Alvvays – Antisocialites

Oh Archie, what have you done? It’s been three years since Alvvays’ self-titled album, a most auspicious indie-pop debut that doubled as a dog-eared short-story collection. Its breakout track was “Archie, Marry Me,” the rare proposal that could rhyme “matrimony” with “alimony” and still sweep people off their feet, but acerbic wit and heart-tugging melody could be found all through the succinct nine-song set. You pronounced their name “always” because you expected them to last.(Pitchfork)

Antwood – Sponsored Content

Now, Antwood is back with his second record for Planet Mu. Sponsored Content takes a slightly more melodic approach and Antwood heavily edited his work to reduce any extraneous elements. The music is focused and lean with aural white space giving the songs space to breathe. Like Venetian Snares, Antwood is creating his own musical vocabulary.(Pop Matters)

Chad VanGaalen – Light Information

Ladies, gents, and parasitic germs: I return today to headquarters after a long, strange journey. Far away, high up north in a distant land where every face stares at blank lights and every creature could burst into a kaleidoscopic sketch, I charted the fantastical lands conceived by Chad VanGaalen. Yet, no matter how peculiar the contours would seem, no matter what morbid demons the routes would plow through, I felt eerily at ease within Light Information. For our host is a prismatic genius, of many talents – and among them is his uncanny ability to merge surreal dilemmas with irresistible melodies, the kinds that soothe and embrace.(Drowned In Sound)

Comeback Kid – Outsider

Outsider sees COMEBACK KID changing things up a little bit. There’s still plenty of their trademark sound here, the title track opens things with but this time round a bigger focus has been place on melody. The album is packed with some of the biggest choruses COMEBACK KID have ever come up with. This gives the album a more fun vibe than what COMEBACK KID have had before. That’s not to say the album is lacking in aggression. Surrender Control gets the balance between mosh heavy hardcore and anthemic rock spot on. Lead single Absolute also made it clear just how different this album was going to be with its guest vocals from Devin Townsend, it’s a bizarre pairing but one that works really well.(Distorted Sound)

Death From Above – Outrage! Is Now

If you take 10 years off between records, you might as well be starting from scratch. That was certainly the case for Death from Above 1979, whose first album (2004’s You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine) helped define the dance-punk years with its jet-powered collection of thrashable love songs. That record was rightly beloved and, after the band’s 2006 breakup, seemed destined to exist as a singular artifact of its trucker-hatted, mp3-blogged time. (CoS)

Faith Healer – Try 😉

[T]he Edmonton band will follow up Cosmic Troubles with Try ;-), an album that finds multi-instrumentalist Renny Wilson joining Jalbert as a full-time member. Jalbert has called the album an attempt to write more simple and straightforward songs, citing the likes of Wipers and Elvis Costello as reference points, and these nine tracks certainly sharpen Faith Healer’s focus to an extent. But anyone who fell in love with the previous album’s aesthetic mastery will still find a lot to love here; it’s like happening upon a lost classic in the dollar bin and catching a vision of future past.(Stereogum)

Julie & The Wrong Guys – Julie & The Wrong Guys

If you’ve gotten to know Julie Doiron’s music through her many solo records, you might well view her as a scruffy chronicler of heartbreak and melancholy — the sort who assesses a breakup by singing, “You got the hard consolation prize / For having to survive.” But the New Brunswick singer-songwriter got her start amid heavier sounds, as she first made her name with the sweetly ragged, distortion-infused rock of the Sonic Youth-inspired band Eric’s Trip.(NPR)

Lunice – CCCLX

Lunice seems to have taken forever to put out his debut album and on finally listening to it, you wonder whether it’s because he was attempting to make it the most theatrical gesture possible. Played loud, as he’s clearly intended for it to be, it less immerses you and more pummels you into submission in kind of the same way that ‘Yeezus’ did – sparse, aggressive beats are the name of the game, and the clattering style of his TNGHT collaborator Hudson Mohawke is a clear influence.(Loud And Quiet)

Neil Young – Hitchhiker

Neil Young‘s unpredictability is reliably predictable. You can count on him to follow a period of one great record after another with a series of left-field genre experiments or frustratingly dull albums. You can expect songs written years or even decades ago to show up once in a while too.(Ultimate Classic Rock)

Partner – In Search Of Lost Time

Back in high school, not a day went by that I didn’t listen to Weezer’s first self-titled album, known by fans as ‘The Blue Album’ (1994). Though it was released years before, it spoke directly to my teenaged-self on a number of topics. That’s the vibe I’m getting from Partner’s debut album, In Search Of Lost Time (releasing September 8), though overhauled for the youth of a more sexually-conscious 2017. Hailing from Sackville, New Brunswick (that’s on Canada’s East Coast for those that don’t know), Partner is a duo made up of friends Josee Caron (vocals, guitar) and Lucy Niles (vocals, drums). While their indie rock / pop punk sound is familiar, especially among their Bandcamp stomping grounds, Partner has an undeniable technical proficiency which uplifts their lighthearted lyrics.(Northern Transmissions)

Walter TV – Carpe Diem

Ten tracks in length, Carpe Diem is said to show a band that “has taken their version of lo-fi recording to a near professional level (or at least attempted to).” A taste of the new sounds of Walter TV — which of course features members of Mac DeMarco’s band — comes alongside the announcement via the uplifting “Graceland,” which you can hear in the player below.(Exclaim!)

And here are some we missed

Laura Sauvage – The Beautiful

Peter Katz – La somme de tous nos efforts

Pierre Kwenders – MAKANDA at the End of Space, the Beginning of Time

With his latest album, the talkatively titled MAKANDA at the End of Space, the Beginning of Time, Montreal-by-way-of-Kinshasa musician Pierre Kwenders (real name José Louis Modabi) reins in the electronic experimentations that characterized his 2014 debut record Le Dernier Empereur Bantou to let things breathe a bit. (Exclaim!)

The Belle Game – Fear/Nothing

Written in basements and apartments, Fear/Nothing is about becoming at home with yourself, and for Belle Game, it was about becoming at home with each other once more. The opening track of the album is called “Shine”. Setting the tone for the rest of Fear/Nothing, “Shine” begins softly, timidly. Vocalist Andrea Lo is easing into her voice. But when she’s finished the first line, it becomes apparent that there is something Other in her voice this time. It’s deeper, more powerful, wider. “It’s not enough, it’s never enough.” Indeed, as Lo sings these words on “Shine”, she seems to be reaching for the stars; slow-motion climbing her way to the heavens. This is where Fear/Nothing lives — somewhere in between the earth and the sky. Not quite among the stars, but ever reaching for them.
(Earmilk)