New Vinyl Releases February 2023

Tennis return to their boat in Maine for Pollen, trading Denver's altitude for the maritime existence that first shaped their aesthetic. Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley's self-produced sixth album refines rather than reinvents their retro-pop formula, but there's confidence in knowing your lane.

Tracks like 'One Night with the Valet' balance yacht rock shimmer with contemporary indie precision, whilst Moore's voice remains their secret weapon, turning songs about creative partnership and relationship complexity into something warmer than mere nostalgia. Released on their own Mutually Detrimental label, it's modest yet assured.

Yo La Tengo's seventeenth album arrives as the Hoboken trio enters their fourth decade, yet This Stupid World sounds neither complacent nor desperate for relevance. The ten tracks navigate their familiar terrain with hard-won wisdom, balancing noise and nuance as Ira Kaplan's guitar alternates between gentle caress and serrated edge.

Produced with Tom Schick at Marcata Recording, the album confirms what three decades of consistent lineups prove: Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew have perfected the art of making maturity sound thrilling rather than safe.

Andy Shauf's seventh album transforms social discomfort into exquisite miniatures, tracking the titular Norm through parties and interactions where internal monologue drowns out conversation. Recording alone in his Toronto home studio, Shauf arranges woodwinds and strings around his neurotic observations with the precision of a Short Cuts-era Altman.

The songs capture that universal gap between facade and inner turmoil, where making eye contact feels like competitive sport. His melodic craft renders awkwardness not as quirk but as genuine emotional architecture, proving mundane anxiety deserves the same narrative attention as grand romantic gestures.

Caroline Polachek's second solo album arrived on Valentine's Day 2023 as a shape-shifting meditation on longing that refuses to sit still. Working primarily with Danny L Harle, she constructed twelve tracks that veer from flamenco flourishes to baroque electronics, treating desire less as confession and more as controlled metamorphosis.

The production swings between orchestral grandeur and skeletal experimentation, while her gymnastic vocals navigate the space between human intimacy and digital alienation. Critics recognised its ambition immediately, earning Polachek her first Grammy nod and cementing her transition from cult favourite to art-pop architect.

Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre memorialises the Hackney Wick rehearsal space that incubated Britain's contemporary jazz explosion before property developers claimed the building in 2019. This compilation gathers the eclectic community that passed through Paul Willmott's affordable studio, where Kamaal Williams, Nubya Garcia and Yussef Dayes workshopped the sounds that redefined UK jazz.

The collection captures a rare moment when economic precarity and creative ambition collided productively, preserving the genre-crossing experiments that thrived in those rooms before London's housing crisis erased another vital cultural space.

Mogwai's debut arrived like a tectonic shift disguised as whispers and screams, establishing the Glasgow band as architects of tension rather than mere dynamicists. The 16-minute Mogwai Fear Satan sprawls across the album's centre like a fever dream, its glacial build and crushing release defining post-rock's quiet-loud vocabulary for a generation of imitators.

NME's 1997 Album of the Year wasn't hyperbole. Young Team proved guitars could still discover new emotional territories, turning restraint and eruption into a language that spoke louder than any lyric sheet.

Karin Dreijer's third Fever Ray album recruits Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross alongside techno provocateurs Peder Mannerfelt and Nídia, forging club tracks that throb with unguarded longing. Where previous work weaponised discomfort, Radical Romantics channels queer desire into surprisingly direct pop architecture, all pulsing synths and visceral hooks.

What They Call Us and Shiver radiate with a warmth that never sacrifices Dreijer's alien precision, proving that accessibility needn't dilute strangeness. Six years after Plunge, they've crafted their most physically immediate record whilst losing none of their transgressive edge.

The Strokes' greatest hits package arrives two decades after they soundtracked every skinny-jeaned art school kid's formative years, proof that their particular brand of New York cool still moves units. Twenty-six singles trace the arc from garage rock saviours to arena veterans, documenting Julian Casablancas's evolution from sneering nihilist to slightly older sneering nihilist.

The Vol 1 suffix hints at ambitions neither their catalogue nor cultural patience can quite sustain, but tracks like Last Nite and Reptilia remain perfect little monuments to when guitar music still felt dangerous.

Shame's third album finds the South London outfit abandoning rigid post-punk orthodoxy for something messier and more human. With Flood smoothing their edges without sanding down their teeth, Charlie Steen trades youthful antagonism for genuine vulnerability, his voice cracking around mortality and millennial dread.

The guitars sprawl where they once just jabbed, songs like Fingers of Steel proving these lads have outgrown simple thrash. It's the sound of a band realising that growing up doesn't mean mellowing out, just learning where the bruises actually are.

After a decade away and Janet Weiss's brutal 2019 car accident, Quasi's tenth album finds the Portland duo transmuting physical trauma into their signature blend of sardonic fury and art-punk rigour. Sam Coomes's Rocksichord still churns through angular riffs whilst Weiss pounds out rhythms that refuse easy consolation.

The title's aggressive wordplay signals their unchanged appetite for political mockery, but mortality now haunts the margins. Sub Pop's faith in these veterans proves warranted: resilience here sounds less like triumph than stubborn, necessary defiance.

Katherine Paul's third album as Black Belt Eagle Scout channels ancestral memory through waterlogged guitars and slowcore drift, recorded in her Portland home studio with producer Zach Siebert. The Swinomish and Iñupiaq songwriter weaves Indigenous displacement and queer identity into shoegaze reverie, her reverb-heavy arrangements creating space for grief and resilience to coexist.

Tracks like My Blood Runs Through This Land don't announce their politics so much as let them seep through the sonic fabric, Paul's intimate vocals mapping personal geography onto stolen ground with understated power.

Mainstream Disco Funk excavates the obscure grooves of Bob Shad's label as it pivoted from jazz towards the dancefloor between 1974 and 1976. While Salsoul and West End claimed the spotlight, Mainstream's New York studio crew crafted proto-disco burners that now sound thrillingly raw, caught between funk's swagger and disco's pulse before the genre calcified into formula.

BBE's compilation rescues these rare singles from collector limbo, documenting how independent labels experimented with extended rhythms during that brief window when disco still belonged to the clubs rather than the charts.

Four decades after helping define post-punk's feminist vanguard with The Raincoats, Gina Birch delivers her debut solo album with the directness its title promises. Released on Jack White's Third Man Records, the album centers on Birch's characteristically unorthodox bass work, where rhythm and texture trump virtuosity.

Her instrument remains loud not just in volume but in its refusal to fade into conventional rock arrangements. It's a statement of persistence from someone who never needed mainstream validation, arriving precisely when a new generation has begun understanding what she was doing all along.

Phew's third solo album arrives after a decade-long retreat, distilling her post-Aunt Sally experiments into skeletal electronic forms that refuse easy categorisation. Where her late-seventies post-punk snarled and spat, Our Likeness floats through industrial debris and ambient drift with that same detached vocal presence now serving as spectral guide through minimalist soundscapes.

Released through Meldac to little fanfare outside Japan, the album has gained traction through recent reissues, revealing an artist who'd quietly been mapping experimental territory while others chased trends.

Paramore's sixth album strips away After Laughter's synth-pop gloss for something spikier and more claustrophobic. Produced by Carlos de la Garza, these songs bristle with Talking Heads-inspired angularity, all jerky guitars and taut rhythms that mirror Hayley Williams' lyrics about social exhaustion and doomscrolling fatigue.

The title track's nervous energy sets the template for a record that feels like a panic attack set to post-punk, yet the trio's melodic instincts remain sharp enough to keep things from collapsing into pure anxiety. It's their most grown-up work, even when it's falling apart.

Kelela emerges from six years of silence with Raven, a record that trades Take Me Apart's introspective heartbreak for the kinetic rush of the dancefloor. Produced with Asmara, LSDXOXO, and Kaytranada, the album channels UK garage, jungle, and breakbeat into a breathless exploration of post-relationship liberation.

Her voice still floats like smoke through strobe lights, but now it's tethered to club rhythms that refuse to sit still. This is R&B refracted through underground electronic music's most urgent frequencies, fifteen tracks where emotional vulnerability meets physical release without compromise.

Anna B Savage's second album pushes against the piano-confessional framework of her debut, collaborating with Mike Lindsay to build electronic architectures around her unflinching emotional directness. The vocal manipulations and synthesiser pulses on tracks like The Ghost suggest not abandonment of intensity but its refraction through new textures.

Where A Common Turn felt like overheard therapy, in|FLUX sounds like the aftermath, processing transformation through drum machines and layered production. The title's punctuation hints at the in-between states Savage navigates, neither fixed nor fully dissolved.

Dylan Khotin-Foote's first album for Ghostly International finds the Edmonton producer refining his signature ambient house into something genuinely buoyant. Recording after relocating from Vancouver, he trades the coastal fog of earlier work for prairie light, his vintage synths and tape loops achieving an uncommon warmth without sacrificing their pleasantly worn edges.

The title promises catharsis and delivers it through eight tracks that feel less like lo-fi exercises than actual emotional geography, mapping memory and place with the gentle insistence of someone who's found peace in letting go.

Laraaji's 2024 offering continues his half-century communion with amplified zither and celestial drone, the 81-year-old mystic still chasing those shimmer-soaked frequencies that made Brian Eno take notice back in 1980. Where lesser ambient practitioners mistake stillness for profundity, Laraaji understands that transcendence requires movement, his cascading arpeggios and mbira patterns creating what he'd call spiritual laughter in sound form.

The album arrives amid his late-career renaissance, proof that meditation music needn't be passive. It pulses with the gentle insistence of someone who's spent decades knowing exactly where the light enters.

Released during Neutral Milk Hotel's long hibernation, this 2011 box set canonised their complete studio output just as the cult had reached critical mass. Both On Avery Island and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea arrived pressed on vinyl, the format that best honours their grimy fidelity and brass-saw-accordion clatter.

The timing proved prophetic, preceding their 2013 reunion by two years. For obsessives who'd worn out their CDs debating Anne Frank theories and for latecomers raised on forum mythology, it offered a definitive pilgrimage object, analogue warmth intact.