Out This Week | Post-Trash Highlights

As we all head into the weekend, we’re happy to share a few of our favorite new releases, out this week (in splendid alphabetical order). The write-ups are all kept brief and bite sized, snippets to catch your interest. There’s a lot of great music out every week and these are just some of the many we think you should check out.

Featured

BIG L | "Harlem’s Finest: Return Of The King"

Mass Appeal Records
Spotify | Apple

Big L cemented himself as one of the all time greats on his classic debut, Lifestylez Ov Da Poor & Dangerous, back in 1995. Four years later he was tragically murdered, a young and hungry MC lost in his prime. Harlem's Finest: Return of the King is an exceptional posthumous look back at his raw talent via immaculate freestyles and lost verses reconstructed with peers and followers, but more than anything, it's a reminder that Big L was one of the greatest to ever touch the mic.

BILLY WOODS & AUGUST FANON | "Gowillog"

Backwoodz Studioz
Bandcamp

Five months after the release of GOLLIWOG, billy woods returns with gowillog, a reimagined full length companion album. Produced in full by August Fanon, the pair have pieced together both remixed tracks and brand-new songs with a startling sense of dread and a sonic clarity that feels fully realized. Fanon is a great producer in his own right, pairing woods' intricate and intellectual bars together with frightening soundscapes and eerie avant-garde hip-hop bangers.

THE FASCINATING CHIMERA PROJECT | "Little Wooden Boat"

Self Released
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple

While their latest full length, Songs For The Moon, was released back in March, The Fascinating Chimera Project are back this week with Little Wooden Boat, a collection of covers that range from Madonna to Erasmo Carlos, capturing the band's psychedelic pop and bossa nova influences amid songs sung in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. "Esa Tristeza" is an immediate highlight, a vivid transportation to tropical Uruguay, as the band gorgeously reshape El Kinto's original from 1968.

MANEKA | "Bathes and Listens"

Topshelf Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple

Since it's inception, Devin McKnight's Maneka project has been in its own plane of existence, a visionary hybrid of post-punk, shoegaze, post-hardcore, art rock, and slowcore. Bathes and Listens is Maneka's third full length and they've never sounded better. Intricately structured with a map that at times feels shapeless, McKnight's blistering guitars lead the way, surging between paint peeling intensity and crushing riffs, densely layered into songs that live, breath, and progress with an uncanny patience. It's the type of record best played on repeat with undivided attention, a treasure trove of deranged sonics that lend to gorgeous walls of sound and a delightfully warped sense of accessibility.

OPTIC SINK | "Lucky Number"

Feel It Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple

Lucky Number, the third album from Memphis' Optic Sink, feels like a major step-up for the band. While still rooted in the synth punk they've always traded in, this time around they're reaching further into the outer ranges, creating a record that's as spaced out and hypnotic as it is immediate. Natalie Hoffmann (NOTS) and the band sound fully transfixed, blending spiky post-punk grooves with motorik rhythms and swirling harmonies, equal parts rough and cosmic.

RADIOACTIVITY | "Time Won't Bring Me Down"

Dirtnap Records
Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple

It's been ten years since Radioactivity released their second album, but the band return as radiant as ever on the aptly titled Time Won't Bring Me Down. Jeff Burke (The Marked Men) and co. rattle with crackling energy through eleven fuzzy power-pop tunes that stick in your head like superglue. Warm and swarming with melodic bite, the band balance their punk legacy with an added emphasis on introspection and adventurous songwriting.

RANSOM & DJ PREMIER | "The Reinvention"

TTT
Spotify | Apple

Sometimes a collaboration is better on paper than it is in reality. In the case of Ransom and DJ Premier's new EP, The Reinvention, the pairing is just as welcome in actuality. Preemo is in classic form, his cuts and menacing boom-bap production finding the perfect match for Ransom's lyrical brilliance and brawn, mixing street knowledge and all the guttural grime. Ransom, one of the underground's more profound MCs, makes the most of the brief run-time, hitting the beats hard and eloquent.

Further Listening:

Blue Zero - Confusion
Chat Pile & Hayden Pedigo - In The Earth Again
Daisy Rickman - Howl (reissue)
Den - Post Pink
Guided By Voices - Thick Rich and Delicious
Holy Sons - Puritan Themes
Joyeria - Graceful Degradation
MONO - Forever Home: Live in Japan with Orchestra PITREZA
Outkast - Stankonia (25th Anniversary Edition)
Plattenbau - Cursed
Primitive Man - Observance
Sachet - Taipei Learner
Snocaps - Snocaps
Snoozer - Little Giants
Stephen Brodsky - Cut to the Core (Volume 1)
Tha God Fahim & Nicholas Craven - Dump Gawd: Hyperbolic Time Chamber Rap 17
Tha God Fahim & Nicholas Craven - Dump Gawd: Hyperbolic Time Chamber Rap 18
Tha God Fahim & Nicholas Craven - Dump Gawd: Hyperbolic Time Chamber Rap 19
Westside Gunn - Heels Have Eyes 3
Zach Hill & Lucas Abela - Bag of Max Bag of Cass

Further Listening:

by: dan goldin