NPR Music - New Music Friday: The best albums out Oct. 17

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

Tame Impala. Silvana Estrada. Soulwax! Guest host Anamaria Sayre is joined by Travis Holcombe of KCRW in Los Angeles to chat about their favorite albums out Friday, Oct. 17.The Starting 5: - Tame Impala, 'Deadbeat' (Stream)- Silvana Estrada, 'Vendrán Suaves Lluvias' (Stream)- Soulwax, 'All Systems Are Lying' (Stream)- Meme del Real, 'La Montaña Encendida' (Stream)- Clarice Jensen, 'In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness' (Stream)**Read our review of Clarice Jensen's album on NPR.org.**The Lightning Round:- Nathy Peluso, 'MALPORTADA' EP- Sudan Archives, 'The BPM'- Skullcrusher, 'And Your Song Is Like a Circle'- C.Y.M., 'C.Y.M'- Sam Wilkes, 'Public Records Performance'See the long list of albums out Oct. 17 and sample dozens of them via our New Music Friday playlist on NPR.org.Credits:Host: Anamaria SayreGuest: Travis Holcombe, KCRWAudio Producer: Noah CaldwellDigital Producer: Elle MannionEditor: Otis HartExecutive 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

Happy Friday, everyone. Welcome to New Music Friday for October 17th, 2025. I'm Anna Maria Sayer sitting in for the vacationing Stephen Thompson. Very jealous. Each week on New Music Friday, we speak to a DJ from the NPR Music Network of Public Radio Stations. And today, we're very lucky, I'm very lucky, to be welcoming back Travis Holcomb of the world-renowned KCRW in Los Angeles, also my home station. Welcome, Travis. Thank you.

It is great to be here on the mothership with you, Anna Maria. I'm honestly really excited and I feel like I'm in the room with an expert. So let's get it going. So the music you're hearing right now is from a Chilean children's TV show called 30 Minutes, and it's one of our most recent tiny desks. It's something I want to start the show talking about today because it has actually set the record for the most views within nine days of any tiny desk we've ever published, and yet people in the U.S. aren't really talking about.

talking about it. So we're going to talk about it here today. Did you watch it, Travis? I did watch it and it was incredible. If that wasn't the record for the most people to be on a tiny desk, it's definitely... It's not the record. Well, they have the record for the most puppets on a tiny desk. Is that accurate? I feel like I feel comfortable without having fact checked. That feels good to me. So let's just go with that. It was a lot of fun seeing that session. And I feel like anyone, especially if you have any little ones, they're absolutely going to love it. So definitely check, make some time to check it out. It's a super deeply

important cultural institution for Chileans and also a lot of people across Latin America, so it's a huge part of why the hype. It's thoughtful, it's critical, it's smart, it's funny. It's also just literally the bubble machines and the puppets are just fun to watch and I would highly recommend to anyone.

So we're talking about it because I, we, me and my co-host Felix Contreras from Alt-Latino, just wrapped up El Tiny 2025, which is where we bring artists from all over Latin America to do a month-long takeover of the tiny desk. So that was one of my favorite shows and definitely one of the most noteworthy. Now, without further ado, Travis, very importantly, we have to get into.

I love a lot of albums on today's show, and yet still, this is maybe the one I'm most excited to talk about, Tame and Paula's new album, Deadbeat. Do you have a track that you want to start us off with? You know what? I feel like end of summer does a really good job. It's almost like a thesis statement. It was the first single from this record, and I feel like it kind of, you know, kind of told us exactly where he was going with Deadbeat.

Okay, let's hear it end of summer from Tame Impala's new album, Deadbeat. Okay, so first and foremost, importantly, we always have to say go watch Tame and Paula's Tiny Desk concert. We just published it today. All Songs Considered host Robin Hilton actually said, and I quote, this is one of the very best we've ever done. Deadbeat is Tame Impala's fifth full-length album. Travis, what is Tame Impala? Who is Tame Impala? For those who don't know, although they probably do know even if they don't know, what's the deal?

So Taman Paula is actually the project of Kevin Parker. So when you see them live, there's going to be a bunch of other guys on stage, but he's essentially the guy that writes all the songs and he plays all the instruments in the recording. He's been around for about 20 years. And he was once seen as like the savior of psychedelic rock. And he kind of came in with the wave with Melody's Echo Chamber, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Dunyan. and kind of defined the sound of rock music in the post-strokes era, I would say. And I think for this reason, like a lot of die-hard Tame and Paula fans who originally got into the band when it was more of a straightforward rock act,

feel some kind of way about this new direction of Taman Paula that he's been going on. This isn't exactly like Dylan goes electric. He's been heading in this direction in a while, certainly since currents, which was arguably like his first big mainstream breakout album that came out back in 2015. It got sampled by rappers. It was covered by Rihanna. But undeniably, since 2020 is the slow rush. He's been heading in more of a pop direction, or at least away from psychedelic rock.

And this new record Deadbeat is like a clear, I guess, deviation from psychedelic rock completely. For that reason, especially with the singles in the lead up to the release of the album, it has been a very polarizing record from Tame Impala. Oh, in particular to me, Travis, and this is coming from a less educated opinion, feels a lot less restricted, actually, than what I've heard from previous Tane and Paula records. I mean, it seems like he's not taking himself as seriously. There's less rigidity. Like, when I think of Tame and Pala, I think of an exactness.

Every beat, every note is so intentional. And there's a little more flow here. He's taking his time a little bit. I mean, does that resonate with you? Where do you sit thinking about it? this. I definitely agree with that. I mean, he's always been known as being a perfectionist, which is why it takes them roughly five years to release a record every time. But this one does have a looseness to it. I feel like, you know, he's talking a lot about feeling behind in life

and struggling with self-criticism and unfulfilled potential, some real midlife crisis type stuff throughout this record. But I also feel like, you know, he's been known as a perfectionist in the past and he's turned some of that, the harshest criticism. of himself and externalized him on this record. I mean, a lot of it, you hear a lot of self-loathing in the lyrics. And we're saying this, I sound like a downer on the record. I actually love this record. I love just the way he's evolved.

I mean, like, if he was doing the same thing that he started doing 20 years ago, I think we'd be bored with it by now. The fact that he is evolving and doing more kind of electronic, dance floor-oriented stuff is really exciting. I think especially when you have a fan base like what he does, you have to push your own fans to see the vision. And I think he addresses some of these things pretty directly in the opening track, which, by the way, I'm obsessed with.

I would love to hear a little bit of it first. It's called My Old Ways. So listening to that track for me, like right out the gate, I'm like, oh, this is not the Tame Impala that we're used to. And I love that. I really appreciate that. And it feels to me, like, within this individual song, he actually is immediately saying, this is where I am.

This is where I've been. Maybe you're not used to it. but the subtext of it to me is get used to it. Yeah. He's done a lot of different experimenting with different genres throughout his career, but this is the first time he's gone full-on, like, house. And in his way of doing it is more like kind of like an emo house sort of vibe. And on the side of the spectrum with fortet and floating points,

an ethereal connection, which was originally released as the B-side to the first single end of summer, is another great example. It's just like pure dance music bliss. That was Tame and Paula's new album Deadbeat. Next up, Silvana Estrada's Vendran Suave's Juvias. Okay, so Mexican singer-songwriter Silvana Strada has just released her much-anticipated second album, Vendran Suave's Juvias.

Now, the last album she released, Travis, was in 2022. She started working on songs for this record in 2020, so it took her pretty much five years. I do have to say, disclaimer, it's hard for me to not be incredibly lovey-dovey about this album because she is a very dear friend of mine. She's kind of become one over the years of, you know, me covering her, and she's playing. a tiny desk. Her second tiny desk came out two days ago. So I want to hear from you, Travis. What's your impression of the record? You know, I love the intimacy of a lot of these tracks. She's kind of, she almost feels like she's in the room with you while she's singing them.

That felt very immediate to me. How does this new record compare to her first record, though? You know, the thing about Silvana is she's always been really good at being very Mexican. What that means to me is, you know, her first album was called Marchita, which is Spanish for Withering. And she was really good at doing this very, what I see is a very Mexican thing, which is balancing pain and beauty. That's kind of like what the synopsis of the record was. It was very cinematic. It was talking about a lot of death and longing and hard things, but also with this really kind of beautiful strings and her beautiful, like, very light but powerful voice. And this second record I told her when I first heard it, I was like, Silvana, this is all that you are.

Because getting to know her over the years, you know, Silvana is a very light, funny, laughy kind of person. And she really incorporated more of that. She gets kind of playful in the track, in the first track we just played, which is called Good Luck, Good Night. You hear her kind of playing. It's a track about ghosting, actually. But she does it in this most grandiose, like, transitioning from this, like, really. flowery, beautiful lyricism into like this really hard kind of like invoking this drunken New Orleans kind of cabaret type of thing. I think she's become a lot more comfortable with imperfection, with the pain points of her life, she lost a very dear friend in between album one.

an album two, and that was something that she had a lot of trouble talking about until she actually came out with a song on this record. It's called A Raya de Luce. And it's basically a play on a lyric by a very famous singer from Chile, who was very popular in Mexico, Chavella Vargas, who basically said this thing where death must be so beautiful that no one ever returns. And so this is her reflection on her friend not having returned, and where she might think that at this point they are and feeling okay, but also moving through that pain.

And so she's really good at that balance. And I think she's only growing more and more into that part of herself that's able to do that. I liked a lot of the tracks with the feature the lush orchestral arrangements. That was definitely unexpected, especially in the way that the album built. Was that something that was present in the first record as well? Definitely present in the first record, but not in the same way. So a funny or kind of really interesting piece to this whole puzzle is that she tried originally to produce this record in Mexico City.

Didn't feel satisfied with it, completely threw it out, went back to square one. around this time she was kind of sunk into this deep depression. She got invited to go perform at a tribute show in Montreal for the famous singer Lassa de Sela. She's a huge fan that's a big inspiration for her. And she reached out and asked if she could actually record a couple songs with Lassa de Sela's original band. They say yes.

So that's when she goes. She actually ends up producing with them, producing it herself. They actually export a lot of their strings to places like Macedonia. So that's where a lot of these strings were recorded. I was very confused when she originally told me this. And so basically it was through working with them and doing string arrangements with them that she was actually able to kind of fully realize her vision for this record using this band from this artist who had so deeply inspired her. So it's kind of this really beautiful full circle moment.

And I think that's why the body of the strings feels so nice. That's Silvana Estrada and her new album, Vendran Suave's Juvias. We've got three more albums we want to recommend, plus a lightning round of more great music. But first, we need to take a quick break. And we're back with Travis Holcomb, host of Freaks Only on KCRW in Los Angeles. Travis, I couldn't help but notice that KCRW has a brand new website. Does this mean I can hear your show without staying up until 1 a.m. on the East Coast? Absolutely. We have full archives.

You could listen to my show on a loop for probably a week straight and not get to the very end of it. You should. I like this challenge. I'm going to do it. You are a three-time guest on New Music Friday, and we asked you back this week specifically to discuss one of your all-time favorite acts, the indie dance duo Soul Wax, who are now somehow in their 30th year as DJs. Their new album is called All Systems Are Lying. Okay, so, Travis, all systems are lying.

Of all of the things that I read about this album, the most interesting to me was that they described themselves, as a super group of you. Can you please explain that to me? I can't explain that, exactly. Oh, great. I was hoping to get answers. A super group of you.

What does that mean? I was like, oh, this is tiny Travis. I can tell you that this new record is their first studio record in seven years. That seems like a long gap for a band to not release a record, but they stay very busy. Soul Wax is sort of like their band, essentially. But they also do a lot of touring as too many DJs, which is where they kind of made their name with a lot of people in the early 2000s,

being really early on the mash-up wave. And in addition to that, they run a thing with James Murphy of LCD's sound system called Despacio, which is basically the most perfect club environment you can step into. They've finally tuned this sound system, and they DJ for six to eight hours at a time.

Usually happens, at festivals. They just did it at Portola Festival in San Francisco a couple weeks back. It's been to Coachella before. And they also run their own label in Ghent Belgium called Diwi, which is home to Bolus Poupoul and Charlotte Adigieri and Marie Davidson. And if that weren't enough, they're also kind of the most in-demand remixers and electronic music for the past decade plus. So while they haven't released a full-length record in a while, they have been staying busy. And, I am very excited that, you know, we have a new record from Soulax. It's much more, I would say, vocal forward than their previous record, which was called Essential.

This one is more of like a straightforward, somewhere between synth pop and electronic record. You know, I have a lot of conversations with artists that take a lot of time off in between records. And there's this kind of energy that people are like, well, what happened? Why did you disappear? And it's like, well, I didn't disappear. Like my only metric of being alive and creating and kind of infusing my energy in the world is not just whether or not I've released a new record. Like there's a lot that goes on outside of that. And I think a lot of times the life that happens outside can then inform the way that the record sounds.

And this to me was like listening to this was like, what is this magical, mystical wonderland of an album I've just stumbled on? It does feel weird. really accessible to me. I find it to be kind of like twisty and mysterious, but oddly comforting in this way that I don't often find dance music to be. It's very grounded. So what has changed for them that you think brought them in this direction? I don't know if anything has changed, but they do.

I had them on Freaks Only about three weeks ago, and I was just sort of trying to get a sense of like how they decided to just go forward and make an album, because they've been releasing singles here and there or working on other people's projects and doing all their other stuff. And it just sort of seems like they just decide, hey, I like the direction we're going in. Let's just keep doing it until it doesn't feel good.

And they just sort of pursue their own muse. Solax's new album is called All Systems Are Lying. Next up, one of my favorite albums of the year, the Mexican musician Meme del Real and his new album, La Montagna Encendida. Princess, the world is derrits in my head

You are my unique certainty The time The time that I per die with that torpeza

Allo everything is a recompensate Princessa Princessa Princessa Okay, so a very exciting day, Travis. One of the most legendary rock-adjacent-ish bands,

just a very important band for Mexico called Cafeta Cuba. Their lead singer, his name is Memme Del Real, is releasing his debut solo album. Now, the album is called La Montagna Encendida, which means the mountain, on fire, and it is just to me, like, this gorgeous encapsulation of the Meme brain. There's a lot of things happening here.

One is that he does this incredible homage to so many different genres. We're talking Cumbia, Bossa Nova, Bolero, Ranchera. I mean, this is nothing like really what Cafeta Cua was and is. He also brought on Gustavo Santaolayo, which is, like, one of the most legendary Argentine rockers, composers, he does a ton of film scores and stuff too. You've probably heard a couple of his pieces. But really what's amazing to me about this is the way that he is pulling from the past, but really skips over the present and just exists in the future. He told me in the process of doing this record, he took a ton of vocal lessons, which you can also really hear. There's like a dynamism.

He plays a different character, really, to me, in a lot of the different songs. I'm curious what you thought about it before I launch into my retrospective on the genre of regional Mexican music and how it relates to this album. I really enjoyed it, especially the track Princessa, the way it kind of blended orchestral arrangements with trip-hop beats. And I thought it was interesting the way a lot of the vocals seem rooted in traditional Latin music, but the rest of the, everything around the vocals

kind of shoots off in all these different unexpected directions that I really appreciated. One thing that I always know for people for people that don't listen to a ton of music from Latin America is there's this thing that happens where the vocals often get mixed way farther forward than you hear in a lot of American than you hear in a lot of American or British or. let's say produced pieces. And so you already have kind of this immediate competition for the instrumentation or the beats or whatever it is to kind of compete with because people love the story of it. And the story here is beautiful. I mean, the lyrics are like incredible classic me me lyrics.

But he really does find a way to have the beats and the instrumentation here hold its own. It sounds a lot like Mexico City to me, honestly. Like it invokes this very historic like Castillo de Chabuetepec, like the... the historic castle in the Bosque kind of thing, but then also now you're in the hottest club in the city, all at the same time. One thing that he does here that's really interesting to me, which is embodied pretty nicely in the song Mbeses,

is he adds to the conversation around regional Mexican music. Now there's been a lot of conversation in the past few years because regional Mexican music has been experiencing kind of like this explosion or reinvigoration. A lot of artists who are doing it have gone literally global, like topped global charts with their songs. And what he did here is really fascinating because what a lot of the younger artists have done

is they've taken the sound, they've added hip-hop beats to it, and they've made it contemporary. This song, he took it, he absorbed it and he like totally flipped it on its head to me. Instead of taking past sounds and pulling them into the present, he's like creating this sonic landscape

where ancestry in whatever spacey, futuristic sound world awaits us and he makes it so they can coexist. That's Emmanuel del Real Diaz, aka Meme del Real and his new album, La Montaigne Encendida. We've got one more amazing album we want to discuss as well as a lightning round of other music we're excited about this week. But first, a quick break. And we're back.

The last album we want to discuss today is a bit of a curveball for both of us, Travis. But after talking to my colleague, Tom Hisinga, I think this is one of my favorite albums now. It's an artist that NPR Music has fallen in love with since her debut album in 2018. Cellist and electronic producer Clarice Jensen and her new album in holiday clothing out of the Great Darkness. So this is Jensen's fourth solo album under her name. But she's also an in-demand session artist working with artists all over the map like My Chemical Romance, The Yeah, Yeah, Yeah's, and even Taylor Swift.

after talking to Tom about Clarice, her energy, what she does, the way I would describe her is she's like this beautiful chameleon of a cellist. She embodies and distorts both in who she plays with and within her own music. She does this thing where she basically plays a lot of traditional cello and then she adds all these effects and, as Tom describes it, toys to her cello. And it creates all these really interesting sounds and loops and distortions. He says that it can be anything from like, the sound of a plane flying overhead to like everyday noises.

What's really cool about this new record is that she kind of stripped all of that back. So she left a lot of her gear behind, and Tom says that this record in particular was very inspired by Bach, the six solo cello pieces, which a lot of cellas love to cover. Yo-Yo Ma has covered it three times, actually. But unless you're a Tom or someone like a Tom, You wouldn't necessarily hear that with the naked ear because she does it in a really unique, really specific to her, nothing you've ever heard before kind of way. I really didn't know anything about Clarice Jensen before we had this segment that I had to prepare for.

But I will say, just listening to this record will make any mundane task feel incredibly cinematic. So if you want like some extra drama in your life, just put in your AirPods and like go for a walk and like you will feel like the main character. of the world listening to this new record. Well, and it's really interesting because she does this constant back and forth with her electronic side and her cello side on the record. There's this piece called 2 comma 1 that I think pairs really nicely with another track on the album called 1 comma 2. It feels like she's almost trading off letting her loop lead versus letting the cello lead.

It's really interesting to hear the 2 back to back. And I really loved the, I believe it was the opening track in Holiday Clothing Part 1. It kind of sets the stage for the whole record with a long 12 plus minute song that just kind of sucks you into her world almost right off the bat. Really just beautiful stuff throughout though. It's slow, it's chilling. It's one of those that's like really worth spending a lot of time with. My colleague Tom Hisinga, who will speak much more eloquently about this than I am, has a piece that comes out Friday morning. you should definitely go check it out.

That was Claris Jensen's new album in holiday clothing out of the great darkness. Now, before we go, we want to give y'all five more quick recommendations because there are always more than five great albums out any given week. I believe this week in particular is especially full. So I'm going to start with Nati Peluso's new salsa EP,

Mal Portada. So quick things to note about Nati, she is an Argentine artist who grew up in Spain. There's been a lot of ruckus noise energy around salsa in the Latin music space. In recent times, most notably, Bad Bunny did a huge salsa track on his last record. We got to give credit where credits do. Nati was one of the first to really start paying attention to it. I actually talked to her about it last year at the Latin Grammys, and she told me, like, duh. Salsa was always just a duh for her as a lover of music.

The energy that Salsa has, the way that it moves was something that she just had to do, even though it's not really part of Argentina or Spain's specific history. So this is another work. This is not her first work of Salsa, but another body of work that she's doing. She keeps growing in the genre really excited to hear that this was out this week. I've got a new release from Sudan Archives, an L.A.-based artist, who is a self-taught violinist, who's previously released two fantastic folds. links back with a third record called the BPM. And like Tame and Polish, she's sort of branching out

into electronic and dance music, club music for this record. It's just like an exciting mix of R&B, avant pop and club music. Okay, so I feel like there's a theme starting to develop for this week's show. And it's long-awaited albums, Travis. All these really amazing artists have been making us wait a while. Skull Crusher is another one of those artists. Last time they released an album was their debut record in 2022. They're out with a new record today called And Your Song is Like a Circle. It was deeply inspired by all different types of cinema, kind of like this amalgamation of Japanese horror and David Lynch films. It was really designed to be visual, really exciting to see that they're finally back. I've got one from a group called

CYM. This is a group comprised of Chris Beio of Vampire Weekend and Mike Green. This is their debut full length. They originally came out back in 2019 with an EP that was heavily influenced by Crout Rock. This one feels a little more expansive, sort of venturing in the shoegaze and further into electronic territory. So I'm really excited about this new record from CYM. Last but not least, the final record recommendation for me and Travis is Los Angeles guitarist Sam Wilkes' new record, public records performance. Now, the story of this one is really interesting to me. So Sam was about to play at Public Records in Brooklyn when Shasad Ismaili reached out asking to sit in on the performance. Now, this was Sam's deal.

If Shazad was willing to play the soprano voice and the three-part harmony of the outro guitar solo from the boys are back in town on his synth during set closer, then he could join in. I love this. I'm going to start creating really elaborate specifications. That is very specific. Very like almost Nathan for you. Yes, literally. Shehada Smeli's like, sure, why not? So they sit down and they start rehearsing.

They're like, wait, this is actually something really cool. So they recorded the whole live performance together. Over here at NPR Music, we're kind of big fans of live recorded shows. So I was really excited to hear this record. It's really something special. Definitely should check it out. And that's our show for the week. Travis, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day

to virtually join us from Los Angeles. Well, thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. If you enjoy this week's show, we always appreciate a positive review on Apple or Spotify or whatever app you're listening to us on right now. This episode was produced by Noah Caldwell

and edited by Otis Hart. The executive producer of NPR Music is Soraya Mohamed. We'll be back next week to discuss the new Brandy Carlisle record and much more with Iona Contreras from Rocky Mountain Public Radio in Denver, Colorado.

Until then, take a lot of moment to be well, go watch the 30 Minutes Tiny Desk, please, and treat yourself to all kinds of good music.