It’s far too early to prejudge what might be the song of the summer, but the fun is in the hunt, anyway. These albums cast their gazes both forward and backward for inspiration, explore love and despair, and often carry hope – either in their lyrics, or in the expectations of their fans, since in some cases these albums may or may not have even been recorded yet. What is summer for, though, if not for longing?
Fred again.. and Brian Eno, Secret Life (Text Records, May 5): Some of 2023′s most fun musical storylines are the friendships that the prolific pandemic wunderkind Fred again.., a British dance-music producer, has been building with the pioneers of his genre’s previous generations. His tripartite bromance with dubstep king Skrillex and texture manipulator Four Tet has been widely documented, but the two-way mentorship he’s had for more than a decade with Brian Eno, the art-rock and ambient-music giant, has given us one of the year’s most pleasant surprise albums. On Secret Life, Fred sheds his propulsive style to play in the ambient-as-art sandbox Eno began building in 1978. It’s an evocative, gorgeous slow burn, perfect for lying on the beach and staring at the sunset.
Kaytranada and Aminé, Kaytraminé (Venice Music, May 19): Kaytranada is Montreal’s king of the summery, bouncy anthem; the electronic producer has a keen ear for hooks and the right beats to complement the many vocalists he works with. The Portland rapper-singer Aminé has been an occasional collaborator for nearly a decade. In their first full-length together, their kinship’s playfulness reveals itself. Lead single 4eva, featuring perennial hitmaker Pharrell Williams, shines like a sunny afternoon, while Rebuke builds a beach day out of a sample from Brazilian guitarist Lo Borges.
Pony, Velveteen (Take This to Heart Records, May 19): With rock music melting away from the charts this past decade, its keenest students are less bound to the genre’s immediate past than older generations. Pony, who flit between Toronto and Windsor, Ont., hew toward the wall-of-sound power pop of the 1990s, when the nerds of college rock crossed paths with the ethos of punk and embraced crunchy, playful fun. Led by songwriter Sam Bielanski and guitarist Matty Morand, Pony write songs that are both urgent and exciting, including Sucker Punch, Très Jolie and Peach.
Arlo Parks, My Soft Machine (Transgressive, May 26): Arlo Parks’s 2021 album Collapsed in Sunbeams was one of the most pleasant musical debuts of the early pandemic: empathetic, confident songs set to live R&B instrumentation that was so tight that the Gen-Z musician could even win over the heart of the most cynical boomer. Two years later, the British singer-songwriter’s follow up embraces a more synth-driven future. Songs such as Weightless and Blades – the latter of which was directly influenced by Kaytranada – take Parks’s wide-eyed lyricism, now steered a little more toward longing, and set it to grooves more likely to get a dance floor moving.
Foo Fighters, But Here We Are (Roswell/RCA, June 2): Okay, so maybe rock is still a going concern, but there’s a good argument to be made that there’s pretty much one guy holding it up. Dave Grohl, the rock ’n’ roll Atlas, has long since passed shouldering the legacy of Nirvana – just as he’s shed the power-pop music he made after Kurt Cobain’s death – to become a stadium mainstay. And yet he and his fellow Foos are mourning another death: that of their drummer, Taylor Hawkins, who died last year on tour. It’s not yet clear who’s drumming on their new album’s lead single Rescued, which blends the poppier side of their songwriting with The Pretender-like anthemic moments. Could it be Queen scion Rufus Taylor? Renowned session drummer Josh Freese? Or maybe Grohl himself?
Félix Leclerc, L’alouette en colère (Édition Anniversaire) (Universal, June 9): The Québécois activist and folk singer-songwriter Félix Leclerc died 35 years ago, but his legacy has long carried on throughout Quebec, where the esteemed Félix Awards still bear his name. Universal is reissuing his seminal album L’alouette en colère for its 50th anniversary, bringing it back to the masses with never-heard-before demos. That includes a very early recording of the title track, made in 1971 in the wake of the October Crisis, which serves up a case study in duality: Leclerc exudes both calmness and extraordinary frustration as he processes what he felt as his homeland slipping away after Ottawa’s heavy-handed response to the calamity.
Jenny Lewis, Joy’all (Blue Note/Capitol, June 9): After conquering countless flavours of indie rock with her solo career, Rilo Kiley (which the aforementioned Pony cites as an influence) and the Postal Service, Jenny Lewis has gone to Nashville. Working with Dave Cobb – who’s produced for “alternative” (scare-quotes half intended) country acts such as Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell – Lewis’s new record filters her fine songwriting through the genre with great confidence. There’s often been a country element to Lewis’s evocations, and in some cases aesthetics (see: Rabbit Fur Coat). But the Joy’all single Psychos layers her evocative songwriting atop the lucid pedal steel and ultratight rhythm section you’d hope for from Nashville’s finest.
Jessy Lanza, Love Hallucination (Hyperdub, July 28): The California-via-Hamilton producer-singer revealed with the single Don’t Leave Me Now earlier this year that she’d been nearly struck by a car soon after moving to Los Angeles. The incident left Lanza effectively agoraphobic, the experience of which she channelled into the song, which wraps a house-like beat around a handful of hooks. The song has since been packaged as the first single from Love Hallucination, produced with a handful of collaborators including fellow Canadians Jacques Greene and Jeremy Greenspan. Second single Midnight Ontario, co-produced with Greene, keeps beckoning to the dance floor, where Lanza’s music is best enjoyed.
Frank Ocean, TBA (TBA, TBA): Listen, Frank. We know you’ve got a new album in you. We’re ready for it when you are. (It’s been seven years since Ocean released Blond on Apple Music and iTunes, back in the days when artists would sometimes give certain streaming services exclusive rights. How quaint! No, but for real, the groundbreaking R&B singer-songwriter casually dropped the line “not that there’s not a new album” at Coachella in April, so now he’s got us thirsty. Even though we don’t know yet what label it would even come out on.)
Pusha T and DJ Drama, As-Yet-Untitled Gangsta Grillz mixtape (Def Jam or Generation Now, TBA): Two of the most prominent figures of hip hop’s past two decades have promised to join forces sometime this year. Why not this summer? DJ Drama’s Gangsta Grillz mixtape series chronicled the ascendance of Southern rap, and inspired one of the best rap albums so far this decade, Tyler the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost, on which he serves as narrator. Whether the Push collab will take on the same lushness is unclear, though where Tyler is goofy and introspective, Push is all brashness. It’s a formula that’s worked from Justin Timberlake collaborations to a lucrative solo career spent rapping lucidly about what he knows best (which we probably shouldn’t discuss in detail in a family newspaper).