Welcome back! Notable Releases took last week off due to the holiday weekend but we filled the gap with our lists of our 40 favorite albums of 2025 so far and 58 albums we’re anticipating for this summer. Some of those anticipated albums are among the five highlighted in Notable Releases this week, and some of the others are covered in Indie Basement.
Last week was also largely defined by the final Black Sabbath show and the start of the Oasis reunion, which took place on back to back days in the UK. We didn’t attend those shows, but we did discuss Sabbath’s farewell, Oasis’ return, and much more on the new episode of our BV Weekly podcast. And if you haven’t heard it yet, last week’s episode was all about our favorite albums of the first half of this year.
In addition to the five albums I highlight below, Bill put up a lengthy review of the new Wet Leg earlier this week, and he talks about new albums from Mark Stewart (The Pop Group), Gina Birch (The Raincoats), Rip Van Winkle (Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices), Allo Darlin’, Gwenno, and Poor Creature (members of Lankum) in Indie Basement. On top of all those, this week’s honorable mentions include the surprise Justin Bieber album, Burna Boy, The Swell Season, Chris Stamey (The dB’s), Half Japanese, Joey Waronker and Pete Min, Mike Polizze (Purling Hiss), Larry June & Cardo, Mal Blum, Goon, Brent Cobb & the Fixin’s, Worlds Worst, Split Chain, Somerset Thrower, Aunt Katrina (ex-Feeble Little Horse), Andy Boay (Tonstartssbandht), Hammock, Matt Jencik & Midwife, Olafur Arnalds & Talos, Kokoroko, Tony Njoku, Ketch Secor (of Old Crow Medicine Show), Givēon, N8NOFACE, Petey USA, The Wildmans, Karma Glider, Sister., Sunking, Fuubutsushi, Dom Salvador/Adrian Younge/Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Ava Mendoza/Gabby Fluke-Mogul/Carolina Pérez, Cruelster, Impureza, MF Tomlinson, 81355, Molly Joyce, Murry Hammond, Amy Macdonald, Midnight Rodeo, The Queen & I, World’s First Cinema, Horror Movie Marathon, Tanner Usrey, dead7, Yelawolf & J. Michael Phillips, Barry Can’t Swim, Noah Cyrus, the Innocence Mission EP, the Cosmorat EP, the Hushmoney EP, the Brutus VIII EP, the Charlotte OC EP, the Gracey EP, the doseone & Height Keech EP, the Superdestroyer & PhonesWithChords EP, the Africa Express Presents… Bahidorá comp, All Leather’s re-recorded/reworked discography release, and even more from the Guided by Voices universe: a GBV live album.
Read on for my picks, and for even more of this week’s new music and music news check out the new episode of the BV Weekly podcast. What’s your favorite release of the week?
Clipse – Let God Sort Em Out (Roc Nation)
Pusha T, Malice, and longtime producer Pharrell’s first Clipse album in 15+ years is a course corrective, a return to form, and a maturation all at once.
If you thought Clipse had run its course by the end of the 2000s, you probably weren’t alone. After releasing two of the decade’s best rap albums with 2002’s Lord Willin’ and 2006’s Hell Hath No Fury, the Virginia Beach duo were met with mixed reviews and declining sales for 2009’s Til the Casket Drops, which was also their first album that wasn’t entirely produced by The Neptunes. The duo split the following year, with Pusha T signing to G.O.O.D. Music label as a solo artist and his brother Malice changing his name to No Malice after finding religion and pursuing Christian rap. The more Pusha T’s solo career ramped up and No Malice stayed out of secular rap, the more Clipse seemed like a relic of a bygone era.
Longevity seemed like it wasn’t in the cards for Clipse, but Pusha T found it with his solo career. His run of solo albums (and standout features on massive Kanye West songs) made him as much or even more of a force throughout the 2010s and early 2020s as Clipse was in the 2000s, and he integrated himself into rap’s next generations without ever really deviating from the unflinching coke rap style he honed with Clipse. That was never clearer than on 2018’s Kanye-produced Daytona, an album of hard beats and rapping that sounded straight out of the early 2000s and was also widely recognized as one of the best albums of 2018. Its aughts-era spirit might’ve had you revisiting those old Clipse records and wishing for a reunion, and a year later we got one: a Clipse guest appearance on Kanye’s 2019 album Jesus Is King.
The Clipse reunion didn’t stop there. When live music returned after lockdown, Clipse played their first show in 12 years at the 2022 edition of Neptunes member Pharrell Williams’ Something in the Water festival, and Pharrell split production duties with Kanye on Pusha T’s solo album It’s Almost Dry that same year. More reunion shows followed, and then Pusha T and No Malice got to work on a new Clipse album, entirely produced by Pharrell. The album, titled Let God Sort Em Out, is here now and it piggybacks on the momentum of Push’s solo career. It also adds a much more triumphant chapter to Clipse’s story than the one they left off with. Similar to Daytona, it captures the spirit of aughts-era Clipse and it also sounds like some of the most urgent rap music of 2025.
So much about Let God Sort Em Out sounds like the Clipse you know and love, from Pharrell’s trunk-rattling beats to the chemistry of Pusha T and Malice’s combined shit talk and street tales. They bring in two of the most important rappers to emerge in the years since Clipse broke up–Pusha T’s “Nosestalgia” collaborator Kendrick Lamar and Pharell acolyte Tyler, the Creator–as well as another rap veteran who’s been on a tear lately (Nas), a much newer coke rap torch-carrier (Stove God Cooks), and longtime collaborator Ab-Liva. Every guest raps with a level of intention that suggests they care as much about a great Clipse comeback as Pusha T, Malice, and Pharrell do. Kendrick brings some of the album’s hottest heat of all on “Chains & Whips” with a verse that follows his recent onslaught of Drake disses and links him up with one of Drake’s other most notable haters. Choice lyric: “Therapy showed me how to open up/It also showed me I don’t give a fuck,” presumably a reference to how quickly Kendrick shifted from the mental health awareness of 2022’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers to being a professional hater in the GNX era. (Drake isn’t actually mentioned by name on the song, but Pusha T told GQ that Kendrick’s verse caused Clipse to split with Def Jam because the label’s parent company UMG disliked the optics of having two of Drake’s biggest haters on one track.)
Let God Sort Em Out has clear echoes of the past, but Pusha T and Malice aren’t living in it. They’ve grown and matured and dealt with new crossroads of life, and that’s evident from the very first song, “The Birds Don’t Sing,” a gospel-rap song featuring John Legend and the Voices of Fire choir that deals with Push and Malice’s mother and father both dying between November 2021 and March 2022. It’s a tragic note to open on, and it also grabs you right away, letting you know off the bat that this is a more reflective, world-weary version of Clipse than we’ve ever heard before. It’s also on that song that Malice raps what appears to be a quote from his father encouraging him to return to being the rapper that Clipse fans remember: “You owe it to the world, let your mess become your message.” The Malice we get on Let God Sort Em Out is neither a full return to form, nor is it the No Malice who publicly disavowed the music he made with Clipse. It’s a Malice with the wisdom to find a balance between who he is in Clipse and who he is in his personal life. Hearing him once again go bar for bar with his brother, this is more than a reunion. This is a version of Clipse that found and mastered the art of longevity that almost escaped them.
Nuvolascura – How This All Ends (Zegema Beach/I.Corrupt)
The LA screamo band’s third album and first in five years is some of their darkest, most personal, and most cathartic work yet.
After releasing their first two albums in an 18-month span between 2019 and 2020, LA screamo band Nuvolascura endured “a very lengthy and difficult wait of five years” with no new music besides one song on Touché Amoré vocalist Jeremy Bolm’s Balladeers, Redefined compilation, and I imagine that has something to do with vocalist Erica Schultz’s recovery from her 2019 breast cancer diagnosis. That’s also something that informed the writing of this album. Erica said lead single “And in the End, You Threw It All Away” was written about “the constant fear and worry that stays with you” even after cancer recovery, and there are other moments on the album that seem to share similar themes. Other moments seemingly tackle abuse and capitalist greed, though the lyrics are usually open-ended enough that they could be interpreted in more ways than one. Three songs on the album are sung from the perspective of an “us” against an unnamed “them.” One simply says, “Too hard to live in a world where torture is entertainment.” It’s an album of darkness and pain, and Nuvolascura’s heavy, cathartic, hauntingly beautiful screamo is a perfect soundtrack.
Open Mike Eagle – Neighborhood Gods Unlimited (Auto Reverse)
The multihyphenate rapper turns a planned TV show into his most grand, cohesive solo album in five years.
In addition to being one of the most consistently great indie-rappers of the past decade-plus, Open Mike Eagle is also a podcaster, comedian, actor, and screenwriter, and he launched his own Comedy Central show The New Negroes in 2019. He actually originally imagined Neighborhood Gods Unlimited as a TV show, inspired by Get Out, Sorry to Bother You, and Boots Riley’s I’m A Virgo, but he ended up turning it into a concept album instead. Its structure has echoes of a TV show (with a theme song and commercials), and the concept is a personal one for Mike, inspired by childhood trauma that he “spent the majority of [his] life not knowing” about. Similar to 2020’s Anime, Trauma and Divorce, it’s melancholic and reflective but also clever and funny. It’s also great rap music, a post-boom bap album with vintage soul samples (“me and aquil stealing stuff from work”), jazz excursions (“contraband [the plug has bags of me],”) and too many ear-catching hooks and punchlines to count. And it’s Mike’s most grand, cohesive solo album since the aforementioned Anime, Trauma and Divorce, following a label showcase tape, the short-but-sweet Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering, and the debut album by his group Previous Industries, whose Video Dave and Still Rift are two of the only three guests on Neighborhood Gods Unlimited. As great as all of those projects were, it’s nice to see Open Mike Eagle back in auteur mode.
Nate Mercereau, Josh Johnson, Carlos Niño – Openness Trio (Blue Note)
Three longtime collaborators make their Blue Note debut with a trio album that exists at the crossroads between spiritual jazz, ambient music, and new age.
Even before assisting André 3000 on New Blue Sun, Carlos Niño emerged as one of the most prominent architects of a sound that exists at the crossroads between spiritual jazz, ambient music, and new age. Now, in a trio with two of his frequent collaborators, guitarist Nate Mercereau (who’s also all over New Blue Sun) and saxophonist Josh Johnson (Jeff Parker, Makaya McCraven, Miley Cyrus, Bright Eyes, etc), he makes his Blue Note debut with Openness Trio. The album is textural, meditative, and serene, right in that same ballpark as New Blue Sun and last year’s Shabaka album (which Niño also plays on). All three players utilize electronics, but the album never sounds too synthetic. Like on Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda, so much of the ambience is created naturally from Carlos Niño’s mix of bells, shakers, cymbals, and gongs. Josh Johnson’s sax tends to provide floating, freeform murmurs rather than lead melodies. Nate Mercereau’s guitar work is manipulated to the point where you might not even realize a guitar is in the mix. The field recordings on the album are as present and crucial as the “proper” instruments. Stretches of the album were actually recorded outdoors, and it often sounds like what the artwork depicts: a hazy, grainy, out-of-focus view of the natural world.
Pygmy Lush – Totem (Persistent Vision)
Shelved in 2016 and finally released, ‘Totem’ shows off a heavier side of the usually-folky pg.99 offshoot.
Pygmy Lush recorded Totem in 2016 as an intended followup to 2011’s Old Friends but ended up shelving it after the band “lost momentum” following the completion of the LP, as band member Mike Taylor puts it. “It was a very transitional time for Pygmy Lush where we were trying hard to figure out what this group wanted to do.” Now, nearly a decade later, they’ve finally decided to release it in its original form and I don’t think I’ll be alone in feeling very glad that they did. It’s a great album that sounds as urgent and delightfully out-of-step in 2025 as it would have in 2016. A lot of it is on the heavier side for Pygmy Lush, who formed in 2005 as a folky offshoot of the legendary screamo band pg.99. The folky side is toned down on this one, and in the forefront is a white-hot offering of experimental post-hardcore that kinda sounds like a cross between ’80s Sonic Youth and ’90s Dischord, all done in the way that only Pygmy Lush can.
Wet Leg – Moisturizer (Domino)
Wet Leg follow the overnight success of “Chaise Longue” and their 2022 self-titled debut album with their anticipated sophomore LP, Moisturizer. Does it deliver? Read Bill’s review to find out.
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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Mark Stewart (The Pop Group), Gina Birch (The Raincoats), Rip Van Winkle (Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices), Allo Darlin’, Gwenno, and Poor Creature (mem Lankum).
Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases archive.
Looking for a podcast to listen to? Check out our new podcast BV Weekly.
Pick up the BrooklynVegan x Alexisonfire special edition 80-page magazine, which tells the career-spanning story of Alexisonfire and comes on its own or paired with our new exclusive AOF box set and/or individual reissues, in the BV shop. Also pick up the new Glassjaw box set & book, created in part with BrooklynVegan, and browse the BrooklynVegan shop for more exclusive vinyl.
