Hello and welcome to the latest installment of Five Albums, the feature for paid Hearing Things subscribers in which we recommend you the new records from across genres that you need to hear each week. As music journalists, the question we get most often from friends is how to stay on top of what’s new and cool. This is our attempt to provide a practical answer.
Starting a publication from scratch involves making a lot of not-exactly-trivial decisions about how to categorize and present your articles, and we’re making a tweak today. From time to time, you’ll now see certain extraordinary Five Albums recommendations flagged as Must Hear, the designation we use elsewhere on the site for the absolute best new releases in music.
This week, we’ve got not one but two of them: a folky singer-songwriter record that taps into the deep beauty of everyday existence, and an indie-rap molotov cocktail chucked straight into America’s darkening heart. Rounding things out are a blast of French-Canadian prog-punk that’s just proggy enough to satisfy the heads without scaring the normies, a rap album that’ll make you feel like the slickest person in the room, and a limited reissue from one of the best and most elusive bands of the early 2000s.
