NPR Music - New Music Friday: The best albums out June 20

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

HAIM. Hotline TNT. Yaya Bey. World Cafe's Raina Douris joins Stephen Thompson to give you a quick tour through the best records out this week.Featured albums:• HAIM, 'I quit' (Stream)• Hotline TNT, 'Raspberry Moon' (Stream)• Yaya Bey, 'do it afraid' (Stream)• Kelsey Waldon, 'Every Ghost' (Stream)• S.G. Goodman, 'Planting by the Signs' (Stream)Check out the long list of albums out June 20 and sample more than 50 of them via our New Music Friday playlist on NPR.org.Credits• Host: Stephen Thompson• Guest: Raina Douris, WXPN• Producer: Simon Rentner• Editor: Otis Hart• Executive Producer: Suraya MohamedSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

A quick note before the show, this podcast contains explicit language. Your place, my place it doesn't matter to me. Happy Friday, everyone from NPR Music. It's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson here with Raina Duras from World Cafe in Philadelphia. Hey, Raina. Hey, what's up? It is such a pleasure to have you here.

Before we start, I actually just up front want to do a quick public service announcement. Many of you, if you listen to this show, probably subscribe to the NPR Music newsletter. if not, why not? But we wanted to let people know that we are launching an official Tiny Desk newsletter. If you want to be alerted every time we publish a new Tiny Desk concert, which we do several times a week, and they're always newsworthy. So you can sign up for that at NPR.org slash Tiny Desk newsletter. Raina, have you signed up yet?

Yes. Yes, I have. I'm trying to remember if I have. And if I haven't, I'm doing it right now. Awesome. Thank you, Raina. We're going to kick things off with the new album by Heim. Heim has a new album called I Quit. So Heim's new album, I Quit.

It's their fourth album. It's their first since 2020 when they put out Women in Music Part 3. They co-produced it with Rostom, Bat Mangli, who they've worked with a whole bunch before. And honestly, I think that deciding to release this on the first day of summer, very smart move. Such a good idea. Comparing this summer in music to last summer in music, asking myself the question, like, what is the brat of 2025? What is the Sabrina Carpenter espresso of 2025? What is the kind of big, messy, joyful pop-banger record? I was listening to

this record, and I was just thinking, like, would I be shocked if this became I quit summer? Thematically, it is very much about shedding toxicity. It's about leaving bad stuff behind, leaving bad relationships, shedding what doesn't bring you joy. That's actually a pretty decent piece of advice and an excellent theme to hang a big summer pop record on, right? It's called I Quit, but I think even they've said that it's not about quitting in the negative sense. It's about like quitting being afraid and like moving on and how you quit. And like it's a very kind of positive thing.

Do you know how badly I need it? fun, pop-rocky music from a bunch of women that doesn't sound like 90s grunge rehashing. It doesn't sound like sad diary entries. It's fun. It feels so fun and so freeing. And I feel like when I put this on right away, I was like, oh, this is what I needed.

I listened to this record kind of three times through in a row. And I was really starting to feel these songs sink in. And you start to pick up on where songs could really get their hooks into people. not just because they're catchy, but because they're saying something that is going to speak to people in a kind of a grand and universal way. So there's a song on this record called Relationships,

and it's like, I think I'm in love, but I can't stand effing relationships. And it kind of set to this spare beat. Man, I can feel that resonating with people on TikTok. I can feel this song hitting people at the exact right time in their lives. I played it on my show a while ago, and I think what I said was,

There's somebody listening to this right now who's on the fence about whether or not to leave their crappy partner, and this is going to do it. And so, like, if you're the partner, I'm sorry in advance. But this is like the, okay, I'm done song. That theme runs through the whole record. You know, the song, Gone, which opens the record, samples George Michael's Freedom 90, which is like taking Freedom 90 as kind of your mission statement makes so much sense on this record. And also on second thought, I changed my mind. You've been in this graveyard. And also, on Gone, I love the production.

It's kind of weird. And the deadpaned vocals, especially in that song, it really sounded to me like Cheryl Crow. Oh, I got Cheryl Crow quite a bit listening to this record. Yeah, like this is like an open the car windows, let your hair down and drive away from your problems. album. Haim is really one of the prototypes for the

musical genre coined by our colleague Lars Gottrich called Rose A Wave. Yes. And Lars has been writing and talking about Rose Wave for years and basically the concept of it is it sometimes something can sound

basic and poppy and summary and it's not necessarily doing grandly artistically ambitious things but it just works. And it's just what you want. A big glass of rosé with a big fat ice cube in it is sometimes what you want, sonically speaking, and that is something that Haim has done really well, even as this record, as you say, has some really interesting sonic flourishes. Yeah, the bass tones are so thick.

T-H-I-C-C-C. I literally, yes, in all caps. And to your point, I also wrote down, this album makes me want to go drink wine in the park with my girlfriends at night and then ride our bikes. Don't ride under the influence. Sure. Raina, you just let me fill the air with words for how many minutes. And then you just dropped the perfect encapsulation of this record. Yeah, yeah, right?

We need it. It's the album we didn't know we need it. That is I Quit by Heim. Next up, oh man, Raina, I love this record. Hotline TNT. Hotline TNT has a new album called Raspberry move. Hotline TNT, they record for Jack White's third man label, you know, kind of a lot of lineage and a lot of, for lack of a better term, shoegaze bands. I was struck listening to this record,

Raina, how much it immediately nodded to every guitar band I obsessed over in the 90s. Swerve driver, teenage fan club, hum, big billowy, booming guitars on. on top of guitars layered in such intoxicating ways, and yet not performed using any pedals at all. See, I actually didn't know that. That is so cool. Every little dot on the speaker has guitars coming out of it. In just the best way.

Talk about a record I didn't know I needed. It turned out I was greatly craving a truly kick-ass guitar rock record. It kind of feels like right now, the world feels extremely. overwhelming and noisy and sort of difficult to take in. Turning this album up really, really loud really blocks all of that out. It leaves no space in your brain for anything else while you're listening to it, which is nice.

And also, those guitars and just how big they are, are so good at getting big feelings across. Like listening to this album made me feel like a teenager. If I was in high school feeling all these big feelings for the first time, I feel like this album would have like totally blown my mind. Yeah, this would have 100% rocked my world in 1993. But it's not just a throwback, right? It's just picking up on a lot of the majesty of a lot of those great records. And this record opens with a song called Was I Wrong?

They're able to use distortion to almost create a sense of twang. The sound is just bending under its own weight, and that is creating the illusion of a twang. I just think it's so cool. Will Anderson of Hotline T&T, I think he usually works alone when he adds the layers on his own. And this time his touring band

came into the studio with him and they were involved in the process and that I think is part of the reason it feels so alive. Like every guitar, everything in there has a mind of its own. I think sometimes, personally, I can find the wall of sound guitar thing.

I can find it a little samey after a while. But it feels like there are so many hooks on this album. On one level, I enjoyed it as a kind of 35-minute wall of sound, but I really did enjoy it as a collection of great rock songs. I'm going to keep coming back to it. That's Raspberry Moon from Hotline TNT. We've got more great records we're going to talk about,

but first, let's take a quick break. From NPR Music, it's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson here with Raina Duras from World Cafe, in Philadelphia. Raina, tell me what's going on with the show. Well, this week on World Cafe, we're launching our Sense of Place Rome series. Our Sense of Place series is where we go to a different city

or different country. We dig into the music scene there. We have sessions with a whole bunch of great artists from Italy. And then we also visit a record label that's dedicated to releasing lost Italian B-movie soundtracks. We go to Forum Studios,

which is the studio founded by Ennio Morcone. We went to like a finger-style guitar social club up in the hills outside of Florence. It's beautiful. I'm excited for everybody to hear it. That'll be going on for like two weeks. I want NPR to send me to Rome, but just to eat bread. Yes, well, I did do a lot of bread eating and spaghetti eating. In fact, at that finger-style guitar place, they insisted we have dinner with them first, and they made like, Pente Bognays and a red wine, and it was just, it was unbelievable. All right, well, next up, we've got a new album from Yaya Bay.

Yaya Bay's new album is called Do It Afraid. Spin to the other side of the world, a little bit stronger. Yaya Bay, she's an artist from Brooklyn. And yeah, this one's called Do It Afraid. And it's, it takes you on a journey. Yeah, it really does. I feel like the whole first half, I was like, like, you could almost play this in a spa.

Maybe this is like a summerhand kind of pool party album. And then it like just picks up and goes. There is almost this cinematic quality where it's like the camera has been fixed on this small point on the landscape and all of a sudden it pans out to reveal the entire earth. You know, when you hit the song Dream Girl, it really kind of explodes into a celebration. It kind of takes you from this low-key, R&R. R&B kind of chill vibe into Technicolor dance music with bits of soul and jazz and hip hop. In like a dance song, you really get a sense of just how big her toolkit is.

It sounds like she's having so much fun. And it sounds like I think by the end of this album I was like, Yaya Bay seems to be in a really good place. And I'm very happy for her. Which is what I want from the artists I love. Yeah, a little before Dreamgirl, there's spin cycle. And I think there's a lyric in it where she says, take your stress away.

And I really felt like it does. Like it felt like a nice morning, getting up and making coffee, gardening, easing into your day kind of song. We often on this show will sort of find connective tissue across these different albums. One big theme of this record, and the title Do It Outs. afraid is about this larger theme, about moving through your life and kind of embracing fear, embracing pain, embracing hardship as part of a path to a place worth reaching. Life is hard.

You know, we're all hopefully pursuing happiness, but we're going to hit pitfalls along the way, and that's okay. And you can come out of it and you can have a great time. And I think putting this album in conversation with something like Heim's record, I quit. They both do feel like you're gonna go through this stuff and you're gonna emerge on the other side out of like out of the ashes of whatever that is. It may be feeling even better than before.

She also has a real sense of humor. Maybe it kind of comes from her early experience writing rap verses for her dad's rapper friends because he was a record producer and a rap producer. The sense of humor shines through on these songs. Call me Tina, I squibis. We ain't done till I say we is. Shit, nika, all these tables is bullshit.

All your heroes ain't bow shit. government don't give a shit It's a recession They don't say it but shit I know it is This shit depression I don't say it but shit I know it is confessions of a real

As this record rolls along Especially as you get into the back half You know there are 18 tracks here Yeah Rolling by in only about 45 minutes So you get a lot of pretty quick hit songs And she uses that as a way To weave in a lot of different

genre explorations along the way There's a track called Merlo and Grigio That is like a little funky bit of like vaguely Caribbean pop, you know? It kind of sounds like Mario Kart music in there. And I mean that as a compliment. Oh, my God, I certainly interpreted it as one. But then you also have a track like a surrender,

which is kind of bleary in a way that almost feels like an interlude, but it's a fully realized song. Yeah, she is kind of all over the place, but in a way that I felt was also very cohesive. No, but when will it ever be? That is Do It Afraid by Yaya Bay. Next up, the singer-songwriter Kelsey Walden has a new record called Every Ghost.

Kelsey Walden is a singer-songwriter from Kentucky. She's a country singer, but she's also recording for John Prine's O'Boy label. And that should give you a sense that as much as she is singing country songs, She's also singing folk songs, and the two styles really weave together seamlessly here. What really stood out to me is the warmth with which she tells her stories, not unlike somebody like John Prine, where she can tell stories of people who, you might describe them as flawed, but she does it with so much warmth and so much empathy. That stood out over and over again on this record to me.

When we talk about it, these recurring themes, leaving your baggage behind. It is a big theme of this record. These songs are about addiction, about kind of generational trauma, about going through hardship. There's a vulnerability to them and a rawness about them. But there also are these larger ideas around undoing your bad habits, about making amends, about establishing healthy boundaries, and assessing yourself in a really frank,

an open way. So you have a song like Lost in My Idlin is about substance abuse. Lost in My Idlin, that was the song where I really, where it clicked for me, the level of like empathy that we're hearing, but also she sings without judgment. This person, the narrator of this song, it's not just like a condemnation of drinking and addiction. It's like she acknowledges that from the drinker's perspective, sometimes it's fun. Sometimes it's fun to go in and play a a bunch of stuff on the jukebox and sit and have a drink with people. And, like, I think that that's really important because otherwise it can come off as kind of preachy. And she's very plain spoken about it in ways that are really deeply relatable.

Then there's a song called My Kin, where she's, like, assessing her place in her lineage, and looking at where she's thrived and where she's fallen short. You don't trust me if I won't trust you. It culminates in this line, I'm the best and worst of my kid. That is such a great line, and it gives you a sense of how unsparing she's willing to be when she's looking at herself and our own life and the decisions she's made along the way. Tiger lilies start with these, like, blazing, awesome strings, and it's about her grandma and how her grandma would transplant flowers.

And Kelsey has some of the tiger lilies, her grandma, transplanted once, in her yard. Kelsey said that she didn't want to write something that sounded sentimental, but she wanted to write something for her grandmother. And she writes a song in memory of somebody as a tribute to somebody without it coming off as saccharin or sappy. These songs that are kind of digging into some of these more deeply felt topics, that ends up kind of buying her the credibility to just do like a straight-ahed outlaw country song.

like Let It Lie, you know, which has these like swoopy fiddles and big slide guitars. The song Comanche, it's a song about setting boundaries and the car sort of represents a kind of independence. She really does own a Jeep Comanche, which I found interesting right away because Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee also owns a Jeep, also sings about owning a Jeep. And there's something to me that is so lovely about these beautiful storytelling songwriters with gorgeous voices driving around. round in jeeps. It just feels right. Drive past a liquor store. You know, I don't drink that stuff no more.

The rum, all of the engine feels like my soul. Smooth when it's running. A little rough when it's not moving. That is Every Ghost, the new album from Kelsey Walden. We got one more record we want to talk about in depth, as well as a lightning round of some of our other favorite albums out today, June 20th. But first, let's take a quick break. From NPR Music, it's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson here with Raina Dores from World Cafe in Philadelphia.

Next up, we've got a new album by S.G. Goodman. S.G. Goodman's new album is called Planting by the Signs. I love this record. I loved it. I think of all the albums we are talking about today, this is the one I'm going to keep putting on over and over. S. G. Goodman, also from Kentucky, like our last artist, Kelsey Walden, who she's actually, they're friends with each other. So that's perfect. Makes sense. That's so nice. There is something about the atmosphere S.G. Goodman creates that I find so compelling.

It's kind of creepy sometimes, or like dark or like menacing even at times. It's beautiful. But it feels like there's something out there in those woods. You know what I mean? When trying to unpack what makes S.G. Goodman's sound so intoxicating, I was really starting to kind of study the juxtaposition between her kind of sandy, gritty, very lived-in voice, and the way her arrangements have this shimmery, almost ethereal quality to them. The friction lies in the voice, and then the arrangements are drifting into the ether in ways that really pull you in. It's kind of foggy late-night music. Mm-hmm. You feel like you are with her in a very specific place in West Kentucky.

And we were talking about the themes throughout this episode. This album also deals with grief coming through, difficulty, getting at the other side. The album is called Planting by the Signs. Planting by the Signs is the practice of timing events to the cycle of the moon. Basically, like using the moon's cycle to determine when is the best time to plant your crops, when is the best time to get a haircut, when is the best time to wean your baby, making decisions according to the cycle of the moon. And that provides a really sturdy metaphor for the state of the world today, right?

And trying to live a life where you are pushing back against endless technology, pushing back against, you know, news cycles, whatever about the modern world is bedeviling you, taking a step back and trusting the natural world that got us here. You know, S.G. Goodman a few years ago lost her mentor, Mike Harmon, to a freak accident. And in the aftermath of his death, losing him compelled her to reach out and reconcile with her then-former collaborator and guitarist Matthew Rowan. And they talked about this shared, loved one that they had lost and used that experience as a way to mend fences and kind of start working together again. And he winds up not only co-producing this record and playing all over this record, but the title track from the album Planting by the Signs has him taking lead vocal and then having them share their vocals. That was intended in part as a tribute to My Carmen, a tribute to her mentor,

and wound up kind of getting this beautiful record in part out of that loss. There's a song on the album called Snapping Turtle. Oh, that's such a good song. I love it. I mean, it kind of sounds like Kurt Vile a little bit in a way, but it tells a story. And you know, I'm assuming, I guess, here that it's autobiographical. Maybe it really isn't, but it tells a story of growing up in a small rural town and she sees kids killing a snapping turtle, how it hardened her and how it sticks with her in ways.

That song, kid in a small town, you drive before the legal age. And I won't forget that day. That song, in a way, kind of casts her, you know, she comes upon these kids. They're wamping on a turtle with a stick. And she kind of comes in like, hey, can I get in a lick or whatever? And then she beats up the kids for hurting this turtle and ends up sort of as this avenging angel rescuing this turtle. What a metaphor for humanity's responsibility to nature,

which is a big part of kind of the larger ideas behind this record. I raise my hand, breath of God himself, beat those kids till they cry now for myself in the truck. And then you have like fire sign. And the one line I wrote down is just, I was born a seeker. And it feels like a great description. of how I feel S.G. Goodman is in her lyrics and with her music.

That's Planting by the Signs, a new album from S.G. Goodman. Raina, there is absolutely no way that we could possibly get to every great record out today, June 20th. So we're going to do a lightning round of some of our favorites. I'm going to kick us off for more than a decade. Seven Davis Jr. has presided over this wildly diverse sound that encompasses really timeless funk and soul and dance music, trip hop, and more. His new album is full of wild-eyed, beat-driven explorations. It's called Don't Crash Out Challenge.

Meg Remy of U.S. Girls has a new album, and this record, she just sounds so comfortable in the music, in her vocals. She has such a wild range and can do so much with her voice. There's parts of the album that kind of sound like E-L-O. It's a lot of fun. It's called Scratch It. Last month, the inventive jazz pianist Matthew Schip made headlines when he posted a rant to Facebook that slammed Andre 3000's new recording of piano instrumentals. In the process, he wrote about the craft of improvisational piano, the work that goes into it, and that essay triggered a lot of conversations about whose music attracts attention from listeners.

And more to the point, the press, including NPR. Now, Perfect Timing, Ship has a new album of solo piano pieces. It's dense and enveloping and an ideal soundtrack to what Ship was just writing about last month. It's called The Cosmic Piano. I'm not allowed to say the full name of this band on air. It's Tropical F Storm, and they're from Australia. I actually hadn't heard of them until I was preparing for this show, Stephen. And I just loved it.

It kind of sounds like a fellow Australian, Nick Cave, but really fuzzed out. It's shambling. It's a little scary. It's got raggedy guitars. I listened to this two times back to back right away the first time I heard it. The album's called Fairyland Codex from Tropical F Storm. Finally, I'm going to close this out with one more Kentuckian. Nathan Salzberg, one of my favorite guitar.

He's a professional historian. He's done stunning work alongside his wife, the great singer-songwriter Joan Shelley, and he's made a string of deeply creative, instrumental acoustic guitar records. And the latest is a 40-minute single track in which he channels what he describes as sort of a mix of meditation and rage. It's called Ipsa Corpora. Now, Raina, I'm going to try to pin you down and just have you name one song. What is the best new show? song you've heard this week. I'm going to have to give it to S.G. Goodman Snapping Turtle. Right now when we're talking, I'm like, I'm looking forward to going back and listening to that again. It's just a great song. I'm going to pray for forgiveness. I'm going to pray for grace. Five feet down like that snapping turtle day. I could have gone with a couple of different tracks from the soundtrack to I Quit Summer. But I'm going to go with the song Candle from Hotline TNT.

which was just one of the songs that just jumped out at me. You mentioned Raina, just the sheer amount of hooks on that record, not just the big billowy guitar, but also the hooks that they're hanging on. Candle is probably the song from that record that most resonated with me that I'm most going to want to go back to again and again. But there was a lot to choose from this week.

That brings us to the end of our show. Thank you so much, Raina Doris, for taking time out of your week at World Cafe and WXPN in Philadelphia. Thanks so much for having me. It is always a pleasure. If you enjoyed this week's show, we always appreciate a positive review on Apple or Spotify or whatever app you're listening to right now.

This episode was produced by Simon Retner and edited by Otis Hart. The executive producer of NPR Music is Saraya Mohamed. We'll be back next week to talk about a bunch of new albums with One Way Possible of Bay Area Public Radio Station KALW. Until then, take a moment to be well, plant by the signs, and treat yourself to lots of great.

music.