The Canadian trio’s first studio LP in five years boasts contributions from Karriem Riggins, Laraaji, Terrace Martin, Brandee Younger, and Arthur Verocai

Lump began in 2018, with a collaboration between Mike Lindsay - a Mercury Prize-winning producer and co-founder of band Tunng, and the GRAMMY-nominated singer-songwriter Laura Marling. "The last record was an experiment," says Lindsay. "And I thought we weren't ever going to do another Lump record." As with the first album, Marling would arrive in the studio without having heard any of Lindsay's music, with the hope that it would bring the lyrics an immediacy and a spontaneity. Having begun studying for a Masters in psychoanalysis, she found she drew heavily on her course texts for this album's lyrics. There were other sources too: half-memories, family stories, strange dreams; things she had read, or been told or imagined. Animal was a word Marling threw into a lyric simply to meet a rhythm. But it seemed to capture the mood of the record, and of the band as a whole. "There's a little bit of a theme of hedonism on the album, of desires running wild," she says."Through Lump we find our inner animal, and through that animal we travel into a parallel universe," adds Lindsay.

For the first installment of its proposed seven-album anthology of the late composer’s work, the California collective breathes new life into his ecstatic minimalist masterpiece.

"Pay Your Way In Pain" is the first single ahead of St. Vincent's highly anticipated new album Daddy's Home, produced by pop producer and long term collaborator Jack Antonoff. "I was inspired by the classic records of the 70s. Stevie, Sly, Stones, Steely Dan, Chords, Groove. The days when sophisticated harmony and rhythm didn't sound heady - they just sounded, and felt good. Lots of guitar. But warm sounds, not distortion and chaos. Hopefully a turn nobody will see coming" - Annie Clark.

Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered, the fourth record in a partnership between New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records, will be released on September 25, 2020. A video for “Sanctus/Benedictus” from the Mass, made by Deborah Johnson/CandyStations, is now available and is the first of six videos created for the project.
Snider’s Mass, with a libretto by poet/writer Nathaniel Bellows, is a celebration of, and an elegy for, the natural world—animals, plants, insects, the planet itself—an appeal for greater awareness, urgency, and action. Originally commissioned by Trinity Church Wall Street, this recording features the English vocal ensemble Gallicantus conducted by Gabriel Crouch.
The six-movement Mass for the Endangered is a rumination on the concept of the traditional Catholic Mass, its fidelity enhanced by Snider’s interpolation of traditional Latin text for the Gloria, Sanctus/Benedictus, and parts of the Kyrie, Credo, and Agnus Dei. For the album art, Bellows created an illustrated triptych of endangered flora and fauna that evoke medieval Christian altarpieces and stained-glass windows.
Snider explains, “The origin of the Mass is rooted in humanity’s concern for itself, expressed through worship of the divine—which, in the Catholic tradition, is a God in the image of man. Nathaniel and I thought it would be interesting to take the Mass’s musical modes of spiritual contemplation and apply them to concern for non-human life—animals, plants, and the environment. There is an appeal to a higher power—for mercy, forgiveness, and intervention—but that appeal is directed not to God but rather to Nature itself.”
Growing up in Princeton, NJ, one-time home of the American Boychoir School, Snider attended that venerable institution’s co-ed summer camp as a youth: “I attended for five summers. I fell in love with choral singing there, and later sang with the Princeton High School Choir, which was at the time one of the most celebrated high school choirs in the country. These experiences were profoundly formative for me, and I learned a lot of the choral repertoire. I felt very at home in that music, but I hadn’t yet had a chance to explore it in my writing in a significant way. The Mass was my first large choral commission, and I was thrilled to immerse myself in memories of singing the Mozart, Brahms, and Fauré Requiems, the Palestrina and Byrd Masses, the Bach chorales.
“Rather than consciously upend those traditions,” she continues, “I wanted to open the gates in my mind between centuries-old European vocal traditions and those of more recent American vernacular persuasion, and write from a place where differing thoughts about line, text, form, and expression could co-exist.”
Recently called a “significant voice on the American music landscape” by the Philadelphia Inquirer and “an important representative of twenty-first century trends in composition” by New York Classical Review, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider writes music of direct expression and vivid narrative that has been hailed as “rapturous” by the New York Times, “groundbreaking” by the Boston Globe, and “poignant, deeply personal” by the New Yorker. With an ear for the poetic and the architectural, Snider’s music draws upon a variety of influences to render a nuanced command of immersive storytelling. Of her orchestral song cycle, Penelope, Pitchfork said: “Snider’s music lives in … an increasingly populous inter-genre space that, as of yet, has produced only a few clear, confident voices. Snider is perhaps the most sophisticated of them all.”
Snider’s works have been commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Kansas City Symphony, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra; the Residentie Orkest Den Haag, Aarhus Symfoniorkester, Britten Sinfonia, and National Arts Centre Orchestra; violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, percussionist Colin Currie, and vocalist Shara Nova (formerly Worden); eighth blackbird, A Far Cry, Ensemble Signal, The Knights, and yMusic; Roomful of Teeth, Cantus, and Trinity Wall Street Choir, among many others. Penelope and Unremembered, her first two LPs, earned critical acclaim from NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Nation, and Pitchfork. Her music is published by G. Schirmer, Inc.

Already heralded as one of the most highly anticipated albums of the year, 25-year old singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers has confirmed details of her sophomore solo album, Punisher.
+ Limited Edition LP is a UK exclusive on Blue Green Swirl vinyl.
Bridgers is a singular talent, and also the rare artist with enough humour to deconstruct the tired heuristics of a meteoric rise. Punisher, written and recorded between the summer of 2018 and the fall of 2019, cements her as one of the most irresistibly clever and tenderly prolific songwriters of our era. Returning to work with her 'Stranger In The Alps' collaborators Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, Bridgers - who co-produced the 'Boygenius' EP and Better Oblivion Community Center album - stepped into the role of co-producer for Punisher and has drawn from the same tight-knit group of musicians who appeared on her debut as well as those she has worked with since. The album includes Bridgers’ band of Marshall Vore (drums), Harrison Whitford (guitar), Emily Restas (bass) and Nick White (piano) as well as performances from Conor Oberst ('Halloween', 'I Know The End'), Lucy Dacus ('Graceland Too', 'I Know The End'), Julien Baker ('Graceland Too', 'I Know The End'), Blake Mills ('Halloween', 'Savior Complex' and 'I Know The End'), Jenny Lee Lindberg ('Kyoto', 'ICU'), Christian Lee Hutson ('Garden Song', 'Halloween', 'Savior Complex', 'I Know The End'), Nick Zinner ('I Know The End'), legendary drummer Jim Keltner ('Halloween' and 'Savior Complex') and Bright Eyes’ Nathaniel Walcott on horns ('Kyoto' and 'I Know The End'). Punisher was mixed by Mike Mogis, who also mixed Stranger In The Alps.

Run the Jewels have finally announced the details of their new album Run the Jewels 4. It’s out June 5 via Jewel Runners/BMG. The new album features the previously shared songs “ooh la la” and “yankee and the brave (ep. 4).” Plus, there are guest appearances from Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de La Rocha, Pharrell, 2 Chainz, Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, and Mavis Staples.

Springing from a decades deep body of work, defined by a rigorously singular and adventurous approach to sound, cellist, composer, and improvisor, Okkyung Lee, returns with Yeo-Neun, her first outing with Shelter Press, and arguably her most groundbreaking and unexpected album to date.
A vital, present force in the contemporary global landscape of experimental music, Okkyung Lee is widely regarded for her solo and collaborative improvisations and compositions, weaving a continuously evolving network of sonority and event, notable for its profound depth of instrumental sensitivity, exacting intellect, and visceral emotiveness. Yeo-Neun, recorded by Yeo-Neun Quartet - an experimental chamber music ensemble founded in 2106 and led by Lee on cello, featuring harpist Maeve Gilchrist, pianist Jacob Sacks, and bassist Eivynd Opsvik - represents the culmination of one of longest and most intimate arcs in her remarkable career. A radical departure from much of the experimental language for which she has become widely known, it is equally a fearless return.
Yeo-Neun loosely translates to the gesture of an opening in Korean, presenting window into the poetic multiplicity that rests at the album’s core. Balanced at the outer reaches of Lee’s radically forward thinking creative process, its 10 discrete works are born of the ambient displacement of musician’s life; intimate melodic constructions and deconstructions that traces their roots across the last 30 years, from her early days spent away from home studying the cello in Seoul and Boston, to her subsequent move to New York and the nomadism of a near endless routine of tours. At its foundation, lay glimpses of a once melancholic teen, traces of the sentimentality and sensitivity (감성 / Gahmsung) that underpins the Korean popular music of Lee’s youth, and an artist for whom the notions of time, place, and home have become increasingly complex.
Elegantly binding modern classical composition and freely improvised music with the emotive drama of Korean traditional music and popular ballads, the expanse of Yeo-Neun pushes toward the palpably unknown, as radical for what it is and does, as it for its approachability. In Lee’s hands, carried by a body of composition that rests beyond the prescriptive boundaries of culture, genre, geography, and time, a vision of the experimental avant-garde emerges as a music of experience, humanity, and life. Meandering melodies, from the deceptively simple to the tonally and structurally complex, slowly evolve and fall from view, the harp, piano, and bass forming an airy, liminal non-place, through which Lee’s cello and unplaceable memories freely drift.
Remarkably honest, unflinchingly beautiful, and creatively challenging, Shelter Press is proud to present Yeo-Neun, an album that takes one the most important voices in contemporary experimental music, Okkyung Lee, far afield into an unknown future, bound to her past.
Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker, housed in reversed-board printed inner and outer sleeve with artwork by American photographer Ron Jude.

属 Belonging, Ian Chang’s first full-length album, is like a cyborg - part purring mechanism, part animate bio-mass rising from primordial ooze. In nine concise, largely instrumental pop songs, Chang conjures a personal cosmos: the listener feels as if we might reach out and touch Belonging's jagged and tender aural sculptures. At every level, his music sings with earnest and deceptive simplicity. The album's melodies are intimate, its rhythms rewarding, and yet, just beneath the surface glimmers innovation, as if the neurons firing in each melodic idea have become audible. From the tradition of Bjork, Burial, and Flying Lotus, Chang breathes a new kind of human vulnerability into electronica.

Fetch the Bolt Cutters is the fifth studio album by American singer Fiona Apple. It was released on April 17, 2020, and is Apple's first release in nearly eight years, since The Idler Wheel... in 2012.

A Western Circular by Wilma Archer, releases 03 April 2020
Within A Western Circular lies an exciting and varied crew of guest artists including MF DOOM, Samuel T. Herring (Future Islands), Sudan Archives, and Laura Groves, all contributing vocals to his rich, dextrous compositions. Supple and multi-layered, honouring his acoustic heritage and influence, A Western Circular builds a sonic universe that commands contemporary references to everything from Frank Zappa to Yasuaki Shimuzu, Robert Wyatt to Arthur Russell.

The second album from the Brighton four-piece is the sound of a band mercilessly digging into itself with a stunning, dynamic performance from singer-songwriter Dana Margolin.

For almost a decade, Agnes Obel has been one of the most independent and original artists in contemporary music. Now she has returned with new album Myopia – through Deutsche Grammophon, Universal Music Group’s prestigious Yellow Label, and Blue Note in North America.
Following the same principles as with her previous albums (Philharmonics, Aventine and Citizen Of Glass), which she completed as a one-woman project in her own Berlin home studio, Obel has been under self-imposed creative isolation with the removal of all outside influences and distraction in the writing, recording and mixing process.
“The albums I’ve worked on have all required that I build a bubble of some kind in which everything becomes about the album. For me the production is intertwined with the lyrics and story behind the songs,” says Obel.
This is precisely what makes her music so compelling and the same is true with Myopia. “Paradoxically, for me I need to create my own myopia to make music.” Obel was experimenting with techniques of recording processing, warping and pitching down vocals, strings, piano, celesta and lutheal piano, finding ways to melt these elements together to become one and twisting them in a way that you feel at home within the sound she conjures throughout the record. Although her music can often curate a monologue of modern-day dystopian-esque news stories that we are all now subject to, the contents of 'Island Of Doom' - first single to be released, are much more personal, as she explains: “The song is made up of pitched-down piano and cello pizzicato and vocals, all choirs are pitched down and up… In my experience when someone close to you dies it is simply impossible to comprehend that you can’t ever talk to them or reach them somehow ever again. They are in many ways still alive because in your consciousness nothing has changed, they’re still there with everyone else you know.”