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Returning after a five-year hiatus with the Southern-stamped The House Is Burning, the Isaiah Rashad of 2021 felt more shrouded than ever, his voice mumbling and crackly, his feelings hidden behind loud cowbells and flying hundred-dollar bills. And although you could feel the darkness knocking at the walls -- a forced smile, his eyes disguised behind sunglasses and tinted windows -- it’s the kind of thing you wanted Zay to come into on his own terms.The full weight of this elephant comes into being on It’s Been Awful, the Chattanooga rapper’s fourth full-length project. Things begin in earnest with the swaying monologue of “The New Sublime,” “I’m cut from a sinful nature, and I feel afflicted” runs Rashad’s opening statement as he staggers through a mire of Percocet addictions, family traumas, and reckless ends. The objects of Rashad’s introspection are continually shifting, none more so than the rapper’s long-standing substance abuse issues, which are transmogrified between wicked temptations, cathartic necessities, and springboards to growth. Admissions of methamphetamine usage and a profound loss of innocence needle into even the album’s warmest, most stretching sections, though Rashad embeds his most pressing revelations at the ends of verses, where his nimble flow can quickly cycle things back to a comfortable chorus; the intensity of confrontation bleeds even into the skeleton of the work.
IT’S BEEN AWFUL is the sound of Rashad breaking lock after lock open, and letting everything bundle out into the open; on the late-summer air, his flurried thoughts spread into a stunning whole of growth and selfhood. ~David Crone, all music.com
Isaiah Rashad - IT'S BEEN AWFUL
Snocaps - Snocaps
Sisters Katie (Waxahatchee) and Allison Crutchfield have formed Snocaps and released a self-titled album! An indie-rock record that recalls Allison's band Swearin' and Katie's early records as Waxahatchee, Snocaps was born out of the twin sisters' desire to work on music together as they had in their teens and twenties. Allison and Katie are backed by friends and close collaborators Brad Cook and MJ Lenderman. The album was produced and almost entirely engineered by Cook, and all four musicians play multiple instruments across the record. After a handful of shows at the end of 2025, Snocaps will be put on ice for the foreseeable future, although, as Katie says, "Allison and I have been, in some way, shape or form, doing this together for over 20 years, " so it is practically a given that they will work together on music at some point again in the future.
Born in Miami, Florida to a French mother and Haitian father, Cécile McLorin Salvant was interested in music from a young age. She began piano lessons at age five, and by eight was singing with the Miami Choral Society. She studied classical voice privately before enrolling at the Darius Milhaud Conservatory in Aix-en-Provence, France, where she studied law as well as classical voice. It was during this time, studying and performing with reed player Jean-François Bonnel, that she became increasingly interested in jazz performance.
Salvant’s first orchestral album, With Every Breath I Take, features the Metropole Orkest conducted by Jules Buckley. Salvant and the ensemble perform timeless songs newly arranged by composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue. Salvant performs some standards by Billy Strayhorn, Stephen Sondheim, Bertold Brecht & more.
Cecile McLoran Salvant - With Every Breath I Take
Rostam — American Stories
Since his days in Vampire Weekend, Rostam has worked through questions of heritage in omnivorous, seemingly easygoing music with a lot going on underneath the surface. As a solo artist, those explorations have become more personal and more potent: Half-Light introduced his feelings of being musically and culturally bilingual, rooted in American and Iranian traditions while standing slightly apart from them. On American Stories, he celebrates these differences and the new harmonies they can create, both figuratively and literally, by marrying the sounds of American folk, pop, and country with microtonal melodies and Persian instrumentation including the saz and yaylı tambur.
This blend never feels academic. If anything, it heightens the emotional impact of American Stories' songs. On first listen, "Back of a Truck" sounds like a country-pop feel-good hit of the summer. However, its down-home twang comes from both guitar and the saz; when banjo, pedal steel, and fiddles join in, it's a gesture of unity as moving and meaningful as when Rostam sings "blow a kiss to the gods above." Similarly, a soaring saz solo courtesy of the Voidz' Amir Yaghmai lifts "Like a Spark"'s wish for freedom to poignant heights.
Occasionally, his search for common ground results in tempos and rhythms that are a bit too similar to each other, but that barely detracts from what he's accomplished here. At the time of American Stories' release, striving for harmony was a rare thing. It's still a noble goal, and on these songs, Rostam achieves it beautifully.
Kelsey Lu--So Help Me God
So Help Me God is the long-awaited second album from Kelsey Lu, the classically trained cellist, singer and songwriter from Charlotte, North Carolina. Moving between shadow and release, the 10-track record follows her groundbreaking 2019 debut Blood and is co-produced by Lu, Jack Antonoff and Yves Rothman, mixed by Oli Jacobs, with contributions from Sampha, Kamasi Washington and Kim Gordon. Across the record, Lu blends distorted guitars, choral swells and dark electronic pulses into a sonic landscape that moves between devotional intensity and cinematic scale. So Help Me God expands Lu's singular creative universe - where music, visual art and performance converge into one multidisciplinary project, marking the return of one of contemporary music's most singular voices. Indie/Retail Exclusive Brick Color Vinyl in Gatefold Jacket and Printed Inner Sleeve.
