FEATURE:
One for the Record Collection!
IN THIS PHOTO: Mavis Staples releases Sad and Beautiful World on 7th November/PHOTO CREDIT: Elizabeth De La Piedra
Essential November Releases
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EVEN though…
IN THIS PHOTO: The cover for Jessie J’s Don’t Tease Me with a Good Time, due for release on 28th November
November and December are quieter when it comes to new album releases, there are a few really interesting ones out this month I want to guide people to. I am going to take guidance from this website when it comes to releases and dates. There are ones that I am not going to mention that you will want to seek out. 7th November is the busiest week. Let’s start out with Hatchie’s Liquorice. You can pre-order the album here. I am a fan of this Australian artist, so I am curious to see what Liquorice offers:
“The cover of Liquorice, the third album from Australian indie pop artist Hatchie, features a closely cropped portrait of Harriette Pilbeam laughing, her smudged red lipstick suggesting the glorious aftermath of a kiss. Captured during a spontaneous backyard photo shoot using a dinky digital camera, the image encapsulates a record that is rough around the edges and joyfully undone with themes of longing, lust, and regret. Pilbeam began writing Liquorice in earnest while living in Brisbane over 2022-2023, and later at a home shared with Agius in Melbourne, ultimately completing the demos in mid-2024. As a musician who has previously worn her influences on her sleeve, Pilbeam strove to write from scratch without any specific musical influences in mind; allowing songs to breathe for weeks, rather than rushing ideas.
She found herself drawn to the melodic simplicity of her early songs and embraced her musical insecurities: “I wanted to see my limitations as strengths that inform my style.” After working with producers Jorge Elbrecht (Caroline Polachek, Japanese Breakfast, Sky Ferreira) and Dan Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan) on Giving the World Away, Pilbeam wanted to complete Liquorice with a single collaborator, ideally a non-male producer who also fronts their own musical project. In September 2024, Pilbeam and Agius returned to Los Angeles to work with Melina Duterte, who records indie rock under the name Jay Som and has production credits on an assortment of projects including the Grammy-winning boygenius album the record. “My last album ended up being really dark and introspective and that is one part of me, but there was this whole other side that I felt like I wasn't expressing,” Pilbeam says. “I’m a hopeless romantic and a very silly person, sometimes to a fault.” Now 32 and married, Pilbeam found that “eternal feelings” of yearning and heartache quickly rushed back as she reflected on her experiences as a younger woman.
At the same time, she channeled her fondness for tragic romance movies where the characters do not necessarily find a happy ending together. Liquorice is preoccupied with the finite forever. These songs capture the overwhelming, exhilarating, and transforming side-effects of infatuation, even if the entirety of the love story only lasts for one magical night. Like the rich flavors of the twisty, titular candy - sweet, salty, and bitter all in one bite—Liquorice validates how longing and obsession are intertwined in the self-discovery of young womanhood”.
Mavis Staples’s Sad and Beautiful World is available to pre-order. There is not a lot of information about this album, so I am going to source a recent interview from The Guardian, where readers posted questions for Staples. In a career that has lasted over seventy-five years, this is an artist that is still so powerful and relevant. Do go and order her new album, as it is going to be one of the most important and moving of this year:
“Can you speak about the array of songs and artists on your new record? What kind of message and lyrics do you want to sing at this point in your life? steve_bayley
The first song I got for the album was Human Mind, written by Hozier and Allison Russell, and that really set the tone for the entire record. It starts: “I deal in love baby, in good words from above … and I ain’t giving up.” I cried when I was trying to sing it for the first time. Then the next song was Beautiful Strangers by Kevin Morby. All the songs are part of me and what I’ve been singing about my whole life. There’s some about war, fighting, love … some about hard times, like the farmer whose losing his farm. Things that are going on in the world today, so Sad and Beautiful World is the perfect title.
You were influential in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Do we need another civil rights movement now, 50 years later? AD2023
When I did my album of freedom songs with Ry Cooder [We’ll Never Turn Back, 2007] we sang a song called 99 and 1/2. You know, 99 and a half won’t do … we gotta make a hundred. We gotta keep on pushing because the struggle is still alive.
In my mind Stax Records was a true band of sisters and brothers pushing boundaries and creating magic, with a shared vision of art, liberty and righteousness. Is that the reality? Mr_202
It was a pleasure working at Stax because they had all these great people such as David Porter and Isaac Hayes. We called Otis Redding “the footballer” because he was so huge, but he was one beautiful spirit. They had a mixed [race] band in Booker T and the MG’s. In the early 60s, two white guys and two black guys working together was not supposed to happen, but in Stax no one looked at colour. Anybody could walk into your session and sit and listen. It was like a family and, now they’ve got a museum, a lot of teenyboppers can see Stax today.
Is this the darkest time you’ve lived through or am I foolish to believe it is? babylonfalling
It is pretty dark. There are some things going on in the US that are not pleasing to me, but I keep my head up. I turn on a light, you know, I don’t dwell on it. If someone needs me out there, I’ll be out there, but I leave that darkness out of my home and out of my life. You can’t let them bring you down”.
Midlake’s A Bridge Too Far is also out on 7th November. You can pre-order the album here. If you have not heard of this legendary American band, then do go back and check out their incredible catalogue. Their latest album is set to be one of their best. Rough Trade have provided a bit of information about A Bridge Too Far. I am intrigued to see what we get with this album:
“Beloved for their cinematic songwriting and atmospheric blend of folk, rock, and psychedelia, Midlake returns with their sixth studio album, A Bridge To Far -- a sweeping, soul-stirring meditation on resilience and hope.
Lead singer Eric Pulido describes the record as a reminder that, regardless of circumstance, there is a place -- "not made of stone" -- where one can find solace and strength. It's a call to persevere, to "go bravely arm in arm and climb upon," inviting listeners to transcend the darkness through connection and belief. This is Midlake at their most inspired and intentional, weaving together mythic storytelling and emotional clarity with the signature textures that have made them a touchstone in modern independent music.
Recorded in the band's hometown of Denton, TX at The Echo Lab with acclaimed producer and mixer Sam Evian, A Bridge To Far captures the warmth and wildness of the band's earliest recordings while pushing into luminous new territory. The first single, "The Ghouls," arrives as a haunting and propulsive introduction to the record's themes--equal parts spectral and cathartic”.
About four more albums from 7th November before I move to the following week. One that you will definitely want to get is ROSALÍA’s Lux. Pre-order the album here. This NME article tells how this new album is going to be multilingual. It is really fascinating. One of the biggest artists in the world always doing something different. ROSALÍA definitely is in a league of her own. If you have not heard her music either, then I would urge you to check her out, as she is a brilliant artist:
“Rosalía has revealed that she sings in 13 different languages on her new album, ‘Lux’.In a new interview with the New York Times, the musician revealed that she spent two years learning how to write and sing convincingly in other languages. The album features Rosalía’s native Spanish but also Catalan, English, Latin, Sicilian, Ukrainian, Arabic, German and more.
Fans were expecting something completely different to her last after Rosalía shared in August that her next album would not sound like her last LP. She told ELLE: “The rhythm [of the music industry] is so fast. And the sacrifice, the price to pay, is so high. The driving force that leads you to continue making music, to continue creating, has to come from a place of purity.”
Details of the new album emerged earlier this month (October 21), when Rosalía confirmed her new project, ‘LUX’, would be released in November, the follow-up to 2022’s ‘Motomami’. The album – her fourth studio record – will be released on November 7 via Columbia Records, and you can pre-order/pre-save it here.
Speaking about her multi-lingual approach to the album, the musician told the New York Times: “It’s a lot of trying to understand how other languages work…it’s a lot of intuition and trying to be like, ‘I’m going to just write and let’s see how these will sound in another language.’”
She told the publication she had spent a lot of time on Google translate as well as speaking with professional translators — “If I rhyme this with this, does this make sense?” — she said she would ask them. She also worked with teachers who coached her phonetically on how to pronounce words and phrases.
Speaking about her desire to understand new cultures through the language learning on the album, she explained: “I love traveling, I love learning from other humans. Why would I not try to learn another language and try to sing in another language and expand the way I can be a singer or a musician or an artist? The world is so connected.”
PHOTO CREDIT: The Lede Company
The orchestral ‘Berghain’– taking its name from the iconic techno club in Berlin – has lyrics in German, Spanish and English and heavy classical influences.
Rosalía’s voice is at the forefront in the first half as she sings in German and Spanish over dramatic strings. About halfway through, Björk – who Rosalía also worked with on the 2023 charity single ‘Oral’ – comes in singing, “The only way to save us is through divine intervention,” and Yves Tumor takes over for the outro, repeating, “I’ll fuck you till you love me.”
The German lyrics sung by the choir, “Seine Angst ist meine Angst, Seine Wut ist meine Wut, Seine Liebe ist meine Liebe, Sein Blut ist mein Blut,” translate to “His fear is my fear, his rage is my rage, his love is my love, his blood is my blood.”
In her interview with the New York Times, Rosalía also opened up about working with Björk on the song, saying: “She is my favourite woman and artist. I think we met through Pablo, El Guincho [Rosalía’s former producing partner]. We went to have some tapas in Barcelona. And I thought that she was the most fascinating human I’ve ever met because her train of thought was so different than I’ve ever seen before. It was just an instant crush of admiration.
“We stayed in touch and I just felt like with this album, if this was such a strong, demanding musical exercise, if I was doing it good enough, maybe, I would send it to her, and if it was in the right level, maybe then she couldn’t say no.”
In the three years since she released ‘Motomami’, her third album, Rosalía shared a collaborative EP with Rauw Alejandro – her then-fiancé – and released the standalone single ‘Tuya’ in 2023, and worked with artists including Ralphie Choo and BLACKPINK’s Lisa.
The singer, who had a cameo in the 2019 movie Pain And Glory, is also set to venture into acting by joining the cast of HBO’s Euphoria for its upcoming third season. She said earlier this year, “This is my first job, eh? Well, I’m learning, I’m figuring it out. I’m trying not to forget my lines, but it’s been really inspiring being beside these amazing actors and actresses. My first time, figuring it out, trying to have fun with it, play around, improvise.”
NME gave ‘Motomami’ five stars, writing: “Rosalía isn’t so much carving out her own lane as building her own ultra-modern, super-bendy sonic motorway. It’s one you’ll want to hurtle down again and again”.
Go and pre-order Stella Donnelly’s Love and Fortune. This is an artist that you may not be familiar with. I would say go and hear her. She is remarkable. The Guardian recently spoke with her about Love and Fortune. An album that captures the pain of being rejected by a friend, this album is also one where Stella Donnelly reconnected with music. Rekindling that passion and love. I have been following her for a while, and this album sounds like it will be incredible:
“We have a language for coping with romantic heartbreak, learned from movies and songs – but there are fewer mirrors in art for coping with the end of platonic bonds. On her third album, Love and Fortune, Donnelly has captured the dull ache of being rejected by a friend who once knew her best of all. It might become the record ghosted friends turn to when they find a person they knew intimately for years no longer wants to hear from them.
When it happened to her, Donnelly felt powerless, realising “no amount of questioning or reaching out is going to work. I’d never come up against that in my life.” Any tensions in other friendships she’d had previously could be talked through; this time, she was having a conversation with herself.
“It’s so heavy and, for me, never resolved,” she says. “Ever.”
As much as the 33-year-old tried not to write about it, it sprang up each time she touched an instrument. She writes of letters left unsent on the track Friends, hiding herself away and not showing up to gigs she thinks her friend might also go to on Ghosts. “It’s as much an offering as it is a journal, in a way,” Donnelly says of the album.
We’re chatting over kombucha in the garden of Ceres, a farm and nursery in Melbourne’s East Brunswick. Around us flit magpies and other species that Donnelly, a keen ornithologist, notes by name. Birds are a symbol for evolution on the record: over plaintive, soft keys on Please Everyone, she recalls birdwatching with her former friend as sweet recorded chirps arrive on the track. “Wherever you may be, I hope it’s kind to you,” she sings. By the time we get to the album closer, Laying Low, she’s calmer, singing of the feathers left behind when someone flies away. By then, she’s learned, trying to grab them would be a fool’s errand.
PHOTO CREDIT: Nick McKinlay
Donnelly is quick, eager and delightful in conversation, but she has been struggling in interviews, she says, “because I’m so busy trying to protect the other person in all of this. But then I have gone and written this record.” When a freak sun shower prompts us to scurry away for cover, it also gives her respite from having to tiptoe around her words. When we settle again out of the rain, she apologises for “giving politician answers”, explaining the last thing she wants to do is twist a knife in someone else’s side with a more uncensored version of events.
After writing her past two records on tour and on deadline, Donnelly wrote Love and Fortune in her head and on her bike around Melbourne’s northern suburbs.
Six months ago, after being diagnosed as neurodivergent, she learned what self-care looks like for a person with a sensitive mind. “It’s just understanding that I need a little extra help here and there with things, and that a motorcycle riding past really loudly on the street can be a day-ruiner for me. I’m just a lot kinder to myself now, about everything.”
“Take back my little life … I set myself on fire for someone else’s game,” she sings on W.A.L.K, a song about caring for herself like she would a beloved pet. Tending to her most basic needs became a new daily devotion.
“I think, up until this year, I’d been really hard on myself because I was just like, ‘Why can everyone else do this and I can’t? Why can everyone else cope with life?’” she says.
She now has “hindsight kindness” for the past versions of her. The ones that couldn’t cope as well, who pushed through the discomfort of touring and sat in bed waiting for a text back – then chastised herself for doing it. “Finally allowing myself to just write a whole fucking album about this big thing that had happened to me made me accept that that’s kind of who I am: I’m this annoying person that writes songs about their personal life. I had to reconcile with the fact that that’s who I am, and grow to love that person”.
I will move to The Mountain Goats’ Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan. I can’t find too much online about this album, so I will have to rely on Rough Trade and what they have published about Mountain Goats’ new album. I have heard a couple of songs from it and it is one of those albums that needs to be in the collection. Even if you have not heard of the group, I think you should dive in and explore an album that is going to be one of those under-reviewed gems:
“The Mountain Goats, led by singer-songwriter John Darnielle, have built a prolific and influential career in indie music since the early 1990s.
Known for their vast discography of storytelling and literary lyricism, Darnielle is regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in modern songwriting. Their work has a deep emotional resonance with their avid and loyal fanbase, built over the past 30 years. Today, we find Darnielle awoken from a dream where he titled an album Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, with no sense of sonic direction in the dream, then proceeded to write the entire album based off of this arbitrary title.
Produced by the Mountain Goats’ multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, who also co-wrote several songs, the record is embracing, inviting, and overflowing with melody and orchestration that extends far beyond the boundaries of their past work”.
Whitney’s Small Talk seems like it is going to be among this year’s est. You can pre-order it here. New Music City spoke with Max Kakacek, a founding member and guitarist of Whitney, ahead of the release of Small Talk. It sounds like it is a masterpiece, so an album that you will want to pre-order and ensure you do not miss out on:
“Three years ago, Whitney released their third record, “Spark” (2022), an album that left fans and critics bemused and, at times, downright cruel. (Hello, Reddit.) The record was created mainly in isolation during lockdown, a period in which both Julien Ehrlich (drums and vocals) and Max Kakacek (guitar) were navigating painful breakups. The pair had grown disillusioned with their chosen instruments and felt experimentation would render inspiration. “Spark” represents a more pop-adjacent exercise by the soft-rock duo, and it’s a decent experiment. But this proposition did not sit well with many Whitney loyalists who, like me, had been so enchanted by “Light Upon the Lake” back in 2016, with its inventive blend of indie soft rock and folk backed by orchestral textures akin to micro-chamber music. “Candid” (2020) and “Forever Turned Around” (2019) are good albums, but the bar had been set so high with “Light Upon the Lake” that fans have eagerly, and perhaps impatiently, been seeking a follow-up that tickles the itch that Whitney’s first record unveiled. As Kakacek says of the “Spark” era: “We felt really boxed in by our instruments… So we completely shifted focus. In hindsight… It didn’t really capture the soulfulness of the project.”
Three years on from “Spark,” “Small Talk” has already generated pre-release buzz, and with good reason: It is phenomenal. Of their four studio albums, it is the clear tour de force and, upon release, could join Chicago’s canon of indie music in the same breath as Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” (2002)—a profound, persistently revered and proud patch of Chicago’s soft-rock fabric. It is fast and slow at once, clocking in at thirty-six minutes and eleven songs. The opening track, “Silent Exchange,” is stunning. Beginning with meandering, isolated yet purposeful piano, Ehrlich’s gently piercing vocals enter with “Write my name / in a line of gas… bite my tongue / and they ask how I’ve been / ’cause I can’t talk / without crying again.” Kakacek’s guitar is gently introduced before a characteristic violin and horn section builds the track into something beautifully melancholic and grand. It is a mesmerizing start. “Silent Exchange” is followed, logically, by “Won’t You Speak Your Mind,” a faster track that leans on Kakacek’s guitar a bit sooner, leading into Whitney’s horn section quicker, with more capriccio. Themes of desperate, painfully disconnected communication associated with collapses of intimacy and love are clear throughout the record.
While prereleased tracks like “Damage,” “Dandelions” and “Darling”—likely the hit of the record—continue to dissect the pain of post-relationship chaos, “In the Saddle” offers a slightly psychedelic and redemptive arc to the record. It’s a song to which Julian Ehrlich’s previous work with Unknown Mortal Orchestra can clearly be connected. Thematically, “Back to the Wind” further substantiates themes of defiant hope within the album with simple poetic dexterity: “Back to the wind now feel so strong / No reflection in the glass babe I’m gone… swept in the wind turning brown / floating through the street upside down.” It’s not laureate-level prose—it’s accessible, clever and quick, and for me, it initiated an interesting meditation: Wind does not exist without that which it displaces. You cannot hear it without the rustling of trees or the buffeting of ears. You cannot see it without the leaves it carries. But there it always is, powerfully, if recklessly, forcing progress. “Back to the Wind” posits embracing the painful winds of change in a clear, hopeful way.
In the process of producing “Small Talk,” Whitney embraced first-instinct energy. “It was more like, trust your intuition immediately,” Kakacek says. “The first iteration of each song would eventually be the final product.” That openness bled into a pattern of retaining several “happy accidents.” “On ‘Islands,’ I layered a mono-synth part four times live—some notes were ‘wrong,’ but the tension felt desperate and sad,” Kakacek says. “We tried to redo it once and stopped immediately. Whatever happened that night wasn’t repeatable.” The approach also felt cyclical for the band, a return to the group’s roots. “It felt like we were coming back to a home base… letting the weird nuances of being a little naive in our recording process be a part of the songs again [as they were in 2016]”.
There are two albums from 14th November I want to cover off. Austra’s Chin Up Buttercup is the first. This is an artist that I am relatively new to, but I do love the sound of what the album will deliver and I would advise others to investigate it. You can pre-order it and check out an album that is going to be terrific:
“I’m so chaotic in love,” sings Katie Austra Stelmanis on “Amnesia,” the cinematic opening track of Chin Up Buttercup, the fifth album by her alter ego and longtime pop project Austra. You know Austra’s astonishing voice – singular and operatic, it betrays a fearlessness and sophistication. She’s the woman you’d be afraid to approach in a bar. Her voice draws you like a siren to the dance floor as the beats build toward the hypnotic chorus of “my life is not the same without you in my arms.” Listen closely and you’ll hear a vulnerability that sets this album apart from her earlier work. This is a grief album you can dance to.
Stelmanis and co-producer Kieran Adams shared a mutual love of pop divas, Eurodance and hard-to-find techno. Madonna’s 1998 album Ray of Light, produced by William Orbit, was a key influence in the later stages of album making: “Ray of Light was produced almost entirely on a Juno-106 and a Korg MS-20 which we’d been using, so the reference point was aligned,” says Stelmanis. The album sounds like a mix of hypnotic dance floor anthems and elegant melodies to soothe your broken heart”.
I am actually going to now move to Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover’s What of Our Nature. You can pre-order it here. That comes out on 21st November. Not too much available about this album, so I am going to come to The Line of Best Fit and their feature from on 15th October. A little more insight regarding what the album is about and the artists involved. These are artists I am also fairly new to, so I am curious to hear what comes from What of Our Nature:
“The announcement comes alongside Haley Heynderickx's signing with Fat Possum Records, with the collection being the result of shared songwriting duties between Heynderickx and Max García Conover.
On new single "Fluorescent Light", Heynderickx offers a critique of commercialism, while on "Boar", García Conover chronicles the pair's first time meeting. What Of Our Nature follows Among Horses III (Fifth Edition), which Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover released in 2023.
What of Our Nature was developed over the course of a year, with Heynderickx and García Conover exchanging songs with one another from across the US while reading the work of Woody Guthrie. The album was produced by Sahil Ansari, recorded to tape across five days while in a barn in Vermont.
Tracklist:
Song for Alicia
Mr. Marketer
Boars
Cowboying
In Bulosan’s Words
This Morning I Am Born Again
Fluorescent Light
Buffalo, 1981
to each their dot
Red River Dry”.
Two more albums to get to. On 21st November, Keaton Henson’s Parader is released. You can pre-order it here. An extraordinary songwriter from London. He is a hugely prolific artist. His previous album, Somnambulant Cycles, was released last year. Such an amazing talent who is consistently brilliant, I feel Parader will offer so many gems and memorable moments:
“Keaton Henson is shedding the “quiet boy” persona that has defined much of his career. Embracing the grunge-infused sounds of his youth on new album Parader, the elusive songwriter melds emotional darkness, melancholy, and seething frustration as he reckons with the hauntings of his past: “I was nervous about being too loud, but then it sort of just came out.”
What unravels across Parader’s 12 tracks is an introspective autopsy of time as it distorts and folds to inhabit the songwriter’s present. “There are these disjointed snapshots,” he shares, “memories across time popping up amongst this collection of thoughts about what it feels like to be this age and a musician.”
“Parader has legitimate confidence, it’s not me pretending to be anything I’m not,” Henson admits. “It’s maybe just me accepting that part of me is this. It's louder and it has those bigger, louder, rasher sounds, but not from a performative point of view. Maybe I'm accepting that that is a part of me as well.” As the record closes out, final track ‘Performer’ brings us full circle to the question of the album’s title – the two intrinsically linked. As he sings, “I’ll show my scars to you no matter who you are,” Henson acknowledges the emotional pains of being a musician in the public eye, with the relentless march of time a grudging ally in delivering his stories: “I am the parader. The person who parades around showing their wounds for a living”.
One of the biggest albums of the year comes from Jessie J. It arrives on 28th November. Don't Tease Me With a Good Time. Go and pre-order the album. Following on from 2018’s This Christmas Day, it is exciting to hear a new album from Jessie J. At the moment, she is awaiting treatment for breast cancer, so it is a very challenging time. Some of these lows and challenges she has experienced will go into the album. It is going to be a very personal album, but one that mixes emotions:
“Jessie J’s sixth studio album Don’t Tease Me With A Good Time - her first in nearly eight years - is a bold kaleidoscope of emotions, capturing the raw highs and lows of the last decade. Recorded over the past five years in Los Angeles, the album is emotional, unfiltered, and unapologetic, it’s music that wears its heart on its sleeve and demands to be felt at full volume. Working with a close-knit group of collaborators, Jessie J teams up with Ryan Tedder (One Republic, Beyonce, Adele), Jesse Boykins III, Los Hendrix (SZA, Brent Faiyaz), Marty Maro (John Legend, Anitta) and more, to create a body of work that effortlessly blends old-skool alt-R&B, upfront pop, and contemporary R&B.
The 16-track album includes standout singles ‘Believe In Magic’, the deeply personal ‘No Secrets’, and the euphoric anthem ‘Living My Best Life’, teasing the album’s broad sound and subject matter. The album closes with the power-ballad ‘Award Goes To’, which Jessie J gave a showstopping live performance of earlier this year at the BAFTA Television Awards”.
These are some of the best albums out this month. There are others, though I wanted to highlight a few that I feel you should order. Ranging from Jessie J to Mavis Staples through to Midlake and ROSALÍA, it is a broad and interesting month for music! So many greats in there. Even though December is a quiet month for album, I am sure I will put together a feature that spotlights the best…
NEXT month.