My recommended best long playing albums and records of the last month. This is what I listened to and loved the most.
Kelela – new avatar
The long-awaited third album from Kelela, her first full-length since 2023’s Raven. Kelela is one of the most singular voices in contemporary R&B, threading club-adjacent production, ambient patience and emotionally direct writing through a body of work that has become steadily more essential with each release.
new avatar is another top tier album from one of the great modern voices – this time pairing iced-cool synths with minimal beats and lots of grungy guitar texture – creating a whole new shoegaze R&B sound (with elements of witch house even? – Burial is getting mentions too), for that voice to do its significant business.
In case you haven’t guessed, Kelela possesses one of my favourite voices and new avatar is no different in terms of the quality she has displayed since the 2013 Cut 4 Me mixtape.
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AK Paul features on ‘outta time’,bringing another distinct sound world – The Paul Institute to this character’s orbit, Foushée guests on ‘new life forms’ and Pinkpantheress features on The Bridge’.
Swapmeet – Mount Zero
A new album from South Australian band Swapmeet, working in a scuzzy guitar-forward alt-rock slowcore register. Mount Zero is a strong pickup for anyone into the melodic fuzz end of the rock.
This is the band’s second album after their 2024 debut EP, released on LA-based label Winspear. In the spirit of their name, each band member traded instruments throughout with common themes throughout: first loves, first heartbreaks, first embarrassments, first disasters.
Playing Dublin in November too.
Four Tet (00000ooooo) – Symbols side-project
A surprise new album from Kieran Hebden on his 00000ooooo Bandcamp, the symbols alias he has used across the years for a small, cherished corner of his prolific catalogue. Hebden’s Bandcamp-only releases under this alias have leaned toward the more experimental, patient and ambient-adjacent end of his practice, and the new record continues that thread. A properly stealth-drop Friday release from one of the artists whose next move has always been worth stopping to check on. All very familiar Four Tet noise – twinkling bells, beats, bass and split between starry-eyed and propulsive production. A couple of the tracks are either previously released or new versions of previous KH songs like ‘Feelings’ which is track five on this.
Mad Professor – Melodies International presents Ariwa Sounds
Ariwa, Mad Professor’s label and reggae studio in South London has been running since 1979 and has released over 300 albums in reggae, dub, and Lovers Rock since.
This 15-track compilation released on Melodies International draws from 45 years of recordings on the Ariwa label with tracks from Johnny Clarke, Sandra Cross, Kofi, U Roy, Sister Nancy, Queen Omega, Aisha, Garnett Cross, Abel Miller, Horace Andy. It’s a beaut.
Mallory Hawk – Chinook
The debut solo album from Mallory Hawk, the Philadelphia singer-songwriter (born Hawkins, the surname clipped to summon a bird of prey), and Stereogum’s album of the week. Chinook takes its name from the twin-rotor military helicopters that filled the skies over her childhood in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and turns them into a metaphor for a habit of caring for everyone around her at her own expense.
The music refuses to sit still, moving from noisy indie to dance-punk, folk, garage-punk, new wave and swaying country rock across its 10 songs, held together by Hawk’s weary, big-hearted writing.
Irish listeners may know her as a former touring bassist for Dublin’s M(h)aol; she has also fronted Brooklyn post-punks Customer, played in Trace Mountains, and co-ran the indie-pop label Double Double Whammy.
The Strokes – Reality Awaits
The seventh album from The Strokes, and their first since 2020’s winning The New Abnormal. Twenty-five years on from Is This It, Julian Casablancas and co. occupy an unusual position: a band whose debut is permanently lodged in the canon, still capable of surprising people when they choose to. The gaps between records have grown long enough that each new one arrives as an event in itself.
Reality Awaits, perhaps because of the gap, and the band’s recent return via Coachella which seems to have increased their cultural cachet, finds the band in a slightly new reality – their old tight rock style is evident in the album’s DNA, it’s just pitched differently – brighter lighter – and doesn’t stray too far from the sonic sound of the last one – there’s a Phoenix-esque jam on ‘Lonely In The Future’, the soft neon rock of ‘Dine’n’Dash’, Julian Casablancas’ vocal auto-tune as deliberate effect on ‘Psycho Shit’, ‘Going Shopping’ and ‘Falling Out of Love’ and classic rock on ‘The Fruits Of Conquest’. That makes sense The Strokes are the most palpable classic rock bands we’ve got.
WILLOW – THE THREAD
The new album from WILLOW whose explored alternative music for years now – moving between pop-punk, neo-soul, jazz-adjacent art-rock and back again. Each WILLOW record has landed somewhere different from the last, and THE THREAD arrives with that same unpredictability baked in – WILLOW is an artist of interest – always intriguing.
Lido Pimienta – Caribenya
“What if Enya went to the Caribbean and partied with my Black and brown friends, what would happen? How can I create a record that goes Enya-mode and doesn’t care about trends or fashion, or that doesn’t care about how I look?”
That’s how Colombian-Canadian artist Lido Pimienta pitched her new album Caribenya to The Guardian last week. Intriguing!
Caribenya is follow-up to 2020’s Polaris-nominated Miss Colombia (she won for her album La Papessa in 2017). Pimienta makes vivid, politically charged art-pop rooted in Afro-Colombian and Indigenous musical traditions, and her records are among the most singular in the wider Latin-alternative world.
Charli xcx – Music, Fashion, Film
The follow-up to Brat, and by any measure the most-watched pop release of the year. Charli spent 2024 turning a lime-green square into a cultural event, then spent the time since refusing to simply repeat it. Music, Fashion, Film arrives led by ‘Camera’, with an Aidan Zamiri-directed video starring Vincent Cassel, and the title alone signals an artist thinking well beyond the record as a format.
Music, Fashion, Film is an inevitable comedown sonically but not much has changed in Charli’s brain – even during BRAT she was questioning herself, her insecurities and her place in the world. This time around, there are lots of big names attached to the project – David Cronenberg offers advice on the closing track ‘No One Last Forever’, and the triumvirate of John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese are on the cover.
As promised there is a lot of “rock music”, mostly in the form of sharpened guitar tones alongside some more PC Music-style synth textures like on the commerce galaxy brain of ‘Card Declined’, the guitar through effects on ‘Camera’, the muted emo-pop-punk of ‘2007’, and the frazzled fuzz of ‘I’m Afraid’ , ‘Magic Metal Montana’ is an ode to AG Cook built on a Strokes-esque lollop, and the pop punk returns on ‘Yeah’. It sounds like a musical exorcism of the BRAT era, an album operating on unstable ground, spilling out over the edges in an honest fashion. The album she had to make? Probably.
Body Type – Tally
The Sydney four-piece Body Type, whose scratchy, melodic guitar records sit in the lineage of Australian indie that runs through The Go-Betweens and out the other side. ‘And What Else?’ which kicks off the record caught my ear a few months ago.
Body Type releasing on King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s p(doom) records and are Sophie McComish, Annabel Blackman, Cecil Coleman, and Georgia Wilkinson-Derums.
Baby Rose – YEARNALISM
The Washington DC Atlanta-based singer has one of the most arresting voices in contemporary R&B – deep, weathered, the definition of a proper soul voice – her 2024 EP collaboration with BadBadNotGood was a hit around these parts.
The new album YEARNALISM is a follow-up to 2023’s much-loved Through and Through. Rose’s voice is one of the most immediately recognisable in contemporary soul, deep and unhurried, and her writing has consistently paired that instrument with real emotional weight. One of the more warmly anticipated soul records of the summer.
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Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
