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Stream of the Crop: 10 New Albums for Heavy Rotation

New projects from Nadine, No Age, Migos, and Agrimonia make this week's list of essential albums.
Ebru Yildiz

Every week, the Noisey staff puts together a list of the best and most important albums, mixtapes, and EPs from the past seven days. Sometimes that list includes projects we’ve written about on the site already; sometimes they're just great records that we want everyone to hear but never got the chance to write about. The result is neither comprehensive nor fair. We hope it helps.

Nadine: Oh My (Father/Daughter)

Nadia Hulett, who you may know for dreaming alongside Makonnen in Phantom Posse, and Ava Luna’s Carlos Hernandez and Julian Fader have condensed all of their previous projects’ genteel sway into the debut of their new collaborative project oh my. The narcotized daydreams they conjure manage to recall both the worldly exploration of Martin Denny’s chintzy exotica and the cosmic bop of Stereolab’s future-lounge experiments, without getting too sedentary in their easy-goingness. “Ultra Pink” imagines a version of easy listening where you’re implicated in your placidity—”Don’t tell me I’m some kind of woman,” Hulett pleads obliquely—forcing you to take ownership of your own comfort. Do you deserve it? Does anyone? — Colin Joyce

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No Age: Snares Like a Haircut (Drag City)

The LA-based noise-rock band's fifth album (and first since leaving Sub Pop) is joyous and anthemic, never more than a couple seconds from Dean Spunt exhaling a weightless vocal hook and Randy Randall striking some exultant power chord. There's fear beneath the fuzz, because it was written in 2017. On "Stuck in the Changer," Spunt sings, "Everywhere I face / I toss and turn"; on "Send Me," he's more restless still: "Send me, send me / Where should I go?" But it's all delivered with such abandon that the angst burns away. — Alex Robert Ross

Migos: Culture II (Quality Control)

Migos' third album (but something like their tenth release counting their mixtapes, which you absolutely should) Culture II sounds like two projects smashed together, reflected in its movie-length 105-minute run time. One is a holding pattern; well-crafted Murda Beatz/Metro Boomin/Zaytoven beats with ghostly Quavo vocals and machine-gun raps from Offset and Takeoff, just like the first Culture. The other LP takes chances and is filled with small sonic experiments; the percolating "Stir Fry," the overt, sunny pop of "Gang Gang," and Quavo's Roger Troutman vocoder turn on "Too Much Jewelry." It portrays a world where the Migos fully embrace their status as one the world's biggest groups of any genre and decide to take over all of music. — Phil Whitmer, Let's Briefly Explore Migos' Recent Love Affair With the Sax

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Agrimonia: Awaken (Southern Lord)

These Swedes deftly illustrate what can happen when a genre first forged by a bunch of young anarcho-punks who possessed little more than a few beat-up guitars, a passing familiarity with the concept of tuning their instruments, and something to say is exposed to heavier metallic elements and filtered through modern equipment. Their ambitious new album, Awaken, takes great care to show off the band’s masterful command of melody, even as vocalist Christina Blom delivers its ominous prophecies through bared teeth. — Kim Kelly, Agrimonia’s New Album Shows What Can Happen When Crust Grows Up

Long Neck: Will This Do? (Tiny Engines)

The record doesn’t only feel haunted by loss—it’s more a portrait of hard-won resilience as the world crumbles down around you. The record’s high points—like “Milky Way,” a fuzzy ballad that might have been on Dinosaur Jr.’s Bug in another life, or the foggy anthemics of “Lichen”—billow with a winning self-assuredness, confronting romantic dissolution and even mortality with a head held high. Will This Do? can be as impossibly funny (mark this winning couplet on “Lichen: “When you bury me, don’t put lillies in my fist / Put a beer bottle there, cause that’s how I lived”) as it is heavy, lending a fullness and light to this depiction of dark times, a reminder, as Mastrodimos suggests, that there’s always a way through. — Colin Joyce, Long Neck’s New Album Is a Rebuke to a Year of "Loss and Bullshit"

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Cucina Povera: Hilja (Night School)

Maria Rossi’s debut LP as Cucina Povera (that’s an Italian style of cooking that involves making do with what ya got) finds her mostly using her own voice to create a creeping collection of spectral chorales. Hilja has the sort of sparse, handmade, grayscale feel of recent records by Carla Dal Forno and Roe Enney, but Rossi has a unique knack for letting her compositions float. Tracks like “Avainsana,” ballast her spiraling melodies with drippy, treated found sounds which pulls them closer to earth, even if they’re still hovering somewhere above it. They’re ballads drifting over from other realms, with nowhere here to really call home. — Colin Joyce

Khruangbin: Con Todo El Mundo (Late Night Tales)

A three-piece from Burton, Texas (population 300), Khruangbin build unclassifiable, international instrumental jams. Their debut LP, 2015's The Universe Smiles Upon You, drew from Thai cassette tapes, with the band's roots in hip-hop and house bubbling beneath. But Con Todo El Mundo is, as its name suggests, even more diverse, touching on Compas, Persian pop, and psychedelia. It hangs together beautifully, mostly because the trio itself is so well-balanced—Mark Speer's fluid guitar is given space to spill over by drummer Donald Johnson's gentle syncopations, and Laura Lee's intuitive basslines are always drifting in and out. It's truly international music at a time when that's more vital than ever. — Alex Robert Ross

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Palmbomen II: Memories of Cindy (Beats In Space)

Paired with a few surrealist public access broadcasts, this LP from the Norwegian California resident Kai Hugo is a certified multimedia comedy experience. The record itself, compiled from a few EPs he’s put out over the last year on the New York dancefloor standard-bearers Beats in Space, is reflective of that same expansive vision—a hazy vision of lost loves, late night falafel shops, and dancefloor abandon, dreamt from a couch in the side room of the afterlife’s scummiest DIY club. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll dance, and if you’re lucky you’ll manage to find a way to do all three at once. — Colin Joyce

Mammoth Grinder: Cosmic Crypt (Relapse)

Mammoth Grinder's new joint, Cosmic Crypt, is so good that I'm kind of mad about it. It's the kind of record that's going to fuck up your whole day, because any time you come across something new on Bandcamp, or get a hankering for some Iron Maiden (given our newly somehow even worse apocalyptic predicament) you're going to have to resign yourself to listening to something that isn't Cosmic Crypt, and no matter how good that something is… part of you is still going to be annoyed about it. The record kick-flips off the once-bulletproof line between death metal and hardcore and dives right the fuck on in, conjuring a messy, infinitely headbangable mashup of Bolt Thrower and Entombed with grotty crust, jumpy d-beat, and trace amounts of Ulsh's equally riff-obsessed other band, Power Trip. The end result is so much fun to listen to that it cured my winter doldrums and made me want to chug exactly seventeen beers, flip a table, then punch a cop. — Kim Kelly, Mammoth Grinder's New Album Is So Good We're Kind of Mad About It

Hollie Cook: Vessel of Love (Merge)

The easiest touchstone for Hollie Cook’s sound, though Vessel of Love arguably being a departure, is reggae music. Mojo Magazine listed Cook’s 2014 album, Twice (that’s the album’s name…it wasn’t listed twice), in its top reggae albums of all time. When I asked her about that inarguably impressive accolade, she lightly says, “Yeah…well remembered. I may have been around 199. That’s cool. That’s pretty excellent.” She was number 31, and one of the few women (and frankly, one of the few living musicians) on the list. But Cook’s modesty doesn’t ring false. If she’s not going to worry about boxes people may put her in, then it’s only fair that she not take the praise to heavily either. — Zachary Lipez, Hollie Cook's New Album Will Warm Your Cold, Dead Heart

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