1) Iron and Wine, “Light Verse” / The world needs more Sam Beams, artists who grow both more gentle and weird as they grow older. The songs on “Light Verse” fit what most people think an Iron and Wine record sounds like, but listen as close as possible to hear the ways Beam and Co. both fulfill and subvert expectations: taking lovely and lusty lyrical left turns, making fugues of folk songs, never once settling.
2) Frank Turner, “Undefeated” / More and more, I share a wavelength with Frank Turner, the British punk turned folkie turned revered rocker. The songs on his latest lean into a wealth of emotions that cohere and conflict and create new worlds around the listener. Songs of infatuation and disappointment, calls for common ground between two people, and a continued working out of the dream for a more just world—it all sounds so right in Turner’s work.
3) Hana Vu, “Romanticism” / The latest from Los Angeles artist Hana Vu arrives with a practically perfect texture, musically and emotionally. Lyrical allusions to Tears for Fears meet up-to-the-minute observations, just as Vu twines together manifold threads of rock to create a sound that never forsakes nuance for volume (or vice versa).
4) Adeem the Artist, “Anniversary” / The songs on Adeem’s latest unspool so soulfully and organically you can’t imagine them sounding another way. The songwriter digs around the fleshy, vital stuff of life—our hopes and fears and fault lines and the ties that bind—with a real sensitivity and attention to narrative detail. These songs feel lived-in without ever taking the easy route.
5) Hanif Abdurraqib, “There’s Always This Year” / Perhaps our best writer adds another worthy title to his canon, a lyrical exploration of belonging and maturing set at, against, within the story of late 20th- and early 21st-century Ohio basketball. Abdurraqib is both more stark and sacred than ever with his prose forever sweeping you up into a world where all is connected (or should be).