Don’t Miss New Albums From Wet Leg, The Swell Season, Clipse & Others

Wet Leg released their highly anticipated second album, moisturizer, through Domino. The group led by Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers once again worked with producer Dan Carey, who helmed their 2022 self-titled debut album. Teasdale and Chambers were joined on moisturizer by bandmates Ellis Durand on bass, Henry Holmes on drums and Joshua Mobaraki on guitar and synthesizer. All five members earned songwriting credits.

“We were just kind of having fun and exploring,” Chambers said.

“We focussed on: Is this going to be fun to play live?,” Teasdale added. “It was very natural that we would write the second record together.”

After 16 years, Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard and Czech musician Markéta Irglová released a new The Swell Season album, Forward, today through Masterkey Sounds/Plateau Records. In 2007, Hansard and Irglová starred in the feature film Once, following the release of The Swell Season’s self-titled debut album in 2006. The duo was bolstered by the critical acclaim garnered by Once, which showcased their original songs. The Swell Season won the 2007 Best Original Song Academy Award for “Falling Slowly.” A second album, Strict Joy, was issued in 2009 and remained their most recent full-length release. The Swell Season reunited for shows in 2022, which lead to a full tour in 2023. The tour helped spark the duo’s decision to record a new album.

Featuring eight new songs (including the prior-released “People We Used To Be”), Forward was recorded by Hansard and Irglová with producer Sturla Mio Thorisson at his and Irglová’s Masterkey Studios in Iceland. The sessions included original The Swell Season musicians Marja Gaynor and Bertrand Galen on strings and Joseph Doyle on bass, with newcomer Piero Perelli on drums/percussion.

Hansard shared the below thoughts regarding the pending release:

“After our whirlwind that led up to the Oscars and after, we were so busy and with that came a pressure that neither of us particularly wanted, and ultimately we kind of drifted in the middle of all of that hard work and celebration. We remained good friends, helping on each other’s records, keeping up with each other’s families.

“While touring my last record, I realized I just missed her. I remember calling Marketa and saying, ‘Do you feel like doing some gigs?’ She said, ‘Yeah, that sounds great,’ and the shows went really well. Once we were hanging out again, new songs started coming through, and we started trying new ideas and playing the songs onstage.

“From there the idea was to do a little recording and not put any pressure on it, just see what happens, and suddenly we found ourselves making a record. And we were both totally into it, and so here we are, a new chapter of our lives.”

“It felt right to title the record ‘Forward‘ because it’s a reunion of sorts, but we’re not going backwards,” Irglová stated. “Both of us have grown and changed; we’re in different places and getting to know each other again as the new people we’ve become.”

Acclaimed rap duo Clipse return with Let God Sort Em Out, their first album since 2009’s Til The Casket Drops. Brothers Pusha T and Malice put the project on hiatus after the last record came out, reuniting in 2019. Let God Sort Em Out was produced by fellow Virginia Beach native , who previously worked with Clipse as part of The Neptunes production team with Chad Hugo. Pharrell appears on the new album, along with additional special guests Kendrick Lamar, Nas, John Legend, The-Dream and Tyler, the Creator, among others. Clipse recorded their fourth album during sessions in Virginia Beach and in Paris at the Louis Vuitton headquarters in Paris.

“It just felt like a real good family setting,” Malice told Apple Music’s Ebro Darden about the sessions in Paris. “The creative aspect, the same as it’s always been from way high.”

“We get caught up in the feeling of certain records,” Pusha T added. “You got to realize that before we even get to the process of hooks and writing, man, we’re so entranced by the beat.”

Icelandic composer and producer Ólafur Arnalds had the difficult task of completing A Dawning, an album he started with Talos (Irish musician Eoin French). Posthumously released today following French’s untimely death in August 2024, work on the album began the year prior after the pair collaborated at Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival in Cork, Ireland. They later reconnected at Arnalds’ studio in Reykjavík, Iceland and at French’s home in West Cork. Discussing the project, and the album track “Signs,” Arnalds stated:

“We made this album together. Even after, while I was there working on some arrangements, I never felt like I was truly alone. Near the end, where we were saying how grateful we were to have met each other, he told me, ‘You know, I’m still gonna be there.’

“At its core, ‘Signs’ feels like a coming together, a curious meeting of creative souls. It’s filled with carefree experimentation and exploration. ‘Signs’ was the first song that Eoin and I wrote together. It was only shortly after we became friends and we were rather decisively paired together by our friend Mary Hickson at her music residency in Cork – she seemed very sure that we would get along musically. She was right, of course. It was the start of an incredible, inspiring, heartbreaking but heartfelt journey that took us places we could never have imagined in our wildest dreams.”

Third Man Records released Trouble, the second solo album from Gina Birch. Birch, an accomplished film and video director and painter, was a co-founding member of the influential feminist punk rock band The Raincoats. The follow-up to Birch’s 2023 solo debut, I Play My Bass Loud, was recorded with the same team who worked on the previous record, producer and Killing Joke founding member Youth and engineer/mixer Michael Rendall.

“The record title refers to all the mini revolutions that have occurred in my life,” Birch stated. “Not following the usual paths, falling down holes, making the same mistakes over and over, trouble of being a young woman at a time our options were generally secretary, mother or sex worker. Trouble I’ve caused and trouble I’m in…”

Open Mike Eagle drew upon his experiences living in Chicago for his new album, Neighborhood Gods Unlimited, released today by Auto Reverse Records. The 14-track effort features production by August Fanon, Child Actor, Ialive, K-Nite 13, Kenny Segal, Nolan the Ninja and Playa Haze.

After 14 years, Allo Darlin’ have released a new studio album, Bright Nights. The long-awaited follow-up to the London-born outfit’s 2014 third album, We Come from the Same Place, comes after a break-up in 2016 and reformation in 2023. The band — Elizabeth Morris Innset, Bill Botting, Mike Collins and Paul Rains — recoded the 10-song album at Globus in Oslo, Norway and at Big Jelly in Ramsgate, England. Collins produced, engineered and mixed the album.

“It’s an album from the heart, dealing with themes of love, birth and death, which are things we reflect more on than we did when we made our [2008 self-titled] first album, ” said Morris Innset. “I would hope that the album sounds timeless and joyous, at other times reflective and emotional.”

This Is For is the the fourth Korean-language album from South Korean vocal group TWICE (and their ninth overall including Japanese-language records). The new album follows their Japanese album, 2024’s Dive, and is their first Korean album since 2021’s Formula of Love: O+T=<3. Nayeon, Jeongyeon, Momo, Sana, Jihyo, Mina, Dahyun, Chaeyoung and Tzuyu will release the Japanese-language album Enemy next month. The group will soon embark on the This Is For World Tour in support of the new release.