Notable Releases of the Week (2/28)

This was a pretty big week for music festival announcements, with Warped Tour, When We Were Young day 2, Shaky Knees, Louder Than Life, Green Man, Iceland Airwaves, Festival d’été de Québec, Upstate NY’s Borderland, and Maine’s new Back Cove fest all announcing lineups, not to mention an exciting update from Vegas emo fest Best Friends Forever. Both Shaky Knees and Louder Than Life share headliner Deftones, who also began their massive headlining tour this week with support from Fleshwater and The Mars Volta, the latter of whom appear to have debuted an entire new album live at night one.

It’s also a good week for new albums, seven of which I highlight below. Bill covers more in Indie Basement, including The Chills, Doves, Andy Bell (of Ride), bdrmm, and Everything Is Recorded (ft. Sampha, Florence Welch, Bill Callahan, Kamasi Washington & many other guests), and this week’s honorable mentions include Cheekface, Boldy James’ third album of 2025 (with producer Chuck Strangers), The Men, The Residents, LISA (of BLACKPINK, and who’s also currently starring as Mook in the new season of The White Lotus) Miya Folick, Year of the Cobra, Gunn-Truscinski Duo, Venamoris (Dave & Paula Lombardo), Reason, Ichiko Aoba, Yves Jarvis, David Grubbs, Marie Davidson, Deep Sea Diver, Godswounds (ex-Mr. Bungle), Vacuous, Hachiku, Bonnie Trash, Rattle, Daniel Carter & Ayumi Ishito, Edith Frost, saoirse dream, Domestic Drafts (Andy Cush of Garcia Peoples), Sports Team, Cornelia Murr, The Vapors, Pink Turns Blue, Kilbourne, Kip Moore, Mae Martin, Avantasia, Artemis, Aloe Blacc, Big Black Delta, The Ting Tings, Rebecca Black, BANKS, Architects, the deluxe edition of serpentwithfeet’s GRIP, the Mdou Moctar acoustic album, the instrumental Unknown Mortal Orchestra album, the Yo La Tengo EP score to Old Joy, the starsfadingoutquietly EP, the Lucrecia Dalt EP, the Pierre Kwenders EP, the Heaven’s Club (Deafheaven, Marbled Eye) EP, the Reggie Watts & CAPYAC EP, the Homeboy Sandman & Illingsworth EP, the guest-filled 10th anniversary edition of Free Throw’s Those Days Are Gone, the unearthed Ella Fitzgerald 1967 live album, and Dirkschneider’s re-recording of Accept’s Balls To The Wall.

Read on for my picks. What’s your favorite release of the week?

Panda Bear – Sinister Grift (Domino)
If ‘Sinister Grift’ isn’t Panda Bear’s most accessible album yet then it’s at least his peppiest, and it’s got help from Cindy Lee, Rivka from Spirit of the Beehive, all three other members of Animal Collective, and more

Noah Lennox is no stranger to receiving Brian Wilson comparisons, but usually it’s for taking Brian’s slower, trippier side into even hazier territory. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard him channel the peppy warmth of pre-Pet Sounds Beach Boys the way he does on Sinister Grift. You can hear the difference right from opening track “Praise,” a song with enough of a hop in its step to sound like Panda Bear’s very own “California Girls.” It’s got such a sturdy, rockin’ rhythm section that it makes “My Girls” sound slurred and woozy in comparison, and it’s not the only song on Sinister Grift that embraces surfy rock & roll and tropical pop. For an artist who’s said to have released his “most accessible” album more than once in his career thus far, he might’ve just done it again.

Sinister Grift is a Panda Bear solo album, but for the first time in his career, it features contributions from all three of his Animal Collective bandmates. Deakin (aka Josh Dibb) co-produced it with him and played on multiple songs, Geologist (Brian Weitz) is credited with “sounds” on more than half the songs, and Avey Tare (David Portner) contributes a noise solo to “Ends Meet.” Rivka Ravede of Animal Collective acolytes Spirit of the Beehive sings backup on two songs (“Praise” and “Ends Meet”), and Noah’s teenage daughter Nadja Lennox reads a poem that she herself wrote on “Anywhere But Here.” (Rivka also designed the album art, and Spirit of the Beehive fans will probably instantly recognize her style.) The guest contributor on Sinister Grift that stands out the most though is Cindy Lee on closing track “Defense.” Both artists have their own ways of putting a modern psychedelic spin on the sweet sounds of ’60s pop, and “Defense” sounds less like a guest appearance and more like a true 50/50 collab, a song that would’ve fit just as perfectly on Cindy Lee’s indie-scene-conquering 2024 album Diamond Jubilee as it does on Sinister Grift. There’s so much uplifting brightness in this album, but as you might expect from an album with “sinister” in the title, there’s almost always an underlying darkness and weirdness too. It’s there even in the catchiest songs, and it comes through. most prominently in penultimate track “Elegy for Noah Lou,” a haunting, six-minute psych-folk song that finds Panda Bear ending up somewhere closer to Syd Barrett or Mark Fry than Brian Wilson. It stops you in your tracks the way the best dark folk songs always do, and it only makes Sinister Grift hit even harder when “Defense” comes in to end the show on a crowd-pleasing note.

Sinister Grift by Panda Bear

Cloakroom – Last Leg of the Human Table (Closed Casket Activities)
The heavy shoegaze trailblazers embrace alt-country, post-punk, desert rock, and more on their conceptual fifth LP

The current wave of heavy shoegaze wouldn’t exist without the influence of Cloakroom and other likeminded peers (like Title Fight, Superheaven, Pity Sex, Nothing who currently count Cloakroom singer/guitarist Doyle Martin as a member, etc), but Cloakroom didn’t just help start that trend; they’re actively contributing to it. They’re also not just hanging on to the Hum-gaze vibes that they helped bring to a new generation over a decade ago. Last Leg of the Human Table ranges from fast-paced punkgaze (“Ester Wind”) to snappy post-punk (“Unbelonging,” “Story of the Egg”) to druggy desert rock (“The Lights Are On”) to alt-country (“Bad Larry”) and beyond, all done in a way that sounds distinctly like Cloakroom. Last Leg of the Human Table also piggybacks on the concept of its 2022 predecessor Dissolution Wave. According to the album synopsis, if Dissolution Wave “was a space western following an asteroid miner protagonist, Last Leg brings the observer back to Earth where most things are not as they’re cracked up to be.” Combined, the two albums mark a new chapter in Cloakroom’s career and a clear evolution from the band who gave us the paradigm-shifting trilogy of Infinity, Further Out, and Time Well. Especially for a band who formed out of the ashes of multiple shorter-lived bands (Grown Ups, Native, Lion of the North, etc), it’s exciting to see Cloakroom embracing longevity and consistently moving forward.

Last Leg of the Human Table by Cloakroom

You, Infinite – You, Infinite (Pelagic)
This Will Destroy You co-founders Jeremy Galindo and Raymond Brown reunite in You, Infinite, and they bring both a freshness and a familiarity to their first album together in over 15 years

Last summer, the news broke that Texas post-rock greats This Will Destroy You would be splitting into two bands, one led by each co-founding guitarist: Christopher King and Jeremy Galindo. Jeremy’s iteration will be celebrating the band’s 20th anniversary by performing the band’s 2006 debut album Young Mountain in full on tour this summer, and on top of that, he’ll also be performing material on the tour from the self-titled debut album by his new band, You, Infinite. It’s a collaboration with founding TWDY bassist/keyboardist Raymond Brown, who left the band after the making of their 2008 self-titled sophomore album, and the two were backed in the studio by Johnnie McBryde, Ethan Billips and Nicholas Huft, who are all in the touring lineup of Jeremy’s iteration of This Will Destroy You. So it’s both a new project and a long-awaited reunion from two members of TWDY’s most classic lineup, and it has both a freshness and a familiarity that delivers on that promise. With 9 songs that clock in at over an hour, it’s a towering, immersive post-rock journey that’s effectively a new This Will Destroy You album in all but name. It captures some of the same chemistry that was present on those first two TWDY albums, but in new ways, and it tugs at the senses in the way the best post-rock albums always do. The goosebumps start coming right from the ethereal textures that introduce opening track “Focus On Reflection,” and they never let up.

you, infinite by you, infinite

Shygirl – Club Shy Room 2 EP (Because Music)
the ‘Club Shy’ EP gets a sequel that picks right up where its predecessor left of, with druggy, glittery, sexed-up club bangers that are confident, sassy, and delightfully weird

Brat Summer wasn’t just about Charli XCX; it was also about a handful of other artists in her orbit, like Shygirl, who appeared on the Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat remix of “365” and performed it on stage with Charli during the Sweat Tour, which she opened. Shygirl was a natural fit for Brat Summer because she herself has been blending the worlds of art pop, rave, and mid 2000s trashiness for years, including on last year’s dancefloor-friendly Club Shy EP. Today, that EP gets a sequel. Club Shy Room 2 picks right up where its predecessor left of, with druggy, glittery, sexed-up club bangers that are confident, sassy, and delightfully weird. The casually-genre-defying six-song set includes collaborations with West Coast rapper Saweetie (on “Immaculate”), neoperreo icon-in-the-making Isabella Lovestory and alt-pop star PinkPantheress (on “True Religion”), UK soul singer Jorja Smith and Jamaican-Canadian dancehall singer/rapper SadBoi (on “Wifey Riddim”), Toronto’s equally-genre-blurring (and club-loving) BAMBII (on “Flex”), and French pop singer / electroclash revivalist Yseult (on “F* Me”), and Shygirl doesn’t necessarily adapt to their styles so much as she invites them to step out of her comfort zones. Like Brat, Club Shy Room 2 is a hot mess, an unabashed dose of mid aughts It Girl pop that’s too NSFW to have ever actually been played on the radio in the mid aughts. It’s feverishly addictive, and despite her chosen moniker, Shygirl’s huge extroverted personality is what makes Club Shy Room 2 stand out from Brat and Eusexua and anything else in that realm that’s been coming out lately. Shygirl is overflowing with big ideas and even bigger attitude, and this brief EP can barely contain them.

The Casper Fight Scene – The Casper Fight Scene (PNWK)
The raw, scrappy, yelpy sounds of Midwest emo are alive and well on The Casper Fight Scene’s debut LP

If you’re in the market for some good old fashioned Midwest emo, don’t miss out on the self-titled debut LP from Marquette, Michigan’s The Casper Fight Scene. They cite 2010s-era bands like Modern Baseball, Joyce Manor, and Prince Daddy & the Hyena (and also recently contributed to a 10th anniversary tribute album to Modern Baseball’s You’re Gonna Miss It All alongside other newer emo bands like Red Sun, TRSH, Swiss Army Wife, Summerbruise, and Hey, ily!), and they do a fine job of carrying the torch that those bands lit in their house show days. (They also must be Menzingers fans, given the nod to “I Don’t Wanna Be An Asshole Anymore” on “Cadillac Death Trap.”) They put out two promising EPs (including one for the influential No Sleep Records before the label shut down), and now they build off the energy those EPs created with their first full-length. In true Midwest emo fashion, it’s raw, yelpy, and scrappy, but The Casper Fight Scene are really writing some big hooks beneath all the noise. Not the most groundbreaking thing in the world, but what they lack in originality they make up for in honest, sincere emotion.

Runaway Brother – Want You Need (self-released)
The Ohio indie/emo band’s first LP in seven years finds them sounding older, wiser, and great as ever

Those with a fondness for 2010s emo may also have fond memories of Ohio’s Runaway Brother, who were labelmates and tourmates of The Hotelier in the mid 2010s and had a youthful approach to indie-pop punk that fit nicely alongside bands like The Front Bottoms and Modern Baseball. They slowed down after the release of their 2018 album New Pocket, but now they’re back with their first album in seven years and they’re older, wiser, and as great as ever. On Want You Need, Runaway Brother find themselves in power-poppy, punk-informed indie rock territory in a way that recalls fellow Ohioans The Sidekicks and the more recent material from another band that was on that 2015 Hotelier/Runaway Brother tour, Oso Oso. (The fourth band on the tour was Spirit of the Beehive–what a crazy bill in hindsight!) A lot’s changed about the music scene that Runaway Brother were part of a decade ago, but what hasn’t changed is their ability to write big, catchy, heartfelt hooks. If anything, their songs these days might just be even stronger.

Want You Need by runaway brother

Darkside – Nothing (Matador)

Darkside, the prog/psych/art rock project founded by vocalist / electronics wiz Nicolas Jaar and guitarist Dave Harrington (that now also includes drummer Tlacael Esparza as an official third member), are back for round three with another mind, body, and head trip, Nothing. The addition of a live drummer makes things harder, louder, and at times even more chaotic than the first two LPs. For more on Nothing, Bill’s got a longer review in Indie Basement.

Nothing by DARKSIDE

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including The Chills, Doves, Andy Bell (of Ride), bdrmm, and Everything Is Recorded (ft. Sampha, Florence Welch, Bill Callahan, Kamasi Washington & many other guests).

Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases archive.

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