Jenny Lewis’ fifth solo album, Joy’All arrives June 9th. Joy’All finds the singer-songwriter embarking on a new era, in a new town – and on a new label, as she joins the iconic roster of Blue Note/Capitol Records. While Joy’All pulls from a bounty of sonic inspiration – from classic soul to ‘90s R&B, as well as country and classic singer-songwriter records – the album’s rich, intimate and warm live sound is the hallmark of eight-time GRAMMY-winning producer Dave Cobb. Recorded at Nashville’s historic RCA Studio A, Joy’All includes new single “Psychos” and the previously released single “Puppy and a Truck.”

A lot of people don’t realize that Freddie has actually been in the game for over a decade and came in on the same Freshman XXL cover as Meek Mill, Nipsey Hussle etc…
Yet he was the only one with no major Label Backing or Artist Affiliation and his partnership with Warner is his very first solo Major Label deal.
With that being said, he feels as if he has made it thus far in his career without compromising his morals, Creative Integrity and Principals as a Man all while resisting temptations ….Hence the title “$oul $old $eparately."

Ghost follows last year’s international chart-topping opus IMPERA as intended from the start with PHANTOMIME, a diverse and spellbinding sampling of the GRAMMY Award-winning band’s musical DNA. Featuring covers of classics by Television, Genesis, The Stranglers, Iron Maiden and Tina Turner, PHANTOMIME pays tribute to these unlikely bedfellow influences while stamping them all with Ghost’s undeniable sonic signature.

Dave Matthews Band’s 10^th studio album, Walk Around the Moon, took shape during the pandemic and is as much a reflection on the current times as it is an urge to find common ground. Walk Around the Moon will be released to coincide with the start of the band’s 2023 summer tour.  

The duo of Dylan Brady and Laura Les, 100 gecs, announces that the band’s highly-anticipated sophomore album, 10,000 gecs, will arrive on March 17th, 2023. Following their breakout debut album, 1,000 gecs, the anticipation of their next body of work has been high and the band’s teases have been plentiful. The forthcoming album is set to include previously released singles “mememe” which was described in the story as "an ebullient carnival of ska-inflected verses that bounce off a chorus of thrash guitars and a squiggling synth line" along with the 90’s Alt Rock-inspired “Doritos & Fritos,” which The Fader noted as "unlike any other Gecs track before it.”
 
For those yet initiated: 100 gecs planted their flag on the proverbial pop culture moon with their 2019 debut album 1000 gecs, which was heralded by The New Yorker as, “an impressively precise maximalist exercise with no rules” and “utterly unhinged in the best way possible” by GQ. The innovative project captured the hearts of fans and critics alike - selling out all of their live shows to date along with The New York Times calling it, “some of the savviest pop music of the year,” and Rolling Stone dubbing it “one of 2019’s most exciting debuts.” In just a few months following the release of 1,000 gecs, the band went from playing their first concert from inside the video game Minecraft to selling out shows across the country, proving that their rabid, rapidly multiplying fanbase doesn't only exist in the far corners of the internet. After their world tour was postponed in the summer of 2020, Brady and Les kept rolling with the release of 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues, a rework of the original album featuring collaborations from the likes of A. G. Cook, Fall Out Boy, Charli XCX, Rico Nasty, as well as crowd sourced contributions by fans. The transformative release was described by The NME as a “brain-melting, genre-crushing vision of pop’s future.” Their subsequent international touring over the past two years has sent the unlikely wizard-cloaked pied pipers jumping from sold-out show to sold-out show, seemingly two steps ahead of the zeitgeist, not to mention having a blast while doing it. 

We’re celebrating the 30th anniversary of the debut album from legendary hip-hop collective The Pharcyde with this exclusive RSD Essential 2-LP set of Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde, pressed on clear with yellow + purple splatter vinyl.

Originally released in 1992 through the iconic Delicious Vinyl, this RIAA Gold-certified album was featured as one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

This album features the singles “Passin’ Me By” “Ya Mama” and “Pack the Pipe”, and is a must-have for any West Coast hip-hop fan.

Kanye West delivers a Deluxe Edition of the record-shattering Donda, featuring 4 bonus tracks plus fan-favorite verses from Andre 3k, Kid Cudi and more. This release, from one of “the most influential pop stars of the 21st century,” was his 10th #1 album on the Billboard 200, racking up over 1 billion streams in the first 10 days. Originally previewed at 3 historic livestream events, the global phenomenon topped charts in 11 countries and set an Apple Music record of #1s in 152 countries. 4 LP.

Pearl Jam delivers the Tour Edition of their 11th studio album, 2020's critically acclaimed #1 Rock Album and Billboard 200 Top 10 album, Gigaton, featuring 11 live songs including: "Dance Of The Clairvoyants", "Superblood Wolfmoon", "Retrograde" and more. Gigaton (Tour Edition) includes the original vinyl LP with an 11 track live CD recorded during various 2021 performances. The Gigaton Tour continues its European leg through July and then the band will hit Canada and the East Coast this Fall! 

Dirt, the critically acclaimed and 5x Platinum certified, studio album from Alice In Chains is celebrating its 30th anniversary.  The album, which features some of the band's biggest hits including "Them Bones," "Would?," and "Rooster," is now available on vinyl for the first time as a 2-LP with remastered audio. 

Original album, remastered

After heating up the anticipation to a boiling point, CLEVER unleashes his debut album, CRAZY, via Grade A/Posty Co./Republic Records. He bulldozed the way for the record with the buzzing smash “Life’s A Mess II” featuring Juice WRLD & Post Malone. Right out of the gate, it amassed 4 million and counting Spotify streams in addition to garnering critical acclaim. Repeatedly dubbed “The music industry’s best-kept secret,” CLEVER is no longer a secret in 2021.

21 years since the release of Radiohead’s seminal albums, Kid A and Amnesiac comes a combined and expanded reissue, KID A MNESIA Here put back together as originally intended, with an additional disc of bonus material - including 2 original unreleased recordings from the era: ‘If You Say the Word’ + ‘Follow Me Around’. 

“A new, uniquely fearless kind of rock record for a new, increasingly fearful century, Radiohead’s fourth album, released in October 2000, remains one of the more stunning sonic makeovers in music history” – Rolling Stone [500 Greatest Albums of All Time: #20 Kid A]

The legendary original soundtrack to Cowboy Bebop is finally available on vinyl!

The Bebop crew is just trying to make a buck. This motley lot of intergalactic loners teams up to track down fugitives and turn them in for cold hard cash. Spike is a hero whose cool façade hides a dark and deadly past. The pilot Jet is a bruiser of a brute who can't wait to collect the next bounty. Faye Valentine is a femme fatale prone to breaking hearts and separating fools from their money. Along for the ride are the brilliant, but weird, hacker Ed and a super-genius Welsh Corgi named Ein. On their own, any one of them is likely to get lost in the sprawl of space, but together, they're they most entertaining gang of bounty hunters in the year 2071.

Composed and performed by Yoko Kanno and the band SEATBELTS, the music of Cowboy Bebop is one of the signature elements of the series. The energetic jazz-infused pieces rip and roar across the stars and are as indispensable as the crew of the Bebop themselves. This release is pressed on a pair of black vinyl discs housed in a gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeves while the Swordfish/Red Tail variant is presented on red and purple vinyl.

Groundbreaking, genre-defying instrumental trio, Animals As Leaders bring you their highly anticipated new album "Parrhesia". Their first new full-length album since 2016's critically acclaimed "The Madness Of Many" will be released on 3/25/22 via Sumerian Records.

Sonny Clark, one of the finest pianists and composers of the hard cop era, arrived fully formed on his supremely swinging 1957 Blue Note debut, Dial "S" for Sonny. Clark assembled a top-flight sextet for the occasion with Art Farmer (trumpet), Chris Fuller (trombone), Hank Mobley (tenor saxophone), Wilbur Ware (bass), and Louis Hayes (drums). Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series is all-analog, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes, and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Optimal.

In the kitchen of the Byron Bay home of Winston McCall stands a refrigerator, adorned on one side by a quote from Tom Waits: “I want beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”

This, the PARKWAY DRIVE vocalist says, is a pretty good summation of him-self. It holds true, too, as one of the guiding principles behind Darker Still, the seventh full-length album to be born of this picturesque and serene corner of north-eastern NSW, Australia, and the defining musical statement to date from one of modern metal’s most revered bands.

Darker Still, McCall says, is the vision he and his bandmates – guitarists Jeff Ling and Luke Kilpatrick, bassist Jia O’Connor and drummer Ben Gordon – have held in their mind’s eye since a misfit group of friends first convened in their parents’ basements and backyards in 2003. The journey to reach this moment has seen Parkway evolve from metal underdogs to festival-headlining behemoth, off the back of close to 20 gruelling years, six critically and commercially acclaimed studio albums (all of which achieving Gold status in their home nation), three documentaries, one live album, and many, many thousands of shows.

While Darker Still remains irrefutably PARKWAY DRIVE, it finds the band sonically standing shoulder to shoulder with rock and metal’s greats – Metallica, Pantera, Machine Head, Guns N’ Roses – as much as it does their metalcore contemporaries. “I wanted a classic guitar tone for this record,” explains Ling, who credits much of his inspiration to the connection his riffs have with a crowd in a live setting. 

Emerging from the darkness of the past few years, this is the true face of PARKWAY DRIVE: redefined and resolute, focused in mind and defiant in spirit.

100 gecs is a duo comprised of Laura Les and Dylan Brady. Scavenging scraps of musical influences and welding them together into dangerous machines, they destroy the competition with their army of lethal bangers. This is a repress of the band’s debut album released in May of 2019.

Omar Rodríguez-López THE CLOUDS HILL TAPES Part I, II & III These recordings of three sessions dating from the years 2018/ 2019 and taken at the Clouds Hill Studio are now being published digitally and as a 3-LP vinyl box set. Part I features eight pieces, and Parts II and III six pieces each, which have been entirely newly arranged, produced by Johann Scheerer, and performed by Omar Rodríguez-López and a range of guest musicians. Only very few songwriters and arrangers have succeeded in leaving their mark on several generations with their compositions and their performances. Omar Rodríguez-López is one of these exceptional artists. Just hearing his name brings a shine to the eyes of aficionados of hard or virtuoso or cosmic music. Listening to his music you can feel it: This is someone who completely abandons himself to his art - and someone with an incredible amount of knowledge about the depth of possibility guitar music can explore. During the 2000s Omar Rodríguez-López released an astonishing variety of solo works. On these recordings the artist used pieces that had accumulated over the years. However, what has so far been missing is a release that brings together the pieces from that era. This wait now has come to an end for here are THE CLOUDS HILL TAPES, Part I - III featuring 20 tracks that present his music in a new light. Omar Rodríguez-López has long considered the Hamburg Clouds Hill studio his creative second home. He has known the producer Johann Scheerer for 15 years and they are close friends as well as creative partners. "Johann is great at what he does. What makes him truly special is his instinct. This helps him find most interesting sounds, make the right decision", is how Omar Rodríguez-López describes it. Whenever the two meet, a shared creative process ensues immediately. This is just what happened at the end of 2018: Really, Omar Rodríguez-López had come to Hamburg as a visitor at the Clouds Hill Festival, but Johann Scheerer invited him to use free studio capacity for a session in which to re-record outstanding pieces from the previous solo albums. "We got the band together, rehearsed for two days - and then we ran the tapes", Omar Rodríguez -López recalls. These original tapes can incidentally be seen on the covers of the three albums resulting from the sessions. THE CLOUDS HILL TAPES will be one of the reference works in the musical cosmos of this unique artist. The Clouds Hill Tapes Pts. I, II & III

Culture Shock exclusive release of 100 hand numbered copies for release on Record Store Day October 24th, 2020.

Support your local Record Stores and Bands!

---includes bonus tracks only available on physical release---

-Burn The Bridge (Original Demo)

-Voyeuristic Observer (Original Demo)

-Small Town (Original Demo)

-Dark Daisies (Unreleased)

20 Year Anniversary 2XLP. Gatefold Packaging. First time on vinyl.

“Fearless was an album full of magic and curiosity, the bliss and devastation of youth. It was the diary of the adventures and explorations of a teenage girl who was learning tiny lessons with every new crack in the facade of the fairytale ending she’d been shown in the movies. I’m thrilled to tell you that my new version of Fearless is done and will be with you soon. It’s called Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and it includes 26 songs.” – Taylor Swift. Includes 6 unreleased tracks. Gold 3 LP.

2021 marks the 20^th anniversary of Shakira’s hit crossover album, Laundry Service. Originally released on November 13^th 2001, The album was written and produced by Shakira and features the #1 single, “Suerte/Whenever, Wherever,” “Objection (Tango),” and “Underneath Your Clothes.” To commemorate its 20^th year, the LP will be reissued on an exclusive opaque yellow vinyl.

Album formatted collection of underheard Sonic rarities from the legendary band's 2000-2010 era, most for the first time on any physical format. Essential for the band's hardcore fans and for enthusiasts of instrumental rock.

Coleman shook the jazz world when he arrived at the Five Spot Café in New York City in 1959 and began his run of seminal albums on Atlantic that laid the foundation for the free jazz movement to come. After a period of disillusionment during which he withdrew from public music making, Coleman re-emerged on Blue Note in 1966 and began writing an intriguing new chapter of his legendary career.

"I have been an Ornette Coleman fanatic going back to the late-60s, in fact going back to the time the records in this set were originally recorded for Blue Note," says Harley. "Turns out Don Was is as big an Ornette fan as me, so it was only a matter of time before we put our heads together to plan this boxset. I love those early records Ornette did for Atlantic. who doesn't? But I feel that Ornette's later recordings for Blue Note are every bit as vital and important to gain a more complete understanding

"It is true that the most shattering of his wails could wake the proverbial dead," writes Conrad in his essay. "But something happened to Coleman's tone while he was woodshedding those two years. In the Golden Circle it is still penetrating but more pure. His cries are even more vocal, more human. His control of microtones provides new resources of expression. He can now make the same note sound ecstatic or despairing or anywhere in between, through microtonal nuance."

At The `Golden Circle' Stockholm, Vol. 1 (1965)

At The `Golden Circle' Stockholm, Vol. 2 (1965)

In late 1965, Coleman embarked on his first tour of Europe with a new trio featuring David Izenzon on bass and Charles Moffett on drums. Two nights of the trio's two-week engagement at the Golden Circle (Gyllene Cirkeln) in Stockholm, Sweden were recorded and released across two volumes the following year. The freewheeling live sets were electrifying and found the saxophonist jumping off into sound explorations on the violin and trumpet as well.

The Empty Foxhole (1966)

Coleman's first studio recording for Blue Note was his first studio album in four years and he once again confounded expectations by selecting his 10-year-old son Denardo Coleman to play drums on the date alongside bassist Charlie Haden. The music is raw and exploratory with solemn ruminations and bursts of unbridled joy. The striking album cover features a painting by Ornette himself.

New And Old Gospel (1967)

Coleman's next appearance on a Blue Note album came in a rare sideman role on this explosive session led by alto saxophonist Jackie McLean. McLean had already waded into the avant-garde on prior Blue Note dates like One Step Beyond and Destination. Out!, but he went even deeper here with Coleman featured entirely on trumpet along with LaMont Johnson on piano, Scott Holt on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums. Following an extended suite by McLean on Side 1, the second half of the program featured two Coleman c

New York Is Now! (1968)

Love Call (1968)

On April 29 and May 7, 1968, Coleman brought a dynamic quartet with tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones into the studio to record what would yield his final two albums for Blue Note. The alchemy of this group, which combined Coleman's first-time two-saxophone pairing with a rhythm team deeply associated with John Coltrane, produced thrilling results.

BLUE NOTE RECORDS - ROUND TRIP - THE COMPLETE ORNETTE COLEMAN

"Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us.

Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash.

“I can’t say that I’m sorry / when I don’t feel so wrong anymore,” the record begins, her voice softer and more open than ever, as if she’s singing through a hard won smile. “All the Good Times”, a twangy banger with nods to JJ Cale, starts the album on a triumphant and bright note. The title song, “Big Time”, follows and continues the warm optimism. “Guess I had to be losin’ to get here on time,” she sings, a fearless love song co-written with her partner.

Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time.

“Some experiences just make you feel as though you’re five years old, no matter how wise or adult you think you are,” she writes of that time. After that tearful but relieving conversation, she celebrated with her partner, their friends, oysters, and wine. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me.”

Three days later, her father died; his funeral became the occasion for Olsen to introduce her partner to her family. Though she was fearful their presence as a newly out queer couple would be “an additional symbol of loss,” those days went peacefully, yet only two weeks later Olsen got the call that her mother was in the ER. Hospice came soon after, and a second funeral came quickly on the heels of the first. Another trip back to St. Louis, another grief to face, another deepening and intensification of this still-new love.

The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album. “It’s a hard time again,” she sings on “This is How It Works”, pushing against the irrevocability of death, “Tell me a story that will make me forget.” “Go Home”, which begins with an almost numbed calm, slowly builds up to a wailing that comes up straight from the ground: “I want to go home, go back to small things. I don’t belong here. Nobody knows me.”

“You can’t plan grief, you can’t organize it or schedule it or know how you’ll feel when it comes. It just happens, and when it does sometimes it’s not what you thought it would be.” Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was in the studio, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album.

Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

Playful bits of Tammy Wynette and Kitty Wells are here, too, but so are the complex orchestrations of her genre-bending 2019 record, All Mirrors. While that record was full of dramatic shifts and twists, here the surprises come in their simplicity—a slow swell of strings, instrumentation that cycles like a storm, or sparkling horns in a light-flooded break-up ballad.

While the spritely nature of her last EP, Aisles, may have signaled Olsen’s turn deeper into the electronic direction of her last All Mirrors, there’s hardly a synth in sight here. Jonathan Wilson, served as co-producer and also mixed the tracks, while Drew Erickson played piano, organ, and scored the string arrangements. Emily Elhaj, Olsen’s longtime bandmate, was a consistent collaborator as well, on the bass throughout.

“And I can’t fit into the past that you’re used to, I refuse to,” she sings as a wraithlike piano scaffolds her hopeful voice on “Ghost On”. “Forget the old dreams,” she rejoices on “Go Home”, “I got a new thing.” Darkness inherently suggests depth, but it takes a much wiser writer to find meaning and complexity in the luminous place that Big Time occupies. “Chasing the Sun” ends the record in a smiling, romantic place, a verdant crescendo rising as she pines: “Write a postcard to you / when you’re in the other room/ I’m just writing to say that I can’t find my clothes / If you’re lookin for something to do.”

The burning of her earliest work is still here, of course, but this time she’s “freed from the longing / for one moment to last” and she’s ready to “walk through the fires / of all earthly desires.”

—Catherine Lacey
Oaxaca, February 2022"