New Music Friday: Stream projects from fantasy of a broken heart, Nines, Ezra Collective, and more

Ezra Collective follow their Mercury Prize-winning 2022 album Where I’m Meant To Be with a new collection of upbeat, life-affirming music. Dance, No One's Watching uses jazz as a bridge across the genre lines, allowing the London-based group to touch on highlife, amapiano and Afrobeats on a song like "Streets Is Calling," or to interpolate Chicago house pioneer Larry Heard as they do on "The Traveller." Underpinning this freedom is a quest to make people move, as best summed up by lead single "Ajala," a tireless effort named after the Nigerian journalist Olabisi Ajala, whose name is shorthand in Yoruba for someone who can't stand still. — David Renshaw

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feats of engineering packs a prog-rock epic’s bombast into a humble bedroom-pop package, each abrupt structural shift and layer of flaring sonic fantasia guided by a strong sense of play. A shared love for Yes and King Crimson guide them philosophically, if not precisely sonically. Those bands, the band’s Bailey Wollowitz explains, are “both obsessed with making really insane-sounding stuff, whether the arrangement or the musical palette itself is busted open.” The popular success of these groups formed fantasy’s mandate, he says: “None of it is inaccessible.” Read our full profile of the band. — Jordan Darville

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There are plenty of reasons to be pissed off right now, and Show Me The Body’s Corpus II EP II gives voice to those collective feelings of anxiety, anger, and suffering. Just like the first Corpus II release from July, their follow-up effort contains six furious tracks featuring the likes of High Vis, B L A C K I E, Corbin, and Special Interest, who help the hardcore trio smoothly navigate their way through unfamiliar sections of scarry rap, sudden bursts of spiky noise, and ominous drone interludes. And with such a heavy presence on the record, Corpus II EP II is an example of true musical collaboration and communal camaraderie, unified by an attitude of rightful rage and biting dissidence. — Sandra Song

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U.K. rapper Nines says that the aptly titled Quit While You're Ahead will be his final album. If that is the case the collection of hard-boiled street rap acts as a perfect victory lap. The London MC has spent the past decade establishing himself as one of the strongest storytellers in his scene and that continues here with reflections on the underworld he claims to have never truly left. "Cap" is heavy and remorseful while "Tony Soprano 3" is a arguably Nines' strongest entry in his trilogy of tracks named after the HBO don. Aside from battle tales old and new, Nines offers amusing dispatches from what sounds like a chaotic love life and brings in friends including K-Trap, Skrapz, and Rimzee for guest verses. By the time the album wraps Nines has made it clear he has told his story and feels he has nowhere else to turn. If so, this album ties things up nicely. — DR

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It’s only once you reach your late twenties that you realize that everything they ever told you is a lie, and that you can still do whatever you want in life, and no it’s never too late to do anything you want, especially if it’s becoming a therapist. On Jerry Paper’s latest record INBETWEEZER, the L.A. songwriter grapples with the major life changes that come with suddenly realizing that your destiny is being a therapist – while writing fun, zany, bubblegum pop bangers that fizzle and effervesce with zest. The off-kilter, synth-laden “Scenic Route” is about navigating through feeling lost and helpless, while the lo-fi “Moonstruck” captures the moment when Jerry Paper returned home from the high of tour, only to realize that their destiny was to head to grad school and train as a therapist. Filled with sonic moments that hark back to the likes of New Order, King Tuff, and Parquet Courts. — Cady Siregar

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13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips is Xiu Xiu’s best pop album to date. Named for a large switchblade Stewart actually owns, it captures the band’s ability to be anthemic and lush while retaining a sinister undercurrent. Its success is less a function of its softness as a collection of timbres and tones than of founding member Jamie Stewart’s own easing, a newfound flexibility that finds them swimming with the current of the music, rather than against it. — Raphael Helfand

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Whodunit is defiant and unwavering in its open-heartedness. This is a “divorce album” hat opens with its protagonist asking, over a luxuriously slow acoustic guitar and without a hint of sarcasm, “How did I get so lucky?” On a smoldering and hypnotic song called “Grief,” he revels in the idea that “this taste of life is all mine”; two songs later, on the airier “Joy,” he seems to fall in love with the world around him. Towards the end of the record, Dan Knishkowy repeats lines that come over like a mantra: “I will let your flowers grow / I will let myself go.” This is not Blood on the Tracks. — Alex Robert Ross

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Dave Benton’s fourth album under the Trace Mountains moniker is his most ambitious yet. The days of the singer-songwriter’s country-inspired bedroom recordings are firmly in the past: in their place are nods to widescreen ’80s rock gods Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. The album conjures images of wide open roads and endless possibilities while Benton himself is going through some form of hell, plundering the dying embers of a relationship and picking himself up to go again. Read our Q&A with Trace Mountains here. — DR

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Throwing Bows is an exhilarating return to form for Monaleo fans by way of “Ass Kickin’” and “Ranchero.” Whether dispensing tough love for women dating losers (“Flush Em”) or going onomatopoetic bar for bar with H-Town favorite Sauce Walka (“Ee-er”), Big Leo is back in a major way, balancing bottles on her head and making fiancé Stunna 4 Vegas “put some Jibbitz in his Crocs.” — Vivian Medithi

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