The 10 best new albums and tracks to listen to this week
These are the new albums and tracks our critics have been listening to this week. Make sure to follow our playlist, which is updated weekly.
Which new albums have you been listening to? Let us know in the comments
Kacey Musgraves
Middle of Nowhere
Lost Highway
★★★★☆
For the past few decades country music has fallen into two distinct camps. There is Nashville country: commercial, conservative, concerned with hardy perennials of small-town life like patriotism, adultery and alcoholism. Then there is alternative country and Americana: rough-hewn, middle class, socially conscious. Almost uniquely, Kacey Musgraves has managed to straddle the two. She sang the American national anthem at the 2002 Winter Olympics, got her break on a talent show called Nashville Star and presents a slick, glamorous image — all solid country credentials — but she has also extolled the virtues of cannabis and homosexuality, which are definitely not. Now comes an album on which she acknowledges her position, and does so with a lot of wit and introspection along the way.
There is a longing for homespun simplicity on Middle of Nowhere, on the title track in particular. “No service on the phone and I’m all alone, but honestly it feels good,” she sings over yearning pedal steel as a tale emerges of a woman returning to her home town after a break-up and enjoying the spaciousness of being left alone with her thoughts. Not that the single life doesn’t present its own problems. “I’m lonely with a capital H, if you know what I mean,” she sings, before confessing to dealing with the situation by spending a lot of time sitting on top of the washing machine. You never got that from Loretta Lynn.
Elsewhere Musgraves sticks to more traditional themes. Back on the Wagon concerns a formerly drunken boyfriend who has mended his ways — or so she tells herself. “This time he’s changed,” she insists. Uncertain, TX brings in the country legend Willie Nelson for a zydeco-tinged gripe about cowboys who can’t commit. “You think you really know somebody, and then they up and walk out the door,” she observes, while on the haunted Coyote she accepts that an old flame is destined to be for ever on his own. Country music is all about lived experience and that’s what comes through here.
Musgraves is also doubling down on her credentials, perhaps in response to all manner of people jumping on the country bandwagon (step on up, Beyoncé). “I bet most of these boots have probably never seen any dirt. And the crowd ain’t any softer if you’re wearing a rhinestone shirt,” she complains on Everybody Wants to Be a Cowboy, a pastiche of a fashionable LA scene where looking the part is more important than putting the hours in. Then there is the mariachi brass-bedecked Horses and Divorces, a duet with Musgraves’s deadly rival, her fellow Nashville Star alumna Miranda Lambert. “Maybe we’re more alike than we think,” the pair realise after downing a bottle of whiskey and calling a truce.
Of course this wouldn’t be a Musgraves album without at least one reference to weed. It’s in Rhinestoned, a suitably laid-back tale of getting over your troubles by going round the back of the honky-tonk and lighting up a big fat joint. Therein lies the appeal: Musgraves is a straight-talking, honey-voiced country star of the old school who sings about whatever is on her mind but with a sense of mischievousness that sets her apart from the genre’s more conservative-minded practitioners. In a sense this goes back to the very quality at the heart of all the best country music: not taking yourself too seriously.
Maya Hawke
Maitreya Corso
Mom + Pop
★★★☆☆
Having made her name playing one of the most popular characters on Stranger Things, Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman’s daughter has forged a nice side hustle in quirky indie pop. The appeal is in the unassuming quality. Love of My Life finds her imagining a domestic future raising “a couple of good-for-nothing kids” while the childlike Dream House is a sweet acceptance of being happily in love on which she asks of her partner: “Would you try not to die?” It’s all quite lightweight, with a cuteness verging on cloying, but the melodies are pretty, the singing mellifluous and the artistic vision of an anxious person discovering that life is actually quite good is charming.
Lip Critic
Theft World
Partisan
★★★★☆
Perhaps reacting to coming of age in an era of global instability, a new wave of young bands are embracing noise, chaos and general mayhem. Leading the New York chapter are this four-piece combining a two-drummer attack with all manner of electronic barrages and the frontman Bret Kaser’s surreal rants. “I still crave the feeling,” he shouts of a gambling addiction on Jackpot, sounding like a cross between Mark E Smith of the Fall and Fred Schneider of the B-52s, while Debt Forest captures modern poverty with zest as he cries: “My soul’s in the bin with the T-shirt!” As for Yard Sale, never has such a humble sell-off of one’s unwanted clutter been ridden with such menace. It is frantic to the point of nerve-shredding and very creative with it.
Tori Amos
In Times of Dragons
Universal/Fontana
★★★★☆
Witches, wizards, sea goddesses and 16th-century nuns are evoked for Tori Amos’s metaphorical portrait of a modern age where billionaire tech overlords and, on the title track, “the lizard demon and his sadistic companions” are the monsters to be vanquished. Amos’s daughter, Natashya Hawley, comes in to duet on Stronger Together, an emotional tale of overcoming challenges by talking about them, while Ode to Minnesota is a protest anthem against ICE tactics. Amos is the classically trained Methodist preacher’s daughter who broke through in 1992 with Little Earthquakes, which dealt with everything from sexual assault to religious dread with florid melodrama. That spirit remains here, on an album where imagination is the ultimate weapon against forces of oppression.
The Black Keys
Peaches!
Easy Eye Sound/Parlophone
★★★★☆
Of all the bands to have become massive in the 2010s, the Black Keys were the most unlikely: two blues and indie rock-loving misfits from Akron, Ohio who found themselves filling stadiums with catchy slices of rock’n’roll soul like Lonely Boy and Blues on the Ceiling. The mainstream wasn’t the Black Keys’ spiritual home, however, and after a period in the wilderness they have gone back to their roots with this superb collection of raw blues covers. Tomorrow Night by Junior Kimbrough, an ornery legend of Mississippi hill country blues, blasts along with hypnotic, primeval mysticism, while Dr Feelgood’s She Does It Right is overdriven to the point of collapse and viscerally exciting with it. This is the sound of the Black Keys doing what they do best — Dan Auerbach dragging the feeling out of every riff, Patrick Carney attacking the drums like they just insulted his mother — and it’s fantastic.
Best new tracks
By Blanca Schofield
Madonna, Sabrina Carpenter
Bring Your Love
Strike a pose. The Madonna comeback is going to be a good one, if the level of the first two singles is anything to go by. Following her appearance with Sabrina Carpenter at Coachella last month, the 67-year-old Queen of Pop is joined by the Espresso star for what is bound to become one of the songs of the summer.
Zara Larsson, Shakira
Eurosummer (Girls Trip)
Another collaboration by two of pop’s megastars. The Swedish singer Larsson’s popularity has boomed to such a degree that she is now one of the top 25 most listened-to artists in the world, while Shakira is in the top 15. The lyrics are a bit painful post-Brexit, but as a dancefloor bop it works wonders.
Kneecap, Kae Tempest
Irish Goodbye
They’re not always raucous controversy hunters. Here the Irish rap trio slow down to deal with depression and loss in a moving work, accompanied by the London-based spoken-word artist Kae Tempest.
Nia Archives
Boys in Blue
Pop-rock meets electronica in the Bradford-born musician’s latest release from her forthcoming album, Emotional Junglist. It’s a fiery work about moving on from a sudden break-up.