10 new albums to listen to in February

In 2023, Matt Pond PA members Matt Pond and Chris Hansen released an album under the new moniker The Natural Lines. It was a worthy experiment but, according to Pond, “[I]t was tough reconnecting with people who knew me by my real name. Then it hit me—after all those years of running in circles, maybe the answer was simple. I should just be myself until the end.” Now, Pond and Hansen have re-adopted the name Matt Pond PA. The Ballad Of The Natural Lines reflects on their decision to embrace the original band name and why they felt a change was necessary in the first place.

Though Squid’s first two albums, Bright Green Field and O Monolith, evoked a sense of place, the post-punk band’s earlier EPs were more character-focused. Squid returns to that character-driven storytelling with their third album, Cowards, which was partly inspired by “bleak books about horrid murderers,” according to singer and drummer Ollie Judge. The first single, “Crispy Skin,” was specifically inspired by Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is The Flesh, a dystopian novel about legalized cannibalism. “A lot of the album deals with the idea of sleepwalking into a world of complacency,” Judge said in a press release.

“The world can be a terrifying place, and for a young, queer, black person in rural America, that terror can be visceral,” reads an album note for Horror, musician Bartees Strange’s third record. “Horror is an album about facing those fears and growing to become someone to be feared.” Since his full-length debut in 2020, Strange has quickly established himself as a master of blending genres, including alternative, indie, hip-hop, and country. Each song on Horror sounds different than the one that came before, but an underlying feeling of disquiet is the constant that ties the whole album together.

After her breakthrough 2019 debut album, The Jungle Is The Only Way Out, R&B singer Mereba spent some time figuring out where to go next. Six years later, she’s finally back with her sophomore album, The Breeze Grew A Fire. In between her two albums, she switched labels from Interscope to Secretly Canadian, a move that necessitated some introspection. “For this [album], it went back to me being on my own for the creation of a lot of the songs, and it was really important for me at this time of life because I was a little disconnected from the world, and from who I was. So I was trying to find my way back to myself first. What do I like? What do I want to hear? What do I want to say to people now?” Mereba said in a press release.

The amount of previously unreleased material in Neil Young’s archives is staggering. Over the past decade and a half, in addition to several box sets’ worth of demos, live tracks, and unreleased songs, he’s released nine full albums that were shelved for various reasons throughout his career. Oceanside Countryside is the 10th part of that collection. Originally recorded in 1977, the album is split into two sides. Young explained, “I sang the vocals and played the instruments on Oceanside in Florida at Triad studios and Malibu at Indigo studio. I sang the vocals and recorded with my great band of friends, Ben Keith, Joe Osborn, Karl T. Himmel, and Rufus Thibodeaux at Crazy Mama’s in Nashville on Countryside. I hope you enjoy this treasure of an Analog Original recording, recorded by Tim Mulligan, as much as I do. Listening to it now, I think I should have put it out back then.”

For her seventh record, Basia’s Palace, singer-songwriter Basia Bulat took a different approach to writing. Instead of composing on a piano or guitar, she turned to MIDI soundscapes as the foundation for her new songs. The resulting tracks sound unlike anything else in Bulat’s catalogue, taking her usual folk tunes and turning them into something a little more mysterious.

Will Wiesenfeld is back with the first new Baths album in eight years (he’s continued to release music under the name Geotic in the meantime). Gut represents a new direction for Baths—though the songs still have electronic elements, Wiesenfeld incorporated more live instruments into the recording. Wiesenfeld told Paper, “I’m a fan of all sorts of rock, but especially the sort where artists are doing something different, and that electricity was a driving inspiration. Like, the idea of a ‘band-sounding record’ was the inciting concept, but I can’t help myself, and I always fold in all the other things I find interesting along the way as well. In part Gut was an effort to prove to myself that I’m capable of a sort of music that I hadn’t actively pursued before, but it very quickly just became ‘correct’ to have the album sound the sort of direct way that it does, and I didn’t have to focus on it as conceptually as I did at first. I could just sort of build the world of it from the inside out once I realized I was comfortable there.”

The Navy Album, Roddy Ricch’s follow-up to 2021’s Live Life Fast, was supposed to come out in December 2024, keeping the pattern of December releases Ricch established with his first two records. But on December 6, The Navy Album’s release date, Ricch announced that the album had been delayed to February 2025. It seems like everything is on track for the rapper’s return this time around, but let’s hope we don’t get another last-minute delay.

Tate McRae’s So Close To What is set to be the breakout pop album of early 2025. McRae has been circling pop superstardom for a minute now, with her 2023 single “Greedy” (from her album Think Later) peaking at number three on the Billboard Hot 100. The lead single from So Close To What, “It’s ok I’m ok,” only peaked at number 20, but its early-’00s sound and the Britney Spears references in the music video show that McRae is keenly aware of current pop trends—and she’s well-positioned to take advantage of that.

Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear, has spent the five years since his last solo record in and out of the studio with his band, Animal Collective. Though he’s long been a prolific solo musician as well, he’s tended to keep his Animal Collective and Panda Bear work relatively separate, looping in one or two Collective members at a time on his solo projects. On Sinister Grift, however, Lennox invites all his Animal Collective bandmates to collaborate on a single Panda Bear album for the first time, turning it into more of a “band record” than anything Panda Bear has done before. The new album also features guest vocals from Cindy Lee on the single “Defense.”