10 New Albums to Stream Now: Rolling Stone Editors’ Picks
Kesha, Rainbow
Kesha’s first album in nearly five years – and her first since she entered a protracted legal battle with her onetime producer Dr. Luke – finds “common ground between the honky-tonks she loves and the dance clubs she ruled with hits like ‘Tik Tok’ and ‘Die Young,'” writes Brittany Spanos. “In the process, she also finds her own voice: a freshly empowered, fearlessly feminist Top 40 rebel.”
Read Our Review: Kesha’s Battle Cry of Many Colors on Rainbow
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | SoundCloud Go | Spotify | Tidal
Downtown Boys, Cost of Living
The third album from this Rhode Island hardcore band “comes with the potent sonic upgrade they deserve,” writes Jon Dolan. “[O]n the Spanish-language ‘Somos Chulas (No Somos Pendejas),’ singer Victoria Ruiz carves white-supremacist ideology a new one, making her own utopia right before our eyes.”
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Bandcamp | SoundCloud Go | Spotify | Tidal
Alex Williams, Better Than Myself
“Indiana longhair Alex Williams casts himself squarely in the outlaw mode Chris Stapleton has rebooted with his debut LP,” writes Will Hermes about the debut album from this 25-year-old who uses his baritone to “ride hard for stoners” and whose collaborators include Mickey Raphael (Willie Nelson) on harp and Julian Raymond (Glen Campbell) behind the boards. “Old Tattoo,” writes Hermes, is a particular standout, a message to a dead grandfather that “shows a real storyteller getting his legs.”
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | SoundCloud Go | Spotify | Tidal
Oneohtrix Point Never, Good Time Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Already the winner of the Cannes Soundtrack Award, one of this generation’s most celebrated sound artists brings his signature mix of synthesizers and smeared electronic noise to the Robert Pattinson crime indie Good Time. The opener “Good Time” cycles through many of the moods OPN does best: romantic, nostalgic, terrifying, unnerving. Throughout there are crooning synths, some nausea-inducing ambience and what sounds like an updated version of the arpeggios on the early OPN albums from the late Aughts. The closer is a drones-and-keys collaboration where Iggy Pop is equal parts David Bowie and Leonard Cohen. Christopher R. Weingarten
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Spotify
Milo, Who Told You to Think??!!?!?!?!
The new album from the wordy, introspective MC Milo continues his trend-bucking path. “This album is fucking awesome. It’s my favorite thing I’ve ever made,” he tells Rolling Stone. “And I already know that people love it because I rapped all of these songs to their faces before I ever recorded it.”
Read Our Feature: Milo: Why the Self-Sustaining Indie-Rapper Is Trying to “Sidestep the Gatekeepers”
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Dean Hurley, Anthology Resource Vol. 1: △△
Inside Twin Peaks‘ Bang Bang Bar, musicians often sizzle with romance and reverb. Outside, Angelo Badalamenti’s score provides some of the show’s signature melancholy. But it’s Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley who provides much of the nightmarish ambience, now available to creep you out on the streaming service of your choice (and soon, on vinyl). The album is mostly deep drones, but many techniques are on display: “Electricity I” is a blur of harsh noise; “Slow One Chord Blues (Interior)” plays like a Link Wray version of overheard-from-the-bathroom electronic artists like Lee Gamble. It’s 40 minutes of sounds that recall foley work, drone music, dark ambient, noise and barely-there fogs. Christopher R. Weingarten
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Bandcamp | SoundCloud Go | Spotify | Tidal
David Rawlings, Poor David’s Almanack
On Rawlings’ third LP under his own name, the question of whether his solo efforts are somehow lesser than those he’s made with top-billed Gillian Welch (who sings throughout this beautiful set) becomes moot. Most of these 10 originals sound like time-proven folk classics, and his sibling-deep harmonies with Welch remain glorious. His pop tastes, however, are a bit more explicit than hers. “Airplane” might be a stealth country hit posing as an orchestral folk set piece, while “Cumberland Gap” suggests nothing so much as a backwoods Fleetwood Mac that could teach Haim a thing or two. Will Hermes
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Spotify
Lindsay Ell, The Project
The Alberta native shows off her slick guitar skills and wide-ranging idea of what “country music” can be on her peppy, winsome debut, which was produced by Sugarland’s Kristian Bush.
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | SoundCloud Go | Spotify | Tidal
Nadia Sirota, Tessellatum
New-school violist Sirota has performed with Paul Simon, the National, Arcade Fire and others; she also co-directs the modern chamber ensemble yMusic. On this luminous 38-minute work by Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy, Sirota leads a viola quartet of herself, quadruple-tracked, while Liam Byrne layers 11 tracks of viola de gamba. Together they generate dense harmonic clouds that move around birdlike melodic phrases, which by turn crisscross, then flock to formation. The piece is best experienced as soundtrack to Steven Merten’s psychedelic companion film, though it’s plenty consciousness-altering on its own. Ambient music for short attention spans. Will Hermes
Hear: Amazon Music Unlimited | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Yasunao Tone, AI Deviation #1, #2
Is Japanese artist Yasunao Tone developing a new frontier of improvisation? With the help of researchers, Tone developed artificial intelligence software that can “listen” to his performances and spit out results similar to how he has performed in the past. For the show at the Brooklyn venue Issue Project Room captured here, he controls and collaborates with the cyber-Tones, making a slurry of electronic noise where you can’t tell man from machine. The effect is like the electroacoustic music of the Sixties and Seventies discovering free improv – a splintery, harsh buzz-and-bloop with no rhythmic coherence. Though his sound palette is fairly static, the rhythmic and tonal unpredictability is wild. Christopher R. Weingarten
Hear: Bandcamp | SoundCloud | Spotify