NPR Music - The most anticipated fall '25 albums

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

We get a jump on the upcoming fall releases we’re most excited about, including new ones from Skullcrusher, S. Carey, Silvana Estrada and more. Featured artists and albums:1. Snōōper: ‘Worldwide’ (Oct. 3)2. Sudan Archives: ‘The BPM’ (Oct. 17)3. Claire Rousay: ‘Little Death’ (Oct. 31)4. Crushed: ‘No Scope’ (Sept. 26)5. Cate Le Bon: ‘Michelangelo Dying’ (Sept. 26)6. S. Carey: ‘Watercress’ (Oct. 3)7. Emily Sprague: ‘Cloud Time’ (Oct. 10)8. Skullcrusher: ‘And Your Song Is Like A Circle’ (Oct. 17)9. Silvana Estrada: ‘Vendrán Suaves Lluvias’ (Oct. 17)Weekly reset: Walking through the woods on an autumn afternoonEnjoy the show? Share it with a friend and leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.Questions, comments, suggestions or feedback of any kind always welcome: [e-mail] 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

We're in the home stretch. Yeah. Hazel Sills, Sheldon Pierce. Hazel, welcome. Oh, sorry. I've got to try to buy something. Are you here? Yes, I'm here.

I'm so sorry, guys. We're getting a jump here on the fall album releases we're most excited about. It's all songs considered. I'm Robin Hilton, our fall preview. Did you all know there's a new Taylor Swift album coming out? Who's that? Taylor Swift. Yeah, I didn't.

I... Yeah. It's a big one. I hear she's got a lot of fans. Interesting. I thought she was kind of like a left field. Kind of a, yeah, up and comer. Deeply underground.

Her album, The Life of a Showgirl, can't really play it or talk about it because we just don't have that kind of pole. Does anybody is the question. Nobody, yeah, no single. Her own brother-in-law hasn't heard it. Yeah. Or brother-in-law to be, I should say. Nothing out yet from it, at least as of this taping, no other details other than it is supposed to come out on October 3rd.

That's a pretty big record for this fall. The Onion actually had the best take on it. Did you see The Onion's headline for it? Taylor Swift, hence new album, could be about her. I don't know. I guess we'll have to see. It could be. It's her most personal record.

Her most vulnerable. Yes, exactly. It really opens up. The Life of a Showgirl, October 3rd. Tons of other stuff we're excited about for this fall that we can play and tell you all about who wants to start. Yeah, I want to play a song from an album is called Worldwide, and it's by a band called Snooper. Incredible band. Wait, why are you laughing? You always bring, like, they're called Snuggle. Listen, I'm not making the band names. It's not me.

They're called hug, hug. Listen, it's 2025. It's 2025. There are only so many things you can name your band. So we're running out of names. That's what's happening. All right. Let's play the title cut.

Good stuff, Azel. There's just so much to love about this band. Like I hear so much 80s new wave in this group. I hear Pylon. I hear Devo, but I also hear kind of like a brady cheerleader kind of style of punk. Like it reminds me of like the Go Team. If anyone was a Go Team fan. I mean, you name-checked everything that I was thinking when I listened to this.

Oh, I just stole your home. Well, no, I mean, I just feel like they really thread that needle between old and new really, really well. Like it's like I almost get whiplash zigzagging back and forth when I listen. Like, oh, this is classic New Wave punk. But then, no, this is like something totally from the future. Yeah, yeah. There's something just so fun-loving and light about it as well, even as it's really snappy, really riffy.

It's like there's something about it that reminds me of the sensation of eating pop rocks. Twelve songs on the album and they clock in at 28 minutes total. Yeah, it's a sugar rush for sure. Yeah, sugar rush. Very easy to listen to. And it's all just this breathless. Sprint. So Snooper, Worldwide is the album

October 3rd, the release date. Sheldon, you want to do that Lana Del Rey album you've been chasing all year? If only we could. It's called stove now, by the way. I would have gone with, like, lamp

maybe, or sandwich. But stove's good. Stove's pretty good. Is it? It is stove now. What was it before? What was it? I think at one point it was Lassau. Yeah, it's gone through so many iterations. Another point it was something else.

Yeah. Well, I think we talked about that maybe on the spring preview or summer preview, because we thought maybe it's coming. Yeah, that's how. Still don't have it. What's your safety then, if we've, since we can't do that? Yeah, instead, I'm going to go to the singer-songwriter and violinist, Brittany Parks, who records as Sudan Archives.

She's got a new album, her first since 2022. It's called the BPM, and I want to listen to My Type. So I went to find a loft that she meant I'm trying to soft in the inner clothes and her shirts and her blue-brown jeans. Right on a sauce and her name is Bloss. And she bought a boat just a better foes can't enjoy the sea. Her mind is woke and she's trying to smoke and I'm trying to do it. So I went back and I listened again to some of the earliest Sudan archive stuff to try to see like, should I have seen this

clubby sound coming? Was it there all along? And I just didn't see this coming. Like, some of her early stuff is, it's almost quirky. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think of her as a sort of restless artist, like never sort of doing the same thing twice. But to your point, this record feels like the furthest from her wheelhouse as anything that she's done. I mean, 2020's natural brown prom queen was one of our top 10 albums of that year. It's like really was such an evolution for her in a different way. Ecclectic, self-assured soul. It was so big, so bold, so audacious.

This record, I mean, it changes the state of play again to your point in a very clear way. It's like digified club forward. There's some like housey stuff on here, almost kind of like forward. So I wonder if this is, I haven't heard the whole thing. Like, is this a good starting point? Yes, it is like very clearly a move to the dance floor for her. But I think it maintains a lot of the most interesting stuff about her music. Compositionally, she's obviously very skilled.

She's classically trained. And there is this elevated aspect to it that you get with all of her records. But as a person who probably takes themselves too seriously, I'm always. like awestruck by a serious musician then like figuring out how not. Wait, does, you take yourselves too seriously? I do for sure. I'm Sheldon. That's crazy because neither of us do Sheldon.

We don't do seriously at all, so I don't know why you are. When I come on the show, I think I'm barely interested in what I have to say. I don't know how anyone else could be, but... Hey, I'm trying to get there. We've had so many artists this year, like Amore, FK Twigs, who are are looking to the club, looking to that music for their own projects in a way that I feel like has really freed them. And I think the same thing seems to be happening on this album where it's like, you know, I think club music gets a bad rap sometimes for being overly simplistic or repetitive or, you know, and I think like for these artists, like including Sudan archives, it can be this vessel through which you explore your loosest. impulses. Like, what makes you feel good? Like, what makes you feel like you're having fun?

There's just a sense of experimentation and freedom and, yeah, I definitely hear it. Well, I've definitely come around to club music more than at any other point in my life because of all of the artists you just mentioned. Sudan Archives, the BPM. That is out October 17th. I want to do something totally, totally different. there is so much great electronic and ambient music coming this fall. There's one from Emily Sprague that I'm excited about called Cloud Time. I think we're going to talk about that one a little bit later on in the show. Carelease Coverdale, we talked about her on our spring preview. She had an album in May.

She has another one in September. She's got a third one coming in November, all these gorgeous electronic and ambient albums from Carly's Coverdale. but I want to go with the latest from Claire Rousey. Claire Rousey also releasing her third album of the year at the end of October. It is called Little Death. I mean, don't you want to follow every little sound? Yeah.

Just flitting around. What is that? What is that? What is that sound? How is she doing that? So this song from Claire Rousey's upcoming album, the song is called Just. I think this music is actually really, really hard to do.

to do well, I should say. So much, I'm going to call this ambient music, although I don't really know what, it's ambient. I mean ambient, yeah, ambient music, experimental soundscape, whatever you want to call it. So much of it, I think just ends up being wallpaper, like almost mindless in a way, like you forget it's even there. And maybe that's partly the intent of a lot of this kind of music just to not get in the way too much. But Claire Rousey, I don't know, her work just feels so intentional, so distinctive. even if it's kind of drifting in the ether, like, I am so in her universe. Yeah, I mean, I often think about her music as an artist at the center of a room, sort of like compiling everything that is going on around her,

as opposed to, like, a lot of ambient music specifically exists in the background of a life. Or she's taking that background and pulling it forward and turning it into... But there's also, I mean, there are like strains of conversation like occurring in her music. I think the process for her is much more active. Yeah, and I think she asks that of the listener, which I think is important, which is not, I mean, we've talked about the wave of ambient music in the last few years and kind of the rise of it on Spotify and this kind of like lean back listening that's so much ambient music, you know, requires of listeners nowadays. And I think that when she takes, you know, these fragments of sound from her daily life,

she's really putting like a magnifying glass to them. and she's asking the listener to listen closely. Like, Robin, I think to your point about, like, wanting to follow her, I think that's why her approach to ambient music is so interesting and compelling to me. It's not just pretty background noise. There's something a little unsettling or weird or mysterious to her work. And, yeah, similarly, like anything she does, I'm very interested. Well, Claire Rousey's on a role.

Three albums this year. I've been doing lots of collaborations, a tour. This album, Little Death, out on October 31st, the very end of the month. And it follows when she had in March, a March album called No Floor, and then another one called Quilted Lament that came out in May. Okay, Hazel, we're back to you. So I want to play a bit from an album that I'm also excited about this year called No Scope. It's from this Los Angeles duo called Crushed, which I feel like me and a lot of other critics really fell in love with this EP they put out a few years ago called Extra Life.

Now they're coming back this year, this September, with their first full-length album. And they're a very cool band. And I want to play a song from the album titled One Shot. Yeah, I love the contrast in this one. Like when it starts off, it is so, it's almost kind of. sinister and I think oh yeah this is gonna be really nice and creepy and then it just instantly bursts into this glittery pop jam yeah I think that's kind of why I like them because they're really kind of walking this border of like trip hop and shoe gaze and then just like

pure late 90s early 2000s pop music and I feel like there are a lot of artists I feel like working in the same space right now as crushed kind of making music that pulls on those trip-hop influences, and I think a band like this might run the risk of just being like a vibes curator. I know we were just talking about late back listening. But I just think that they do what they do so well. Like, there is something very pristine to this music.

I just feel like when they reach into the past and they sort of play with these sounds, everything I've heard from this album does sound a lot more pop than what they put out on their EP, which I feel like was pretty dark. But I don't know, the songs are just so, so strong. There's something about it that's very alt-radio crossover in 1999. Yeah, yeah.

I've seen people describe it as dream pop. It doesn't really feel like floaty or surreal to me in that way. There's something about it that's very firmly planted on the ground. And honestly, can be kind of somber, to your point about the way that this song starts off, Robin. But it does have this very nice balance. I would have been happy if they doubled down a little more on that opening sound a little bit and got a little, like, they could have had a bridge in here, I think, in this song, One Shot, where it just, like, it's weird and dark for a little while before kind of coming back.

But, yeah, this is one of those bands. I ended up going down this internet rabbit hole trying to find out more about them because I read this quote from them. They said this song, One Shot, well, here's the quote. They say, like Sniper Wolf making her final plea to Solid Snake, Like one shot is about lying on the brink of death and begging to be put out of your misery. And I, so I don't know who sniper wolf is. Those are video game characters, Robin.

So then I discovered Metal Gear of the video game series Metal Gear. And then I just- Then Robin had to go out and buy the video game. Yeah, and played all of them. It's a great series. But they seem to have like this real love of video games and fantasy stuff because no scope apparently is a reference to shooter video. Game Sheldon, you're a player.

I don't... Yeah, yeah. It's a term that is used when you have a sniper rifle and you fire on your opponent without having to look through the scope. Because you're just that good. You know-scoped them. Yeah. No-scope them.

But, yeah, no-scope. The record from crushed is out September 26th. The first full release day after fall officially starts. September 26th. Sheldon, what else do you got for us today? The Welsh producer and indie polymath, Kate Laban, has a new record coming out. It's called Michelangelo Dying.

That's a very dramatic title. And the song I want to play is called Is It Worth It? Happy Birthday. Yeah, I'm curious to hear more what you think about this album and this song. and everything, Sheldon. There are other songs that I like more than this one, but I read that this one is sort of the centerpiece of the album,

so I figured maybe we should go with it. Yeah, this song is sort of the centerpiece of this record, and, you know, it has, the record honestly has a lot of backstory. All of it is very interesting, but personally, I think it's far more moving to go into this record blindly and just sort of live in it a little bit. I feel like I'm being subsumed in this album when I listen to it.

When I hit play, there's something almost like shimmerous and amorphous about her guitar tone on a lot of these songs. Something sort of like smeared about the vocals. All of it is like disembodied a little bit. And I think that is really what drew me to this more than its story per se. Yeah, there's something really psychedelic about this music to me. to the point about the album title being kind of dramatic. There is such drama to the music on this album. And I feel like her music has just gotten so much richer

and more complicated and complex as she's grown as an artist and a producer. And I hear that so much on this album. I hear someone who is using the studio to the fullest extent and really blowing up their sound in this very grandiose way. Yeah, that's why I'm like the story of the story of, the record, it's, while beautiful and fascinating, is like not the draw here, in my opinion. You listen to this record and you're like, wow, Kate can really produce a record. Well, what is the elevator pitch of the story of this record? I mean, I know broadly it's about

love and lost in that she was sort of reluctant to do it. Yeah, yeah. It was kind of a process of like turning herself inside out, started as a bit of a love story, ended up in a different place. Well, I thought the fact that she was kind of reluctant to go in some of these directions was interesting because I feel like it comes through in the music, that reticence. Like, it sounds when I listen to these songs and try to make sense of the lyrics, it sounds like she's almost writing around whatever it is that she is on her mind instead of like coming right at it.

That's kind of what I was getting at with. esotericness of it. It's like there is not a lot of like what you would think of as like penetrating writing I would say across this album or like not a lot of directness in terms of what she was is facing. So Kate LeBond Michelangelo dying

that out on September 26th. I think I'm going to go next to S. Carey. He's got a new one coming out. You know I don't know where you all fall on the whole Bonie Vare universe. Are you like You fans? I'm not a fan. I'm not deep.

That was not a ringing endorsement, I will say. Well, I mean, he's got this. I just got deep in the Bonne Verre. Like, I didn't really know that much about Escarry's work. Like, I'm not deep in the Bono Ver universe. Well, because so S. Carey's done a lot with BoniVare, been the drummer in the band. But S. Carey has put out a lot of his own solo stuff. He's been doing that for like a good 15 years or so now.

And for me personally, I feel like he's kind of. eclipsed bone of air. Interesting. I feel like I listen to this and I know why you would say that, though. Well, I mean, I appreciate all the different

ways that Justin Vernon has pushed and stretched his sound and taken chances. It hasn't always landed for me. I mean, but, and this is also like right in your wayhouse. Yeah, this is like, I mean, maybe as scary stuff has, he's been, I think he's been more

consistently great, at least for what I'm wanting to hear anyway. This new EP, it's not a full-length album, an EP from S. Carey is called Watercress, and this is the title cut. I don't know. I mean, I think this is really beautiful. It's, I mean, it's so perfectly produced and arranged. I love his voice. I don't know. What do you think? I mean, I do think the vocals, they're kind of like Carrie and Lowell coded to me. That's why I did. I did get that. Yeah, like this is right in Robin's wheelhouse. Right away, I hit play on this and I said, Robin will.

He goes for this. And, like, to be fair, it's awesome. Like, I love that too. All right. I do think in comparison to Monty Verre and the stuff that Justin Vernon has, Justin Vernon is moving in much weirder directions. Yeah, he's moved away from this. Yeah, over the last, over the last, what, like seven years probably?

Yeah, it's been a while. Yeah, he hasn't been in this. in many years. But I do love, like, you could almost take it as ambient in a different sense. Like, there is... Like, is it's wallpaper for you? No, no. I think in terms of there being an almost, like, incorporeal sense to it, a translucence to it,

I feel like I can, like, almost see through it. Like, that is kind of the quality of it. It is in the room here with me, but I'm not sure I could reach out. and touch it is the energy that it has given me. And I like that kind of thing. It's interesting because I don't know if I feel like I hear translucent to me. Like if anything, I feel like this song is very grounding to me.

Like, and maybe it's because I was listening to the lyrics a lot. And, you know, it's clearly so inspired by the natural world and it has this real, you know, kind of simplicity to its imagery. And there's also like a sense of hope as well in it. You know, there's that line like, don't be in your head, which is also why I thought Robin might connect with this song and more than just the way that it sounds. Yeah, I don't know.

It makes me think a little bit about the pros and cons of staying in your lane as an artist versus mixing things up. I mean, S. Carey definitely has stayed in his lane over the years way more than Bonavere has. Sometimes I just want that. I just want a straight-up singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar making beautiful sounds lighten me up with their words. I've been there. And also, it's like some artists don't feel like the need to reach beyond that, and that should be fine too.

So S. Carey Watercress, that EP is out on October 3rd. All right, we've got the weekly reset coming up at the end of the show. I know we all have one more thing that we want to play, but we should maybe mention some of the other stuff that's coming out that we're not going to get to play. There is a bunch of it. Some of the stuff we've already featured on the show, this year when the albums were first announced. I'll just mention some of them. Jeff Tweety's triple album, Twilight Override, that's coming September 26th. Patrick Watson's, uh-oh, also September 26th. We've got the Florence in the Machine album coming out. That's a big one this year. Everybody Scream. That's October 31st. Oh, and Maddie Diaz, Maddie Diaz had one of my favorite albums last year called Weird Faith already back with a follow-up called Fatal.

Optimist, that is coming October 10th. There are so many other albums I could have shouted out and played. There is an album from this Copenhagen-based band called Halo Plus that's coming out September 19th called Musicality. And then the rock band Baratalia is putting out an album called Some Like It Hot that comes out October 17th. And everything I've heard from it is just like they are trying to be a capital R rock band. And I'm very excited for that. I knew you were pretty hot on that band. We played J-SOM on a Contenders episode.

The record, Belong, is out October 10th. That same day, there's a new record out from the R&B singer Amber Mark. It's called Pretty Idea. The post-punk band Just Mustard has an album coming out. It's called We Were Just Here. That is out October 24th. And the drummer and composer, Mackiah McCraven, has a series of EPs coming out.

I think there's four of them. They're at October 31st. There's a whole bunch of like anniversary albums coming out this fall. Patty Smith's Horses, 50th anniversary edition of that coming October 10th and the 50th anniversary edition of Tom Waits Nighthawks at the Diner. That is coming October 24th. But we all have one more thing that we want to play Hazel. Robin, you mentioned this, I think, at the beginning of the show,

but Emily Sprague has a new album coming out in October. It's called Cloud Time. I feel like a lot of people probably know Emily as the lead singer of the band Florist, but she also makes ambient kind of synthesis-driven work under her own name, all of which I've really loved, and this album sounds like it's going to be no different, and I wanted to play a song off of it called Tokyo One.

Yeah, I think everything that I said about Claire Rousey, you could say about Emily Sprague too. Like just so much color and character. And I don't know, like, I keep coming back to the word humanity, just like this like a humanist in these, these otherwise, I guess, pretty digital artificial landscapes that she sort of imagines and builds up. There's significantly less movement here, like,

or at least the movement is far more gradual. And it really kind of does feel like hovering over a city, taking in its splendor? Like there's the sense that you're like astral projecting in a way. She recorded these songs. You know, she performed them. She was improvising them.

You know, when she was on tour in Japan and, you know, kind of just captured the music on stage and was really, you know, responding to the energy in the room as she was making this music. And there's something very sweeping and enveloping about this music. I feel like the last few Emily Spray

releases, there was kind of an element of like quirkiness or like surprise that I don't hear here, but it's like a, it's a completely different experience. And I, I feel like almost like a wash in this music where I haven't really felt that way with her music in the past. But still has me locked in. You know, that's what I'm saying, like the similarities to Claire Rousey is that it's pretty drifty. But, um, I don't know. It's, still it's not losing me. I'm not forgetting that I'm listening to it, you know. So Emily Sprague, the album, Cloud Time. Emily Sprague having a good year too. Yeah. Florist record, Jelly Wish. You're a big florist fan. I brought Jelly Wish to the show. Yeah, that was back in April.

And like, I mean, the next thing I want to bring is sort of in the florist vein. It's the folk singer-songwriter Helen Ballantine, who performs as skull crusher, not a very folk name, but she's got a new record, and it's called, and your song is like a circle. I want to hear exhale. Can I be honest? Sure. I don't think I knew what skull crusher is. I think I heard skull crusher, and I immediately thought of the Yule song Skull Crusher,

which sounds more like what you would think it would sound like based on the name. Yeah. And so I thought, oh, great, we're going to play Skull Croucher. It'll be good to get a little, get some noise in there, kind of rock out a little bit. And then I heard this and I thought, okay, I'm clearly completely off track here. Yeah. I mean, this is gorgeous. I love it.

But, I mean, there is something about this release that sounds like it can be even more beat-driven. I feel like there are, like, more dynamic shifts across this record in particular, more variation than you usually get on a whispery folk album. them. The shifts can be like very subtle, but they're there. The songs to me sound sort of like an old manor house that's haunted by a young ghost, and she's lost in yearning, but not malevolent, and she's also got great taste. Wow, that's so specific. You really thought that through. Like, you've got the whole narrative there and everything. The vocals sort of like wafting around in the background really make for such an ethereal experience. Coming to a theater

well Sheldon just explained probably why this is going to be one of my favorite albums of the year I can't even tell you how many times I've listened to Exhale in particular I think it is so insanely beautiful and it just builds in this intense way I mean yeah you see you read the word skull crusher and you're like well this is like folk whatever this song crushes me this there is a depth and a darkness to this song and to her music. Like, I think of Helen Ballantine as being like, you know, kind of in the same lineage as like Grupper or like Julia Holter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's an intensity here. So that album from Skull Crusher, and your song is Like a Circle, is out on October 17th. That is a very busy release day.

Yeah. There's a lot of stuff coming out that day, including the one that I want to play. And we can wrap the show up after this one from Silvana Estrada, singer-songwriter from Mexico. She's got this new album called Vendron Swaves Juvius. There will come soft rains. Every track I've heard from this album has just been so lovely.

The one I want to play is called No Tevayas Sins-Saberer. Yeah no to save us. We're going to scumbras, Maybe Weard about Incajas

Miedos and reproaches Tirandolos Toe If you learn to To learn to do without

know That I I I want I'm I'm I'm I'm

We've talked about the perfect Sunday morning on the show. We've talked about music to calm the nerves. I think this album is both of those things. What do you say? Yeah. There's a lightness to it that I was actually kind of surprised by. How so?

Because so Silvana Estrada put out her first album Marchita in 2022, and it was such an intense record. She really sang with this full-throated vocals, and there was so much rage and sadness on that album. And even though she was like using her quattro, which is like a Venezuelan, you know, small guitar, and it was so beautiful. But I feel like this album, her sound is much smoother and lighter. And, like, I hear a new side of her in this music. Yeah, this, I mean, this record to me feels just a little bit more, like, radiant than Marchita. Like, there is, like, a brightness, a blooming list to it that that record didn't have. Well, I mean, she said, I mean, apparently she went through quite a bit in the years leading up to making this record.

Like, she had some bad spinal injury. A friend of hers was killed. Oh, wow. which is like, I mean, God, I can't even imagine. And she said that she just wanted to sort of seek out and find a softness and a sweetness in the world again. I think she found it. Yeah.

Yes. Well, this whole album is really, really gorgeous from Silvana Estrada. Bendron Suaves, Juvius. Again, that is out October 17th. Tons more that we could mention, of course. We'll put a more complete list of what's coming out this fall up on our side. NPR.org slash all songs. But we'll go out on this.

Hazel Sills, Sheldon Pierce. Thanks, as always, for the hang. Thank you. Always a great time. And for NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's all songs considered.