NPR Music - New Music Friday: The best new albums out June 13

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Brandee Younger. The Cure. Annahstasia. WRTI's Nate Chinen joins Stephen Thompson to discuss our favorite albums of the week.Featured albums:• Annahstasia, 'Tether' (Stream)• Mary Halvorson, 'About Ghosts' (Stream)• Brandee Younger, 'Gadabout Season' (Stream)• Joe Armon-Jones, 'All The Quiet (Part II)' (Stream)• The Cure, 'Mixes for a Lost World' (Stream)See our long list of albums out June 13 and sample more than 50 of them via our New Music Friday playlist on npr.org.CreditsHost: Stephen ThompsonGuest: Nate Chinen, WRTIProducer: Simon RentnerEditor: Otis HartExecutive Producer: Suraya MohamedVice President, Music and Visuals: Keith JenkinsSee 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

I shall procees and continue to rock the mic. Happy Friday, everyone from NPR Music. It's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson here with Nate Chenen from WRTI in Philadelphia. Hey, Nate. Hey, Stephen. It is a pleasure to have you here. We've got a terrific roundup of new records,

including a remix album from The Cure, new albums from Brandy Younger and Mary Halverson. But first, Nate, I wanted to talk to you. You were just at the Roots Pills. That I was. Tell me about that. It's really this big tent kind of hip-hop and R&B festival. This year I was especially interested to go because they were celebrating the 30th anniversary of Do You Want More?

Oh, yeah. With the chicks, I was a chocolate boy. Raised in the cellar with the rhythm like Ella. The Roots major label debut and... Anniversary is designed to make us feel old. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, no surprise. They crushed it.

And I have to say, Stephen, that in 2025, I was legitimately bowled over by the ferocity and sheer charisma of Lenny Kravitz. Lenny Kravitz is a charisma factory. I was like, all right, this will be fun, you know, 90s hits. And, man, he and his band just crushed it. Well, speaking of Lenny Kravitz, we're going to kick off with an artist who has. has opened for Lenny Kravitz. This is true. A new name for me, Anastasia has a new record called Tether.

Take care of me for anyone. Anastasia was also a new name to me, and I've done a little bit of research because this album is so transfixing. I was like, what is happening here? And who is this person? So Anastasia Inuke is her name, And a lot of people are coming to her right now because she plays the love interest in Kendrick Lamar's video for Luther, his single with Siza.

This video is really beautiful and simmering and sensual. And she is this, you know, a resting presence in it. She has just a lot of composure as an actor in this film. But the reason I wanted to bring that up, not just to name drop Kendrick Lamar, but I was thinking about the way that Luther Vandross functions as this kind of ghost reference in that song. He's not just a sample. He kind of haunts the song. And that quality I hear all over Anastasia's music too.

I read that when I read that when. she was 14 years old, her uncle gave her an iPod that had a playlist with Bill Withers, Nina Simone, and Janice Joplin on it. I thought those are three very interesting artists to kind of cite in this statement of principle for yourself as a singer-songwriter. Yeah, I definitely hear those influences and I definitely hear the timelessness of that kind of cross-section of where she's coming from. If you don't hear Tracy Chapman listening to this record, you have spent a lot less time listening to Tracy Chapman than I have.

Because that kind of knowing, kind of weary tremulousness cut with kind of moral authority that Tracy Chapman brings to every song she sings, I hear that influence here as well. Tracy Chapman is one of my favorite singers, and so I was immediately transfixed by Anastasia's voice. But I also just appreciate how many different styles she's trying on here. How many genres. There's definitely a lot of these songs are rooted in folk music, but there are songs that incorporate rock, jazz, pop, spoken word. I'm just seeing this, you know, this kind of new, fresh talent. This is her official debut album, but she has kind of self-released some stuff before this.

But at this point, I'm hearing this, and I'm like, why didn't Kendrick Lamar hire her to sing? Yeah, right. Yeah, that may be the next step. Yeah. I love that you mentioned Tracy Chapman because there is this fundamental, like, deep center of gravity. It's like a black hole's kind of center of gravity where everything is being pulled towards it, you know? She's just a really magnetic vocal presence

and, you know, it's not just the timbre, but it's also like her phrasing and her sense of pace and the way that the voice is presented in these different sonic environments. We are going to hear a lot more from Anastasia in the years to come, I feel confident in proclaiming that her fantastic new record is called Tether. Next up, the guitarist Mary Halverson has a new album. It's called About Ghosts.

Mary Halverson is one of the most decorated jazz guitarists around. She's a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient. She's worked with everyone from Anthony Braxton and John Zorn to Mark Rebo, Bill Frizzell. She's, you know, received an enormous number of accolades across the jazz world, and she's put out a string of really fantastic records. I should come right out and say it. This is a frontrunner for one of my albums of the year. This is just an unbelievable statement from one of my favorite artists, and it advances the narrative, you know, that she's been building over the last decade or so.

Mary has created music for small groups and slightly larger groups and slightly larger groups. Larger groups still. Yeah. With this particular band, she's just surrounded by incredible improvisers who really understand her language. I'm talking people like the vibraphonist Patricia Brennan and the drummer Tomaf Fujiwara and the trumpeter Adam O'Farrell, trombonist Jacob Garchick, bassist Nick Dunstan. I think that's all of the core people. That's the sextet she has called Amarillis. You've got a couple of saxophonists joining at times,

Emmanuel Wilkins and Brian Settles. There's this really fantastic push-pull throughout this album. She knows how to write structures for this ensemble that really enable things to sort of expand and blow up and get a little crazy, but also get minutely layered. and beautifully reactive,

all these different elements that can bloom in the context of a composition. From moment to moment, I find it a very almost suspenseful listen because you never really know what's around the corner. A word that I kept kind of writing down in my notes, and I mean it as a compliment,

even though it can sound like a pejorative, is busy. There's a busy quality to this music. There is so much going on. You just named all the, kind of central players, you know, and they're all just constantly weaving their, their instrumental voices together in ways that still somehow, even with all those participants, there's still some space to breathe here. There's a track called Even Tidal, you know, which has this, like, kind of calmer, more reflective, more low-key sound,

even as it's still weaving in these many, many voices. Nobody sounds like her. She plays this guild guitar with these heavy gauge strings, and she plucks really hard. She loves to add a wobble to the end of a phrase. She loves to give you this kind of shiver or this warp sensibility. She just has a very unusual sonic output. And so much of what she does, I think of as destabilizing. That is About Ghosts, the new album from Mary Halverson, one of many terrific records out today, June 13th.

We've got some more records we want to get to, but first, let's take a quick break. From NPR Music, it's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson with Nate Chenen from WRTI in Philadelphia. Nate, what's going on at the station? We are really happy because we have a new addition to our programming staff. His name is Julian Booker. He is our new associate program director for jazz. He's also on the air now hosting our Saturday evening show, which is called The Get Down. And then, you know, I'm still co-hosting our podcast, The Late Set. We recently had a blast going down to the Exit Zero Jazz Festival in Cape May and doing a whole bunch of live interviews. And we didn't interview her there. but we saw Brandy Younger at the festival, and one of our latest episodes

is a conversation with Brandy about her new album. Well, in the spirit of jazz, you just handed me the perfect segue. See what I did there, yeah. Because our next album is by Brandy Younger. It's called Get About Season. I'm going to guess

that most people listening to New Music Friday have at least heard the name Brandy Younger. She's had a really, impactful last decade or so in the spotlight. And with each album, she seems to deepen her artistry as well as her prominence. And this album, I think, is her strongest total statement as a creator so far. It is all original music and features her trio at Barry the Lead. She is a harpist.

Yeah. And she is one of the most prominent harpists on the scene. She certainly has elevated the profile of the harp in jazz and improvised music. Also has drawn attention to the legacy of black women playing the harp. She is constantly paying tribute to her two most important forebears, Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby. She told me that she recorded this album with Alice Coltrane's harp. Yes. So there is a real direct...

lineage and legacy being expressed here. Her working band has Roshan Carter on bass and Alan Mednard on drums. Roshan also produced the album instead of kind of going into a studio and knocking it out. They really sat with it. They had multiple sessions. They recorded it at home. Roshan really got into production. But in a way that is very subtle. I think they really just wanted to take the time to create something that feels really refined. It's a challenge to make a harp-forward jazz record that still has a sense of propulsion to it. Elements of this record are really cinematic to use a phrase that gets applied to music probably more than it should.

The opening kind of interlude reckoning feels like it would kind of sweep in in a climactic scene from a movie. You can kind of hang back in a... a song like End Means, which has, you know, Shabaka comes on and plays the flute, it can have this kind of transporting, relaxing quality. But if you dig deeper into it, there's still some real power here. Randy is a groove meister. Yeah.

I think she would tell you, 70s soul is kind of her default. That's the sweet spot for her. And so that's her resting pulse. It's like the sound of like 70s. What a great resting pulse. What a way to live. She spent a good part of the early phase of her career really kind of pushing back against the perceptions of the harp as this instrument of wellness and diaphanous, you know, like dreamy, angelic wonder, really trying to say, no, I am a member of the rhythm section, like, I can groove. One thing about this album is that she does both.

There's a tune here called BBL. I've seen her perform it a few times, and she always introduces it in a really fun. funny way. BBL is an acronym that stands for Brazilian buttlift, but she never says that. So she can do all of that. But at the same time, she really is no longer shying away from those things that the harp does that no other instrument can do, right? Those glissondi and those like beautiful shimmering textures, those are things that she is fully at peace with and she knows how to marshal that vibe and those resources, I think this album, the word that comes to mind for me is balance. It's all just so beautifully balanced. You think about a track like surrender, you know,

which opens with kind of a meandering harp. You're getting like kind of this harp solo. But the song is drifting into something that's making space for this wonderful, super dynamic piano solo, very acoustic bass forward. It's like letting a lot of the different instruments breathe. Before we finish talking about this record, we should acknowledge the title. Gatabout season is referring to kind of a dedicated pursuit of pleasure and joy. You mentioned that piano solo. That is by Courtney Bryan, who is a MacArthur-winning composer as well as a pianist. And you mentioned Shabaka.

There's also a great guest appearance by the alto saxophonist Josh Johnson, who is a Michelle Indigocello and SML associate. You know, he's one of those people who pops up on a lot of great, great records. And his appearance on this album comes on a track titled Discernment. And it is just one of those like deep exhale kind of moments. He brings this like warmth and rounded feeling and just spiritual vibe to his cameo. Let's get about season, the new album by Brandy Younger. Next up, Joe Armand Jones has a new record. It's called All the Quiet. So we've given you jazz guitar. We've given you jazz harp. Now we're giving you jazz keyboards, all the colors of the jazz rainbow. British keyboardist, producer, songwriter, Joe Armand Jones kind of made this big double-length record, but released it in two parts, just a couple months apart.

Part one came out back in March. All the Quiet Part Two is out now. But it's really meant, to be taken as one big, grand, ambitious piece of music that's rooted in jazz, but it's incorporating dub and soul and funk. There's so much to absorb here. Yeah. I feel like this is such a leveling up for Joe Armin Jones. He is somebody who, I feel, makes every musical situation sound and feel better. Seems to have, like, that catalytic energy. but I feel like as a bandleader and as a sort of sound visionary, like this is the one. It did not surprise me to learn that some of this came out of his study during the pandemic. Right.

You know, how many times have we talked at this point about like, oh, the pandemic gave me an opportunity to do X, right? Whether it's sourdough starters or starting a podcast or sharpening your knife skills. Well, in the case of Joe Armand Jones, he basically built himself an old-fashioned dub studio. So real-to-real machines and spring plate reverb and all this very geeky, old-school, mechanical recording technology. And he figured out how to use that in a studio that became part of his creative practice. He's part of this London jazz scene that really understands dub music. It's a part of their foundation. Now he has the tools to access the producer side of that and the engineer side of that.

So it's like, man, it feels so deeply considered and expertly executed. It's just like, whoa, okay. Among other things, that creates an environment that's really conducive to collaboration. And so he's able to bring in guest voices. In a lot of different styles, you have spoken word. There's a track called, Acknowledgement is Key, you know, featuring Hack Baker, that builds to kind of a spoken word vocal. of the wrong reparation, yi-g-y-y-dhocan

I called my grandson asking her old age stories, way before the toilet we've destroyed our communion glories. She lays before me her way in her cosmic journey, fulfilling life. I've never sat so close to it, apart of one of the many coffins I've seen in the silent stenches of stroke. You've also got a song called Another Place, where Green Tea Pang, who we talked about on this show a couple months ago, comes in, Wulu comes in,

and you have this mix of sung vocals and rapped vocals. Room for voices to come in and kind of interrupt the flow of these records in really welcome and intriguing ways. I had to cut through family to get back in line. Her feelings they're lost. Switch off when I try to speak my mind. I can't breathe with you. I can't speak with you.

It's complicated when I'm... You felt cold when you left Who knows what's best Trying to speak of chess It makes no sense You also have Some real playfulness Some real sonic experimentation

There's a track called a PSR orchestra That has the feel of almost like a warped Calliope, you know like that warped calliope music You know where you're in just some kind of demented circus

It's like a strange little kind of hypnotic interlude I think the spirit of dub really feeds into this. This music is constantly being muddied a little bit. Let's see if we can try it from this angle and this angle.

Always in the service of like groove and vibe. Joe Armand Jones is just a master of vibe and has been very influential, maybe even stealth influential, in the growth of that presence, in the jazz, the global jazz and improvised music world.

You can jam out on a single chord or two chords for like a good long time and like really dig in rather than like chase complicated structures. Like you can do that and it can be not only valid but like transportive. You know, along with partners like the saxophonist, Nebaya Garcia, who is, who appears at times on this album as a member of the horn section. he's been a member of her band forever. And so there's this scene that is coalescing around some of these values. That's Joe Armin Jones.

His new album is All The Quiet Part 2. Put them all together, you get a nearly two-hour record that we highly recommend. We've 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 13th. But first, let's take a quick break. From NPR Music, it's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson here with Nate Chenen from WRTI in Philadelphia. Got one more record we wanted to talk about.

It's mixes of a lost world by The Cure. One of my favorite albums of last year was The Cure's Songs of a Lost World. Their first album in ages, a really epic kind of, orchestral, really searching beautiful, doomstruck record from a band that still sounds in peak form, what, 40-some-odd years into its career? Not all remix records are created equal. And when The Cure puts out a remix album, My Ears Per Gop, this is their, I believe, their third remix album, and they've all been amazing. This is kind of taking Songs of a Lost World. And, It's technically, it is three remix albums.

You know, there's a two-disc version, there's a three-disc version. It's 24 tracks. Songs of a Lost World is eight tracks. And each one gets three very, very different remixes. And you're just getting so many different views and perspectives on these songs, which are certainly bleak. But there is joy to be found here. and many of these remix artists really find that joy. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the operative word here is world.

This whole project really does feel like a legend of Zelda type thing, where it's like you can just wander around. Totally, it's an open world. Open world, there are so many different versions or, you know, parallel realities to choose from. Really, like, embracing the spirit of the remix as an art. form. The artists who have been enlisted to remix are heavyweights, right? So we're talking about Paul Oakenfold and Fortet, Mogwai, Orbital, you know, this is like handing raw

materials over to master chefs. The way this project opens and the way that it ends. It opens with a remix of I can never say goodbye. Paul Oakenfold handles the remix. and it really kind of opens the album on this portentous, to hear, I'm going to use this word again, cinematic, note taking a lot of the orchestral qualities of the original record and amplifying them. It's a lovely reworking of the song, but it doesn't necessarily start to hint

at how many different directions this project ends up going over the course of its runtime. And between the first song and the last song, the last song being an 11-minute, remix of N-Song by Maguai, this fantastic veteran post-rock band. You know, they're bringing the kind of epic, shimmery, booming qualities out, where it really feels like it's meeting at a midpoint between the cure and Maguire. But in between, you get four on the floor dance beats.

You get house music. There's a track where Shanti Celeste remixes Alone. And Alone was kind of the first singing. from Songs of the Lost World. And it's this long, billowy, bleak, sad song. And Shanti Celeste turns it into a banger. Spending another two hours with this record that I love, but in the hands of artists who are teasing out different elements of it

that either you didn't know were there or weren't there just only enhances my appreciation for the songwriting at the core of this project. this project. You mentioned end song and this is a tune that on the original album has this incredibly dramatic build, right? It feels almost operatic. Robert Smith doesn't even enter vocally until something like what seven minutes in? Yeah, where there's a long windup before you even hear his voice. The chorus of this song is devastating, right? Singing, it's all gone. It's gone. Nothing left of all I loved. It all feels wrong. It's all gone. It's all gone. No hopes, no dreams, no world. No, I don't belong. No, I don't belong here. I mean, um, whoa, right?

The Orbital remix, which is track two on this whole package. I thought this was a really compelling rewriting of this tune. The vocals come in a little earlier. You get less of the kind of wind-swept thunder and stern and drang kind of vibe but but there's still a really powerful undercarriage to to the sound the lyrics really pop for me and so i thought it was really effective it was like not undermining the the grandeur of the original you know or the bleakness of the original lyric but just kind of like bringing you there on a different route you know I mentioned a version of Alone that I really like. There's another treatment of Alone by Fortet.

This song is just a masterclass in how to tease out different elements of a song while still staying true to all of them. The original is kind of a majestic dirge. And the Fortet remix, which is, you know, bringing out some of its, you know, kind of a little bit dancier qualities, leans hard into both the dirgyness and the majesty. And that, first of all, that's kind of. you know, the root of a lot of my favorite dance music. If I'm on a dance floor, I want to be a little depressed.

And I think that Fortet understands that. Do you feel like there is a producer who, like, especially understands the essence of the cure? You're just like, wow, this is really, like, a deep understanding. Because I do think Fortet really really. understands the cure. I think Magwai, in their treatment of N-Song, I think clearly understands, you know, like where, how much connective tissue there is between what Robert Smith and the cure do and what Maguire has done for 30 years. Yeah. There are certainly some pretty radical

reworking. I think the ones that are finding ways to meet at the midpoint between what the remixing artist is known for and what the original artist is known for are doing some of the work that I found most compelling during my first run through this gargantuan collection. It's a whole journey. It's a whole journey. It's got so much for you. If you loved that great record from last year, definitely dig in. That is Mixes of a Lost World by The Cure out today, June 13th.

Now, Nate, we wanted to do a lightning round with some of our other favorites. I'm going to kick us off. The decorated UK rapper A.J. Tracy is back with his third album. It's an ambitious set of songs about getting the most out of life and striking a balance between legacy and family. It's got guests like Georgia Smith, Masterpiece, and more. A.J. Tracy has a distinctive voice. He's also got a genre-blurring sound, a bunch of UK hits, and now he's got a new record. It's called Don't Die Before You're Dead.

Wake up in a tea house on your own turn the line back on, Kong, cuddle and snooze. I don't know how many times I told Mom that I found money on floor. I ain't find money on floor. Theo Crocker is a trumpeter and producer and bandleader whose new album Dream Manifest really captures some of his ideas about what contemporary jazz should sound like today. It leans into elements of hip-hop and electronic music and it is informed on the creative end by his experience with psychedelics. He's got a whole bunch of collaborators rotating in and out, and he has a really focused idea about what a contemporary electro jazz effort

from a trumpet player should sound like, and I think it really works. Kosi Fannie Tutti has been musically active since the late 1960s. She was a founding member of the experimental performance art band Throbbing Gristle and has spent the last 50-plus years pushing a guy. against the boundaries of sound, sex, politics, and basically everything that has a boundary. Now, Kosi Fannie Tutti is back with an appropriately throbbing new album full of strange rhythms and unsettling ambience. It's called Tutti 2.2. Drummer Terry Lynn Carrington and singer Christy Dashill have a new album called We Insist 2025 with an exclamation point.

This is a tribute to an album that was made by Max Roach with a new album. Abby Lincoln in the very early 1960s called We Insist Freedom Now Suite. That album was a landmark of the civil rights movement and its musical soundtrack, and Terry Lynn conceived of this project as a tribute coming just on the heels of the Max Roach Centennial. So it is a track-by-track reimagining of the Freedom Now Suite, but recast in a completely different musical and stylistic framework. It feels very R&B adjacent. It has a lot of smoother texture and complex rhythm at the same time. So it is very much in tune with what Carrington and Dashel do in their respective solo careers. And it's a real meld. And obviously, it coalesces around an idea of activism and social justice. at a time when, you know, we could use those things.

Finally, an unusual and frequently beautiful bit of archival music worth celebrating, Ella Hanshaw was a self-taught country musician who switched to Pentecostal gospel music in midlife. Her music reflects on her faith and failings and recordings that span much of her adult life and themes ranging from the personal to the deeply spiritual. During her lifetime Hanshaw never released an official record, but there's now a compilation of home and church recordings assembled by her granddaughter and released nationally titled Ella Hanshaw's Black Book. Nate, this is the part of the show where we put ourselves on the spot and ask ourselves what is the best song that you heard coming out today, June 13th. Can I sort of swerve and give you the most memorably bad song that I heard?

in preparation for this episode. This comes from an album that did not ultimately make the cut today. But it's from someone that we care about a lot. This is the new Neil Young album. Oh, sure. Talking to the Trees, which features his newish band, The Chrome Hearts. This album is really quite bad. Oh, dear.

But it's bad in an interesting way. When Neil Young is bad, he tends to be bad in an interesting. Yeah, it's bad in a very Neil Young way, a very, like, cranky, topical, kind of like, let me just get this off my chest sort of way. There is a song called Let's Roll Again. Oh, no. Off this album. Oh, Nate.

Yes. No. It is not a good song, Stephen, but it is memorably bad. And one of the things that I chuckle at, he's just kind of ranting about the auto industry. And the line. You know what it is, right? If you're a fascist, then get a Tesla. The song that will haunt your dreams.

It is quite catchy, in fact. So, you know, that is my advisory warning. Let's roll again. It's not a good song, but it is a very Neil Young song. So if you love Neil Young, like, you got to love all of him. And I mean, I love Neil Young. I don't know if I have to love. everything he's ever done.

Well, Nate, I'm going to go with a song that will haunt me in a great way, that Anastasia record. The very first track we played was called Take Care of Me. So sly catchy, so kind of husky and dusky, but also sweet. It's such a showcase for that gorgeous voice that I suspect we are going to be hearing not only in her own music, but as features on other people's albums, kind of the way Obong Jay are popped up on the Anastasia record. I expect to see a lot of track listings containing the words

featuring Anastasia in the months and years to come. That is our show for this week. Thank you so much, Nate Chenen, for taking time out of your week at WRTI in Philadelphia. Always a pleasure, Stephen. 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 Rent,

and edited by Otis Hart. The executive producer of NPR music is Soraya Mohamed, and her boss is the wonderful Keith Jenkins, NPR's vice president of music and visuals. We'll be back next week to talk about the new album by Hime with World Cafe host Raina Duras of WXPN in Philadelphia. Until then, take a moment to be well, hang out with your chosen family,

and treat yourself to lots of great music.