music

The sixth instalment of Night Dreamer’s acclaimed Direct-to-Disc series welcomes Anadolu psych legends BaBa ZuLa into Haarlem’s Artone Studio to cut an uncompromising live set of fuzzed-out psychedelia, infused with the inimitable dubwise experimentalism that has cemented them as one of the global underground’s most exciting and original bands.

Arctic Monkeys' debut gave British rock music a swift kick in the trousers. Riotous tracks like "The View from the Afternoon" and "Dancing Shoes," with their twitchy drum lines and broken guitar scales, are both wobbly and anthemic; they provide a fitting backdrop to Alex Turner's stories of “weekend rock stars” who dodge the police, hustle club bouncers, and dance “to electro-pop from 1984.” The songs are more snapshots than portraits, but there’s an urgent beauty in their raggedness.

For their second full-length, the Montreal-based seven-or-eight-piece Arcade Fire show themselves capable of Big Rock, as original, and as potentially marquee-topping as TV on the Radio and Sigur Ros. Regardless, the intentional murkiness of these pleasantly anthemic New Wave dirges makes it sound as if the music has already reverberated through a crowded cement stadium. Named after cult author John Kennedy Toole's first novel, Neon Bible is smart and subtle enough to present itself as a personal discovery for every listener, every word to be pored over by fans (as with those of Tori Amos, Pavement, and Radiohead).

Available as a 15th anniversary edition of 2500 individually numbered copies on silver & black marbled vinyl. The Shivers package includes an insert with pictures and credits. His second solo album finds him taking the final step into real songwriting, working with such singers as Nadia Ali, Michael Burns, Justine Suissa and Martijn Hagens, and continuing both to refine and expand his personal vision of the ways trance can be defined in a constantly expanding dance music universe. The fourth times voted number 1 DJ in the world (DJ Mag Top 100) was awarded tons of times for his influence in the trance music scene, and this album proves exactly why.

( ) is the third full-length album from Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós, first released in October 2002. It comprises eight untitled tracks, divided into two parts: the first four tracks are lighter and more optimistic, while the latter four are bleaker and more melancholic. The two-halves are divided by a 36-second silence, and the album opens and closes with a click of distortion. Lead singer Jón Þór Birgisson ("Jónsi") sang the album's lyrics entirely in "Hopelandic", a made-up language consisting of gibberish words. ( ) reached No. 51 on the Billboard 200 and received acclaim from music critics.

Born This Way is the second studio album by American singer Lady Gaga, released by Interscope Records on May 23, 2011. The music of Born This Way stems from the synthpop and dance-pop styles of her previous material while incorporating different forms of instrumentation from that on her previous releases, such as electronic rock and techno. It features a broader range of genres, such as opera, heavy metal, disco, house, and rock and roll, while its lyrical topics include sexuality, religion, freedom, feminism, and individualism. Born This Way received three Grammy Award nominations, including Gaga's third consecutive nomination for Album of the Year. In 2020, the magazine Rolling Stone included it in their updated list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, on the 484th spot.

Debut album of INXS (pronounced "in excess"), a band formed in 1977 Australia. They were originally a pub rock band that tried to fit in with the new wave. Before long, the band perfected an appealing mixture of hard rock and dance music that became enormously popular in the 1980's. Their popularity faded in the '90's with the onslaught of grunge.

Texas is an expansive state, with much distance between its sprawling cities. The amount of time we spend in cars⁠—as well as the moods that experience evokes—is precisely what the instrumental Houston trio Khruangbin and Fort Worth R&B standout Leon Bridges aimed to recreate on their four-song EP, Texas Sun. Gospel, zydeco, underground Texas rap, country, R&B, and Tejano music are all layered on the album—led by Khruangbin’s Mark Speer on guitar, Laura Lee on bass, and DJ Johnson on drums, and featuring Leon Bridges on writing and singing duties—to produce a sound that’s distinctly of the Lone Star State.

With incomparable flair, the pop diva returns to her dance-pop days (her first pop-pop album since 2011) with a fabulously fun and deeply personal album that is at turns bizarre, theatrical, and ambitious.

“I feel that we’re on the brink of something. It is going to be strict and wild and pretty.” — Prince, 1986. More than any other release in his four-decade-long recording career, Prince's iconic double album Sign O' The Times captured the artist in a period of complete reinvention. Primarily recorded between the end of 1985 and beginning of 1987, the era saw the dissolution of his band The Revolution, the end of his engagement to Susannah Melvoin, and the creation (and ultimate abandonment) of the albums Dream Factory, Camille, and Crystal Ball. By the end of that period of transformation, Prince emerged with one of his most urgent and wide-ranging releases to date — an epochal double album that would be hailed as a creative, critical, and commercial triumph. The Super Deluxe Edition includes all the audio material that Prince officially released in 1987, as well as 45 previously unissued studio songs recorded between May 1979 and July 1987, and a complete live audio performance from the June 20, 1987 stop on the Sign O’ The Times Tour at Stadium Galgenwaard in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Also included is a brand-new DVD containing the complete, previously unreleased New Year’s Eve benefit concert at Paisley Park on December 31, 1987, which was Prince’s final performance of the Sign O’ The Times Tour stage show and his only on-stage collaboration with jazz legend Miles Davis. The Super Deluxe Edition set also features a 120-page hardcover book containing Prince’s previously unseen handwritten lyrics for many of the songs from the era, including the hits “U Got The Look,” “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man,” and “Hot Thing,” iconic unseen images from the era taken by Prince’s primary photographer in the mid-1980s to early 90s, Jeff Katz, plus images of archive assets including original analog tape reels and studio tracking sheets. Deluxe Edition 13 LP + DVD Set. Release date September 25th, 2020