From Earl Sweatshirt to… Urge Overkill?! 20 albums we can't wait to hear in January

For the third album from the British electro-pop moniker, Years & Years has transformed into a solo project. Only singer and songwriter Olly Alexander remains after the departure of founding members Mikey Goldworthy and Emre Türkmen following 2018’s concept album Palo Santo. Alexander has stressed that becoming a solo act hasn’t diminished the glammed-up intensity of the music, and lead single “Craze” certainly suggests that his muse hasn’t lost its penchant for—as he puts it—”deranged sexual energy.” [Alex McLevy]

Esteemed Canadian indie rock collective Broken Social Scene returns—well, sort of—with Old Dead Young, an assortment of the group’s tougher-to-find singles, B-sides, outtakes, and rarities culled from a variety of sources over the past 20 years. The 14 tracks hew largely to the first half of its existence, and if the sweetly simple “This House Is On Fire” is any indication, these are far more than just the influential band’s also-rans. [Alex McLevy]

Twenty-two years after her iconic cover of the Rolling Stones’ “,” Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power, is releasing her third album of songs written by other people, reinterpreted to maximize their potential for lying on the floor in the dark. Frank Ocean, Bob Seger, Billie Holiday, and country queen Kitty Wells all make the cut, as does The Replacements’ “Here Comes A Regular,” already one of the saddest songs ever written. We can only assume it’s unsafe to operate heavy machinery while listening to the Cat Power version. [Katie Rife]

Fans of the classic boom-bap can look forward to the release of From A Bird’s Eye View, the sophomore studio album from Los Angeles-based rapper Cordae. Following up the massive (and twice Grammy-nominated) success of The Lost Boy, the new album finds Cordae once more delivering lyrically dense verses over beats (courtesy of Hit-Boy) that summon the ghosts of hip-hop’s earlier generations—as demonstrated by the excellent guest verse from Lil Wayne on recent single, “Sinister.” [Alex McLevy]

Former Odd Future member Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, a.k.a. Earl Sweatshirt, has flows that come out hot and ready, birthed from a deeply spiritual and community-inspired place. Compared to the 2018 LP , the glimpse of the upcoming record feels more tightly composed. “2010,” for instance, features swirling, futuristic synths underlying cutting, sharp-toothed lines about his origins. Rap duo Armand Hammer joins Earl for the second single, “Tabula Rasa,” with tinkling piano melodies on repeat as the three rap about the dismal state of U.S. affairs. [Gabrielle Sanchez]

While the prolific Elvis Costello went experimental and political on his 2021 release, , his January 2022 album with the Imposters seems like it will veer toward the nostalgic: The Boy Named If (And Other Children’s Stories) will also include an illustrated storybook related to the song parables. The tracks released so far are promising, especially “Magnificent Hurt,” which engages “Pump It Up”-era organ to punctuate its tale of lost love, while “Paint The Red Rose Blue” is a plodding yet chilling ballad. [Gwen Ihnat]

English pop outfit Fickle Friends offers a look back to the synthy, funk-inflected sound of the ’80s on Are We Gonna Be Alright?, the band’s second album. Singer Natti Shiner is still delivering slick, direct paeans to emotional messiness, now with a beefed-up sense of soulful grooves fused to the band’s sunny melodies and upbeat rhythms. Like many releases this year, the record is a direct result of lockdown (making the album “held us together in a time of uncertainty,” according to Shiner), and the early singles certainly suggest a band eager to open things up. [Alex McLevy]

The Wombats have experienced a bit of a renaissance. The Liverpool band, which was particularly huge with the blogger crowd in the early 2010s, saw the Oliver Nelson remix of their 2015 track “Greek Tragedy” pop up on TikToks recently. So it makes sense, with so many nostalgic British acts like The Vaccines and The Horrors releasing their first records in some time, that The Wombats would make their return as well. They’ve shared the effervescent single “If You Ever Leave, I’m Coming With You” and mellow ballad “Method To The Madness” off their forthcoming record, Fix Yourself, Not The World. The tracks are so starkly different from each other that it sparks intrigue for what the rest of their first album since 2018 will sound like. [Tatiana Tenreyro]

Fans of late ’90s punk (yes, the kind with hints of emo threaded throughout the breakneck pace) should check out the debut album from hard-to-Google band Anxious, a five-piece act from Connecticut that traffics in the kind of melodic punk you would’ve heard blasting from speakers in skate parks in between songs from Lifetime and The Get-Up Kids. Little Green House delivers a tightly packed collection of 10 songs primed to encourage both mosh pit sing-alongs and angsty headphone-aided brooding. [Alex McLevy]

It’s sometimes hard to explain to Americans just how popular Billy Talent is in the band’s home country of Canada. Purveyors of anthemic, adolescent post-hardcore—think Blink-182 and The Offspring slammed together—the group’s sound has expanded a bit in recent years, notably on 2019’s “ ,” but also on new single “End Of Me,” with its Weezer-esque arrangement (fitting, then, that Rivers Cuomo guests on the track). Get ready for Canadian stadiums to be packed to the rafters (eventually) once again. [Alex McLevy]

No, Wata, Atsuo, and Takeshi aren’t Cubs fans. W, the new album from Japanese heavy rock legends Boris, is meant to serve as a companion piece to the group’s last record, 2020’s No. That album leaned into the harsher, more drone-heavy side of the Boris aesthetic; W, on the other hand, is all about making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up with tremulous, ambient sound. Together, they form what a press release calls “a continuous circle of harshness and healing” created for the world we live in today. [Katie Rife]

There’s an appealing weirdness to the ethereal goth-meets-glam pop of Chrystabell. That shouldn’t be surprising, considering she’s collaborated musically with David Lynch (that was her playing FBI agent Tammy Preston on ) and previous albums found her occupying a Kate Bush-like space between synth-pop and operatic bombast. On Midnight Star, Chrystabell gets a little more out there: It’s a sci-fi concept album about a “beneficent being seeking to save humanity from life on a troubled earth.” Okay, we’re sold. [Alex McLevy]

We recently for his superb (and superbly queer) holiday anthem, “It’s Christmas, Motherfuckers!” So consider us amped for his upcoming full-length, New Money, which looks to continue the sound of lo-fi New Order fused to Depeche Mode grime, albeit with lots more hedonism, gay sex, and musical provocations of the most pleasurable sort. There’s a reason he made Out Magazine’s this year—the guy knows what he’s doing, and it’s a delicious thrill to hear. [Alex McLevy]

There’s still plenty of room for spacious, dreamy pop rock, and up-and-coming British band Palace (not to be confused with Will Oldham’s various Palace monikers) is here to stake its claim on the musical territory. Led by singer Leo Wyndham’s crooning tenor, the group manages to duck “easy listening” charges by committing to a spare, appealing blend of minimalist folk and sweeping orchestral pomp, sometimes in the same song. Sure, it’s smoothly appealing—sometimes that’s exactly what you’re looking for. [Alex McLevy]

It’s been more than five years since . After releasing her first solo single “Stillbirth” in 2015, and her self-titled EP in 2017, Glass is ready to reintroduce her artistry to fans with this debut LP. Her music remains as synth-heavy and experimental as ever; her latest single, “FAIR GAME,” features Glass reciting lyrics in spoken word, combined with a sung chorus that sounds reminiscent of her former band’s song, “Courtship Dating.” She also shared “Baby Teeth,” where Glass takes on a youthful inflection—apt for the song’s name. [Tatiana Tenreyro]

Zach Condon’s vocals spill out like sweet honey as the lead singer of New Mexico-based band Beirut. The group’s seventh album, Artifacts, consists of early work, unreleased singles, and B-sides. Beirut’s music is the definition of “comfort music”—grounded and soothing, like balm for the soul. From the sound of the first two singles, “So Slowly” and “Fisher Island Sound,” it appears the band is continuing down the smooth path they’ve carved out. [Gabrielle Sanchez]

Cloakroom enters its second decade as a band with Dissolution Wave, an unexpected concept album that uses fantastical space western themes to tackle all-too-real questions of inspiration, imagination, and post-millennium anxiety. The space-rock outfit’s sound continues to alternate between restrained, sometimes jangly riffing and Hum-like wall-of-sound anthems that could easily rattle whatever interstellar speakers the trio might encounter on their journey—the first with new drummer Tim Remis. [Alex McLevy]

One of those bands for whom the phrase “Look, you just have to hear it for yourself” could have been invented, NYC-based Combo Chimbita returns with their fourth album—and even more influences and genres swirled into a heady stew of quasi-cumbia-tropical-futurism-kitchen-sink musical stylings. Singer Carolina Oliveros still holds court over it all, her fierce voice holding together the disparate sounds and rhythms that, yes, combine to create something greater, and far more compellingly enigmatic, than the sum of its already-strong parts. [Alex McLevy]

Pinegrove returns with 11:11, the group’s latest record and a follow-up to 2020’s Marigold. After teasing the release last summer with the expansive balladry of early single “,” the more recent “Alaska” dials up the musical intensity with a stomping barn-burner of a track, suggesting the record will contain both extremes, and everything in between, all while delivering thoughtful and intense lyricism. In other words, it’ll be a Pinegrove album—none is quite identical to the others, but all are of a piece. [Alex McLevy]

Urge Overkill already had one better-than-expected reunion album that nobody saw coming—2010’s —and now, more than a decade later, they’ve reunited once again. With the unusual choice of Wham! cover “Freedom!” as the lead single, Urge sounds like it’s returning to the sharp riffing and Cheap Trick-style rock it perfected long before Pulp Fiction turned them into “those guys who covered ‘You’ll Be A Woman Soon’.” And honestly? Thank goodness for that. [Alex McLevy]