 7in, Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Gold LP

Djo – the critically acclaimed brainchild of multi-talented musician/actor Joe Keery – makes its long awaited return with the game-changing new album, DECIDE. A spellbinding collage of snaky pop hooks, neon melodies, and deeply personal singer-songwriter lyricism, the album melds high-tech songcraft with quick wit, irrepressible spirit, and an impressive breadth of vision that showcases glowing synths and big beats over the trippy guitars that defined 2019’s acclaimed debut, TWENTY TWENTY. Blissed-out bops like “Change” see Keery delving deep into a broad spectrum of eclectic influences, deconstructing hyperpop, euphoric psychedelia, spiky new wave, and symphonic 70’s rock into something utterly unique via dauntless melodies and technical innovation.

Twenty Twenty: Joe Keery, who you may also recognize from the show “Stranger Things,” began playing music in his teens after co-opting his sister’s guitar, but it was during his college years at DePaul University in Chicago that he formed his first band and began to seriously pursue music. That band was Post Animal, the heavy psych rock outfit that went on to release a self-titled EP and two subsequent albums via Polyvinyl. They also toured with artists like Twin Peaks, Wavves and Cage The Elephant and played a number of US festivals. In 2019, with no announcement or fanfare, Keery’s solo-project Djo was unveiled not with a single, but a lush, self-reflective, layered 12 track full-length album titled Twenty Twenty. “Joe Keery built a carnival. The resonance of each riff or beat is not new, but redesigned and reshaped into the beauty it is today. The face of psych or alternative mirrored through his own design, and it reveals a person who shouldn’t be underestimated,” said Rodeo Mag. Despite the album being released under the radar and without a label, fans found their way to it, and Twenty Twenty has now seen more than 200 million streams to date.

A live album recorded in 1976 during a tour with Crazy Horse. Side A is Neil Young solo acoustic from Hammersmith Odeon, London; on Side B, Neil is joined by Crazy Horse at The Budokan in Tokyo. 10 amazing performances of classic Neil Young songs, including the rare “Stringman”. This album is included on CD in Neil’s Archives Volume II, but this is the debut release on vinyl. 1 LP – 140g black vinyl.

Jenny from Thebes began its life as many albums by the Mountain Goats do, with John Darnielle playing the piano until a lyric emerged. That lyric, “Jenny was a warrior / Jenny was a thief / Jenny hit the corner clinic begging for relief,” became “Jenny III,” a song which laid down a challenge he’d never taken up before: writing a sequel to one of his most beloved albums.   The Mountain Goats’ catalog is thick with recurring characters—Jenny, who originally appears in the All Hail West Texas track bearing her name, as well as in “Straight Six” from Jam Eater Blues and Transcendental Youth side two jam “Night Light,” is one of these, someone who enters a song unexpectedly, pricking up the ears of fans who are keen on continuing the various narrative threads running through the Mountain Goats’ discography before vanishing into the mist. In these songs, Jenny is largely defined by her absence, and she is given that definition by other characters. She is running from something. These features are beguiling, both to the characters who’ve told her story so far and to the listener. They invite certain questions: Who is Jenny, really? What is she running from? Well, she’s a warrior and a thief, and, this being an album by the Mountain Goats, it’s a safe bet whatever she’s fleeing is something bad. Something catastrophically bad.   Jenny from Thebes is the story of Jenny, her southwestern ranch style house, the people for whom that house is a place of safety, and the west Texas town that is uncomfortable with its existence. It is a story about the individual and society, about safety and shelter and those who choose to provide care when nobody else will.   This is what a follow-up to All Hail West Texas entails. But if you think about the Mountain Goats as they were in 2001, when Darnielle wrote and recorded that album on his own, mostly into his Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox, and how they are now as the recording and touring outfit of Darnielle, Peter Hughes, Matt Douglas, and Jon Wurster, you may find yourself asking how. That occurred to Darnielle, too.   “If we’re going to do a sequel to a record that was recorded almost entirely on a boombox,” he asks, “why not do the opposite and make it as big as possible?”   Decamping to Tulsa, Oklahoma’s legendary The Church Studio with Grammy-winning producer/engineer Trina Shoemaker (Sheryl Crow’s The Globe Sessions), that is exactly what the Mountain Goats did. Jenny from Thebes is a lush collection of showtunes, pushing Darnielle as a vocalist and the Mountain Goats as a band, broadening their sonic palette once again by leaning into influences like Godspell, Jim Steinman, and The Cars. The resulting album cuts a path that is simultaneously full of allusions longtime Mountain Goats fans will spin entire mythologies from while also being their most inviting record for those who’ve yet to be converted to the cause.   Lifted by Matt Douglas’ horn and string arrangements, the dreamy guitar of Bully leader (and Bleed Out producer) Alicia Bognanno, and backing vocals from Kathy Valentine of The Go-Go’s (“Only One Way,” “Same as Cash,” “Going to Dallas”) and Matt Nathanson (“Fresh Tattoo”), the album is a widescreen musical in scope, a melodrama of richly detailed characters and sweeping emotions.   Explaining the title of the album, Darnielle notes that Jenny is not unlike a character from Greek literature, someone on the verge of an unimaginable tragedy whose signs and portents will not make themselves known to her until she finds herself amidst the wreckage. “These things never happen in isolation,” he says. “One bad event leads to and is the reason for another bad event. Jenny should know that you can’t keep a safehouse in a west Texas town, but she’s too wrapped up in the process and has to go through the loss to understand how it happened.”   Whether or not she comes to understand how it happened, the events of Jenny from Thebes set Jenny on the run. A woman and her custom yellow and black Kawasaki held in the memories of a vanishing few, someone who held the gate for as long as she could, as a warrior might, before disappearing into the night like a thief.

In This Moment’s eighth studio album, produced by Kane Churko and Tyler Bates. Featuring lead single “THE PURGE.”  

The follow-up to the album containing the GRAMMY® Award-nominated single “The In-Between.”

Not many heroes of indie folk have won an Oscar or created the basis of a successful stage musical, but Glen Hansard is an artist who can wear both of those feathers in his cap. As a member of the Frames and the Swell Season, Hansard won acclaim for his literate, intelligent, and passionate songwriting and his nuanced vocals, and he’s gone on to win similar accolades as a solo artist. Hansard first gained an audience for the limber but emphatic indie rock he created as a member of the Frames, then gained international fame with fellow singer and songwriter Markéta Irglová in the duo the Swell Season, whose emotionally open, primarily acoustic indie folk became the centerpiece of the award-winning independent romantic drama Once. After going out on his own with his 2012 solo debut, Rhythm and Repose, Hansard has shown a stylistic diversity as he embraced the sound of ‘70s singer/songwriters on 2015’s Didn’t He Ramble, vintage soul on 2018’s Between Two Shores, and an eclectic swing between subtle folk and noisy indie rock on 2019’s This Wild Willing.

Glen Hansard now presents All That Was East Is West Of Me Now, his first solo album in 5 years. The album demonstrates the Oscar-win-ning singer-songwriter’s unique ability to blend Irish folk with modern rock & the punch of his storied live shows, of which The Guardian says, “Hansard’s powerful voice, whether raw with passion or tender with regret, shines above arrangements bursting with swagger.”

Troye Sivan’s third studio album, Something To Give Each Other, is a celebration of sex, dance, sweat, community, queerness, love and friendship. Emerging from the tribulations of the last few years, Sivan found himself rewiring with the joy of human connection and dance music. He wrote the songs for the new album with Oscar Görres (Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Sam Smith), Ian Kirkpatrick (Dua Lipa, Britney Spears) AG Cook (Charli XCX, Beyonce) and Styalz Fuego (Khalid, Imagine Dragons).

2023 Marks forty years since Tom Waits released Swordfishtrombones, ushering in a new and critically acclaimed musical era for Waits and his longtime songwriting and production partner, Brennan. Waits went from ‘70’s-era “bluesy, boozy” wordsmith and melodist with seven albums behind him to sound sculptor, miner of the subconscious, abstract orchestrator, sonic cubist—while retaining his innate lyricism, melodic invention, humanity. As he put it in a 1983 interview: “I tried to listen to the noise in my head and invent some junkyard orchestral deviation—a mutant apparatus to drive this noise into a wreck collection.”  It’s a Waits-arranged pastiche, a variety of atmospheres from different sound planets. There is the warped, marching-army-ants music of “Underground,” an impressionist chant about people living below cities, but there was also the poignancy of the spare piano ballad, “Soldier’s Things,” the good bar yarn, “Frank’s Wild Years”, the tender, minimalist paean to Waits’ wife and muse, Kathleen, “Johnsburg, Illinois,” and the raggedy anthem to neighborhood chaos, “In the Neighborhood.”

“On Swordfishtrombones, Waits has made a breakthrough – he’s found music as evocative as his words. Waits’s grumble of a voice now bounces off a peculiar assortment of horns and percussion and organ and keyboards, as if he’d led a Salvation Army band into a broken-down Hong Kong disco. It’s as if he’s shifted from monologues to screenplays…” – Jon Parales January 1984 – GQ Magazine

The album is newly remastered for the first time ever from the original EQ’ed ½” production master tape and personally overseen by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Mastered by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering under the guidance of Waits’ longtime audio engineer, Karl Derfler. The album packaging has also been restored. Available on 180g black vinyl.

Noted as Tom Waits’ most critically acclaimed album, Rain Dogs follows the new musical path Waits had taken with Swordfishtrombones. Considered the middle of a de facto trilogy with Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years, Rain Dogs is the first of Waits’ albums to be written in New York, in a Lower Manhattan basement. A 53-minute, 19-track monster, Rain Dogs is a kind of mutant, late 20^th century musical “Canterbury Tales” with a shape-shifting band. There are banjos and marimbas and bowed saw and parade drum and howling horns (and Keith Richards and Marc Ribot) on this rollicking, rough-hewn opus—and Waits, using his voice in increasingly weird-and-wild ways. The songs are stories, sagas, laments, breakdowns, character studies, comedies and cabaret numbers. There’s the aching “Hang Down Your Head,” and the moving anthem, “Downtown Train,” which was covered by Patti Smith and Rod Stewart.

Waits coined the term, “rain dog,” a reference to dogs who lose their way when touchstone scents are washed away in storms. Among the lost dogs on the album: gruff, wandering merchant marines (“Singapore”), an accordion player in a slaughterhouse (“Cemetery Polka”), a “jockey full of bourbon” (also the song title), an abandoned, withdrawn woman (“Time”), a “gun street girl,” the old drunks and hustlers of Union Square, and even Waits, himself: Aboard a shipwreck train / Give my umbrella to the Rain Dogs / For I am a Rain Dog, too...

Originally released in 1985 on Island Records, the album is newly remastered for the first time ever from the original ½” flat master tape and personally overseen by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Mastered by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering under the guidance of Waits’ longtime audio engineer, Karl Derfler. The album packaging has also been restored. Rain Dogs includes tracks such as “Downtown Train,” “Clap Hands” and “Jockey Full Of Bourbon.” Available on 180g black vinyl.

Originally released in 1992 on Island Records, Bone Machine is Tom Waits’ 11^th studio album. 5 years after Franks Wild Years, Bone Machine is a return to studio albums for Tom Waits. The album features David Hidalgo, Les Claypool, Brain and Keith Richards and won a GRAMMY for Best Alternative Music Album.

Bone Machine is rather pointedly otherworldly… another edge pusher – his most poetically and sonically daring work yet. Writing again with his longtime collaborator and wife, Kathleen Brennan, Waits acknowledges writing ‘darker’ material saying “A great many songs live there, so that’s where I’ve been digging lately.”

Waits calls the songs on Bone Machine “little movies for the ears.” He sometimes wrote them entirely from a percussion pattern—which he played on array of largely homemade instruments. One, the “conundrum,” was rusted pieces of farm equipment hung from a large iron crucifix. As Waits explained at the time, “I have a lot of very strong rhythmic impulses, but this is not my world. I just pick something up and I hit it, and if I like the sound, it goes on. Sometimes my idiot approach serves the music.”

Mortality is a recurrent theme, from “Dirt In The Ground” (“We’re all gonna be. . .”) to “All Stripped Down,” “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me” (a tale of contemplated suicide), “Jesus Gonna Be Here,” the rambunctious paean to childhood, “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” and certainly the broken-hearted, confessional classic Waits ballad, “Whistle Down The Wind.” Waits explained at the time: “Yeah, ultimately, it will be a subject that you deal with. Some deal with it earlier than others, but it will be dealt with. Eventually we’ll all have to line up and kiss the devil’s arse.” Yet the album actually ends upliftingly, with “That Feel” co-written with Keith Richards.

Newly remastered for the first time ever from the original ½” flat master tape and personally overseen by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Mastered by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering under the guidance of Waits’ longtime audio engineer, Karl Derfler. The album packaging has also been restored. Bone Machine includes tracks such as “Goin’ Out West,” “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” and “Jesus Gonna Be Here.” Available on 180g black vinyl.

2023 Marks 30 years since Tom Waits released The Black Rider. Originally released in 1993 on Island Records, The Black Rider is Tom Waits’ 12^th studio album. The Black Rider is a musical comedy/horror collaboration between artists: Robert Wilson (director/designer) writer/Beat guru, William S. Burroughs (text) and Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan (music). Not a cast album, this Island Records release is Tom’s interpretation and performance of the songs he had originally created for the stage production of The Black Rider. The music is a Waitsian concoction of pop, vaudeville, rock, cabaret and blues – a brew that is strangely familiar yet absolutely fresh.

The unlikely source material is rooted in German Romantic literature and the Weber opera, “Der Freischutz” (although Waits’ music does not quote from the Weber score), The story concerns a marksman who makes a pact with the devil (in the guise of a shadowy horseman) in order to win a shooting contest and hence claim his bride.

A cross between the musical, Cabaret and The Threepenny Opera, The Black Rider is brimming with the sort of inspired originality that can only flow from the mind of Tom Waits.

The album is newly remastered for the first time ever from the original ½” flat master tape and personally overseen by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. Mastered by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering under the guidance of Waits’ longtime audio engineer, Karl Derfler. The album packaging has also been restored. The Black Rider includes tracks such as “November,” “Russian Dance” and “The Briar And The Rose.” Available as a CD digipack.

Anonymous Club is Danny Cohen’s candid documentary about the personal travails and hard-fought triumphs of Courtney Barnett, as she rose through the ranks of indie rock during the last decade. A cautiously redemptive portrait, any happy ending reflects the possibilities of fulfillment and stability, not the things themselves. In May 2021, months before the film’s release, Courtney Barnett and collaborator Stella Mozgawa rendezvoused with Cohen in Melbourne to shape a score that fit that premise—nothing too obvious or instructive, to tell the audience how they should feel. Barnett found she liked listening to what the duo had made, existing within its reflective gaze. She began sorting through those little instrumentals like amoebic puzzle pieces, figuring out how they fit into a full picture. The result is a seamless series of 17 instrumental improvisations called End of the Day: Music from the Film ‘Anonymous Club’, soundtrack reimagined as impressionistic sound-art collage. Like Barnett’s rock songs, they wordlessly ask hard questions of our softest parts, wondering what it is we really find there.

The album, described by Springfield, as 20 new songs stylistically somewhere between “Working Class Dog” and “Tao”. Sonically, the album sees Springfield returning to his first love of guitar-based power pop and keyboards, while lyrically featuring his favored subjects of love, sex and death. “My goal was solid three-minute tunes with the biggest hooks I could come up with.” As Springfield explains, “the album is called ‘Automatic’ because the songs just kind of came out on their own."

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of U2’s Zooropa, this limited edition transparent yellow vinyl pressing of the Grammy-award winning album coincides with the band’s performances at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Initially intended to be just an EP, Zooropa became a 10-track album recorded in 6 weeks in 1993, making it the fastest U2 album ever produced. Produced by Flood, Brian Eno and The Edge, the album went to #1 in the UK, US and more. It features the singles “Numb,” “Lemon” & “Stay (Faraway, So Close!).”

On his latest album as The Drums, New York-based indie pop artist Jonny Pierce plunges into the work of healing from childhood trauma and the long shadow it casts over adulthood. The sparkling, eponymous Jonny unfurls a love letter to a galaxy of younger selves, all hungry to be nourished, all rejoicing now that they finally get to belong. Playful, heartbreaking, raucous, and serene all in turn, Jonny embraces the mess of life in all its facets. It renders the magic that happens when you fall in love with yourself down to the marrow.

Soaring to alt-pop prestige on arrival, The Drums have released studio albums that deftly walk the line of aching melancholy and irresistible pop sensibilities, presented through a kaleidoscope of pastel guitars, reverb, modular synthe- sizers and drum machines. It’s a sound that’s wholly unique, and unmistakably The Drums.

The Drums’ music remains timeless, as evidenced by the recent explosion of their RIAA Gold-certified song Money, which first appeared on their breakout sophomore album Portamento, reaching #1 on the Alternative Global Shazam Chart and #2 on the TikTok Global Hashtag Chart.