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During the last half-decade Joe Westerlund became engrossed in studying the clave, the metric pattern that first defined so much Afro-Cuban and Latin music and then drifted into almost every corner of jazz and rock. What did it mean for an idea to be so flexible, for it to fit so many forms while retaining its own essence? The result is aleap into the unknown for Westerlund: Curiosities from the Shift, a 12-track playground of endlessly interwoven beats and melodies, where Westerlund’s clave enthusiasm collides with his textural experimentalism, where his rhythmic symphony of one shakes hands with friends decorating this space alongside him. The three-piece suite that holds Curiosities’ first half begins with the junkyard percussion and delightful bass splashes that frame “Tem” and ends with the surrealistic boom-bap of thumb pianos and shakers on “Can Tangle.” There is a hard-won joy to these numbers, as if Westerlund is delighting in real time in spotting a potential dead end but finding his own way forward, anyway. Those songs became a kind of working roadmap for the terrain that Westerlund explores across Curiosities, from the call-and-response glory of opener “Nu Male Uno” to the uncanny amorphousness of closer “Felt Like Floating.” All of these songs are defined by an identifiable rhythm, like the loping strut at the center of “Midpoint” and the head-nodding pulse that winds through “Persurverance,” winkingly misspelled to suit his North Carolina-via-Wisconsin pronunciation. But those are springboards for other textures, moods, and notions, like the New Age references—shimmering metallophones, chattering birds, retiring flutes—that circle through “Midpoint” or the dub-indebted delays and gamelan hymns that bubble up through “Persurverance.” This is deeply multivalent music, each number’s propulsive core counterbalanced by a series of surprising choices. Bittersweetness and joy, grief and liberation, sighs and smiles: It all exists here, tangling toward infinity. In the months after the initial sessions were done, Westerlund reached out to friends—Califone’s Tim Rutilli, saxophonist Sam Gendel, trumpeter Trever Hagen, and violinists Libby Rodenbough and Chris Jusell among them. These were his most thoroughly composed and precisely built works ever, but he wanted to hear what happened when his pals responded in real time. They delivered grace, depth, and feeling, with their parts pulling back curtains on hidden recesses of rhythmic worlds. Westerlund readily admits he is surprised by the album’s insistence on groove and meter rather than drifting abstraction. Having lived and worked so long with bands, he assumed he was done functioning within basic meter. These 12 songs fuse so many of Westerlund’s loves into pieces that are endlessly fascinating, using familiar elements to render his adventures into the unknown. Playful but tender, wistful but wondrous, driven by beats but not bound by them, this is Westerlund’s definitive statement so far, the solo drummer record that opens wide to reveal a musical and emotional landscape richer than perhaps even he imagined he might find.
Feed Like Fishes is Should's first full-length record — an album of noisy, sedate, and minimal pop songs. Falling somewhere between shoegazer, slowcore, and postrock, Feed Like Fishes is a wonderfully complicated record that echoes the sounds of Yo La Tengo, Slowdive, Bedhead, and Galaxie 500. The album also includes Should's take on The Wedding Present song "Spangle."
The album begins with "Fish Fourteen," a fuzzed-out lo-fi instrumental inspired by Colin Newman's instrumental solo record, Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish. "Sarah Missing" fits perfectly with the work on Should's A Folding Sieve album, with its unforgettable vocal chorus awash in shoegazing delight.
"It Still Would" and "It's Pull Is Slight" are moderately-paced indie rock tunes that bring to mind Bedhead, the latter song featuring a parade of bells throughout its extended coda.
"Memdrive" encircles whispered vocals with gliding bass and guitar lines in the spirit of Main's early work. Should also explore Apollo-era Brian Eno on "Inst2" substituting heavy analog-delayed guitar notes for Eno's keyboards.
"Both Eyes Open" ends the record with a nod to the melodious, delicate side of Yo La Tengo with Marc and Tanya's coupled vocals going down as sweet as sugar.
Martin Khanja (aka Lord Spike Heart) and Sam Karugu emerge from Nairobi's flourishing underground metal scene as former members of the bands Lust of a Dying Breed and Seeds of Datura. Together in 2019 they formed Duma (Darkness in Kikuyu) with Sam abandoning bass for production and guitars and Lord Spike Heart providing extreme vocals to the project.
Recorded at Nyege Nyege Studios in Kampala over three months in mid 2019 their self-titled debut album fuses the frenetic euphoria, unrelenting physicality and rebellious attitude of hardcore punk and trash metal with bone-crunching breakcore and raw, nihilist industrial noise through a claustrophobic vortex of visceral screams.
The savant mix of brutally adrenalized drums, caustic industrial trap, shredding grindcore inspired guitars and abrupt speed changes create a darkly atmospheric menace and is lethal on tracks like the opener "Angels and Abysses" , "Omni" or "Uganda with Sam".
The gruelling slow techno dirges and monolithic vocals on "Pembe 666" or "Sin Nature" add a pinch of dramatic inevitability bringing a new sense of theatricality and terrifying fate awaiting into the record's progression.
A sinister sonic aggression of feral intensity with disregard for styles, Duma promises to impact the burgeoning African metal scene moving it into totally new, boundary-challenging experimental territories.
For the first time on vinyl, Yo La Tengo’s understated, lonesome score to Kelly Reichardt’s classic “Old Joy.”
Recorded in a single afternoon at Yo La Tengo’s studio in Hoboken, Old Joy is a drifting, improvisatory journey, born out of years-long friendship between the band and the film’s director.
The six instrumental tracks, created in collaboration with legendary guitarist Smokey Hormel, carry that unmistakable Yo La Tengo sound, but delivered in service of another great work of art. The music, like so much of Reichardt’s film work, is low-key yet arresting, stripped down to the essentials, warm and unpretentious. The record includes two variations on the beloved “Leaving Home” theme, released for the first time on vinyl after years traveling in Yo La Tengo fan circles.
This music is a balm, remarkably full of emotion despite (or maybe because of) its restraint and minimalism. Originally released on They Shoot, We Score, a CD compiling several of the band’s soundtracks, Old Joy stands as a cohesive whole here, blooming and rewarding repeat listens. Sliding reverbed guitars, muted piano and percussion, the hum of an old amp - the blurry memory of an afternoon in the studio, or a short-lived road trip through the backwoods of Oregon.
Small-run, high-quality LP pressed at Smashed Plastic in Chicago, on black and transparent pink vinyl.</p><iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 340px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=853350/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://mississippirecords.bandcamp.com/album/old-joy-official-soundtrack">Old Joy (Official Soundtrack) by Yo La Tengo</a></iframe>
For the first time on vinyl, Yo La Tengo’s understated, lonesome score to Kelly Reichardt’s classic “Old Joy.”
Recorded in a single afternoon at Yo La Tengo’s studio in Hoboken, Old Joy is a drifting, improvisatory journey, born out of years-long friendship between the band and the film’s director.
The six instrumental tracks, created in collaboration with legendary guitarist Smokey Hormel, carry that unmistakable Yo La Tengo sound, but delivered in service of another great work of art. The music, like so much of Reichardt’s film work, is low-key yet arresting, stripped down to the essentials, warm and unpretentious. The record includes two variations on the beloved “Leaving Home” theme, released for the first time on vinyl after years traveling in Yo La Tengo fan circles.
This music is a balm, remarkably full of emotion despite (or maybe because of) its restraint and minimalism. Originally released on They Shoot, We Score, a CD compiling several of the band’s soundtracks, Old Joy stands as a cohesive whole here, blooming and rewarding repeat listens. Sliding reverbed guitars, muted piano and percussion, the hum of an old amp - the blurry memory of an afternoon in the studio, or a short-lived road trip through the backwoods of Oregon.
Small-run, high-quality LP pressed at Smashed Plastic in Chicago, on black and transparent pink vinyl.</p><iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 340px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=853350/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://mississippirecords.bandcamp.com/album/old-joy-official-soundtrack">Old Joy (Official Soundtrack) by Yo La Tengo</a></iframe>
Antonio Carlos & Jocafi, the legendary duo from Bahia whose music has embodied the soul of Brasil for over five decades, return with a bold new collaboration: Jazz Is Dead 026. Introduced to Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad by Beto Barreto of Baiana System, the meeting was instant magic. “The first time we met, it was like family,” they recall. That kinship led Younge and Muhammad to invite the duo to Los Angeles, where they carried a handful of ideas and created new songs on the spot—an intuitive, improvisatory process that defines the Jazz Is Dead ethos.
The story of Antonio Carlos & Jocafi begins in Salvador at the close of the 1960s, when the pair first joined forces as composers and performers. In 1971, their debut album Muita Zorra! introduced Brasil to a sound that was both rooted in Bahia’s folk traditions and attuned to the modern pulse of samba, funk, and MPB. From that record came Você Abusou, an anthem that became one of the most recorded songs in the history of Brasilian popular music. The duo quickly distinguished themselves through their ability to channel the everyday life, humor, and struggles of Bahia into universal songs that resonated across the country and beyond.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Antônio Carlos & Jocafi wrote and recorded music that blended the sacred and the profane, Afro-Brasilian traditions and urban funk, biting satire and joyous celebration. Their compositions were picked up by some of the greatest voices of their generation: Clara Nunes, Gal Costa, Maria Creuza, and Sérgio Mendes among them. They also contributed to television and cinema, writing theme songs that became part of Brasil’s cultural fabric. Despite their success, they remained deeply tied to Bahia, drawing constant inspiration from Salvador’s streets, the Mercado Modelo, the rhythms of candomblé, and the irreverent humor of the people.
Now, with Jazz Is Dead 026, Antônio Carlos & Jocafi reaffirm their creative vitality while introducing their timeless Bahian spirit to a new generation. “Adrian’s love for Brasil is greater than that of many Brasilians,” they say, noting how deeply he listens, studies, and channels the rhythms, stories, and feelings of their culture. The result is an album that bridges Salvador’s Mercado Modelo with the global stage, weaving Bahia’s folkloric traditions into Jazz Is Dead’s analog soul.
This collaboration stands not only as a continuation of their journey but also as a testament to the enduring power of Bahia’s music—a sound that carries history, resistance, and joy in every beat. From Você Abusou to Jazz Is Dead 026, Antônio Carlos & Jocafi remain essential voices in the evolving story of Brasilian music.
FEAR - the joint album from Jared Mattson of The Mattson 2 and Ruban Nielson of Unknown Mortal Orchestra - was recorded in June of 2024. All recording and mixing took place in Palm Springs. Mastered by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios in London. --- I woke up around noon, disoriented, half-dreaming. Music was playing — unfamiliar, fully formed, the kind of sound you assume belongs to someone else’s life. For a moment I thought I was still asleep, hearing music I wished I’d made. Then it hit me: Ruban Nielson was already awake, in the studio, listening to what we’d made. We both knew it. There was something inevitable about the music — like it hadn’t been created so much as uncovered. We listened on repeat, laughing, shaking our heads. One track brought up a shared image: an evergreen forest by a lake at sunset. Ruban suddenly looked up, eyes wide, like he’d just been handed a message. “I’ve got the title,” he said. American Eagle. The name landed the same way the music had — clean, obvious, impossible to argue with. The American Dream: hot dogs, Cokes, sunset drives. We both lost it, tears in our eyes from laughing hard for minutes straight. We swam in his pool. The conversation never stopped. The flow stayed constant, nourishing, effortless. Then Ruban said it again — the line that had already become a principle: “Let’s make more that sound exactly like this.” So we did. Two days later, 'FEAR' was finished. - Jared Mattson
Critical Thot is the bold new collaborative album from Bay Area-based rapper/producer Sha Ray, and producer/electronic musician DJ Haram—two uncompromising artists reshaping rap and experimental sound. It is an intriguing pairing; Haram is one-half of the duo 700 Bliss with rapper and poet Moor Mother and has several solo records under her belt—including 2025’s critically acclaimed Beside Myself (Hyperdub)—and high profile collaborations with BbyMutha, Fever Ray, Ghais Guevara, and Armand Hammer. Meanwhile, although Critical Thot is Sha Ray’s official debut album, her reputation as a next-wave talent precedes her. Haram got wise in 2022 when she saw Sha Ray perform at a show in Brooklyn. “We spoke at the venue and after that I followed her on social media. She gave an incredible performance, so later on when she slid in my DMs asking for beats, I was already on board,” Haram explains. An Armand Hammer/DJ Haram show in LA was the nexus for these connections to yield fruit. Sha Ray flew down from the Bay to link with Haram, and although the two didn’t end up recording anything that day, it was the springboard for the cross-country collaboration that culminated in Critical Thot. The whole album was made remotely: Haram cooking up beats in Brooklyn and sending them to Sha Ray, who would send back demos and notes. They got to know each other as artists, and as people, while they worked on this project. “Haram and I have had so many overlapping experiences working as women in the music industry, which really enriched our bond. That, and her very striking approach to production, really inspired a lot of the writing on this record,” Sha Ray says. That writing is razor sharp and refreshingly direct. Sha Ray quickly proves herself to be in a class of her own, navigating even the knottiest of DJ Haram productions without taking her foot off the gas. Haram digs deep into her bag with beats that run the gamut from experimental and abrasive to slinky fun to darkly foreboding. Percussive thuds and shots are layered with intricate details and soft linings. A trappy banger dissolves into a flood of strings. A sparse industrial soundscape slowly coheres into a cacophonous uppercut of a rap record. Sha Ray bobs and weaves her way through every drum break and synth with a defiant ease. “As a rapper I’m pretty exclusively interested in interrogating misogyny and sexuality in my work. Critical Thot is a deliberation on unapologetic feminine authority, while being very honest about the complicated truth of being a participant in self-objectification, and sexuality as a social currency,” Sha Ray elaborates. “This record focuses a lot on defining power in feminine sexuality as relational and ever-shifting, and thus inherently imperfect. However, it is a power that I have and I am going to use it.” Critical Thot features contributions from Nappy Nina, JWords, and Archangel.
Assembling a 'Kwaidan'-style anthology from chewed scraps of noir, horror and dystopian sci-fi movies, billy woods chronicles Black American angst on 'GOLLIWOG', running circles around his peers and arriving on the AOTY for fans of Ka, EARL, Aesop Rock, Westside Gunn or Cannibal Ox. Featuring production from El-P, The Alchemist, DJ Haram, Saint Abdullah, Shabaka Hutchings and others.
The English language is violence, I hotwired it woods coolly quips on 'Jumpscare', tossing out run-on cadences to juggle polyrhythms between beatless double-bass and vaudeville Pan Sonic-esque electrical interferences. Within a track, he fully establishes the concept for 'GOLLIWOG', an album that surveys the full spectrum of horror, splicing together creaking floorboards, ticking clocks, industrial clanks, Herrmann-esque stabs and detuned pianos, maniacal screams and blood-curdling laughs to accompany knotty tales of corporeal terror. It's horrorcore in a sense, cobbling together its scenery with the same congealed raw materials as Necro or Prince Paul, but woods uses the schlocky formula to lighten his death blows, landing some of the deepest lyrical lacerations of his lengthy career so far; 'Dead Body Disposal' it ain't. "Daddy longlegs stride your home like Cecil Rhodes," he nicks, equating the fear of (harmless) spiders with the terror of a real-life boogeyman - the coloniser of Zimbabwe (where woods' father was born), no less. And the track ends with a seemingly throwaway vocal sample: "a horrid sight, the blackest gnome." A description of the titular character from American author Florence Kate Upton's 19th century children's book 'The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg', it's actually a clue to unpicking the album's title. What's fear, exactly, ponders woods, and what's merely ideology? And how does all of this become entertainment, let alone throwaway cutesy fodder for kids?
American horror as a genre has long broadcast the innermost fears of a nation who wears its ideology so boldly that it almost vanishes. Way back in the early 20th century, H.P. Lovecraft's racism manifested in stories of an ancient evil lurking beneath the New World's disturbed earth; later on, in the wake of the contraceptive pill and the subsequent free love movement, promiscuity was met with death and mutilation in an endless slew of slasher movies; and during peak neoliberalism, a taste for "torture porn" offset the stasis of safe liberal suburbia. woods accepts the history of horror, and proposes a true Black American Gothic archetype; just like Jordan Peele's 'Get Out' bolted together familiar tropes to signal how psychologically traumatic the Black experience can be within manicured white confines, woods bundles various cultural spikes to fabricate a more dangerous lyrical weapon. On 'BLK ZMBY', the ubiquitous zombie myth - a Haitian folkloric invention that was famously repurposed by George Romero in the '60s as a critique of American capitalism - is used as packaging for a barrage of knowledge that wraps references to Fela, Dune and Usual Suspects in thorny post-colonial theory. In Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead', the Black lead character spends 90 minutes fighting off zombies only to be shot in cold blood by beer chugging rednecks; now, woods' Black zombies have taken over the asylum, ignoring accountability and poisoning the water supply while the third world's corpse is sucked dry. "Zombies go home to platters of prawn and escargot," woods says, not letting Biggie off the hook. "New mothers struggle while the zombies suckle like baby goats."
DJ Haram handles the production on 'All These Worlds are Yours', dilating Shabaka Hutchings' transcendent improvisations with damaged '50s b-movie oscillations, rasping amp distortions and microtonal drones. "Today, I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my own home," woods recounts, accepting the day-to-day wartime horror-tainment we're fed on social media, 'Human Centipede'-style. "Trench fire, silent weapons, body horror, private booth," replies E L U C I D, woods' longtime Armand Hammer cohort. And woods coaxes out some of El-P's best production work in years on 'Corinthians', linking snippets of Lu Xun's 'Diary of a Madman' - that equates the Confucian ethical system with cannibalism - with the breakdown of late-stage Abrahamic morals that'll be closer to home for Anglophone listeners. "Best believe them crackers won't make it to Mars," he quips, double-underlining a verse that muddles St. Paul with Steven King, and Noah with the military industrial complex. By itemizing his own fears in a sequence of 'Cat's Eye'-style vignettes, woods launches hooks into the contemporary façade of terror-as-amusement, a fairground haunted house that's populated with very real demons. It's shockingly effective - the Pulitzer-ready rap album woods has been promising for aeons, and one of the very best things we've heard this year so far.
“No second-guessing, no overthinking. The way I want to live my life is by doing the things that are important to me, and I think everyone should live that way,” says Mei Semones of her strengthened self-assurance. Through continuously honing in on her signature fusion of indie rock, bossa nova, jazz and chamber pop in a way that highlights her technical prowess on guitar, the 24-year-old Brooklyn-based songwriter and guitarist is quickly establishing herself as an innovative musical force. Since the release of her acclaimed 2024 Kabutomushi EP, a series of lushly orchestrated reflections on love in its many stages, Mei has gone on to tour extensively across the US, cultivate a dedicated following, and write and record her highly anticipated debut album, Animaru. Inspired by the Japanese pronunciation of the word “animal” in Japanese, Animaru is the embodiment of Mei’s deeper trust in her instincts – a collection of musically impressive tracks that see Mei sounding more adventurous, more vulnerable and more confident than ever before.
Mei’s newfound assertiveness comes in part from her experiences in the past year, as 2024 was a transformative year for the Mei Semones band. They shared bills with the likes of Liana Flores, Elephant Gym and Kara Jackson, among others, and Mei transitioned to doing music full-time. Amidst the frequent touring, Mei and her five-piece band recorded the album in the summer of 2024 at Ashlawn Recording Company, a farm studio in Connecticut operated by their friend Charles Dahlke. To these sessions, she brought a batch of tracks that, not unlike Kabutomushi, are sophisticated declarations of non-romantic love: love of life (“Dumb Feeling”), love of family (“Zarigani”), love of music and her guitar (“Tora Moyo”). Animaru exemplifies Mei’s enchantingly wide range as a songwriter and musician, including some of the most challenging and most straightforward songs Mei has ever written.
Though her music might inherently evoke feelings of romance and softness, the crux of the album lies in Mei and her band’s skillful balance of tension and release. Often within individual tracks, there will be moments of pared-back acoustic guitar adorned by Mei’s infectious vocalizations that, in a moment’s notice, transform into orchestral swells of sweeping strings and complex guitar rhythms. Album opener “Dumb Feeling” is a prime example, a bossa/samba blend complete with indie rock sensibilities in the choruses as Mei details her contentment with her life in New York City. Mei actively seeks out musical challenges throughout Animaru, like on “I can do what I want,” the album’s most technically ambitious track. But she still manages to make the quickly cascading guitar harmonics and odd meters sound like a breeze to play, her breathy, lilting voice cutting through the track’s energetic dynamics. It epitomizes the album as a whole – she sings of doing things her own way, on her own terms, in hopes of inspiring others to make the same active switch in their own lives.
The simpler moments on Animaru are equally as captivating as when Mei is shredding on guitar or her bandmates are carrying out an intricate arrangement. “Donguri,” a stripped-down jazz duo performance between acoustic guitar and upright bass, is the simplest song Mei has ever written, brought to life by Mei sweetly chronicling (mostly in Japanese) what she imagines life would be like as a woodland creature living in the forest. The album’s penultimate track also encompasses themes relating to the titular “animaru.” Translating to “crayfish,” the bright, effervescent “Zarigani” is a nostalgic expression of love for her twin sister, with Mei singing “We’ll always have each other / I love you like my guitar / I love you like no other.” Family is one of the primary loves of Mei’s life, with her mom, Seiko Semones, making all of her album and single artwork. Despite Animaru being a statement of Mei’s autonomy and confidence at this point in her life, it's the various loves that she surrounds herself with – her family, her friends, her band, her music – that empower her to do things her own way.
