As summer winds down, there is still plenty of time to enjoy a last-minute road trip, a refreshing bike ride, or an evening on the porch made all the more satisfying when accompanied by great music. For your listening enjoyment, I’ve compiled a few of my favorite new album releases below.
La Luz is back with its third and best album to date. Floating Features is a reverb-saturated mélange of surf, sunsets, and smog— dreamy but also dense with darker themes.
The gorgeous, introspective tracks on Mercator, the soon-to-be released album from Myke Dodge Weiskopf‘s Science Park, will make you want to roll your car windows down and embark on a long, moonlit drive.
Colleen Green’s latest vinyl release, Casey’s Tape/Harmontown Loops, brings together re-recorded tracks from her 2016 cassette EP with previously unreleased songs; a perfect blend of minimalist garage punk and well-honed indie pop with a few surprises too.
One of the highlights of this new compilation of thirty-two recordings from outside of Joe Strummer‘s time in The Clash is ”Rose of Erin,” which appeared in the 1993 Sara Driver film, When Pigs Fly, but has never been issued on a soundtrack.
Black Belt Eagle Scout aka Portland-based musician Katherine Paul explores love, grief, and radical indigenous queer feminist identity on her full-length debut, Mother of My Children. Saddle Creek aptly calls the album “a life chapter gently preserved.”
The Welsh-born multi-instrumentalist Gwenifer Raymond knocked around various punk outfits before falling in love with Delta blues, Appalachian folk, and perhaps most deeply—American Primitive guitar. On her stunning debut album You Were Never Much of a Dancer, Raymond references past masters, but forges a path all her own.
