Welcome to our weekly music post, where we spotlight our favorite new songs and albums. Hop in the comments and tell us: What new music are you listening to?
Hideo Kojima pulled out all the stops when it comes to celebrity cameos in Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, and that extends to the soundtrack, too. Caroline Polachek delivers the action-adventure game’s title track, and apparently, it’s a song she’s been holding on to for a few years. Polachek said in a press release, “‘On The Beach’ was actually one of the first songs I ever made with Danny L Harle, but it was too alien and industrial—almost too evil—to [make] sense on Pang, so I set it aside til the right thing came along. When Kojima approached me about DS2, I showed him the sketch of it and he agreed that it was a perfect fit, and so eight years after starting this song, it got reopened, extended, and finished for the perfect setting.” The press release also promises “more to come soon,” which is promising.
Back in April, Mac DeMarco informally announced that his new album would be out in August, and sure enough, this week’s official announcement confirms that Guitar will drop on August 22. DeMarco also shared the album’s first single, “Home,” which he succinctly describes as “a song I wrote at my home in Los Angeles about what home means to me.” DeMarco produced Guitar by himself, along with self-directing all the accompanying music videos and photographing all the promotional artwork.
The Beths, “No Joy”
Just one week after Mac DeMarco, The Beths will drop their fourth album, Straight Line Was A Lie (out August 29). The band released the second single from the album, “No Joy,” this week, and it’s a nice complement to “Metal.” “No Joy” is propelled by drummer Tristan Decks’ infectious percussion and vocalist and guitarist Elizabeth Stokes’ deadpan lyrics. Stokes said about the song in a press release, “It’s about anhedonia, which, paradoxically, was there both in the worst parts of depression, and then also when I was feeling pretty numb on my SSRI. It wasn’t that I was sad, I was feeling pretty good. It was just that I didn’t like the things that I liked. I wasn’t getting joy from them. It’s very literal.”
Lorde, Virgin
Four years after her last album, Solar Power, Lorde is back with her fourth record, Virgin. On Virgin, Lorde lets go of her tightly controlled persona, finally allowing herself the room to discover who she really is. It’s a highly personal album about learning to let go, embrace messiness, and accept that she doesn’t always have all the answers. The A.V. Club‘s full review publishes tomorrow.
Laura Stevenson, Late Great
Laura Stevenson wrote her latest album, Late Great, in the aftermath of a painful breakup, and that heartbreak is evident on nearly every song. But it’s a little more complicated than that, as Stevenson explained in a press release: “[Late Great is] a document of loss for sure, but it also draws the map of this exciting precipice that I’m standing on. I am making my own life now. With the record, with everything, this is the first time I get to call all the shots.” It’s an exciting new chapter for Stevenson, and a lovely album to mark the occasion.
Blonde Redhead, The Shadow Of The Guest
The Shadow Of The Guest is a reworking of several tracks from Blonde Redhead’s 2023 album Sit Down For Dinner, which includes new versions that incorporate the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and others that have been turned into ASMR-inspired ambient soundscapes. It’s a refreshingly weird take on a remix album, and the choral arrangements work surprisingly well with the ambient tracks. The outlier is the final track, “Oda a Coda,” a mariachi rendition of “For The Damaged Coda” from the band’s 2000 album Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons, which is a perfect cap for the ambitious The Shadow Of The Guest.
