Don’t Miss New Albums From The Smile, Leon Bridges, Yasmin Williams, The Hard Quartet & More

David Shaw, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Anna Butterss, Caribou, FINNEAS, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Coldplay also have new records out today.

By Team JamBase Oct 4, 2024 4:20 am PDT

Each week Release Day Picks profiles new LPs and EPs Team JamBase will be checking out on release day Friday. This week we highlight new albums by The Smile, Leon Bridges, Yasmin Williams, The Hard Quartet, David Shaw, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Anna Butterss, Caribou, FINNEAS, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Coldplay. Read on for more insight into the records we have ready to spin.

The Smile

Cutouts

  • XL Recordings
  • 10 tracks

The Smile released a new album entitled Cutouts through XL Recordings. The band – Radiohead‘s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons of Kemet’s Tom Skinner – previously released another album, Wall Of Eyes, earlier this year. The 10-song Cutouts was recorded with producer Sam Petts-Davies during sessions for Wall Of Eyes held in Oxford and at Abbey Road Studios. String arrangements were provided by the London Contemporary Orchestra. The album’s cover art was painted while recording was underway by Yorke and Stanley Donwood.

Leon Bridges

Leon

  • Columbia Records
  • 13 tracks

Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Leon Bridges returns with his highly-anticipated new album, Leon, out now through Columbia Records. The 13-track Leon is the Fort Worth, Texas native’s first full-length album since 2021’s Gold-Diggers Sound. Bridges recorded Leon at El Desierto studios in Mexico with producers Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian. Bridges pulled inspiration from his personal life and upbringing on a 13-track album he says has “been in the works since [his] childhood.” Bridges shared a note to fans discussing the genesis of his fourth studio album:

Leon has been a long-time coming. I started writing pieces of it as far back as Gold-Diggers Sound. They didn’t fit what I was trying to do with that album and I tried moving on. But I couldn’t shake them because they’re part of me. And, if I’m honest, also because I think this is some of my most excellent work yet. In many ways, Leon has been in the works since my childhood. This record is about simpler days. It’s about time spent in my beloved Fort Worth and the experiences that made me the man I am today. It’s soulful music in the truest sense – it’s imbued with my soul.”

Yasmin Williams

Arcadia

  • Nonesuch Records
  • 9 tracks

Yasmin Williams issued her new album, Arcadia, which is her first LP on Nonesuch Records. The composer and multi-instrumentalist produced Arcadia, playing plays various guitars, banjo, calabash drum, tap shoes and kora across its nine songs. She welcomed singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan to add vocals to the album, along with contributions from guitarist William Tyler, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, Dom Flemons on rhythm bones and others. Williams shared more details on Acadia:

“Acadia has several meanings: a place of rural peace and pastoral poetry (Italian), a refuge or idyllic place, (Greek and Italian), fertile land (Mi’kmaq), a place of plenty (French) … all of this relates to the ethos of this album. The songs are seeds I planted, and the seeds grew into the album, Acadia: a place of peace, a place where creativity can blossom, a place where everyone can fit in together and collaborate effectively, a place where the fruits of my own labor in music can fully flourish without judgment or prejudice. One of my visions for this record was to expand the potential for current folk music to encourage collaboration across various genres. Blurring those somewhat arbitrary lines has been a natural tendency for me since I started writing music at twelve years old and Acadia is a full circle moment.”

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The Hard Quartet

The Hard Quartet

  • Matador Records
  • 15 tracks

Supergroup The Hard Quartet enter the fray with their self-titled debut album arriving today through Matador Records. The new band is made up of Stephen Malkmus, Matt Sweeney, Jim White and Emmett Kelly. Malkmus is a co-founding Pavement guitarist and leader of his solo band The Jicks. Among Sweeney’s many guitar and bass credits is co-founding Chavez, as well as Superwolf with Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Multi-instrumentalist Kelly is the primary member of The Cairo Gang and performed with Sweeney in Superwolf. White’s extensive past drumming credits include the Dirty Three and many others including The Double with Kelly. The group members shared the following statements:

“Leave yourself behind and go into something where you’re actually listening to others and trying to come up with a solution to whatever kind of esoteric thing you are attempting to do in your life. You know what I mean?” — Emmett Kelly

“We’re all jazzed.” — Stephen Malkmus

“The way Jim plays really affected the way I hear things. He has this way of making everything sound good. All of a sudden, you really pay attention to everything else that’s going on because of what Jim is doing.” — Matt Sweeney

“There’s this thing where I’ll have a story in my head when I have an intention, and I can hear it in the drums. It doesn’t matter if I tell anyone—even the people I’m playing with. You don’t even have to be particularly conscious of it yourself. But if you have an intention, something happens to the sound. It’s really weird.” — Jim White

Anna Butterss

Mighty Vertebrate

  • International Anthem
  • 10 tracks

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit bassist Anna Butterss released new solo album, Mighty Vertebrate, today via International Anthem, their first release on the label. Butterss worked with co-producer and contributor Ben Lumsdaine on Mighty Vertebrate. For full-band tracking, Butterss and Lumsdaine brought their work to Chris Schlarb’s Long Beach studio BIG EGO where Anna teamed with their bandmates in Los Angeles supergroup SML, guitarist Gregory Uhlmann and saxophonist Josh Johnson, to flesh out the record. Another collaborator, Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, added guitar to the track “Dance Steve.” The album artwork was created by Tortoise’s John Herndon. Butterss began work on Mighty Vertebrate in 2022, finding time to write and record the album amidst their busy schedule as an in-demand player.

“I had just gotten off of a bunch of touring at the end of 2022 and just wanted to write music,” Butterss said. “The best way for me to do that, I’ve found, is to set myself a discrete and focused task.” Butterss created a series of prompts to focus their creation. Check some of them out below:

I’m going to make a song where the bass doesn’t function in the role of a bass.
I’m going to work on this for an hour and then I’m going to stop.
I’m going to make a song that uses groups of three-bar phrasing.
I want to sample something and make it into a song.
I’m going to start with a drum machine.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

Live From The Ryman Vol. 2

  • Southeastern Records
  • 15 tracks

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit have a new live album, Live From The Ryman Vol. 2, out today on Southeastern Records. The 15-song compilation set follows Vol. 1’s arrival in 2018 and features cuts recorded at four of the band’s last six years of sold-out concerts at the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Live From The Ryman Vol. 2 goes heavy on material from the Jason Isbell-led outfit’s past two studio albums — 2023’s Weathervanes and 2020’s Reunions. The live set also includes a cover of Tom Petty’s “Room At The Top” and Isbell oldie “The Last Song I Will Write” off his self-titled 2009 release.

Longtime 400 Unit front-of-house engineer Cain Hogsed captured the multi-track recordings used on Live From The Ryman Vol. 2. Hogsed also co-produced the album with Isbell and mixed the tracks with Todd Tidwell. The LP presents The 400 Unit’s latest lineup via the tracks recorded in 2023, the year multi-instrumentalist Will Johnson came aboard and bassist Anna Butterss stepped into Jimbo Hart’s former role.

David Shaw

Take A Look Inside

  • Yokoko Records
  • 12 tracks

David Shaw of The Revivalists goes the solo route with Take A Look Inside. The new album is Shaw’s second solo full-length following his 2021 self-titled debut. The singer-songwriter recorded the self-produced Take A Look Inside at Esplanade Studios in his longtime home base of New Orleans. Speaking about Take A Look Inside, Shaw stated:

“It’s easy to run for your entire life. As you get older, there are always emotions and thoughts you don’t want to touch. Much of Take A Look Inside was about sitting down for even five minutes and asking, ‘What is this feeling? Why is it being brought up now?’ I chose to face these feelings, ask what they needed, and use them. By shedding some of this shit, I didn’t have as much anxiety. I was happier all around too.

“I hope people can listen to this album when they need some kind of medicine. I want it to be like a trusted friend you can lean on who never judges you. I’ve realized I’m forever a student of life. I love learning about myself, my friends, and my family. Having a child has profoundly shifted my perspective and how I approach life. I wish I’d started this process 10 years ago, but life happens when it happens. I’m thankful to be growing more than ever.”

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Caribou

Honey

  • Merge Records
  • 12 tracks

After releasing a string of singles this year, Caribou (Dan Snaith) issued a new album, Honey, today through Merge Records. Snaith’s sixth album issued under his Caribou moniker, the 12-track Honey serves as the follow up to the 2020 Caribou album, Suddenly. The 12-track album was produced by Snaith, who sought Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden to assist arranging two songs. Snaith discussed using AI to manipulate his own singing voice, stating:

“One thing that hasn’t changed for me from the very beginning is a manic curiosity of seeing what I can make out of sound. Not so much what someone can make out of sound — a ‘professional’ with a host of collaborators and resources at their disposal — but me in my little basement studio. There’s more equipment in here than there used to be, but essentially it’s the same as ever: still chasing that thrill of when something hits really hard, and I find myself jumping up and down or the hairs standing up on my arms in excitement. How lucky am I that that’s never gone away?

“That the chance of making something new and exciting is still as exhilarating as ever, and as much fun as ever? Starting the day with nothing (and finishing most days with nothing good) but occasionally having something that didn’t exist before stuck in my head by the end of the day. It still seems like a kind of alchemy.”

“The word ‘alchemy’ kind of captures something about this, I think. One of the big things that changed while making this album was the ability to manipulate my voice using AI. I found it impossible to resist trying it, and once I did, it was impossible to look away.

“I have such a limited vocal range and style. Over the years, I’ve managed to find ways of making it work, of making it feel at home in the music I make. But what about being able to change it completely? What could that do? What possibilities are opened up by that?

“Well, actually, not change it completely. The central thing that drew me to using this technology on this album was that if I listened closely, I could still hear myself in there, even when trying on different voices using AI. It still captures all the phrasing, the pitch imperfections, the delivery, the breath… even when turning it into someone else’s voice. It sounds both very much not like me but also like me.

“I tried these tracks out on my closest friends and asked, ‘Who do you think is singing?’ They always guessed someone close to me — my daughter, for example — or that it was me with some kind of effect on it. Why? Because it is some kind of alchemy, changing my voice into something that is both mine and not mine.”

FINNEAS

For Cryin’ Out Loud!

  • Interscope/OYOY
  • 10 tracks

For Cryin’ Out Loud! is the second solo album from Grammy and Academy Award-winning musician FINNEAS. Best-known for his work with superstar sister Billie Eilish, FINNEAS’ last solo effort was his 2021 debut, Optimist. According to a press release, “In contrast to his debut album Optimist which featured instrumentals written and performed solely by the artist himself, this time, For Cryin’ Out Loud! sees FINNEAS expand his creative horizons, steering things away from the bedroom producer mentality and to a classic studio/band environment, freeing FINNEAS and ultimately resulting in his most uplifting and raw body of work to date.”

“I had the honor of making these songs with some of my closest friends,” FINNEAS wrote, “and I can’t wait for them to be yours.”

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

“No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead”

  • Constellation
  • 6 tracks

Canadian post-rock stalwarts Godspeed You! Black Emperor make a statement with their new album, “No Title As Of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead”, arriving today on Constellation. The band — Thierry Amar (electric bass, contrebasse), David Bryant (electric guitar, tape loops), Aidan Girt (drums), Timothy Herzog (drums, glockenspiel), Efrim Manuel Menuck (electric guitar, tape loops), Michael Moya (electric guitar), Mauro Pezzente (electric bass), Sophie Trudeau (violin) — recorded the six-song album at Hotel2Tango in Montreal. The album title, which references Palestinians killed in the Israel-Hamas war (according to Gaza’s Health Ministry), was addressed in a statement by the notoriously reclusive band:

THE PLAIN TRUTH==
we drifted through it, arguing.
every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom.
we sat down together and wrote it in one room,
and then sat down in a different room, recording.
NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?
and then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile.
the sun setting above beds of ash
while we sat together, arguing.
the old world order barely pretended to care.
this new century will be crueler still.
war is coming.
don’t give up.
pick a side.
hang on.
love.
GY!BE

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Coldplay

Moon Music

  • Parlophone/Atlantic Records
  • 10 tracks

Coldplay have released their 10th studio album, Moon Music, today through Parlophone/Atlantic Records. The 10-track album, whose full title is Music Of The Spheres Vol. II: Moon Music, is the companion to 2021’s Music Of The Spheres Vol. I: From Earth With Love. Max Martin produced Moon Music, which features guest appearances by Jon Hopkins, Little Simz, Burna Boy, Elyanna, Tini and Ayra Starr. During a recent interview with Zane Lowe, Coldplay frontman revealed there will be only two more albums from the band following today’s release.

“We are only going to do 12 proper albums, and that’s real,” Martin told Lowe. “I’ll tell you why it’s really important that we have that limit: first of all there’s only 12 well, there’s only eight Harry Potters or seven Harry Potters, there’s only 12 and a half Beatles albums there’s about the same Bob Marley [albums] — so all of our heroes. Having that limit means the quality control is so high right now, and for a song to make it, it’s almost impossible, which is great and where we could be coasting, we’re trying to improve.”

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