Don’t Miss New Albums From My Morning Jacket, Japanese Breakfast, Phil Cook, LaMP & More

My Morning Jacket released their 10th studio album, is, today through ATO Records. My Morning Jacket – frontman Jim James, bassist Tom Blankenship, guitarist Carl Broemel, drummer Patrick Hallahan and keyboardist Bo Koster – recorded is in Los Angeles at Henson Recording Studios. The sessions with producer Brendan O’Brien took place after the band held two productive writing sessions, amassing over 100 demos, from which the 10 tracks making up the album were born. James – who produced or co-produced all of the MMJ’s studio albums beginning with their 1999 debut The Tennessee Fire – detailed the album, commenting on the meaning behind its title and more:

“I like how the word ‘is’ indicates a sense of presence in the now – there’s no logic or rationale behind this record; it just is. All these songs came into existence out of an attempt to connect with something beyond the human experiment, which for me is one of the most beautiful things about music – that connection with something larger than us, yet something we are all equally a part of.

“It feels really great to have a collection of songs we all love this much, and to know that we worked as hard as we possibly could on them. Hopefully those songs will be helpful to people and give them some kind of peace as they try to deal with the insanity of the world – because that’s what music does for me, and doing the same for others is always my greatest dream come true.”

The fourth Japanese Breakfast album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), came out today through Dead Oceans. Japanese Breakfast is led by frontwoman and primary songwriter Michelle Zauner, who previously recorded albums in makeshift spaces like warehouses and trailers. Working with skilled producer Blake Mills, Zauner recorded For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) at the historic Sound City in Los Angeles, making it the first Japanese Breakfast album made in a proper recording studio. Actor/musician Jeff Bridges appears on the track “Men in Bars.” The follow-up to her successful 2022 album Jubilee sees Zauner writing about darker topics on the 10 songs making up the For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) tracklist. “The plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends” the album “its most persistent theme, the perils of desire,” according to press materials.

“I felt seduced by getting what I always wanted,” Zauner revealed. “I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I kept going I was going to die.”

Phil Cook shared his birdsong-inspired album, Appalachia Borealis, through Sylvan Esso’s Psychic Hotline label. Cook began generating what would become Appalachia Borealis in fall 2022 while living alone in a secluded area of North Carolina’s Piedmont region during a period of “personal turmoil.” The sounds of birds caught his attention and he improvised alongside and recorded several of their songs, some of which made it to the album. After a return to Durham, North Carolina, Cook was taught by renowned gospel keyboardist Chuckey Robinson, helping to inform his compositional and performance approach. Appalachia Borealis was produced by Cook’s longtime friend and collaborator Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. The album consisting of 10 originals and a cover of Gillian Welch’s “I Made A Lovers Prayer,” was completed during sessions held at Vernon’s April Base recording facility located in Wisconsin’s Chippewa Valley close to where the Cook and Vernon grew up together.

While recording at April Base, Cook played piano as the birdsongs he recorded were played through headphones. Regarding the title track, which features the loon, Cook stated:

“‘Appalachia Borealis’ is my favorite song I’ve written, written in a dreadfully torrential downpour on a particularly lonely and difficult day. A recording of loons calling on a lake at night enters on the last stanza, the moods exactly complementing one another respectfully. I don’t believe I could’ve written this song in my 20s or 30s and I certainly couldn’t have written it without experiencing some real losses in my life and the hole that remains in the aftermath. It heals me to play this song.”

LaMP — Russ Lawton (drums), Ray Paczkowski (keyboards) and Scott Metzger (guitar) — light things up with a new studio album, One Of Us, arriving today via Royal Potato Family. One Of Us follows LaMP’s 2024 release, Live At Nectar’s, captured at the famed Burlington, Vermont club where the band formed in 2018. The new studio effort — cut at Ben Collette’s Tank Recording Studio in Burlington — marks the trio’s first since releasing their 2020 self-titled debut album.

“This record has more of a gritty, edgy sound to it compared to our first one,” Metzger said of One Of Us. “The first album felt clean and smooth. One Of Us has more attitude. It still emphasizes melody, groove, and accessibility like the first record, but this one feels like we’ve got some more miles under our belt, which makes sense since 2024 was a big year for our little band. Most of these tunes started from beats Russ sent around, and Ray or I would put down a harmonic or melodic idea we thought captured the mood of the groove.”/p>

“LaMP definitely started with a sound right from the first show and it continues to grow as we write new songs,” Lawton said. “Someone will come in with a song — or I’ll pass along a rhythmic concept — and we’ll build from there.”

“It’s the next sounds of three musicians who are playing what they feel, and feeling it as one,” Paczkowski added. “The album is called One Of Us, but if there is a theme to this record, it might be ‘three of us.’ We’re all writers in the sense of courting some kind of inspiration, a melody, a rhythm, a vibe; feeling some kind of spark and bringing it to the band. The goal was to get a fire going.”

Lonnie Holley today released Tonky, his fifth album and third for Jagjaguwar. The follow-up to Holley’s 2023 album, Oh Me Oh My, sees contributions from several special guests, with Isaac Brock, Angel Bat Dawid, billy woods, , Jenn Wasner, The Legendary Ingramettes and Mary Lattimore appearing across the 14-track LP. Holley’s Oh Me Oh My producer, multi-instrumentalist Jacknife Lee, contributed to every Tonky track. In his album notes, author Hanif Abdurraqib wrote:

“[Holley] is an incredibly gifted storyteller with a commitment to the oral tradition, such that many listeners (myself among them) would be entirely content sitting at the feet of a Lonnie Holley record and turning an ear to his robust, expansive storytelling. But Tonky is an album as expansive in sound as it is in making a place for a wide range of featured artists to come through the door of the record and feel at home, no matter how they spend the time they get on a song.”

“The work of Lonnie Holley is, for me, a work of this kind of accumulation and close attention. The delight of finding a sound and pressing it up against another found sound and another until, before a listener knows it, they are awash in a symphony of sound that feels like it stitches together as it is washing over you. Tonky is an album that takes its name from a childhood nickname that was affixed to Holley when he lived a portion of his childhood life in a honky tonk. Lonnie Holley’s life of survival and endurance is one that required – and no doubt still requires – a kind of invention.”

Defiant Life is keyboardist Vijay Iyer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s second duo album released by the venerable jazz record label ECM. The follow-up to 2016’s A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke was recorded over two days in July 2024 with producer Manfred Eicher at Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano, Switzerland.

“This recording session was conditioned by our ongoing sorrow and outrage over the past year’s cruelties, but also by our faith in human possibility,” siad Vijay Iyer. “Our time together, from the moment we meet right until the moment we play, is most often spent talking about the state of the world, studying histories of liberation, and sharing readings and historical references, as a means of grounding ourselves purposefully in our present.”

Singer-songwriter Ollella released her second album, Antifragile. The 12-track album follows the Seattle-based cellist/guitarist Ellie Barber’s 2023 release, Back Back Back. Barber worked with producer/engineer/guitarist Jordan Cunningham during recording sessions held at Sage Arts Recording in Arlington, Washington. Along with Barber and Cunningham, the album was recorded by bassist Nate Sharp and drummers Sean Lane and Emily Silks. Horns were arranged by trombonist Willem de Koch of The Westerlies. Half of the songs on Antifragile were written by Barber on cello and the other half were composed on four-string electric guitar tuned like a cello.

“The conversation between the cello and tenor guitar felt very fluid to me while writing this album—the cello is earthy, the electric guitar is edgy,” Ollella said.