Notable Releases of the Week (1/24)

I had to take last week off from Notable Releases, but Bill reviewed a handful of new albums in Indie Basement (The Weather Station, Ex-Vöid, Ela Minus, and Delivery), and now Notable Releases is back in full force. My lead review this week is for an album that already feels like an early AOTY contender, and fun fact: two of this week’s reviews are sort of Armand Hammer-related.

In this week’s Indie Basement, Bill reviews Mogwai, Rose City Band, Young Knives, Edvard Graham Lewis (of Wire), Tunng, Matt Berry, and Anna B Savage, and this week’s honorable mentions include Dax Riggs (of Acid Bath), Wardruna, Boldy James, Sam Amidon, Open Head, François Couturier & Dominique Pifarely, Larkin Poe, Studio, The Veils, Harakiri For The Sky, Dilettante, Kawala, Emily Mikesell & Kate Campbell Strauss, Motherhood, Jeshi, C Duncan, Charm School, Ale Hop & Titi Bakorta, the Sunrot EP, the horsegiirL EP, the acoustic Lucero album, the acoustic Thin Lizzy album, the Iggy Pop live album, and the Boilermaker comp.

And since I missed last week, other notable albums released last week include Mac Miller, Busta Rhymes, Rebecca Black, Pigeon Pit, Kele (of Bloc Party), ZORA, Prism Shores, Benjamin Lackner, Blue Lake, David Gray, jasmine.4.t, Sophie Jamieson, Songhoy Blues, Lots of Hands, Flora Hibberd, Brian John McBrearty, Victoria Canal, Wafia, the Day By Day EP, the Shutdown EP, the Skiifall & Kenny Beats EP, the Yola EP, the Son Lux EP, the Milk & Bone EP, the Blood Lemon EP, the Television Personalities Radio Sessions comp, and the 30th anniversary edition of Frank Black’s Teenager of the Year.

Read on for my picks. What’s your favorite release of the week?

FKA twigs – Eusexua (Young/Atlantic)
The art pop icon’s latest is a rush of feeling, pleasure, and physicality that plays out like a cross between Kate Bush, ‘Erotica’-era Madonna, and the post-COVID party era

To anyone who had a Brat Summer, bundle up for Eusexua Winter. Like the album that dominated 2024’s warmest month, FKA twigs’ latest LP exists at the meeting point between art pop and rave, but with a darker, icier exterior. Its heat radiates from within; eusexua, an FKA twigs-invented portmanteau of “euphoria” and “sexual,” is both the album’s title and its core theme. It’s a rush of feeling, pleasure, and physicality that plays out like a cross between Kate Bush, Erotica-era Madonna, and the post-COVID party era. Primarily co-produced with electronic futurist Koreless (and featuring contributions from Eartheater, 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady, and others), Eusexua splits its time between club-night fever dreams (“Perfect Stranger,” “Room of Fools”), avant-garde excursions (“Drums of Death”), and sensual comedowns (“Girl Feels Good,” “Sticky”). It flirts with J-pop on standout deep cut “Childlike Things” (with rapping in Japanese by Kanye’s 11-year-old daughter North West), and it stops its wild ride for the vulnerable, sentimental closer “Wanderlust,” which feels like it ends with more of a “To be continued…” than a “Fin,” with our narrator leaving us wondering if she’ll wake up Monday morning. It’s a fleeting moment of lucidity amid all the euphoric haze, and it lends itself to playing Eusexua on repeat. As “Wanderlust” fades out and the thumping bass drum of the opening title track comes back in, the rush comes back too strong to worry about Monday morning.

Ghais Guevara – Goyard Ibn Said (Fat Possum)
The Philly rapper/producer’s Fat Possum debut is an ambitious, two-part concept album with contributions from ELUCID, McKinley Dixon, DJ Haram, and more

Ghais Guevara is the kind of rapper that possesses both a defiantly-underground ethos and sky-high ambition. His first album for Fat Possum–an increasingly-diverse label that also has hip hop representation from El-P, Armand Hammer, and Armand Hammer member ELUCID (who guests on this record)–is a concept album split into two acts, with act one highlighting “the triumphs of being a rapper” and act two highlighting the “tragedies” of the experience, as Ghais told NME. The mostly-self-produced album’s wide musical scope ranges from lush gospel-soul samples to smoky boom bap revival to abstract experimentalism to modern trap and drill to one song with a baroque harpsichord and string arrangement (“The Apple That Scarcely Fell” ft. McKinley Dixon). Ghais clearly sees the value in all different types of rap, and he breaks down musical barriers in a way that looks and sounds damn near effortless. Throughout Goyard Ibn Said‘s two acts, he constantly reinforces another sentiment that he expressed in his recent NME interview, that “hip hop can be fun and intellectual at the same time.” He uses his story arc to talk not just about the lives of rappers, but about the greater Black experience within white America. Sometimes his message is weaved into layers of wordplay, and other times it jumps out at you, blunt and direct. He’s clearly thought about what it means to be an artist an activist, and an entertainer, and on Goyard Ibn Said, he’s frequently all three at once.

Goyard Ibn Said by Ghais Guevara

Benjamin Booker – Lower (Fire Next Time)
On his first album in nearly 8 years, the New Orleans artist morphs his blues rock into something new, with help from hip hop producer Kenny Segal

After releasing two bluesy garage rock albums in the mid-2010s, Benjamin Booker all but disappeared from the public eye, only to return years later as a guest singer on “Doves,” the nearly-nine-minute closing track of underground rap duo Armand Hammer’s 2023 album We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, and also on “Baby Steps” from Armand Hammer member billy woods and producer Kenny Segal’s album Maps from that same year. It might’ve seemed like an unexpected path for Booker to take, but meeting Kenny (who also produced “Doves”) turned out to be exactly what he needed. He was looking to take his own music in a new direction, but having trouble figuring out how to create the sounds he was hearing in his head. “Kenny was the missing piece I needed,” Booker says. “He fills in all of my gaps.” The result is Lower, the first Benjamin Booker album in nearly eight years, entirely produced by Kenny Segal. You can hear elements of the fuzzed-out blues rock and the hip hop production that Benjamin and Kenny are respectively best known for, but most of all, you hear the pair meeting in the middle and coming up with a new beast entirely. Some songs are covered by walls of distortion, others are powered by rustic acoustic guitars, and all of them fit the same mood: dark, blown-out, perfect in their imperfections. It sounds like a modern-day answer to genre-blurring psychedelic fusions like War’s The World Is A Ghetto and Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, and the subject matter runs parallel to the music of the Nixon era as well, with pain, sadness, and anger expressed on both a personal and a societal level. Regarding the long gap between albums that Lower closes, it feels less like a comeback and more like a new beginning. “I don’t know what I’ll do next,” Booker mused, “but if I can imagine it, I can do it now.”

Central Cee – Can’t Rush Greatness (Columbia/CC4L)
After rising to global stardom, the UK rapper delivers a mass-appeal new album that features Skepta, Dave, 21 Savage, Lil Baby, Lil Durk, and Young Miko

In the three years since Central Cee’s last full-length project, 23, he went from one of the fastest-rising stars in UK rap to one of the biggest UK rappers in the world, thanks in large part to singles like “Doja,” “Sprinter” (from his EP with Dave), and “Did It First” with Ice Spice. His new album Can’t Rush Greatness arrives as one of the most globally-anticipated UK rap albums in years; it’s a big deal not just for Cench himself, but for UK rap in general. An article by DJ Semtex on Clash asked, “Can Cench deliver? Is he built for it? Can he truly rep for us on the global stage?” That’s a lot of weight to put on any individual artist’s shoulders, but, Semtex assured, “Of course, he can.” I would agree. Can’t Rush Greatness is inseparable from Central Cee’s fame–he reckons with it multiple times throughout the album–and it’s delivered with the confidence of an all-star performer who knows he has to succeed. He’s joined on the album by two other UK rap greats (Dave and Skepta), and he continues his global takeover by finding chemistry with Atlanta (21 Savage, Lil Baby), Chicago (Lil Durk), and Puerto Rico (Young Miko). Throughout it all, his wide appeal is always evident. He sprinkles his drill bangers with glistening pianos and injects his chest-puffed swagger with self-reflection. He works African and Caribbean polyrhythms into a few songs and R&B balladry into a few others, giving us a little something for everyone without sounding like he’s trying too hard to do so. All outlandish expectations aside, it’s a fun record that speaks for itself.

DITZ – Never Exhale (Republic of Music/Domino)
The rising UK band’s sophomore LP is all sneering, sarcastic shouts over a loud, dark hybrid of post-punk, post-hardcore, and noise rock

UK band DITZ have been on the rise these past few years, making fans out of everyone from Chicago hardcore veteran Vic Bondi to NYC noise rock staples Couch Slut, and it’s not hard to see what musicians like those hear in a loud, jagged band like DITZ. They got the idea to form the band in 2015 after seeing back-to-back sets from Lightning Bolt and METZ at Mutations Festival, and they’ve listed both of those bands among their core influences, alongside similarly caustic acts like The Jesus Lizard, Pissed Jeans, and Gilla Band. In the leadup to their sophomore album Never Exhale, they did a tour supporting IDLES, and they fit that bill perfectly too. If you like any of those bands, there’s a good chance you’ll dig DITZ as well. Never Exhale is all sneering, sarcastic shouts over a loud, dark hybrid of post-punk, post-hardcore, and noise rock. It gets pretty heavy at times, and, at least on the seven-and-a-half minute closer “Britney,” it can get pretty out-there too. More than anything else, this kind of music needs energy and attitude, and there’s no doubt that DITZ have both.

Never Exhale by DITZ

Kathryn Mohr – Waiting Room (The Flenser)
Written and self-recorded in a former fish factory in middle-of-nowhere Iceland, Kathryn Mohr’s haunting new ambient pop LP sounds closed off from the world in more ways than one

In my review of Ethel Cain’s new album Perverts, I said it sounded like something that might come out on The Flenser, and albums like Kathryn Mohr’s new LP Waiting Room are exactly what I had in mind. Similar to Kathryn’s labelmate Midwife (who plays on the Ethel Cain album), this album sort of finds the middle ground between Grouper’s ambient pop and Chelsea Wolfe’s goth-folk. It’s a collection of dark, crackling, slow-moving songs that usually find Kathryn singing over a guitar, a piano, or an ambient texture. Adding to how closed off from the world it sounds, it was written and self-recorded in a windowless concrete room of a former fish factory in middle-of-nowhere Iceland, lit by string lights (that are pictured on the album cover). According to the album bio, when Kathryn did leave the factory to explore the nature that surrounded it, she took a field recorder with her, and the sounds she captured add to the aura of this album. It probably goes without saying that music this slow and quiet requires a little patience, but when the music is as gripping as Kathryn Mohr’s is, that’s not a big ask at all.

Waiting Room by Kathryn Mohr

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Mogwai, Rose City Band, Young Knives, Edvard Graham Lewis (of Wire), Tunng, Matt Berry, and Anna B Savage.

Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases archive.

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