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With his dynamic voice more front and center than in the band’s work, Adebimpe guides listeners on a journey through his own recent grief and heartbreak to find the possibility of a more knowing joy on the other side. But maybe the Maels are getting a bit sentimental in their old age. This time around, everything from getting stuck at a long red light to running up a hotel tab is fair game. Insidious, circular song structures that lodge themselves in your head? This sparkling follow-up to last year’s concept album Deira—named for the beachfront hotel on the Gaza Strip his father designed, an architectural gem reduced to rubble—zeroes in on the energies of romance and resistance that make Saint Levant one to watch.
Luke Spiller — Love Will Probably Kill Me Before Cigarettes and Wine
Things don’t faze them and applying that to life is nice.” It’s a skill that takes time to learn, but it’s so important for young women to have it and to also have role models—especially someone like my sister. I don’t want to be 80 years old and have been too fearful to express myself because of what people may say. Not that she ever planned on using love to inspire songwriting. “You don’t even know what love is at that age!
Heartland rock has historically been full of dudes. Inspired by his love of 2Pac and hip-hop, he switches between singing and rapping in the slick title track. Now Vega has broken through as a rising star in his own right with his swaggering debut album Mi Vida Mi Muerte. The Mexican singer-songwriter first made his mark in the crowded corridos scene as a writer for Peso Pluma. Cole’s drawling melancholy adds extra hues and layers of implication to DeCicca’s sharply observed, casually delivered insights about love, hypocrisy, and picayune transcendence.
Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals — A City Drowned in God’s Black Tears
You’re sitting with your band. “Our band was on top of the fucking world,” says Sixx whose sarcasm is so sly, it slips right past me. “We stayed at the Red Lion Inn! It was such a cool time because it was just us and the fans, and that was special.” In the meantime, John pinch hits for them. They can’t hear anything if you don’t shout, a result of being insistent on no ear protection during their shows. In ripped jeans, black T-shirt, a grip of necklaces, bandana tied around his forehead and another hanging from his belt loop, Nikki Sixx looks primed also.
Tunde Adebimpe — Thee Black Boltz
How do you face the horrors of modern life? He honors Puerto Rican music from salsa (“Baile Inolvidable”) to jíbaro sounds from Borinkén’s mountains (“Café Con Ron,” which features a plena collective Los Pleneros de la Cresta) and the out-there reggaeton that made him (“EoO”). I had no take to rock.
Ishibashi has somehow found a way to alchemize her avant-garde leanings into dystopian torch songs, creating mournful serenades for a deliciously fallen, floating world. Through soulcycle tampa textured soundscapes and a meditative vocal presence, Kirke explores complicated topics such as identity, love, and loss, and her compound relationship with those issues, eventually guiding the listener toward a hard-earned sense of peace. Oh, and I don’t want it to get in the way—mullet-nostalgia might distract from the music—so I won’t mention that Djo is Joe Keery and Joe Keery is Steve from Stranger Things.
Saint Levant — Love Letters
It would be easy to draw real-life comparisons from that pivotal moment. ’” the 26-year-old New Zealand musician recalls, about her first acting gig. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to be Ariel. “I’m noticing everywhere, so many people, interviewers, journalists, critics, documentarians, people who are in very different positions, they grew up with us,” says Tommy.
Lee has settled down with his wife, internet personality and podcast host Brittany Furlan, and is a sponge for new music. It’s hard to live down a very public and scandalous — but unapologetic — past. There has rarely been a point in time when individually or as a group, they haven’t had a lawsuit pending. You’re flying over 300,000 people, drinking Jack Daniels.
It’s not a documentary, so you don’t have to stick to any rules as far as that goes.” “Before that I thought of myself more as a guitar player,” he says. And how did I treat the other people who were involved? “What I want to do is to be able to zoom out and sort of see things from a perspective that’s past simple bitterness or anger or resentment or anything like that,” he tells me. “And I want to look at it from the point of view of what was this period in my life? Foxes in the Snow is notably the first album Isbell has made since he filed for divorce from his wife and collaborator, Amanda Shires—the mother of his 9-year-old daughter, Mercy Rose—in December 2023. “I don’t want to keep doing stuff that’s easy,” he says.
- To match his bigger crowds, Borja has amped up his sound and evolved from indie darling to Latin pop heartthrob with his second album Cuando Coincidimos.
- Through textured soundscapes and a meditative vocal presence, Kirke explores complicated topics such as identity, love, and loss, and her compound relationship with those issues, eventually guiding the listener toward a hard-earned sense of peace.
- We’re halfway through 2025, and it’s been…well, eventful, to put it politely.
- With his dynamic voice more front and center than in the band’s work, Adebimpe guides listeners on a journey through his own recent grief and heartbreak to find the possibility of a more knowing joy on the other side.
- “‘True Believer,’ that would be a terribly sad song if there wasn’t any hope,” he says.” And there’s supposed to be this sort of determination.
Dramatic and cinematic, the album draws from the emotional sweep of musical theater yet leans into open-hearted storytelling without feeling overwrought. Luke Spiller cuts quite a figure as the Struts’ frontperson, but on his debut solo album, Love Will Probably Kill Me Before Cigarettes and Wine, it’s clear the charismatic Spiller has been holding back—until now. But the album transcends the individual to become a sum of its parts that works, in the band’s own words, “Like Magick.” This isn’t a side project. Inspired by jazz titans Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman, as well as writer/revolutionary Amiri Baraka, it’s an unruly, surprising, and exuberant mix of unfettered expression, mixing free jazz, fusion, hip-hop, and dub with shrewd abandon. Even when Knives serves up a festive Latin groove on “Sometimes, Papi Chulo” or ’80s funk on “Everyone I Love is Depressed,” Ennals’ verses are full of suicidal thoughts and gallows humor, doubling down on the visceral emotion and omnivorous musicality of 2022’s King Cobra. Polymath producer Infinity Knives occasionally calms things down with acoustic guitars or opera singers, but everything Ennals says on the Baltimore experimental hip-hop duo’s second album is grim, hilarious, or both.
That idea seeps into every corner of his new album, Swimming, which he recorded at Sylvan Esso’s studio with a crew of North Carolina musicians. Dudes singing songs about heartbreak, misunderstood heroes in decidedly un-glamorous parts of the country, dreaming of something bigger and hitching their way there eventually. Cline’s fourth album for the storied Blue Note label showcases his command of jazz history, from hard bop to noirish ballads, but he still finds moments, on “Surplus” and “The Bag,” to stomp on a distortion pedal and let loose. Lately, Cline prefers larger combos where his guitar duels and harmonizes with horn players, and he shares the spotlight with German saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock to great effect on Consentrik Quartet. Avant guitar genius Nels Cline has always been a generous ensemble player in bands like Wilco and the Geraldine Fibbers, but as a bandleader he’s often explored his instrument freely and noisily with just a bassist and drummer. Ethereal and earthy, constantly changing shape yet anchored in pop forms, it’s a lovely, lively, looser take on modern shoegaze.
From the driving funk of what it’s like to be Black in the white music world on “Hit It, Quit It,” to the stripped-down uncertainty of where to live on “Baltimore,” Strange’s latest is boldly honest and loud. Bad Bunny’s best album to date is both a love letter to his island and an anti-colonial stance. So the 2022 allegations from multiple young women that nice guy front-dude Win Butler was actually a pushy, manipulative sleaze—and worse—didn’t rock my take on the band. Our list is alphabetized, not ranked, as we love all of these albums with equal passion. SPIN’s favorite albums of the year (so far) include new and seasoned artists from around the world, and cover multiple genres including hip-hop, jazz, indie rock, funk, and folk. Six months in, and we’ve discovered some pretty amazing new music; albums that have made us think, helped us escape, and have been emotionally cathartic.