New releases out today: Japanese Breakfast, Lonnie Holley, Benefits, Greentea Peng, Men I Trust and more
Here’s a rundown of new Albums & EPs on DSPs and physical releases in record shops this week.
Nialler9 keeps a rolling list of Irish album releases for 2025.
New Albums and EPs:
New Albums
Japanese Breakfast – For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
Michelle Zauner’s fourth album is out today on Dead Oceans. For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) takes its title from a line in the lead single ‘Orlando in Love’, an string-assisted acoustic-grounded track, with pretty production.
It was produced by Blake Mills – who has worked with Bob Dylan to Fiona Apple at the famous Sound City studio in Los Angeles.
It’s the first album since 2021’s Jubilee, and the release of her can’t-recommend-highly-enough memoir Crying In H Mart – one of the best music-related books in recent years.
With success, Zauner “felt seduced by getting what I always wanted,” she says. “I was flying too close to the sun, and I realised if I kept going I was going to die.”
Greentea Peng – Tell Dem It’s Sunny
London psychedelic R’n’B’ singer Greentea Peng’s personality and lived experiences are imprinted on an introspective record.
Tell Dem It’s Sunny draws from a wide array of genre sounds from hip-hop to jazz to neo-soul to trip-hop to ragga, dub, rock and drum & bass.
Peng plays the 3Olypmia in Dublin on April.
Lonnie Holley – Tonky
The 75-year-old American art educator, and musician from Alabama enlists the likes of billy woods, Mary Lattimore, Open Mike Eagle, Saul Williams, Jesca Hoop and Alabaster Deplume among other for an expansive album of storytelling, ambience, poetry, collage, performance art and blues hymnals.
Jacknife Lee produces and co-writes, and a parallel to the music of Peter Gabriel has resonated with me on this album.
Benefits – Constant Noise
Teesside noise rock spoken word punk band Benefits expand their sonic world view on album two out today via Invada Records (BEAK>, Billy Nomates).
Now operating as a two-piece of vocalist Kingsley Hall and electronic producer Robbie Major, Constant Noise features a darker industrial and dance influence with friends and collaborators including The Libertines’ Peter Doherty, Therapy?’s Neil Cooper, Middlesborough rapper Shakk, Archfemmesis vocalist Zera Tønin, and guest producers James Adrian Brown (ex-Pulled Apart By Horses, now electronic/tape loops/noise artist) and James Welsh (Phantasy).
The Horrors – Night Life
The Horrors dream it all up again as they approach 20 years of being a band in existence, with “a new form, with a new sonic outlook and a new line up centred around the core duo of vocalist Faris Badwan and bassist Rhys Webb, now joined by Amelia Kidd on keys and Telegram’s Jordan Cook on drums, making the new album the band’s first to not feature all 5 original members.”
Night Life is a record of weight and space, of melancholy and euphoria; a record that has the ability to make bedfellows of seemingly disparate ideas as only The Horrors can. The ‘Night Life’ here is not the vim and vigour of pubs and clubs. It’s the thoughts that happen under the cover of darkness; the places your mind takes you when the rest of the world is asleep. A record born out of a desire to revive the raw, instinctive spirit of the band’s early work.
Desire – Games People Play
Desire, the Italians Do It Better project of Megan Louise & Johnny Jewel, release their third album of suave electronic neon pop.
“The 21 track album unfolds like a game of chess—Desire as the queen, fate as the dealer, & love as the ultimate wager. Set against Johnny Jewel’s signature cinematic curtain, the record guides players through a shadowy dance floor where strategy & surrender blur. In this world of passion, the line between predator & prey is razor-thin, & every lover is a contender on heartbreak’s edge. Checkmate is inevitable—but who will make the final move?”
Desire said “Games People Play is a conceptual double album with two records inside one. It’s half Dancefloor Pop & half Film Noir. 21 songs recorded in the Key of Love. On the boulevard of broken dreams…She dares to roll the dice one more time…”
Men I Trust – Equus Asinus
Montreal band composed of Jessy, Dragos and Emma who make dreamy indie pop music most of the time.
This is the first of two albums in the Equus series to be released before the upcoming tour. Equus Asinus is mostly on a chiller side of things.
“Early in the writing and recording process, we realized we had a collection of songs with distinct energies yet equally meaningful to us. It became clear that we wanted to release them as two separate entities both from the same genus: Equus Asinus and Equus Caballus.”
Men I Trust play Dublin’s National Stadium in Dublin 8 on Wednesday October 15th 2025.
More Eaze & claire rousay – No Floor
A collaborative album between the Los Angeles “emo ambient” artist claire rousay and Brooklyn composer/multi-instrumentalist mari maurice aka More Eaze.
“Their bond goes back to their youthful hometown of San Antonio, Texas where they played in country outfits and noise rock bands respectively, and each pushed their music to extend beyond the traditions and conventions of genre. ….no floor weds their prowess as sound designers and masterful skills as composers with their skills as acoustic instrumentalists. Eschewing the auto-tune inflected pop-psychedelia and found sounds of their previous collaborations, no floor is collage music as pastoral melancholia, a lush tour into their own version of Americana.”
Matthew Xavier Corrigan – beast of changing
Irish folk artist Matthew Xavier Corrigan’s debut album (the musician previously released music as Ghostking Is Dead) was “recorded straight to tape in Liverpool last winter with producer Michael Halls of Clean Cut Kid, the artist uses countless vocal takes and rich harmonies to paint a story of love found, lost, reborn in salt water.”
Intimate songwriting and organic analogue sounds forged with personal vulnerability.
Also released today
- Daniel Brandt – Without Us
- Flying Lotus – ASH
- Jeffrey Lewis – The Even More Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis
- Lola Kirke – Trailblazer
- My Morning Jacket – is
- Saba & No I.D.- From The Private Collection of Saba and No ID
- Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith – Correspondences Vol.2
- Tamino – Every Dawn’s a Mountain
