Maribou State are back with their new album Kingdoms In Colour released via Ninja Tune’s Counter Records imprint. The album will be available on standard black heavyweight vinyl, limited turquoise heavyweight vinyl, and CD softpack.

Summer 2020, and No Age are back out on the street! Effortlessly raw and extravagant in one practiced swoop, they set their live/bedroom internal clock and get out early into a glorious windtunnel of naked beats and sunbaked guitars, forming a wave from with they hang eleven tunes. A perfectly balanced set, ranging from their classic punk and indie to ever-evolving soundscapes, in their maybe their most direct statement yet.

Like the outlaw he defines himself as, Chris Gantry doesnt really fit into any of the classic country singer identities and 50-plus years since he wrote his first and biggest hit, hes still writing and singing, having lived to tell the tale of his serpentine but ultimately joyful path, a Life Well Lived. Now in his mid-70s, Gantry is still a consummate performer and an inveterate writer; in performance he is a lusty, genial man, grateful to have drunk of his experiences, transcendent and ebullient in the moment of singing it. Recorded in Nashville with the legendary engineer Rob Galbraith, Nashlantis features 11 mesmerizing Gantry performances (a séance with the Human Spirit as the producer puts it) forming a reflection on his long and winding path through this world but the vitality of the songwriting allows the music to rise above simple elegy or denouement, providing a testament to the career and talent of Chris Gantry the individualism that set him apart from his earliest days and his enduringly openhearted embrace of today.

Death's "For the Whole World to See" was a revelation of early punk music from the mid-70s that didn't see release until 2009. Since then, the music and the story of the Hackney brothers, three African-American brothers from Detroit who formed the group as teenagers, has sold nearly 100,000 records in the US, while spawning a documentary and a new life for the two surviving Hackney brothers. "The 4th Movement", self-released by the group in 1980, after moving to Burlington VT and changing their name, is the true sequel to Death's then-unreleased album - channeling both the punk-inflected rock and the introspective spirituality that began with Death - but this time in praise of Jesus!

Double vinyl LP pressing. Includes digital download. 2020 release. A world much like our own. The streets are empty. Panic is in the air. Mayhem is on the horizon. There's a rogue planet hurtling through the cosmos on a direct course for Earth, and there's nothing we can do about it. Welcome to Planet's Mad, the epic new experience from dance music mad scientist Baauer. Baauer's never been a straightforward EDM musician. Revisit 'Harlem Shake,' eight years after it's world-shaking breakout success, and you might be surprised to notice the sonic allusions to 80s-era electro rap and New York Latin flavor right in there alongside the drop heard 'round the Internet. His hip-hop heavy 2016 debut Aa brought him deeper towards his goal of making a 'weird, in-between thing that doesn't fit in one box,' as he puts it. Planet's Mad brings it all the way there, plowing through genre barriers until it all bleeds together into something too crazy and complex to be pinned down. This time out Baauer's going back to the sounds that were in his ears when he first started making beats at age 13. There are huge gobs of arena-sized 90s big beat and the unabashedly exuberant maximalism of Fatboy Slim and Basement Jaxx, which he channels through live samples, surreal synths, and breakbeats driven deep into the red. It's a whole universe that Baauer's inviting us into, and the album's only the beginning. 'I want to tell stories, more than just make records,' Baauer says. 'I'm interested in branching out into different mediums and trying to build a bigger world.'

Here comes SUPERSTAR the bigger, badder, glitter-driven record by Caroline Rose. Written as a sequel to 2018's LONER, the forthcoming 2020 release 'plays out like an epic movie about the pursuit of fame and fortune,' Rose states. 'I've always been fascinated by this pursuit, but what's even more fascinating is what happens when it fails.' Indeed, gone are the successful Hollywood hunks and starlets of old. SUPERSTAR chronicles a quirky anti-hero, who after receiving a wrong call from the elite hotel Chateau Marmont, decides to leave their old life behind in order to become a big Hollywood star.

Enhanced with PlayARt - Augmented Reality

As we age, we face obstacles that are beyond our control. Some forces are internal: insecurity, anxiety, fear. Some are external: the loss of loved ones, an unjust system and the fragility of time. Yet the mark of maturity is how you respond when you realize you’re not in control. Where do you find your resilience? 

This album is a reflection of us coming to terms with how to find our power in the face of an unfair world. These songs lead listeners past “where happy man searches, to a place only mad women know.” We question our purpose, our relationships, our faith. Trading the fears of our youth for the dread that rages within us as mature women.

With SATURN RETURN, our hope is that women can feel less alone in their journey through the modern world. We need each other more than we ever have; the less competition and the more inclusiveness and understanding, the better. We are southern women in the 21st century, convicted by our beliefs.

The Saint Of Lost Causesis the 8th album from American roots troubadour, Justin Townes Earle.  Earle’s latest album finds a songwriter and artist who is unflinching and unequivocal in his truth. When writing this album, Earle focused on a different America—the disenfranchised and the downtrodden, the oppressed and the oppressors, the hopeful and the hopeless. There’s the drugstore-cowboy-turned-cop-killer praying for forgiveness (“Appalachian Nightmare”) and the common Michiganders persevering through economic and industrial devastation (“Flint City Shake It”); the stuck mother dreaming of a better life on the right side of the California tracks (“Over Alameda”) and the Cuban man in New York City weighed down by a world of regret (“Ahi Esta Mi Nina”); the “used up” soul desperate to get to New Orleans (“Ain’t Got No Money”) and the “sons of bitches” in West Virginia poisoning the land and sea (“Don’t Drink the Water”). These are individuals and communities in every corner of the country, struggling through the ordinary—and sometimes extraordinary—circumstances of everyday life.

Steve Earle was nineteen and had just hitchhiked from San Antonio to Nashville in 1974. Back then if you wanted to be where the best songwriters were you had to be in there. Guy Clark had moved to Nashville and if you were from Texas, Guy Clark was king.

Flash forward more than forty years. In the fall of 2018, Steve and The Dukes went into House Of Blues studio in Nashville and recorded GUY in six days. 'I wanted it to sound live...When you've got a catalog like Guy's and you're only doing sixteen tracks, you know each one is going to be strong.'

Earle and his current, perhaps best-ever Dukes lineup, take on these songs with a spirit of reverent glee and invention. But in the end GUY leads the listener back to its beginning, namely Guy Clark, which is what any good 'tribute' should do. GUY is a saga of friendship, its ups and downs, what endures. We are lucky that Earle remembers and honors these things, because like old friends, GUY is a diamond.

The Eclipse Sessions, John Hiatt’s newest album, offers up his strongest set of songs in years. Long celebrated as a skilled storyteller and keen observer of life’s twists and turns, Hiatt can get at the heart of a knotty emotion or a moment in time with just a sharp, incisive lyric or witty turn of phrase. The 11 tracks presented in The Eclipse Sessions, from the breezy opener “Cry to Me,” to the stark “Nothing in My Heart,” the lost-love lamentation “Aces Up Your Sleeve” to the rollicking “Poor Imitation of God,” demonstrate that the singer-songwriter, now 66, is only getting better with age, his guitar playing more rugged and rootsy, his words wiser and more wry.

Hiatt goes all in with The Eclipse Sessions. There’s a grit to these songs—a craggy, perfectly-imperfect quality that colors every aspect of the performances, right down to Hiatt’s vocals, which are quite possibly his most raw and expressive to date. “They ain’t pretty, that’s for sure,” he says about the creaks and cracks that punctuate his phrases in songs like “Poor Imitation of God” and “One Stiff Breeze.” “But I don’t mind a bit. All the catches and the glitches and the gruffness, that sounds right to me. That sounds like who I am.” The Eclipse Sessions is the sound of an artist not only living in but also capturing the moment.

By most bands’ fifth LP, the sound is pretty set. Parameters established. Refinement dissipated in favor of to-formula execution of what’s worked in the past. Fair enough. All Them Witches go a harder route.

In 2017, the Nashville four-piece offered what might’ve otherwise become their own template in their fourth album, Sleeping Through the War. Also their second for New West Records behind 2015 mellow-vibing Dying Surfer Meets His Maker, it brought a larger production value to dug-in heavy psych blues jamming, with oversight from producer Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson).

After exploring new ground through their early work on 2013’s Lightning at the Door and 2012’s Our Mother Electricity as well as Dying Surfer, the band had arrived at something new, sprawling, and grander-feeling than anything before it.

So naturally in a year they’ve thrown that all to the Appalachian wind, turned the process completely on its head and gone the absolute other way: recording in a cabin in Kingston Springs, about 20 miles outside of Nashville on I-40, with guitarist Ben McLeod at the helm. Take that, expectation.

The result, mixed by Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith, Kurt Vile), is the most intimate, human-sounding album All Them Witches have ever recorded and another redefinition of who they are as a band. Introducing keyboardist/percussionist Jonathan Draper to the fold with McLeod, bassist/vocalist Charles Michael Parks, Jr., and drummer/graphic artist Robby Staebler, All Them Witches’ All Them Witches isn’t self-titled by mistake.

It’s the band confirming and continuing to develop their approach, in the shuffle of “Fishbelly 86 Onions,” the organ-laced groove of “Half-Tongue,” the tense build of “HJTC” and the fluid jam in closer “Rob’s Dream.”

It’s a reaction to being a “bigger” band. To playing bigger shows, bigger tours, etc. From the sustained consonants in Parks’ vocals to McLeod’s commanding slide in “Workhorse” and drifting melancholy at the outset of “Harvest Feast,” All Them Witches is their laying claim to the essential facets of their identity.

And most crucial to that identity is its shifting nature. All Them Witches didn’t get to this point by resting on laurels, and if anything, the urgency of these tracks – fast pushers and sleepy jams alike – is among their greatest strengths.

It’s a rawer delivery, as stage-ready as the band itself, and as ever, it captures All Them Witches in this moment. Is it who they’ll be tomorrow? Who the hell knows? Check back in and we’ll all find out together. That’s the whole idea.

By most bands’ fifth LP, the sound is pretty set. Parameters established. Refinement dissipated in favor of to-formula execution of what’s worked in the past. Fair enough. All Them Witches go a harder route.

In 2017, the Nashville four-piece offered what might’ve otherwise become their own template in their fourth album, Sleeping Through the War. Also their second for New West Records behind 2015 mellow-vibing Dying Surfer Meets His Maker, it brought a larger production value to dug-in heavy psych blues jamming, with oversight from producer Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson).

After exploring new ground through their early work on 2013’s Lightning at the Door and 2012’s Our Mother Electricity as well as Dying Surfer, the band had arrived at something new, sprawling, and grander-feeling than anything before it.

So naturally in a year they’ve thrown that all to the Appalachian wind, turned the process completely on its head and gone the absolute other way: recording in a cabin in Kingston Springs, about 20 miles outside of Nashville on I-40, with guitarist Ben McLeod at the helm. Take that, expectation.

The result, mixed by Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith, Kurt Vile), is the most intimate, human-sounding album All Them Witches have ever recorded and another redefinition of who they are as a band. Introducing keyboardist/percussionist Jonathan Draper to the fold with McLeod, bassist/vocalist Charles Michael Parks, Jr., and drummer/graphic artist Robby Staebler, All Them Witches’ All Them Witches isn’t self-titled by mistake.

It’s the band confirming and continuing to develop their approach, in the shuffle of “Fishbelly 86 Onions,” the organ-laced groove of “Half-Tongue,” the tense build of “HJTC” and the fluid jam in closer “Rob’s Dream.”

It’s a reaction to being a “bigger” band. To playing bigger shows, bigger tours, etc. From the sustained consonants in Parks’ vocals to McLeod’s commanding slide in “Workhorse” and drifting melancholy at the outset of “Harvest Feast,” All Them Witches is their laying claim to the essential facets of their identity.

And most crucial to that identity is its shifting nature. All Them Witches didn’t get to this point by resting on laurels, and if anything, the urgency of these tracks – fast pushers and sleepy jams alike – is among their greatest strengths.

It’s a rawer delivery, as stage-ready as the band itself, and as ever, it captures All Them Witches in this moment. Is it who they’ll be tomorrow? Who the hell knows? Check back in and we’ll all find out together. That’s the whole idea.

“Music has just been a part of my life since I was very young—it's been like my football or my soccer,” says Sammy Brue. “I stopped going to school to do it. Because I thought, If I could put seven hours a day into music, imagine where it's going to take me…”

Imagine, indeed. Since writing his first song at the age of 11, Brue has released three homespun EPs, his New West full-length debut, I Am Nice and a 2018 EP, Down with Desperation. In the process, the Ogden, Utah native has been hailed as an “Americana prodigy” by Rolling Stone and one of the “teenagers shaping pop” by The New Yorker.

But these myriad accomplishments may have just been the setup for what is arguably his finest work to date, Crash Test Kid. Brue has always been an artist seemingly wise beyond his years, but on Crash Test Kid he often gets at the heart of a matter or melody with just a simple but insightful turn of phrase or cleverly-picked guitar.

In 2009, Randall Bramblett released the critically acclaimed album The Meantime via his Blue Ceiling label. The recording marked a departure for the highly acclaimed multi-instrumentalist who is best known for his contributions on saxophone with Steve Winwood, Traffic, Levon Helm, Sea Level, Widespread Panic and more. The CD was produced by Bramblett, who performs primarily on acoustic piano, organ, and lead vocals. The CD features 12 original tracks, including some of Bramblett’s earliest songs such as “Sacred Harmony,” “Witness For Love,” and “One More Rose” as well as newer, unreleased compositions. Now, 10 years later, New West Records is proud to reissue The Meantime (10th Anniversary Edition) on CD and deluxe edition vinyl. Spread across two discs, the record features the original The Meantime tracklist as well as two unreleased bonus tracks.

In 2009, Randall Bramblett released the critically acclaimed album The Meantime via his Blue Ceiling label. The recording marked a departure for the highly acclaimed multi-instrumentalist who is best known for his contributions on saxophone with Steve Winwood, Traffic, Levon Helm, Sea Level, Widespread Panic and more. The CD was produced by Bramblett, who performs primarily on acoustic piano, organ, and lead vocals. The CD features 12 original tracks, including some of Bramblett’s earliest songs such as “Sacred Harmony,” “Witness For Love,” and “One More Rose” as well as newer, unreleased compositions. Now, 10 years later, New West Records is proud to reissue The Meantime (10th Anniversary Edition) on CD and deluxe edition vinyl. Spread across two discs, the record features the original The Meantime tracklist as well as two unreleased bonus tracks.

“It's like a coming-of-age crisis,” says Daniel Shultz about Out of the Blue, the messy and melodic debut album from his band, Dan Luke and The Raid. “It’s about being in that space in your 20s where you’re trying to get your shit together and figure things out in life. You’re dealing with your problems”—the singer, songwriter and guitarist pauses—“even as you’re going out and partying and getting into trouble all the time.”

Shultz and his Dan Luke & The Raid band mates know a thing or two about the last part of that equation, as evidenced by the songs and subject matter on Out of the Blue. Throughout the album’s 10 tracks, people are passed out on curbs under neon signs (“Black Cat Heavy Metal”), breaking hearts over rolled-up dollar bills (“Exoskeleton”), leaving baggies lying in passenger seats (“Money Mouth”) and faking smiles and feeling ashamed (“Golden Age”). Legs are bleeding, faces are numb and Shultz declares his band to be the “diamond kings of smut.” All the while, the music throbs and pulses and twitches and buzzes with the energy and enthusiasm and inexperience of youth, bursting with harsh, distorted guitar chords, blown-out synths squiggles and hopped-up rhythms—as well as, on occasion, moments of stunning and sincere melodic beauty.

With the weight and experience of events that have been at times joyful and sad, poignant and puerile, triumphant and tragic, Dan Luke and The Raid continue to carve out their future, one musical moment at a time. “What we want to do is create music, and create music in a way where people feel something,” Shultz says. “And when we see that happening it’s an amazing thing.”

'A forgotten roll of film was found. Shot before the turn of the century, the photographs resonate with music. The images inspired an accompanying soundtrack. The music is full of stories. The songs and stories originate in two neighboring rural counties. The cast of characters includes four families of Mississippi musicians, three generations deep, and a photographer from Texas.' - Luther Dickinson In 2017, Wyatt McSpadden found an old roll of film and tracked down members of North Mississippi Allstars to share his forgotten photographs. The images were so profound and so beautiful that they would come to inspire the latest recording, Up And Rolling. The images inspired the band to ask, 'What did the music sound like that night in 96? What does Mississippi music sound like now? What would ideally be on the push button AM/FM radio as we drove thru the hills?' The North Mississippi Allstars would return to the famous Zebra Ranch to record Up And Rolling, inspired by Wyatt's images. They gathered together, trimmed back the wisteria, and swept out the converted barn recording studio. The fired up the tube amps and old computers and began conjuring up modern Mississippi music, ancient and futuristic all at once. Telling it how it was and how they think it should be. Up And Rolling is modern Mississippi. Transcending time and space, the music reaches out into the dark of night like the wisteria vine, looking for free hearted souls to latch onto and wedge into the foundation of hate, slowly tearing down walls a generation at a time.

Seratones aptly named sophomore release POWER is described by poet and author Hannif Abdurraquib as a glorious, swelling album[a] sonic monument, and precise lyrical tapestry. AJ Haynes bends her gloriously malleable voice seamlessly around the temples of rock, and soul, and funk. All of them, unfurling in waves of keys, staccato percussion and wailing curves of guitar. Based in Shreveport, Louisiana, Haynes and founding members, drummer Jesse Gabriel and bassist Adam Davis, form the kind of laser-focused rhythm section that you only get from bandmates who've been playing together since they were teenagers. New members Tyran Coker (keys) and Travis Stewart (guitar) bring a fresh dynamic to the band with interstellar soundscapes and entrancing melodies, all while maintaining the emotional edge and intensity from their acclaimed proto-punk debut record Get Gone.vPOWER exemplifies a true strength in vulnerability, a kaleidoscopic view into Haynes passions, hopes, and worries: from her love of poetry to her advocacy for Reproductive Justice and racial equity. Hard-learned lessons from lovers and intimate friends. The struggles to adapt and overcome. POWER is as much a statement as it is a question, a semiotic exploration of sound and Soul.

DANIEL ROMANO FINALLY FREE Finally Free marks Daniel Romanos eighth long playing album in the last eight years. He has had what understatedly would be considered a prolific output of incredibly entrancing, poignant and creative records in this span of time. Recording, producing, designing and landing his records into the minds and hearts of scores of fans the world over. He has been called a shapeshifter, contrived, a chameleon, a Charlatan, the best living songwriter, an asshole and a genius. His last record, Modern pressure received outstandingly high acclaim and praise from every notable publication out there and was acknowledged by most reputable for-profit-prize-corporations as well as a plethora of voguish music-as-competitive-sport year end lists. Despite being the bronze placeholder in most of these dogfights, he is most often noted as a person of astounding influence on all of his musically economic successors. No matter what he does, everything he puts out is better than anything else being put out by anyone else. Unnamed Subjugate.

Most people know Aaron Lee Tasjan as one of the wittiest, most offbeat, brilliant, weed-smokin’ & LSD microdosin’ Americana troubadours writing and singing songs today. And the New York Times, NPR and Rolling Stone will all gladly corroborate. But steel yourselves, folk fans, because he’s about to follow his restless muse straight out from under the weight of everyone’s expectations into the kind of glammy, jingle-jangle power-pop- and- psych-tinged sounds he hasn’t dabbled in since his younger days playing lead guitar for a late-period incarnation of The New York Dolls.

   Karma for Cheap is Tasjan’s third LP and second for his label New West Records, based in his current hometown of Nashville. The record was co-produced by ALT and his friends Jeff Trott (Stevie Nicks, Liz Phair, Meiko, Joshua Radin) and Gregory Lattimer (Albert Hammond Jr.) and features Aaron Lee’s road band—guitarist Brian Wright, bassist Tommy Scifres and drummer Seth Earnest—with whom he’s been touring heavily for the last two years.

  While the stylistic shift from Tasjan’s palpably stoned ‘70s-country-channeling 2015 debut, In the Blazes, to his more sophisticated, introspective and lushly produced 2016 follow-up, Silver Tears, was relatively incremental, Karma’s rocked-up Brit-pop-influenced Beatles-Bowie-Badfinger vibes underscore a significant departure. The album boldly reminagines these vintage sounds, pushing the boundary of what can be considered Americana.

    The roots of Tasjan’s Karma for Cheap, stretch deep, drinking up the sounds of a Southern California childhood spent listening to The Beatles while riding around with his mom at the wheel of their navy blue Volvo station wagon—back to the very first pre-teen year he picked up a six-string and started figuring out all the pretty little chords in those Lennon-McCartney tunes. Back to the pure, blissful unfiltered innocence of falling in love with music for the first time. A huge sonic touchstone for ALT’s new record is The Beatles Anthology, one of his childhood favorites. In songs like “If Not Now When,” “Song Bird” and “The Rest Is Yet to Come,” you can hear echoes of George Harrison’s vibrant guitar riffs and Jeff Lynne’s lavish production on those lo-fi John Lennon demos the surviving Beatles dug up and polished off in the mid ‘90s.

  Perhaps the most poignant moment on Karma for Cheap is the anthemic, hypnotic “Heart Slows Down,” a tune rife with musical and lyrical references to the Beatles and Tom Petty, anchored by an unforgettable chorus with a Traveling Wilburys vibe that finds the sweet spot between Tasjan’s two earliest musical heroes. “When I was a kid, my favorite CD to fall asleep to was Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ Greatest Hits, and the last song is a cover of that Thunderclap Newman song ‘Something in the Air.’ From the time I was a little kid to when I was teenager, I used to listen to that song on headphones almost every night—I heard it in that space between wake and sleep so many times. And Tom’s passing—he was a really big hero of mine, so it hit me pretty hard. We were in Seattle playing a show when I heard, and it was a heavy thing to process. But all of those elements are there in ‘Heart Slows Down.’ The chorus, ‘I will always be around,’ is a reminder that all the good you ever got out of listening to this music is still around you. You’ll always have that.”

        Aaron Lee Tasjan says he aims to use his music for good, but he’s no protest singer. And Karma for Cheap isn’t some heavy-handed, didactic political record cramming a set of talking points down anyone’s throat. It’s a finely tuned rock & roll seismograph measuring the dark and uncertain vibrations of the time in which it was created. A cracked mirror reflecting back the American zeitgeist in this foul year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Eighteen. With Karma, Tasjan establishes himself as an artist who not only evolves over time, but isn’t afraid to risk reinventing himself completely from one record to the next.

JD McPherson presents what he calls "A truly romantic garage rock record". Undivided Heart & Soul produced by Dan Molad (Lucius) & McPherson, and developed largely in the studio (that studio being the historic RCA Studio B in Nashville), carries a sense of immediacy and irreverence. "In writing this record, I threw several handfuls of caution to the wind. Lyrically, I was allowing myself to be exposed in a way I never have before. Concurrently, maybe as some sort of a self defense mechanism, the guitars got fuzzier and louder. The first day at RCA was like being in church... by the second day, it was a high school band's rehearsal space." Putting the hands of Dan Molad on the wheel of the record ensured that the music didn't take too many expected turns. "Having toured with Lucius and befriended Dan, I knew he was the guy to push my buttons and challenge me to try new things. He's a tireless worker. He's constantly tinkering away on something... and music just falls out of him." The vintage recording equipment and instruments still housed in RCA Studio B greatly informed the direction of the record. "Each night, at the end of tracking, someone would invariably say, "You wanna put vibes on this?", speaking of the old RCA Vibraphone. I mean, you can hear THAT vibraphone on Roy Orbison's "Crying"... we couldn't keep our hands off of it. It guided some of the songs into some strange and wonderful places. "Lucky Penny" took such a cool turn once Ray (Jacildo, keys) added some to it. We wrote several songs on the piano that Floyd Cramer played "Last Date" on. We were soaking up so much of the phantom energy in that room, it led to some incredible sonic territory." "Most folks know us for our take on vintage R&B and early Rock N' Roll. The past year, I've been digging so much into the heavier, brasher sounds of early Rock N' Roll... from bands like The Sonics, Link Wray, and into some early British Rock such as The Creation... these influences feature heavily in these songs. "The tunes that showed up weren't exactly always in familiar territory, and... we greeted them as welcome strangers. They have a lot of heart... and that's what Rock N' Roll should always have."