New Releases
August 29, 2025Pianist and composer Brad Mehldau’s Ride into the Sun—a songbook record of music by the late singer, songwriter, and guitarist Elliott Smith—features performances by singer/guitarist Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear, singer/mandolinist Chris Thile, bassists Felix Moseholm and John Davis, drummer Matt Chamberlain, and a chamber orchestra led by Dan Coleman. The album's ten Elliott Smith songs are complemented by four Mehldau compositions inspired by him and interpretations of Big Star’s “Thirteen,” which Smith also covered, and “Sunday” by Nick Drake, whom Mehldau sees "in some ways as sort of Smith’s visionary grandfather.”
-
Pianist and composer Brad Mehldau’s Ride into the Sun—a songbook record of music by the late singer, songwriter, and guitarist Elliott Smith—features performances by singer/guitarist Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear, singer/mandolinist Chris Thile, bassists Felix Moseholm and John Davis, drummer Matt Chamberlain, and a chamber orchestra led by Dan Coleman. The album's ten Elliott Smith songs are complemented by four Mehldau compositions inspired by him and interpretations of Big Star’s “Thirteen,” which Smith also covered, and “Sunday” by Nick Drake, whom Mehldau sees "in some ways as sort of Smith’s visionary grandfather.”
Grammy Award–winning singer, songwriter, and guitarist Molly Tuttle's new solo album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine, recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce, marks a sonic departure from her recent work. The album of eleven originals and one cover (Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s “I Love It”) is a hybrid of pop, country, rock, and flat-picking, plus a murder ballad. Her virtuoso guitar work takes center stage on this album more than ever, and for the first time, she introduces her banjo playing into two of her recordings.
This first recording of Steve Reich's Jacob's Ladder, performed by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Jaap van Zweden, and Synergy Vocals, was made during its October 2023 world premiere at Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall. “Lovely and refreshing," says the New York Classical Review. "Superb." The first recording of Traveler's Prayer (2020), performed by Colin Currie Group and Synergy Vocals, was made at Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall, also in 2023. "The tone of its score, from first note to last, is sustained sublimity," says the Los Angeles Times.
About Ghosts features eight new compositions by guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson, performed with her sextet Amaryllis, the improvisatory band featured on her critically praised albums Amaryllis, Belladonna, and Cloudward: Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums), Jacob Garchik (trombone), and Adam O’Farrill (trumpet). Saxophonists Immanuel Wilkins and Brian Settles join the ensemble on five tunes, and Halvorson adds Pocket Piano synthesizer overdubs on a number of tracks. The album was produced and mixed by Deerhoof's John Dieterich.
Lady on the Bike—the debut album from cinematic electro-pop duo Ringdown, featuring Danni Lee Parpan and Pulitzer and Grammy winner Caroline Shaw—celebrates the feeling of possibility in myriad forms: the possibility of love; the possibility of creating connection and community in a world trying to pull those things apart; the possibility of making music in new ways. The songs were collaboratively written and recorded by the duo. New Body Electric members Leah Vautar and Aaron K Peterson perform on and help produce several songs; Sō Percussion is featured on a new version of Ringdown’s previously released single “Ghost.”
Rhiannon Giddens reunites with her former Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Justin Robinson on What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow. Produced by Giddens and Joseph "joebass" DeJarnette, the album features Giddens on banjo and Robinson on fiddle, playing eighteen of their favorite North Carolina tunes. Many were learned from their late mentor, legendary North Carolina Piedmont musician Joe Thompson; one is from another musical hero, the late Etta Baker. Giddens and Robinson recorded outdoors at Thompson’s and Baker’s North Carolina homes, as well as the former plantation Mill Prong House, accompanied by the sounds of nature, including two different broods of cicadas, which had not emerged simultaneously since 1803, creating a true once-in-a-lifetime soundscape.
David Longstreth’s Song of the Earth, a song cycle for orchestra and voices, is performed here by Longstreth with his band Dirty Projectors—Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, Olga Bell—and the Berlin-based chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e. The album also features Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, Anastasia Coope, Tim Bernardes, Ayoni, Portraits of Tracy, and the author David Wallace-Wells. Longstreth says that while Song of the Earth—his biggest-yet foray into the field of concert music—"is not a ‘climate change opera,’” he wanted to “find something beyond sadness: beauty spiked with damage. Acknowledgement flecked with hope, irony, humor, rage.”
The single “Oganesson" marks the first new offering from the band Tortoise since 2016 and foreshadows a larger body of work to come. The track was released just as the band performed both new music and classics from their thirty-year catalog at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.