Souled American waited thirty years to make another record. They did not use the time to hurry. Souled American 沉默三十年之後回來了

L'Arpeggiata & Christina Pluhar — La Torre del Oro

Christina Pluhar has spent twenty years using the theorbo as something closer to a passport than a specialist instrument, and her new album begins, logically, at a port. The Torre del Oro is the twelfth-century watchtower that used to count gold onto ships bound for the Indies, and the record follows what came back: sixteenth-century villancicos sitting next to Venezuelan polo margariteño, a Mudarra romanesca folding into a Mexican son jarocho, Murcia's fandangos answered by anonymous South American dance forms four hundred years later. The trick, if there's a trick at all, is that Pluhar refuses to treat the old and the new as different categories; the ensemble plays them with the same weight, the same generosity of pulse, and the seams disappear. It's a record that sounds obvious in the way really good ideas do.

Souled American — Sanctions

Frog — Frog for Sale

The Bateman brothers have released three albums in fourteen months, which is either a sign of something breaking open or a quiet emergency, and in the case of Frog for Sale it turns out to be the first. Twelve songs about the way money gets in the way of love, written under the patron saints of Paul McCartney and Buddy Holly, which is a combination that only works if the writing has enough plain melody to hold its own. Frog always has. The cover is a childhood photograph of Daniel holding the infant Steve, and the tenderness of that image — an older brother who has been looking after a younger one all along — sits under the whole record like a foundation.

Hedvig Mollestad Weejuns — Bitches Blues

Weejuns is Norwegian slang for Norwegians, and the title is a wink at Miles Davis, neither of which would matter much if the trio — Mollestad on guitar, Ståle Storløkken (of Supersilent) on organ, Ole Mofjell on drums — weren't serious about the double provocation. Their 2023 debut was a live double album; this is a studio follow-up, and the added control makes the dynamic swings feel even more extreme: six instrumental tracks that move from heavy, riff-based pulse to something so rubato it drifts like chamber music, and then drop back without warning. Storløkken's Hammond is the secret weapon, providing both the harmonic ground and most of the bad weather.

Blue Mitchell — The Thing To Do

Label廠牌

Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series

Kris Drever — Doing This For Love

Drever made his name as the guitarist in Lau, the Scottish trio whose extended instrumental pieces rewired what you thought a folk band could do, but his solo work has always moved in the other direction — inward, toward the kind of songwriting that cares more about a specific harbor or a specific argument than about the grand structural gesture. Doing This For Love continues that. Ten songs, place names doing a lot of the emotional work ("Pilot Whales," "Catterline"), a cast of collaborators (Rachel Sermanni, Louis Abbott, Cahalen Morrison) chosen for what they withhold as much as what they contribute. The CD dropped a week ago; the vinyl is today.

Crippled Black Phoenix — Sceaduhelm

Justin Greaves has been running Crippled Black Phoenix for almost twenty years as a loose collective built around a simple, stubborn premise: that rock music ought to be able to carry grief without becoming maudlin. Sceaduhelm — an Old English word meaning, roughly, shadow-covering — is the most withdrawn record the project has made. Written and recorded across 2023–2025 in Lincolnshire, Stockholm, and Louisville, it puts three vocalists in rotation (Belinda Kordic, Ryan Patterson, Justin Storms) and resists every opportunity to build toward the big chorus. The deluxe vinyl edition comes in a gatefold with a three-piece pop-up paper theater you assemble yourself, which is both absurd and, in context, kind of moving: a physical object that asks you to take your time with it.

Jessie Ware — Superbloom

Two records into her disco reinvention, Ware has become the most meticulous pop craftsman in Britain who hasn't been properly canonized — her studio sense, her phrasing, the way she treats a string arrangement as a piece of dramaturgy rather than decoration, all belong to a tradition closer to Sade than to contemporaries. Superbloom is her sixth, and early listens suggest the temperature is a few degrees cooler: the dance impulse remains, but the drama has been pulled back, which may turn out to be the most grown-up move she's made yet. Alt-cover pressings in pink and gold are already selling out at the usual retailers.