We may receive commissions for affiliate links included in this article. This is a sponsored post. Authority Daily makes no warranties about the statements, facts and/or claims made on this article. These are the opinions of the author. Read our advertising and contributor disclosure here.
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Merge
H.C. McEntire: Eno Axis
The second album of soulful Americana from North Carolina songwriter H.C. McEntire begins with an early morning prayer and ends with a slow-burn Led Zeppelin cover. In between, the Mount Moriah vocalist gives a breakthrough performance as a bandleader, using her searing voice and imagistic songwriting to set a dusky, autumnal mood. McEntire began working on the album after touring as a member of Angel Olsen’s band for two years, and her time on the road is audible in these electric, live-sounding performances. As she sings in the rousing chorus of “Final Bow”: “It’s as real, real, real as it gets.” –Sam Sodomsky
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Columbia
Haim: Women in Music Pt. III
Three songs into Haim’s sharpest album yet, Danielle is behind the wheel in her beloved Los Angeles with a Joni Mitchell classic on the stereo, “screaming every word to ‘Both Sides Now.’” How lost must one feel to shout “I really don’t know life at all” alone in the car first thing in the morning? That’s the precise kind of biting honesty that Alana, Este, and Danielle brilliantly amplify on Women in Music Pt. III. Writing with more personality and candor than ever about a range of difficult themes—depression, loss, misogyny, the complications of loving on one’s own terms—they’ve also loosened their taut pop rock just enough to breathe more life into it, incorporating the ‘90s Lilith rock of Sheryl Crow, the blue-skied strums of Wilco, and a groovy Lou Reed interpolation. Through it all, clearer-than-ever proof emerges not just of a great band in stride, but a cultural fact: women continue making the most vital rock music now. The most revelatory sound Haim make room for on Women in Music Pt. III is themselves. –Jenn Pelly
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Polyvinyl
Jeff Rosenstock: NO DREAM
Jeff Rosenstock’s NO DREAM is littered with the mundane, the dirty undesired bits of life that aren’t usually preserved in song. Moldy laundry, “weird chips,” and straight-up garbage line the former Bomb the Music Industry! leader’s latest solo album, a collection of pure pop melodies smuggled into strident, feisty punk songs. Rosenstock surveys the debris, which doesn’t add up to much. But he’s anything but dreary in his delivery, using loud guitars, louder drums, and his own brash and unwieldy voice to set scenes of filthy rental cars and beer-can pyramids. Somewhere in these melodic tantrums, drudgery becomes liberation. –Madison Bloom
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Double Double Whammy
Lomelda: Hannah
Hannah Read can make a melody out of anything. Throughout Hannah, her fifth album as Lomelda, her expressive warble blooms and shrinks into strange and beautiful phrasings, heightening their meaning. On the slow-burning “It’s Lomelda,” she croons off a list of her musical heroes and their work, from Yo La Tengo to Frank Ocean to Sufjan Stevens’ devastatingly spare “The Only Thing.” She turns a conversational bit of advice into a soaring mantra on “Wonder,” repeating the phrase “When you get it, give it all you got, you said” across vocal peaks and valleys. She sings like no one else in indie rock, as though she is guided by a golden energy from within. –Jillian Mapes
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Highway 20 / Thirty Tigers
Lucinda Williams: Good Souls Better Angels
Lucinda Williams drew on a new but all-too-familiar well of inspiration for her 14th studio album: the anger and frustration she felt over the poisonous turn of recent American politics. Her songwriting may be more openly topical than usual, but her sound hasn’t changed much. She maintains her unmatched knack for ferocious marriages of country and rock, swooping from the snarls of “Wakin’ Up” and “Man Without a Soul” to the weary last-call shuffles of “Good Souls” and “Shadows and Doubts.” Alongside her fury for oppressors, Williams offers comfort and solidarity to the dispossessed, with a set of tunes that break your heart only to glue it back together again. –Allison Hussey
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Drag City
Magik Markers: 2020
Magik Markers distinguished themselves in the early 2000s with unfettered noise jams and a merch table so teeming with CD-Rs, tapes, and LPs as to render the idea of a coherent discography faintly obsolete. The New England trio led by singer/guitarist Elisa Ambrogio has slowed down and tightened up considerably as of late. Their first album in seven years is their most finely honed, though it is still rumpled in all the right places. With creaking Crazy Horse guitar solos, basement-Sabbath sludge, and A Thousand Leaves-rustling mysticism, 2020 finds clarity in controlled chaos, an eye in the year’s hurricane. –Marc Hogan
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Wax Nine / Carpark
Melkbelly: PITH
On PITH, Melkbelly’s second full-length, the Chicago foursome refine their knotty but melodic noise rock. Singer-guitarist Miranda Winters calls out from murky depths, conjuring memories of loss, anxiety, frustration, and occasional bliss. On standout track “THC,” the band slowly cranks up the tension until it erupts into an onslaught of guitar fuzz. Melkbelly rarely stays in one place for long, whiplashing from one fractured groove to the next, always finding new ways to shift from quiet to explosive. –Quinn Moreland
Want to get featured on Authority Daily?
