Happy August! The start of the new month means we looked back on the best punk, rap, and indie (basement) of July, and this weekend Lollapalooza is also underway in Chicago. If you’re not there, you can still be streaming it live on Hulu, and we talked about some of the artists on the lineup that we’re excited about on the new episode of our podcast BV Weekly.
It’s a pretty light week for new albums, but I review three great ones below and Bill talks about another three (Debby Friday, Everything Else, and The Warlocks) in Indie Basement. On top of those, this week’s honorable mentions include Hard Chiller (mem The Sound of Animals Fighting, RX Bandits, From Indian Lakes, etc), Scarab, Morgan Wade, Freezing Cold, Kayo Dot, Metro Boomin, AraabMuzik, Reneé Rapp, $uicideboy$, Homixide Gang, Buddy Guy, Travis Roberts, Sunny Sweeney, OT The Real & 38 Spesh, Curren$y, Juicy J, BabyTron, Wolfacejoeyy, Hedonist, Martirio, What Counts, Emily Hines, Blush, OK Cool, Retail Drugs, Go Kurosawa (Kikagaku Moyo), Knosis, The New Eves, Rex Tycoon, Abrupt Decay, Desiigner, 24hrs & MadeinTYO, Young Chop, Ali Sethi, Kyle Hollingsworth (of The String Cheese Incident), The Wood Brothers, Fox Lake, Fit For A King, Moths, QWAM, the Saweetie EP, the Yeat EP, the Sofia Kourtesis EP, the Sex Week EP, the Leather Hearse EP, the Car Bomb EP, the To The Grave EP, the Albert Square (Ogikubo Station) EP, the Laura Groves EP, the Indy Yelich EP, the Xaviersobased EP, the Vientre/Naïveté split, Rosali’s live & solo album, the Mal Devisa compilation, the Dozer comp, the comp of ’70s Elvis rarities, the Fu Manchu live album, and Iodine Recordings’ The Dogs of Hope comp (ft. Walter Schreifels, Orange 9mm, Killswitch Engage, Snapcase, Deadguy, Jeromes Dream & more).
Read on for my picks, and hear about more of this week’s music news and new music on today’s episode of our podcast BV Weekly. What’s your favorite release of the week?
Hayley Williams – 17 New Songs (Post Atlantic)
After a unique week-long rollout, the Paramore leader released 17 new songs that range from shoegazy ’90s alt-rock revival to quiet indie folk to noisy screams.
Earlier this week, Paramore’s Hayley Williams surprise-released 17 songs on hayleywilliams.net, only playable on that website via a media player that looks straight out of Windows 98. Two days later, she took the songs down and replaced them with a note that says “Thank you for listening.” Now they’re all up on streaming services as individual singles. She didn’t give any context on the songs with the initial drop, leaving her listeners with lots of questions: Are these entirely new songs or shelved recordings from a previous era? Is this considered an album? Is it definitely titled Ego, as multiple outlets have reported? At the time that we’re posting this, we know that she’s definitely presenting it as 17 singles and not an album, but otherwise, we still just have the songs standing on their own without context from Hayley, and I think that’s kind of refreshing. It’s rare these days for an artist of Hayley’s stature to put out a batch of songs that leave all context up to interpretation and imagination.
The best of the batch is the one Hayley debuted on Nashville public radio last week (and then performed during a surprise appearance at Newport Folk Fest), “Mirtazapine.” It’s an ode to the antidepressant of the same name, and it finds Hayley going in a very ’90s, shoegazy alt-rock direction that would fit somewhere on the same spectrum as Garbage, Smashing Pumpkins, and The Breeders. My second favorite song in the batch is “EDAABP” (“Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party”), a sorta trip-hoppy song that finds Hayley looking at her hometown of Nashville through the lens of bar-owning racist country singers, bachelorette parties, and karaoke singers, with a nod to TLC. (And that’s not the only time a ’90s karaoke favorite shows up on this album: “Discovery Channel” interpolates The Bloodhound Gang’s 1999 hit “The Bad Touch.”)
Other highlights include “True Believer,” a brooding slow-burner that’s both an ode to Nashville/the South and a critique of it; the groove-fueled, poetic indie rock of “Kill Me”; the screamed, noisy maximalism of “Ice In My OJ”; the airy and therapeutic “Negative Self Talk”; “Love Me Different,” a reggae-pop song that could’ve fit on After Laughter; and “Hard,” which kinda sounds like Hayley doing Billie Eilish. Some songs sound loud and band-driven, and others are quiet and acoustic. It makes sense that she released the project without a specific track order, because it feels like a group of songs that find Hayley getting a bunch of different ideas out without worrying about how they’d work as an album-oriented project. And though the music has no specific stylistic theme, the lyrics are some of Hayley’s most personal and vivid to date, with evocative imagery like “The club with all the hardcore shows now just a grayscale Domino’s,” reflective poetry like “Eldest daughters never miss their chances to learn the hardest lessons again and again/Carrying my mother’s mother’s torment, I think I’m where the bloodline ends,” and multiple references to therapy. It’s the first new music we’ve heard from Hayley since she and Paramore parted ways with the major label Atlantic Records that she signed to as a young teenager–Hayley released these new songs on her own label that’s literally called “Post Atlantic”–and maybe I’m projecting but this feels like the kind of unpolished songwriting (and unorthodox release method) you might get from an artist who no longer has a billion-dollar company weighing in on her end product.
The Armed – The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed (Sargent House)
With a little help from Meghan O’Neil of Punch, The Armed get heavy again.
After getting poppier than ever on 2023’s Perfect Saviors, The Armed have swung the pendulum all the way back in the other direction with The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed. It’s one of their heaviest albums to date, and certainly their heaviest album since at least 2018’s Only Love. The majority of it qualifies as hardcore punk, and Armed leader Tony Wolski splits a lot of the screaming duties with the vicious Meghan O’Neil of Punch and Super Unison, making for her most significant vocal role since the latter band’s 2018 LP Stella. It’s an Armed record, so it’s still full of genre-busting moves that dive into jazz, noise, electronics, melodic alt-rock, and more, but it’s been a minute since they’ve just rocked the fuck out the way they do throughout this entire LP. After touting their last album as “our completely unironic, sincere effort to create the biggest, greatest rock album of the 21st century,” this new one feels entirely unconcerned with that type of thing, and it’s even better.
Wisp – If Not Winter (Interscope)
The fast-rising major label shoegaze act ups the polish for her first full-length album.
Against basically all odds, shoegaze–the cultishly-loved, music-nerd-centric style of music that was most associated with the late ’80s and early ’90s for many, many years–is more popular now than it ever was back then, and it’s also one of the most popular forms of rock music in 2025 in general. Genuine mainstream success for a shoegaze artist seems more possible than ever, and the person that’s most poised to do it is Wisp. Wisp signed to a major label (Interscope) after releasing just one single (2023’s “Your Face”) that racked up millions of TikTok views and Spotify streams before she had the label’s push. (As of July 2025, it has over 140 million Spotify streams, more than anything by My Bloody Valentine or Ride.) Wisp has continued to rise, quickly going from opening for bands like Slowdive and Panchiko to headlining similar-sized venues on her own (not to mention she’s got a few stadium shows with System Of A Down coming up), and now she releases her debut album. “Your Face” producer Grayskies contributed to the album, as did pop-friendly co-writers/producers like Stint (Carly Rae Jepsen, Kesha) and Colin Brittain (Linkin Park, 5 Seconds of Summer), and it definitely sounds a little more “major label-y” than her early singles did. But it’s also a straight-up shoegaze record through and through, and it remains fascinating to hear this once-introverted style of music made with such wide appeal in mind. If this ends up being a younger generation’s gateway album into shoegaze, I’d say the genre is in very good hands, and it wouldn’t take long at all to get from Wisp to the classics–she constantly shouts them out in interviews and goes on those aforementioned tours with them. And even long-running shoegaze heads would have to admit that Wisp is doing something new with the genre, not merely tapping into ’90s revivalism. If Not Winter is an album equally informed by the OGs, Deftones’ shoegazy nu metal, newer heavygaze acts like Narrow Head and Whirr, and Gen Z-era bedroom pop, and it has a little something for fans of all of those things.
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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Debby Friday, Everything Else, and The Warlocks.
Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases archive.
Looking for a podcast to listen to? Check out our new podcast BV Weekly.
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