You Must Hear All Five

Hello and welcome to the latest installment of Five Albums, the weekly feature for paid Hearing Things subscribers in which we recommend you the new records from across genres that you need to hear. 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.

In a historic, unprecedented, and game-changing development that media theorists and music critics will surely be debating for years to come, this week’s installment of Five Albums is all Must Hear. What does that mean? Must Hear is our formal designation for the music that rises above the fray, the albums and songs we don’t just appreciate but love deep in our hearts, the stuff we anticipate taking with us in our lives, our feelings about it growing richer and more complex with each passing season, the records we’ll play a decade from now and think “damn, that shit still rocks.” From time to time, one album or another in this roundup will bring out these sorts of feelings. This week, it’s all of them. 

We didn’t plan for it. We had a meeting yesterday, and one person said “What would you all think about slapping Must Hear on my pick for this week?,” and another said, “Wow, I was gonna ask the same thing,” and another said, “If I’m being honest, me three,” and so on. It was a beautiful moment, and now we are sharing the spoils: an ambitious art-pop album that both acknowledges the attention economy’s devaluing of such work and attempts to take it back through sheer sensual appeal; an electronic album loosely inspired by the films of David Cronenberg, with enough techno-dystopian atmosphere and creepy-crawly texture to earn the name-drop; a singer-songwriter album with an expansive approach to the form and a perfect balance of openhearted sweetness and fuck-you toughness in its writing, and more.