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Music

Stream of the Crop: 9 New Albums for Heavy Rotation

The Kendrick Lamar-curated 'Black Pather: The Album' tops this week's list of essential new projects.
Ollie Millington / Redferns

Every week, the Noisey staff puts together a list of the best and most important albums, mixtapes, and EPs from the week just gone. 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.

Various Artists: Black Panther: The Album

When it was announced that Kendrick Lamar would curate this, the soundtrack to Marvel's much-anticipated new superhero blockbuster, expectations were high. And when Kendrick followed that up with "All the Stars," a smoldering collaboration with SZA, we had every reason to believe it would live up to the hype. This is a cohesive collection of brilliant modern R&B moments, from Swae Lee and Khalid's "The Ways," in which the two (very) young men find themselves awe-struck by a powerful woman, to Jorja Smith's wonderfully sultry "I Am." But Kendrick is the headliner, a man who's been working through his role as a conflicted superhero a lot lately. "Pray For Me," the closer—"Who gon' pray for me? / Take my pain for me? / Save my soul for me? / 'Cause I'm alone, you see"—could have been taken straight from DAMN. That's a feat in itself. — Alex Robert Ross

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The Guests: Popular Music

This Philadelphia five-piece—featuring two-fifths of Sheer Mag—condenses the influence several decades of eyeliner-smearing, leather clad weirdos into 14 tracks of retrofuturist guitar-pop excess. But if the hooks weren’t enough, their record ends with a moving statement of intent too: “We make pop music with the intention of galvanizing the listener toward anti-capitalist action,” a computer voice intones over a droning synthesizer. “Let us move in concert toward full communism. When people move together, transformation is possible.” Imagine the Cars recast as leftist agitators, a cause virtually anyone could get behind. — Colin Joyce

Hovvdy: Cranberry

Charlie Martin and Will Taylor were both drummers when they started playing music together as Hovvdy, and the semi-whispered, mellowed-out acoustic pop that they've produced in the past two years has a pretty, percussive simplicity to it. They call it "pillowcore," which makes sense, and you'll find plenty of parallels between these Austin-based twenty-somethings and the slowcore kids of the 1990s—think Duster and Bedhead, for starters. On Cranberry, though, the hushed, instinctively simple harmonies set Cranberry apart from that lot. "Truck," with its subtle country inflections, is the standout track, suggesting that there's plenty of space to explore moving forward (though they'd only need to look at Alex Giannascoli for proof that bedroom pop can move into strange and exciting new places). In the meantime, Cranberry is a rare treat—a bedroom pop album that demands more than background listening. — Alex Robert Ross

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Eva-Maria Houben: Breath for Organ

There’s that old parable about trying to describe an elephant, about how humanity gives you a limited perspective on life’s vast unknowables, but the way Eva-Maria Houben approaches the organ on this piece seems built as a rebuke of earth-dwellers’ implicitly narrow vision. She traces all the contours of the sounds a pipe organ in a German church can make, presenting an hour-and-fifteen-minute collection of gasps, whispers, whistles, and drones, each as unsettling and distinct as the last. Houben seems to approach the piece as a field recording as much as composition, depicting the fullness of the organ in its own habitat, making cold metal and pressurized air the stars of their very own nature documentary, shot brilliantly from a god’s eye view.

Ruby Boots: Don't Talk About It

If you were hoping that Ruby Boots—born Bex Chilcott—was going to keep making the same kind of country record as her 2016 breakthrough Solitude, the first thing you’d notice about her new album Don’t Talk About It is not that. It starts with a smash – heavy electric lead guitar, bleached-out vocals, classic rock rhythm guitars – it ends with “Don’t Give a Damn,” a honky tonk hit reminiscent of Madman Across the Water-era Elton John and the Rolling Stones’ oft-repeated advice that you can’t always get what you want. The second thing you’ll notice is that, buried beneath the Nikki Lane meets early Yeah Yeah Yeahs vibe that permeates the record, is Chilcott has laid out a ten-track reclamation of herself. — Annalise Domenighini, Ruby Boots' New Record Will Help You Destroy Self-Doubt

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Cecil Frena: The Gridlock

Cybernetic pop goes punk on this debut birth name outing from a songwriter who used to conjure techno-ecstasy as Born Gold. Sun-in-your-eyes post-hardcore intertwines with the over-the-top energy Frena once evoked as a maximalist producer, blending EDM’s pitch-warped, post-human vocal tricks with lonely piano solos and spidery guitar lines that’ll especially impress your friend with the Snowing t-shirt. Frena has also has a knack for relatable self-loathing, like “Unknow Yourself”’s ending cry “If I could punch / my younger face / I’d leave it without any teeth.” It’s the post-genre vision Refused and Panic at the Disco! and Skrillex all imagined for ambitious punk misfits, but taken to operatic extremes. — Colin Joyce

The Atlas Moth: Coma Noir

On Coma Noir, the Atlas Moth takes its darkest and most brutal turns yet. Recorded by Sanford Parker and featuring new drummer Mike Miczek (Broken Hope), the band plunges down from the warm, heady realms of its previous release and into icy, cavernous soundscapes. There’s still plenty of beauty below the surface, including cinematic, instrumental interludes and co-lead singer/guitar David Kush’s smooth, robust vocals, but this time around the scales are tipped in favor of jarring, metallic riffs, industrial-leaning beats, creeping sound effects, and scorching, paint-peeling vocals from co-lead singer/guitarist Stavros Giannopoulos. — Jamie Ludwig, The Atlas Moth's Noirish New Video Flies in the Face of Metal Conventions

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Ravyn Lenae: Crush

A teenaged Chicago futurist with acknowledged debts to Erykah Badu, Outkast, and Timbaland siphons some magic from the internet (and the Internet’s Steve Lacy) for a collection of sleepy and surreal song about love within and without cyberspace. “Computer Luv” is the weepy one about digital distance and “4 Leaf Clover,” a wheezy please-pick-me duet with Lacy, is the obvious standout. But all five of this short release’s tracks are imbued with a hallucinatory energy that few songwriters—of any age—are able to conjure. The kids are alright. But you knew that. — Colin Joyce

MTv: Hollywood #1

On their own the Japanese techno-experimenters DJ Nobu and NHK yx Koyxen have made their share of off-balance bangers, and together as MTv, they double down on the dizziness. On this EP for the electro-tinkerers over at Trilogy Tapes, they fill machinic beats with squirrelly bubbling sounds and nauseous squelches. Careening and swirling around the Motor City precision of their percussion parts, they play the part of assembly-line delinquents, attaching parts where they aren’t exactly meant to go but sorta fit anyway, getting lifted on toxic fumes, splashing around in corrosive chemicals. They splatter the bleak backdrop with colorful, playful synth work, offering a solid life lesson: Sometimes you have to make your own fun. — Colin Joyce

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