New Music Friday: 9/18/26

Well! It's been a minute since we had one of these around here. Honestly, I'd gotten to the point where I'd started to wonder whether new music had lost the ability to move me enough to muster a recommendation. Showing up for that hundred-song playlist every Friday often feels like more of a chore than an opportunity to find some new favorites.

There are a lot of factors involved in this recent malaise, and some of them are undoubtedly anchored in the personal context surrounding everything entering my ears. But I think a big part of the problem was my traditional emphasis on trying to find a substantial number of picks within Spotify's New Music Friday playlist, and while I freely acknowledge I've long since aged out of its target demographic, I'm also comfortable saying those song selections have glurged far further into the middle of the road in recent years. It has a numbing effect — which, for Spotify, is probably a feature rather than a bug.

During my time at Rotten Tomatoes, when people found out where I worked, they'd often ask me to explain the frequently wide gulf between the critics' scores and the audience's. My answer was basically that if you're a regular person watching movies for the regular reasons, you're usually going to be pretty happy if a movie just bothers to show up and does more or less what you bought your ticket expecting it to do. If you watch movies all the time, though — and do your viewing through an analytical lens, with an eye toward trying to put what you've seen in context for a curious reader — then at a certain point, you're bound to start craving originality. Eventually, it grows difficult to find new ways of saying "this is fine." Boredom setting in — or, even worse, resentment — isn't out of the question.

I'm not saying this is the boat I've found myself in, but I have found it harder to close the circuit that jump-starts my interest in new music this year, and as someone who still gets a genuine thrill out of musical discovery, that's been a real source of concern. It remains one; this isn't a story with a neat beginning, middle, and end, like the one my friend Other Jeff Giles told when he wrote about learning to love to read again for the New York Times. If it's a story at all, then I think the moral is simply that if we're lucky, life is long enough that our relationships with the things we love change over time, and sometimes in ways that surprise us or make us uncomfortable.

For now, all I really know is that I'm altering my approach to these New Music Friday posts, in ways that should make them feel less like work. They still take a lot of time, so don't expect to see them on Fridays, but if you've missed getting periodic new-release recommendations around these parts, I think you can safely start to look forward to them again.

And with that...

"It's for the Kids," Anthrax
While it's admittedly comical to me that Anthrax took a whole-ass decade to get their new record together, it's hard to argue with what works, and Cursum Perficio (a phrase meaning, essentially, "my journey is over," which came to drummer Charlie Benante via a Marilyn Monroe documentary) works pretty well. After 45 years, you'd hope a band would be able to figure out how to emphasize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses, and that's basically what you hear with "It's for the Kids" — this is sneering, pissed-off metal that offers no concessions to the passage of time, refusing to acknowledge changing trends or physical wear and tear. Singer Joey Belladonna is 65! Can't wait to see him performing this stuff, Frankie Valli-style, in a couple of decades.

"Tough Luck (When You Don't Call," Boy Harsher
Listening to "Tough Luck (When You Don't Call)," it's hard not to assume that the members of Boy Harsher have spent a lot of time listening to Roxy Music's Avalon... but what's so bad about that, really? Even if there isn't anything particularly fresh or unique about this song, it's still charming, especially if you're in the mood for some lightly caffeinated sophisti-pop, and so well-made that you might not even mind that the band is really from northern Massachusetts.

"Take Me by the Hand," Echo and the Bunnymen
Speaking of old dudes taking a long time to get anything done, here's Echo and the Bunnymen, back after a dozen-year gap. Fat chunks of Apples for Isaac sound like they were written and recorded for an Ian McCulloch solo album, which makes the record hard to recommend for fans who are still holding out hope for a true return to form, but it isn't without its high points — including this track, one of a few that sound like they were made with Will Sergeant's active participation.

"C'mon Baby," Gyasi
The headline "Alice Cooper Guitarist Releases Blues Album" probably doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence among fans of blues and/or Alice Cooper records, but life is full of surprises, and we can count Gyasi among them. Up 'til now, he's been known as a glam rock enthusiast, which makes sense when you consider who's signed some of his highest-profile paychecks, but Gyasi also has a deep affection for traditional blues, as evidenced by this strictly solo, live to tape, National-drenched set. Quibble over authenticity if you want, and I'm certainly not here to argue that any of this stuff outshines the music that inspired it, but I find the entire Songs from the Holler album encouraging, if only because it represents a deviation from the norm in our increasingly quantized era.

"Cup," Jawdropped
There's no shortage of young bands seeking to mine nostalgic ore from the sun-dappled end of the mid-'90s grunge-adjacent pop-rock spectrum, and based on "Cup," I'm not entirely convinced Jawdropped have anything truly distinctive to offer. The same could be said, however, of most of the bands this song evokes, and none of that is enough to keep "Cup" from flooding my well with appreciation for sticky hooks bathed in fuzzy guitar and topped off with honeyed high harmonies. Buzz Bin forever, baby.

"Just Lust," Roger Joseph Manning Jr.
And speaking of the '90s, here's Roger Joseph Manning Jr., who will forever be associated with the dearly departed Jellyfish no matter how many solo records he releases. His latest, Hopium, consists of five new studio tracks and five live recordings. Artists don't tend to cobble together material this way if great new material is coming hot and heavy, and in truth, this LP isn't wall-to-wall highlights — but when Manning is on his game, he can still make a person believe in the redemptive power of power pop, and "Just Lust" is our latest proof.

"Already Gone," Orville Peck
Orville Peck's squarely traditional sound is a big part of his appeal. It's also a big part of what makes his new Mule record such a captivating listen, because there's a certain sort of thrilling dissonance in songs that sound like they could have been part of a holler-dwelling grandpappy's collection if not for the fact that they're about making out with football players and hating rehab enough to wish you were dead. The entire thing hits you like the recovery journal it is, and it's well worth a close listen, but "Already Gone" is a particularly tuneful highlight.

"Blackout," Katie Pruitt
I got my first "Fall is here" email from Starbucks like a month ago. This was not only a scornworthy attempt to gin up anticipation for seasonal syrup in overpriced, non-union beverages, but also a cruelly premature declaration heralding the arrival of my favorite season. Now that fall is officially here, I can feel okay about sharing a song like "Blackout," which is the type of AAA/modern folk that's dusted with just enough high lonesome to evoke late afternoon spent driving down winding roads bracketed by forests resplendent with autumnal colors.

"Akatsuki," Rodrigo y Gabriela
This song checks a lot of boxes for me. "Akatsuki," a brilliant highlight from Rodrigo y Gabriela's new OurHome album, finds the duo performing a typically dazzling nylon-string highwire act while accompanied by Japanese jazz pianist Hiromi — which is all another way of saying it's not only a piece of music that pushes its performers into challenging terrain, but does so while offering listeners the thrilling sound of cultures colliding. In a sea of sameness, stuff like this really stands out.

"Show Me How," Frank Mastra
During the years before Ray LaMontagne came along and reminded record companies that there's a mint to be made from distributing soul music that's safe enough to make white women swoon, there was a long period when his type of sound was rare enough to seem thrillingly exotic. That's very much no longer the case, to the extent that although my first reaction to Frank Mastra's "Show Me How" was "Oh, that's nice," my second was "But what part of this haven't we heard before?" I eventually settled on deciding not to punish Mastra for failing to reinvent the wheel, because this is still an awfully smooth ride.

"The Cringe," Cor de Lux
The musical world Cor de Lux live in is one of tightly organized chaos. If you get off on hearing songs that sound like they only could have come together through the combined efforts of musicians playing at the same time in the same room, then I think "The Cringe" will ruffle your bedskirt quite nicely. If not — or if you're the type of listener who really needs to understand what the hell is happening from moment to moment, or what the singer's saying — then you might end up bailing rather quickly. Only one way to find out which type of listener you really are, right?

"Won't Let You Down," C.O.F.F.I.N.
At times like these, I feel like we can't have enough songs that loudly insist upon the need for right-minded people to stand together and never stop swinging balled-up fists at fascists, bigots, and grifters of all shapes and sizes. While "Won't Let You Down" isn't overtly political in its message, what is overt — that the singer's never gonna let you down, unlike those hoarding, homicidal assholes on the other side of the line — offers the same type of adrenaline shot, especially when it's delivered via a song that shifts into gear with some wailing harmonica and singer/drummer Ben Portnoy bashing the fuck out of his kit. Hell yeah.