Stream Japanese Breakfast’s For Melancholy Brunettes... and more albums for New Music Friday

The beauty of Japanese Breakfast’s new album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), is twofold: her vivid, almost painterly songwriting, like on “Honey Water” when she sings, “The lure of honey water draws you from my arms so needy/ You follow in colonies to sip from the bank/ in rapturous sweet temptation, you wade in past the edge and sink in”; and the record’s lush sound, a dense mille-feuille of guitars, cellos, violins, and synth that settles somewhere in between her usual bright indie rock and country. Despite its title, the record is not so directly sad as its protagonists go on murder rampages, cheat and get cheated on, and take disappointing phone calls. It’s only after her sweet songs finish your brain registers the melancholy, how every scenario is one that’s gone wrong. — Steffanee Wang

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The music of YHWH Nailgun demands. Every song on the New York City band's debut album is crafted to hold your entire attention; bits and pieces here and there won't do. The tension contained in its white-knuckled grip on your senses is the beginnings of a forceful push back against the staid conventions of underground rock music. This is music for the kind of thrashing about that leaves strange bruises the next day, its individual songs veering from ecstatic keening to ominous near-silence like an abandoned warehouse collapsing in slow motion. 45 Pounds isn't just the edge of rock and roll, it's the sound of the edge being blasted away into a steeper, more dangerous precipice. — Jordan Darville. Read their GEN F profile here.

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Los Angeles-based Dutch Interior have known each other for decades but came together in 2020 to make rustic music that is romantic but not sickly, earnest without becoming cringe, and completely free of ego. Moneyball is the prolific six-piece's third album since forming and their most confident work so far. Recorded over a six month period in their Long Beach studio, the band splits the vocals on the ten songs that make up Moneyball between five different members of the band, though their voices are similar enough for things to blend into a uniform drawl. This results in an album that feels loosely tethered and free, skipping between honky-tonk, classic rock (standout track "Fourth Street"), and even a couple of detours into a kind of dusty take on ambient music. While Moneyball is an album crafted in the mold of vintage American music, the band describe "Sandcastle Molds" as a “fucked up Fleetwood Mac song,” flashes of modernity cut through in the lyrics. "Fuck it. Let's have kids" goes one line on "Horse," while Connor Reeves, whose songs lean the most country, adds a previously absent humor and poignancy to the "Live. Laugh. Love" platitude on "Wood Knot." It's these moments that jolt Moneyball out of a comfortable lane of homage and into something more vital, engaging and, ultimately, alive. — David Renshaw

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At 19, Lucy Liyou was a closeted college student, terrified to tell her parents she was trans. As she tends to do with her deepest emotions, she mined this fear to sketch the songs that appear on her new album, Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name. Instead of releasing these seven-year-old tracks in their original form, she decided to rework and repurpose them for a different psychic tragedy: the dissolution of a two-year relationship. “Please stay / Please stay / I have so much love to give, please stay,” she sings on opener “16/8,” a song that likens the mix of hope and horror one feels while waiting for a lover’s response to the rests between notes on a score. Her polite supplications are pathetic, the kind of self-debasing lyrics one can only write after scrubbing the ugly parts of their soul. They strike an even darker chord when one imagines them delivered desperately to the stony ears of parents who will never understand them. — Raphael Helfand. Read our full review here.

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For the last decade, 75-year-old Lonnie Holley has released seven albums, each as steady as it is expansive. These qualities are not necessarily at odds, but as one’s art explores more possibilities, it becomes harder to keep to forge a straight path ahead. In 2023, Holley achieved this balancing act with Oh Me Oh My, an album of varying sounds and various guests, but one best appreciated as an undulating whole. Tonky is an even further expansion of Holley’s sound — much greater in breadth, in fact, than any of his past releases. And while no one could accuse it of being unsteady, its parts are more individualized, each song its own autonomous entity.

The album opens on the nine-minute saga “Seeds,” in which bright strings that might normally signal the start of an overture soon give way to a pulsing electronic beat. “Chasing memories / Something going on in your brain / That keeps chasing you,” Holley says, going on to speak about his adolescence, when he was subjected to conditions very close to those of chattel slavery at the notorious Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children. Later, more defiant voices join the fray. For instance: the oracular Angel Bat Dawid, the doomsaying billy woods, and the sermonic Saul Williams, who reads a short poem about humanity’s luminescence in the darkest of conditions on the record’s minute-long penultimate cut, “Those Stars Are Still Shining.” Rather than covering Sam Cooke on “A Change Is Gonna Come,” Holley continues Cooke’s conversation. “But are we ready? / Are we prepared? / Are we ready for something to happen?” he vocalizes, switching from speech to song as hopeful synths and trumpet swirl around him. The song continues rapturously, affirming its title in its final line. With a bleak global future looming ahead, Holley continues to write his story, one of survival in the face of insurmountable odds. — Raphael Helfand

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