Five Albums: a New Recommendations Newsletter for Paid Subscribers
The first dispatch includes replicant raves, RPG-soundtrack ambient jazz, communist trap music, and more.
Five Albums is a newsletter aimed at helping you sort through the deluge of new music for the stuff you simply must hear. Think of it like the staff picks rack at your favorite local bookstore: We’re not trying to catalog the biggest or (supposedly) most important new releases, but to share records that move us, delight us, and/or blow our minds, whether they’re self-released on Bandcamp or on a major label.
Five Albums is for paid Hearing Things subscribers only. It will go out every Tuesday, with one new album pick from each of our five editors alongside a short blurb about what makes it so great. So thank you for helping us to keep human-to-human music journalism alive. Feel free to share this newsletter with a friend if you think they’ll like it. (And if you got it from a friend, welcome to the internet’s coolest club of music fans, and please consider becoming a subscriber!) The first issue went out to subscribers this morning, but in case you missed it in your inbox, you can read it here, too.
The five of us have widely varied tastes, so each weekly dispatch should have something for everyone. For the first one, we’ve got truly bonkers IDM-adjacent electronic music, English indie folk that hits a nostalgic sweet spot while charting its own path, cosmic jazz that hits like a fantasy RPG soundtrack, an indie-rap concept album in two dramatic acts, and more.
