Rockin Rudys Staff Picks
Rockin Rudys staff favorites of 2022...so far!
God Save the Animals is Alex G's fourth full-length for Domino and ninth overall. Giannascoli wrote and demoed these songs by himself, at home; but, for the sake of both new tones and “a routine that was outside of my apartment” during the pandemic, he began visiting multiple studios in greater Philadelphia. God Save the Animals consequently features the work of some half-dozen engineers whom Giannascoli asked to help him produce the “best” recording quality, whatever that meant. The result is an album more dynamic than ever in its sonic palette.

"Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us.
Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash.
“I can’t say that I’m sorry / when I don’t feel so wrong anymore,” the record begins, her voice softer and more open than ever, as if she’s singing through a hard won smile. “All the Good Times”, a twangy banger with nods to JJ Cale, starts the album on a triumphant and bright note. The title song, “Big Time”, follows and continues the warm optimism. “Guess I had to be losin’ to get here on time,” she sings, a fearless love song co-written with her partner.
Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time.
“Some experiences just make you feel as though you’re five years old, no matter how wise or adult you think you are,” she writes of that time. After that tearful but relieving conversation, she celebrated with her partner, their friends, oysters, and wine. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me.”
Three days later, her father died; his funeral became the occasion for Olsen to introduce her partner to her family. Though she was fearful their presence as a newly out queer couple would be “an additional symbol of loss,” those days went peacefully, yet only two weeks later Olsen got the call that her mother was in the ER. Hospice came soon after, and a second funeral came quickly on the heels of the first. Another trip back to St. Louis, another grief to face, another deepening and intensification of this still-new love.
The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album. “It’s a hard time again,” she sings on “This is How It Works”, pushing against the irrevocability of death, “Tell me a story that will make me forget.” “Go Home”, which begins with an almost numbed calm, slowly builds up to a wailing that comes up straight from the ground: “I want to go home, go back to small things. I don’t belong here. Nobody knows me.”
“You can’t plan grief, you can’t organize it or schedule it or know how you’ll feel when it comes. It just happens, and when it does sometimes it’s not what you thought it would be.” Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was in the studio, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album.
Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.
Playful bits of Tammy Wynette and Kitty Wells are here, too, but so are the complex orchestrations of her genre-bending 2019 record, All Mirrors. While that record was full of dramatic shifts and twists, here the surprises come in their simplicity—a slow swell of strings, instrumentation that cycles like a storm, or sparkling horns in a light-flooded break-up ballad.
While the spritely nature of her last EP, Aisles, may have signaled Olsen’s turn deeper into the electronic direction of her last All Mirrors, there’s hardly a synth in sight here. Jonathan Wilson, served as co-producer and also mixed the tracks, while Drew Erickson played piano, organ, and scored the string arrangements. Emily Elhaj, Olsen’s longtime bandmate, was a consistent collaborator as well, on the bass throughout.
“And I can’t fit into the past that you’re used to, I refuse to,” she sings as a wraithlike piano scaffolds her hopeful voice on “Ghost On”. “Forget the old dreams,” she rejoices on “Go Home”, “I got a new thing.” Darkness inherently suggests depth, but it takes a much wiser writer to find meaning and complexity in the luminous place that Big Time occupies. “Chasing the Sun” ends the record in a smiling, romantic place, a verdant crescendo rising as she pines: “Write a postcard to you / when you’re in the other room/ I’m just writing to say that I can’t find my clothes / If you’re lookin for something to do.”
The burning of her earliest work is still here, of course, but this time she’s “freed from the longing / for one moment to last” and she’s ready to “walk through the fires / of all earthly desires.”
—Catherine Lacey
Oaxaca, February 2022"
Once Twice Melody is the 8th studio album by Beach House. It is a double album, featuring 18 songs presented in 4 chapters. Across these songs, many types of style and song structures can be heard. Songs without drums, songs centered around acoustic guitar, mostly electronic songs with no guitar, wandering and repetitive melodies, songs built around the string sections. In addition to new sounds, many of the drum machines, organs, keyboards and tones that listeners may associate with previous Beach
House records remain present throughout many of the compositions.
Beach House is Victoria Legrand, lead singer and multi-instrumentalist, and Alex Scally, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. They write all of their songs together. Once Twice Melody is the first album produced entirely by the band. The live drums are by James Barone (same as their 2018 album, 7), and were recorded at Pachyderm studio in Minnesota and United Studio in Los Angeles. For the first time, a live string ensemble was used. Strings were arranged by David Campbell.
The writing and recording of Once Twice Melody began in 2018 and was completed in July of 2021. Most of the songs were created during this time, though a few date back over the previous 10 years. Most of the recording was done at Apple Orchard Studio in Baltimore. Once Twice Melody was mixed largely by Alan Moulder but a few tracks were also mixed by Caesar Edmunds, Trevor Spencer, and Dave Fridmann.

Bonobo will release new album Fragments, due on January 14, 2022 via Ninja Tune. Fragments is the most emotionally intense record that he - aka Simon Green - has ever had to make. It’s no surprise that it’s also his masterpiece. The album features Jamila Woods, Joji, Kadhja Bonet, Jordan Rakei, O’Flynn and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Born first out of fragments of ideas and experimentation, the album ultimately was fused together in a burst of creativity fueled by both collaboration and Green’s escape into the wild.
Broken Bells are back with their third full length album, INTO THE BLUE. Pressed on 12" black vinyl and secured in gatefold packaging, the design features their signature pink orb.
Charley Crockett will release his latest album The Man From Waco on September 9th via Son of Davy/Thirty Tigers. Crockett wrote or co-wrote all 14 songs on the album, and in many ways The Man From Waco is the purest distillation of his artistry to date. What started as a demo session with producer Bruce Robison at Robison’s studio The Bunker outside Austin, TX turned into the first album Crockett has ever made with his band The Blue Drifters backing him from start to finish. Mostly first takes with only a handful of overdubs, The Man From Waco finds Crockett refining his singular “Gulf & Western” sound which continues to captivate an ever-growing legion of fans.
“I just wanted an honest partnership: do it at your place, live to tape, everybody in the room,” Crockett says of the recording experience, and Robison was happy to accommodate. “The magic is in the performances on that tape. That’s what Bruce wanted to do, that’s what I wanted to do. When we were done, I said ‘these are masters, not demos.’”
There’s a loose narrative thread that ties the album together, but at the center of The Man From Waco is Crockett, who continues to trust his instincts and carve out his own singular space. Eschewing the ever-growing siren song of major labels and GRAMMY-winning producers, Crockett is forging ahead as a mostly DIY artist, calling his own shots and giving himself the space to strive for greatness on his own terms.
“Everybody was telling me: ‘go right, go right, go right,’” says Crockett. “I went left. I had to hold on to what has gotten me this far.”
The Man From Waco will be in a record store near you on September 9th on CD, Vinyl, and an indie record store exclusive edition featuring alternate album artwork.

Though initially formed as an extension of the lifelong friendship between guitarist Isaac DeBroux-Slone and bassist Raina Bock, Disq has evolved into a far more democratic and egalitarian organization, as Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet finds guitarists Logan Severson and Shannon Conor splitting singing and songwriting duties with the aforementioned DeBroux-Slone and Bock. Such an approach could have easily fallen into the trap of “satisfying everyone, pleasing no one,” resulting in committee-approved music devoid of any personality or rough edges, but happily, the opposite is true.
Pushing play on Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet, it is easy to imagine that it is the year 1998, and your cool older sister has returned from her freshman year at college only to hand you the sort of mind-altering mixtape out of which lifelong rock fanatics are born. It is the sort of record Beck might have made in his prime, if you swapped out the hip-hop and delta blues of Odelay for midwestern emo, Scottish power-pop, and the sort of all-American indie that functions as “classic rock” for this cherubic cohort.
Wrangling a melange of styles such as this is no simple task, but the record is held together by the powerful yet nimble rhythm section of Bock and drummer Stu Manley, whose muscular and hyperactive playing alternately keeps these adventurous compositions tethered firmly to the Earth and sends them soaring into stratosphere. Producer Matt Schuessler (the recording engineer of Collector making the most of his promotion) rarely lets a verse or chorus go by without adding some new sonic sparkle, keeping the arrangements an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of textures and moods. If there is a record in 2022 which squeezes more ideas into 41 minutes, then that record could surely only be the unlistenable mess that Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet avoids becoming so deftly.
Things being how they are in the world today, the idea of finding “someplace quiet” feels like an increasingly remote possibility, and the act of imagining such a place does, indeed, feel more and more desperate. Listening to Disq navigate the myriad twists and turns of their new album can feel akin to an attempted processing of our endless poly-crisis, where each new catastrophe and atrocity jostle for position at the top of the timeline. With their new album, Disq take a valiant stand against the temptation of complacency. As for that “someplace quiet?” It will have to wait... it's about to get loud in here.
Escuela Grind
Memory Theater - Clear Pink [Colored Vinyl] [Clear Vinyl] [180 Gram]
Vinyl: $31.98 Buy
Inspired by old western film scores and vintage Latin American sounds, Hermanos Gutiérrez's new Dan Auerbach-produced album El Bueno Y El Malo takes listeners on a hypnotic and sensual instrumental journey through a haunted landscape - where the haze of the desert meets the blue of a Kodachrome ocean. Born in Ecuador, raised in Switzerland, the brothers create a signature guitar sound forged by their rich cultures, a dialogue between worlds from musicians bound by blood into a singular soul.
The follow-up to their critically lauded full-length ‘Starmaker’—Honey Harper & The Infinite Sky is country music for everyone. Informed by a vast range of influences (George Jones to David Bowie to Kanye West), the record mines decades of musical history and places the most time-worn touchstones in unexpected new contexts. A postmodernist pastiche befitting of a band praised by Pitchfork for its “celestial twang that owes as much to Spiritualized as it does to Merle Haggard."

13x Platinum, 2x GRAMMY Award-nominated, singer & songwriter Kehlani has announced her highly anticipated third album blue water road. “blue water road is a destination in my mind,” Kehlani explains. “I’m giving everyone access. It’s an emotional journey, a sexual journey, and a spiritual journey. To me, the album is like a glass house. It's light, transparent, and the sun is shining right through it.”
Kendrick Lamar released his first album in 5 years, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. Available on physical CD on
May 27, 2022.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava [Limited Edition Recycled Black Wax 2 LP]
Over seven days, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard recorded hours and hours of jams to create their 21st studio album – Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava. “I have a list on my phone of hundreds of possible song titles… words and phrases I feel could be digested into King Gizzard-world.” Mackenzie selected 7 titles from his list that he felt “had a vibe,” and then attached a BPM value to each one. A lyrical group effort, the result of this experimental creative process is a quest into the dense and unpredictable. This 2 LP set is pressed on 180-gram recycled black wax housed in an outer card jacket in place of shrink wrap.
On his first album in partnership with Verve Records, Kurt Vile pulls his talents as a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer in unexpected directions — and the result is a vibrant, yet meditative record propelled by laid-back charm and curious spirit.

Twisting and contorting the English language to fit the meter and his every whim, Lupe Fiasco uses his superb lyrical skill to process the changing world in which he lives. Drawing connections between the concrete and spiritual in his hometown of Chicago, Lupe announces DRILL MUSIC IN ZION, his next album. The product of a burst of thoughtful spontaneity, Lupe created the new album over a short period, diving into a folder of beats sent by his longtime producer Soundtrakk and emerging with a fully-realized album in just three days. “Soundtrakk is the swordmaker, I’m the samurai," says Lupe. "He’s the mechanic, and I’m the driver.” Armed with Soundtrakk's soulful sounds, Lupe creates a focused statement that reflects on the past and paves a way forward, preaching strength through mindfulness and self-sustaining community. DRILL MUSIC IN ZION arrives digitally on June 24th via 1st & 15th/Thirty Tigers. The physical release is set for August 26 (CD, Black Vinyl, and Indie-retail exclusive blue vinyl).
His first new album since 2018's DROGAS WAVE, DRILL MUSIC IN ZION marks the start of another chapter in Lupe's illustrious career. The proud Chicago native has already had a busy 2022, marked with sold out shows, new music, and much more. Lupe recently closed out his "Food & Liquor Tour," a series of performances in which he plays his debut album in full. He paid tribute to his hometown in the reflective, self-produced "100 Chicagos," and dug into the archives to share "Hustlaz," a previously-unreleased song originally recorded before the release of the now-classic debut album Food & Liquor. Beyond music, Lupe continues to focus on the community organizations he founded, including We Are M.U.R.A.L, The Neighborhood Start-Up Fund, Society of Spoken Art, and his cross-cultural content venture, Studio SV.
In These Times is the new album by Chicago-based percussionist, producer and composer Makaya McCraven. This is the album McCraven’s been trying to make since he started making records – and his patience, ambition and persistence have yielded an appropriately career-defining body of work. With contributions from over a dozen musicians and creative partners from his tight-knit circle of collaborators – including Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Brandee Younger, Joel Ross, and Marquis Hill – the music was recorded in 5 different studios and 4 live performance spaces while McCraven engaged in extensive post-production work at home. the 11 song suite was created over 7+ years, as McCraven strived to design a highly personal but broadly communicable fusion of odd-meter compositions from his working songbook with orchestral, large ensemble arrangements and the edit-heavy “organic beat music” that he’s honed over a growing body of production-craft.
We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them.
Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit. Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them.
She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.
Acclaimed singer, songwriter and musician Molly Tuttle will release her anticipated Nonesuch Records debut, Crooked Tree, April 1 (on CD and digital. LP will be May 13) with her new bluegrass collective Golden Highway.
Recorded live at Nashville’s Oceanway Studios, Crooked Tree was produced by Tuttle and Jerry Douglas and features collaborations with Sierra Hull, Old Crow Medicine Show, Margo Price, Billy Strings, Dan Tyminski and Gillian Welch. The album explores Tuttle’s love of bluegrass, which she discovered through her father, a music teacher and multi-instrumentalist, and her grandfather, a banjo player. Across these thirteen tracks, all of which were written/co-written by Tuttle, she honors the bluegrass tradition while also pushing the genre in new directions.
“I always knew I wanted to make a bluegrass record someday,” Tuttle says. “Once I started writing, everything flowed so easily: sometimes I’ve felt an internal pressure to come up with a sound no one’s heard before, but this time my intention was just to make an album that reflected the music that’s been passed down through generations in my family. I found a way to do that while writing songs that feel true to who I am, and it really helped me to grow as a songwriter.”
In celebration of the new music, Tuttle and Golden Highway—Bronwyn Keith-Hynes (fiddle), Dominick Leslie (mandolin), Shelby Means (bass) and Kyle Tuttle (banjo)—will embark on an extensive headline tour beginning tonight with shows at Seattle’s Tractor Tavern (two nights), Portland’s Mississippi Studios (two nights), Los Angeles’ Roxy, Salt Lake City’s State Room, Boulder’s Fox Theatre, Asheville’s The Grey Eagle and Nashville’s Station Inn, among several others. Full details can be found at mollytuttlemusic.com/tour.
In addition to Tuttle (vocals, guitars), Douglas (dobro), Keith-Hynes (fiddle) and Leslie (mandolin), Crooked Tree also features musicians Darol Anger (fiddle), Ron Block (banjo), Mike Bub (upright bass), Jason Carter (fiddle), Viktor Krauss (upright bass), Todd Phillips (upright bass) and Christian Sedelmyer (fiddle) with additional harmony vocals from Tina Adair, Lindsay Lou and Melody Walker.
Nilüfer Yanya runs head first into the depths of emotional vulnerability on her anticipated sophomore record PAINLESS. Recorded between a basement studio in Stoke Newington and Riverfish Music in Penzance, the record is a more sonically direct effort, narrowing her previously broad palette to a handful of robust ideas. Yanya's debut album Miss Universe (2019) earned a Best New Music tag from Pitchfork and saw support tours with Sharon Van Etten, Mitski & The XX. Indie Exclusive Cloudy Blue LP.
Want to get a bead on Paul Cauthen?
Good freakin' luck -- especially on his third album, COUNTRY COMING DOWN.
COUNTRY COMING DOWN has been in motion awhile, actually. The title track, one of several co-writes with good Nashville pal Aaron Raitiere, has been around since before Cauthen's dark sophomore album ROOM 41. Its sense of campfire calm and "damn near off the map" idyll set a bar, for both music and lifestyle, that Cauthen aspired to, while the rest of the new album, recorded at Modern Electric Sound Recorders in Dallas with regular collaborators Beau Bedford (Texas Gentlemen) and Jason Burt (Medicine Man Revival), shows that Cauthen was able to get there without losing any of the playful "hot dog holly golly dagnabit" good-time spirit that rolls off his tongue like a tumbleweed in the west Texas panhandle.
If you want to know what COUNTRY COMING DOWN sounds like, tuck into the album's sonic array, an austere, sinewy attack that puts Cauthen's vocals dead center in the ride. "We've really unleashed Big Velvet in this situation, which I love," he says. Nowhere is that more true than "Country As Fuck," with a taut groove and loping gait tailor made for a 21st century honky tonk. Cauthen, Bedford and Burt play with that template throughout COUNTRY COMING DOWN, punctuating "Caught Me At a Good Time" with a sharp guitar solo, "High Heels" with a tasteful Wurlitzer break and the satiristic "Country Clubbin'" with a disco beat and chorus of female backing vocals.
His muse fully engaged, Cauthen is looking towards doing more of that in the future, with a few conceptual ideas up his sleeve about what he might do next. No matter what direction he takes, however, he won’t be abandoning that cabin in the hills or the "Country Clubbin'" life; Cauthen will just be adding more to the mix he's stirred together.
"It's just about looking at yourself in the mirror and knowing that what you've done to this day has been in good standing, with good morals and a good compass in life, driven the right way," he says. "Legacy is all we have -- that, and try to be a good person as well. If you get all that together, then you can do whatever the fuck you want and it'll be alright."

Limited black and silver colored vinyl LP pressing. 2022 release, the debut album by the Fargo, North Dakota based death metal group. On the album, the four-piece ruminate on philosophical absurdism, existentialism and human consciousness against a backdrop of suffocatingly minacious death metal.
Porcupine Tree have made their comeback today with a new single "Harridan". This will be off their new album "CLOSURE/CONTINUATION" which hits stores on 6/24. The band last released an album in 2009 (‘The Incident’). They released ten albums between 1992’s ‘On The Sunday of Life’ and 2009’s ‘The Incident’ before entering a hiatus after their biggest live show to date at the Royal Albert Hall in October 2010. The band is composed of Steven Wilson, Richard Barbieri and Gavin Harrison.
Revelators Sound System is the collaborative musical project of MC Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger) and Cameron Ralston. Recorded throughout 2020 and 2021, largely at Taylor's home in Durham, NC and Richmond, Virginia's Spacebombstudio, where Ralston serves as the house bassist, the album is a deep meditation on community that caroms from root-down avant-funk and spiritual groove to solitary cosmic minimalism and twinkling dubby ambience. Importantly—most importantly—Revelators is deeply emotional record, the running soundtrack to a world in confusion.
“Grieving,” with its trunk-rattling double drums and searing electric Clavinet, imagines a rhythmic meeting of The Meters, post-Bitches Brew Miles and Can before dissolving into a smoky, time-smeared coda that is a direct descendent of Lee 'Scratch' Perry's headiest Black Ark productions, while “Collected Water” is a mournful, pointillistic improvisation between Taylor's drifting guitar loops, Ralston's loping double bass, and the melodic dancing between Daniel Clarke's chiming piano figures, J.C. Kuhl's insistent saxophone and Reggie Pace's subtle, circular percussion. “Bury the Bell” is a shimmering, Alice Coltrane-inspired piece for guitar, clarinet and orchestra that spins off into stardust. The album concludes with “George the Revelator,” a lush devotional epic built atop the on-the-one drumming of J.T. Batesthat shakes and rolls with psychic, psychedelic fervor.
Revelators is a testament to the telepathic and soulful musical interplay between Taylor and Ralston. “We only ever talked about what emotion we were going for,” Ralston recalls. “We never talked about gearor fidelity.” Taylor echoes this sentiment, elaborating, “This record is about grief. Grief, and whatever comes after. We were looking for a way to communicate that musically.”

MOTOMAMI is the new album from Grammy Award winning recording artist, producer and songwriter Rosalía. The album has been declared as “One of the Most Anticipated Albums of 2022” by multiple global press outlets including BBC, El Pais, NME, NYLON, Pitchfork, TIME and Wall Street Journal amongst others. Rolling Stone en Espańol wrote, “It’s a brave record… Genres are a thing of the past; there’s room for everything here… what modern music should be: art and flavor, dembow, champeta, flamenco, bachata, hip-hop, piano melodies……MOTOMAMI feels like a freight train from the future, hurtling right at us at full speed and no brakes. Rosalía is the power source behind it all.”
MOTOMAMI features the previously released songs “LA FAMA,” “SAOKO,” and much, much more. “LA FAMA” (feat. The Weeknd), is a powerful and cautionary song that finds Rosalía and The Weeknd singing to each other in Spanish about how charming and seductive fame can be, making her a dangerous and shallow lover. And “SAOKO” is a shining example of the spirit ofMOTOMAMI—grit and grace, strength and vulnerability, fierce femininity, and an unapologetic, brave attitude.
“I’ve been coming a thousand years / you could call me the endless fuck,” goes the memorable opening line of Rubblebucket’s Earth Worship, a dance-forward, joyously layered collection of songs which work to dissolve the imaginary lines between the natural world and its inhabitants. Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth, the group’s front persons and co-writers, first began a friendship as jazz students at the University of Vermont. Soon after, they formed a prolific band that has delved into pop, funk, dance and psychedelia over five records, with performances spanning Bonnaroo to their self-curated Dream Picnic Festival, and collaborations with kindred genre-blenders including Arcade Fire and Questlove. But Traver and Toth initially bonded over another shared passion: the two were part of UVM’s Sustainable Community Development program. Though Toth communes with nature as part of his morning routine, and Traver is adept at foraging in the band’s adopted home of New York, songwriting explicitly about environmentalism in Rubblebucket has felt immaterial—besides, the band has shared its beliefs over the years by inviting anti-fracking, reproductive justice, and other organizations to table at their shows. But Traver was interested in writing love songs for and from the natural world, and both were inspired by their parents’ work in ecology and community facilitation, from which they saw a throughline to music’s communal healing. Traver suggested “earth worship” as a lyrical prompt for their sixth record, and with this concept at its core, the duo began writing Earth Worship: a Rubblebucket album with renewed shimmer, showcasing the group’s intricately sparkling beats, hushed yet hooky vocals and infectious melodic complexity.
Spirituals is Santigold's first full-length album since 2016's 99˘,and was mostly recorded during the 2020 lockdown. "All of a sudden there I was with three small children out of school-just-turned-two-year-old twins and a six-year-old-I was cooking, cleaning, doing laundry and changing diapers from morning to night, with three little kids coming in and out of my bed throughout each night like musical chairs. I was losing touch with the artist me, stuck in a part of myself that was too small. I felt the other parts of me were shrinking, disappearing."Santigold struggled but succeeded in defining a space in which she could center herself and collaborate virtually with producers and contributors: Rostam, Boys Noize, Dre Skull, P2J, Nick Zinner, SBTRKT, JakeOne, Illangelo, Doc McKinney, Psymun, Ricky Blaze, Lido, Ray Brady, and Ryan Olson. "Recording this album was a way back to myself after being stuck in survival mode. It wasn't until I made the space to create that I realized I wasn't only creating music but a lifeline," she says. California was on fire, we were hiding from a plague, the social justice protests were unfolding. "I'd never written lyrics faster in my life. After having total writer's block, they started pouring out. I decided to create the future, to look towards where we are going, to create beauty and pull towards that beauty. I need that for myself, but it's also there for whoever else needs it."
Coming February 11th: Spoon's tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, is alive, vital and inarguably the band's heaviest work to date. The first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in its hometown, Austin, in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years ' both in and out of shutdown ' these songs feel like a culmination of Spoon's career while marking a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more vivid.
Steve Earle has been creating intimate and personal music for well over four decades now. His songwriting has wound itself along a path from Texas to Tennessee and his education came in the form of learning from the best. 2009’s Grammy-nominated record, TOWNES, was a tribute to his dear friend and mentor, Townes Van Zandt. Ten years later Earle released, GUY. An album concentrated on paying homage to the late Guy Clark and the indelible friendship that they had formed in stories told through song. 2022 welcomes the release of JERRY JEFF. A 10-song collection of songs written by the gypsy songman, Jerry Jeff Walker. Featuring hits like, “Mr. Bojangles” and “Gettin’ By”, Earle & The Dukes honor the late Texan by amplifying the concept and sound of each song with a full-band recording.
Nearly sixty years after they first played together, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, longtime friends and collaborators, reunite with an album of music from two Piedmont blues masters who have inspired them all their lives: GET ON BOARD: THE SONGS OF SONNY TERRY & BROWNIE MCGHEE.
With Taj Mahal on vocals, harmonica, guitar, and piano and Cooder on vocals, guitar, mandolin, and banjo-joined by Joachim Cooder on drums and bass-the duo recorded eleven songs drawn from recordings and live performances by Terry and McGhee, who they both first heard as teenagers in California.
TAJ MAHAL & RY COODER - GET ON BOARD

Taylor Swift’s new studio album Midnights is available everywhere on October 21st. It’s a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face - the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout Taylor’s life. Each LP includes 13 songs, 1 of 4 album jackets, 1 of 4 marbled color discs, 1 of 4 album sleeves with Taylor’s photo, 1 of 4 gatefold photos, and a lyric booklet with never-before-seen photos.

Before Dan Klein's unfortunate passing, The Frightnrs agreed to keep a promise he asked of them - continue making music together. Part of that promise has been made manifest here...Daptone Records is proud to present ALWAYS! - the raw, soulful new long player from The Frightnrs. The road to Always began with a period of intense songwriting back when The Frightnrs and producer Victor Axelrod (Ticklah) were working on the group's debut, rocksteady masterpiece, Nothing More to Say. In addition to the scorchers heard therein, Axelrod and The Frightnrs agreed many of the recordings were too sweet to tamper with in order to fit the rocksteady mold. Some were created at their headquarters in Queens with Dan on the mic, some were elaborations on older ideas, others were brand new creations made at the finish line. Thanks to the vocal stems they had captured in this golden period, Dan Klein's other-worldly voice lived on, giving The Frightnrs all the raw material they needed for an entire album's worth of new, original music. So with that, The Frightnrs and Axelrod returned to the studio and painstakingly conceptualized, tracked, re-tracked and mixed them into a complete album with their beloved friend singing lead. The fruits of this arduous process lay bare the undying love and respect between musical brothers.The last song written for this album, "Why Does it Feel Like a Curse", married two song concepts with one of Dan's original vocal performances - creating a beautiful, flawless composition that not only serves as a highlight reel of their editing skills and songwriting prowess, but also as a kind of metaphor for The Frightnrs journey. The perfect ending for ALWAYS.
Trombone Shorty returns with Lifted, his first album in 5 years and the follow-up to his Blue Note debut Parking Lot Symphony, featuring special guests including vocalist Lauren Daigle & guitarist Gary Clark Jr. An album that captures the energy of his legendary live shows, Lifted combines classic New Orleans sounds (funk, gospel, street rhythms, Mardi Gras Indian chants & second lines) with modern lyrics, melody & beats to create something fresh & unique. Part Jimi Hendrix, part James Brown and all New Orleans, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews is the bandleader and frontman of Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, a hard-edged funk band that employs brass-band beats, rock dynamics & improvisation in a jazz tradition.
