10 new albums to stream this week

Commitment: Fear Of

Out of Philadelphia’s hardcore scene comes Commitment’s debut LP, the blustering and brilliantly titled Fear Of. Armed with blast beats and bone-shattering breakdowns (helmed by seasoned punk wildcard Pierce Jordan), Commitment’s vengeful punk barrels in with a righteous fury and takes zero prisoners. Tati Salazar tears into the world’s most hateful and hypocritical—the architects of systemic brutality who exploit the world’s most vulnerable for their personal gain—by spitting all that ugliness right back in their faces with a big bloody grin. At the heart of Commitment’s grief and rage is a cry for solidarity—with queer people, with colonized people, with sex workers, with all those who are constantly taken from while being told to wait for a turn that never comes—to charge fearlessly and undying into what’s left of this world and to take what’s rightfully theirs. —Grace Robins-Somerville [Get Better]

Hiding Places: The Secret to Good Living

The Secret to Good Living, the debut album from New York/North Carolina band Hiding Places, isn’t as sunshine-and-rainbows as its title suggests. Moody and spacious, the lush LP reflects on love, loss, and desire through gauzy verses and razored crescendos. Lead single “One Hand” punts back and forth between soaring electric riffs and acoustic arpeggios. “Ballad No. ∞,” a minimalist play-by-play of an ill-fated romantic entanglement, leaves vocalist Audrey Keelin’s floaty soprano undergirded by a lone guitar. Folksy slow-burner “Heat Lightning” is anchored by fellow bandleader Nicholas Byrne and shines a light on the group’s razor-sharp symbiosis. Tender and crackling, self-possessed and honest, The Secret to Good Living coasts on slashing guitars and heady, desperate vocals. Hiding Places is now firmly out in the open. —Miranda Wollen [Keeled Scales]

MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt, & SURF GANG: POMPEII // UTILITY

MIKE and Earl Sweatshirt resent the weight of expectation. After each of their prior records, fans were quick to project their own assumptions onto the pair, but both rappers have been equally fast to shatter them. Earl was, of course, the Odd Future wunderkind who dismissed Odd Future before his first solo album even dropped. Then, just as he seemed set to make waves as an ally to billy woods, E L U C I D, Boldy James, and their ilk, he began hopping on tracks with loose young upstarts like Niontay and El Cousteau. Think MIKE wouldn’t gel with a Brooklyn experimentalist? Here’s Pinball. Think Earl wouldn’t fuck with Clams Casino? Here’s “Making The Band.” At this point, the only thing to expect from one of the most fruitful creative ecosystems in rap is the unexpected. It’s no surprise, then, that the long-awaited collaboration between MIKE and Earl doesn’t sound quite like some corners of rap that Twitter hoped it would. There’s no “H•A•M” here. POMPEII // UTILITY isn’t even a full collaborative album, really, but a split record—each artist is given one side each. Most of the names who lent production magic to beloved projects like Disco! or Live Laugh Love don’t appear here either; it’s instead helmed almost solely by SURF GANG, the Time Square cloud-rap collective who tend to work more with Soundcloud-eccentrics than artists who write effervescent tweets about KA. —Liam Inscoe-Jones [10k]

Robber Robber: Two Wheels Move the Soul

Robber Robber—the Burlington, Vermont, quartet of Nina Cates, Zack James, Will Krulak, and Carney Hemlers—know quite a bit about transience. The group recorded their sophomore album Two Wheels Move the Soul after Cates and James’ landlord decided to have their long-time home demolished. For months, the pair couch-surfed across Burlington while recording the record. Making the album became a source of solid ground amidst the turbulence of their living situation. The band channeled all that stress in the studio. Its songs are coiled springs, bundles of potential energy that always threaten to unravel. “The Sound It Made” kicks things off with blown-out bass and steely guitar, and James’ hi-hats jangle like they’ve got extra metal rattling off them. Like their fellow experimental noisemakers YHWH Nailgun, Robber Robber is a drummer’s band: the exact tone of a snare-drum smack or air-pressure of a kick-drum are just as important melodic building blocks in their music as a guitar line. Just listen to the way James’ percussion snaps between an earthy live kit and processed breakbeats on “The Sound It Made,” the metallic smacks on “Talkback,” or how his beat on “Watch For Infection” presses forward relentlessly while Cates’s vocal line pulls back. Two Wheels is a feast for such drumming. Everything on the album is textured and satisfyingly gritty, played like there’s dirt under the band’s fingernails and a tension headache keeping them awake at night. —Andy Steiner [Fire Talk]

Sunn O))): Sunn O)))

The first few moments of Sunn O)))’s self-titled record play out in standard Sunn O))) fashion: crackling feedback, piercing frequencies, sustained resonance. Such is the lingua franca of the drone metal duo. But around the two-minute mark, the sound of faint, trickling water enters the mix, coursing through Stephen O’Malley’s and Greg Anderson’s chugging miasma like an unlikely river through scorched wasteland. Suddenly, it’s gone, yielding abruptly to the heavy mountains of guitars it once, somehow, coexisted with. Near the 17-minute mark, another improbable sound emerges from the muck: a twittering bird, peacefully chirping amidst the wreckage. “XXANN,” the opening piece of the Seattle band’s first new album since 2019’s Pyroclasts, is an introduction critical to understanding Sunn O))) on a wider scale. Since their formation in 1998 and the nine albums that followed, O’Malley and Anderson have always invited outside collaborators to contribute to their insular, dense mountains of sound. Their 10th record and Sub Pop debut marks the first time the duo has created all the music themselves. Across these six instrumental compositions, they are the sole performers, a fact that feels particularly salient for an eponymous record. But they are not the only ones here; there are natural forces at play, and they fold into Sunn O)))’s orbit in ways that are both organic and surprising. As ugly and murky as Sunn O))) sounds at times, and as long as these stretches of tempestuous distortion elapse, there’s a reprieve that beckons you to listen closer. —Grant Sharples [Sub Pop]

Thundercat: Distracted

When Thundercat locks into the pocket, he’s immaculate. The man born Stephen Bruner is an adept songwriter, someone who soars above the instrumentation with a cooing voice and magnetic charisma. But it’s within the rhythmic grid, six-string bass in hand, where he truly excels. He can shred, groove, riff, supply whatever the moment calls for. His most memorable material features his bass’ hefty, wah-inflected low-end, which swims through the mix with a fluid clarity, an unequivocal star of the show. There’s a reason Thundercat has one of the best Tiny Desk performances ever; the musicianship on display is astounding. “Candlelight,” the opening track to Distracted, his latest album is pure, heady fusion. Flanged vocals and DOMi Louna’s galactic synths share as much room with showy bass fingerwork and JD Beck’s restless drumming. On “A.D.D. through the Roof,” bass and keys trade solos in classic call-and-response fashion over a lightweight backdrop fit for a smoky, dimly lit lounge. There’s also “She Knows Too Much,” an early standout that intersperses blasts of brass with a glassy keys solo and a posthumous Mac Miller performance. Thundercat locks in so hard on “I Did This to Myself” that you can practically see him bopping his head to the beat, his nimble fingers navigating the frets with both intense focus and unbothered ease, like the scene in Pixar’s Soul where Joe loses himself in the music and transports himself to another world. When Thundercat is in this mode, it’s like he’s taking you on that journey with him, and you can witness the otherworldly magic he’s likely experiencing, too. —Grant Sharples [Brainfeeder]

Wendy Eisenberg:Wendy Eisenberg

Wendy Eisenberg has evidently always been a fan of the rhetorical question, but perhaps never more so than on Wendy Eisenberg. “You are the oldest you’ve ever been,” they intone, sweet and clear, on the opening track: “Did you feel yourself change?” Whos, whats, wheres, whys, and hows abound: see “Who was I becoming?” (“Meaning Business”), “What gave me that idea?” and “Where was I when that happened?” (“The Ultraworld”), “Why did I try? Did I try?” (“Will You Dare”), “Is that how I wound up here?” (“Another Lifetime Floats Away”). But, as with all rhetorical questions, there are no answers expected. The asking—or, more specifically, the spacious, open silence that follows in the question’s wake—is the point. After all, absence is itself a kind of presence. Those gaps between certainties, between language, are where life is actually lived. And that’s what Eisenberg is learning to do on their self-titled LP: build a life within the terrifying, sweet hollow of the unwritable unknown. There are feelings that can’t be defined, experiences that can’t be explained, futures that can’t be predicted; it’s all inherently unnerving. There’s a sort of solace, then, in claustrophobia, the same sense of safety you get from lying beneath a heavy weighted blanket. Eisenberg has felt that, too: as they sing of their younger self towards the top of the closing track, “The fact that the walls were caving in somehow seemed a kind of comfort / I wanted to feel comfort.” But the album ends, instead, on the current moment, on the Wendy Eisenberg of Wendy Eisenberg: “I cannot find the walls,” they sing. “I trust that that’s a good thing / Sometimes I’ll need convincing.” Yet for all the bittersweetness and melancholy, Wendy Eisenberg as a whole is profoundly hopeful, guiding a path toward a self finally uninhibited by societal expectation and internal self-doubt. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Joyful Noise]

Best New EP: Los Thuthanaka, Wak’a

How do you follow up one of the best albums of the decade? With an EP announced on short notice, it seems. Los Thuthanaka, the sibling duo of Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, shared their eponymic debut last year and it rattled the music industry, landing at #2 on our year end list (one of its chapters, “Awila,” was our pick for song of the year). Some saw the electronic collage as an illegible noise record, others were stunned by the duo’s ability to interpret Andean folktales into maximalist cut-ups. Wak’a is a three-song EP that runs as long as some full-lengths, with the eight-minute “Wara Wara” placed between “Ay Kawkinpachasa?” and “Quta.” The capo-kullawada tracks come with a PDF of “Qutax janïr Intix Yurkipänxa (Näyrir Qhanapampix Arumt’awita Willirt’ata),” an Aymara story about creation of the sun and its end. While Crampton’s guitar parts on “Wara Wara” stir and burst in the Los Thuthanka runoff, a fiddle colors “Ay Kawkinpachasa?,” a nod to Chuquimamani-Condori’s country music impulses. But “Quta” is the siblings’ greatest creation to date—a truly astonishing song I haven’t been able to move away from. Someone on Bandcamp said Wak’a “sounds like sunlight flooding a valley.” Let that stay the truth. —Matt Mitchell [Self-Released]