Hand Habits’ debut album, Wildly Idle (Humble Before The Void), was released by Woodsist Records in 2017. Two years later, Hand Habits (AKA Meg Duffy, who you might recognize as a long-time member of Kevin Morby’s touring band) has returned with their sophomore album placeholder. As tender and immediate as anything Duffy’s ever written, the album is also intensely focused and refined—the work of a meticulous musician ready to share their singular vision with the world. (Saddle Creek).

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Two years after the release of her critically acclaimed debut Beyond the Bloodhounds, and after a season of dealing with life on tour and a new and more public life around an album campaign, Victoria went inward. The result, Silences , was recorded with The National’s Aaron Dessner at his studio in upstate New York, and through its twelve tracks Victoria explores themes of mental illness, drug addiction, sexism and all the elements that consume the day-to-day lives of women attempting to make a world of their own. (Canvasback Music)

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The follow-up to Julia Jacklin’s critically acclaimed 2016 debut Don’t Let the Kids Win, Crushing finds the Australian artist continually acknowledging what’s expected of her, then gracefully rejecting those expectations.Her second full-length album, Crushing embodies every possible meaning of its title word, and is formed from sheer intensity of feeling, an in-the-moment narrative of heartbreak and infatuation. Produced by Burke Reid (Courtney Barnett, Liam Finn) and recorded at The Grove Studios in Sydney, Crushing sets Jacklin’s understated defiance against a raw yet luminous sonic backdrop. (Polyvinyl Record Co)

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Australian pscyhe-pop band Methyl Ethel release their remarkable new album Triage — written, produced and performed by lead singer Jake Webb. Recorded in Jake’s home studio, this is the third album for the band, following the universally acclaimed Oh Inhuman Spectacle and Everything is Forgotten. Triage marks a more reflective album for this surrealist outfit — a dark and obscured expression of life set to the backdrop of dream pop hooks.(4AD)

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Stuffed & Ready follows Cherry Glazerr’s Secretly Canadian debut Apocalipstick, an album that sizzled with frontwoman Clementine Creevy’s confidence, vision and fiercely idiosyncratic personality. When Creevy began writing Stuffed & Ready, she found unexpected inspiration by turning inward. Her unblinking honesty attempts to reconcile confusion and anger in the current political climate. (Secretly Canadian)

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The music Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad release as Girlpool occupies a transient space of constant evolution, and their new album What Chaos Is Imaginary is no exception — a collection of songs unlike any of the material from their acclaimed 2015 debut Before The World Was Big and 2017’s Powerplant. Think drum machines, synthesizers, new harmonies, huge guitars and at least one orchestral breakdown. (Anti- Records)

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›› ISSUE Feature: Interview and performance by Girlpool

Showcaller is the first book exploring the work of emerging New York-based artist Talia Chetrit. It brings together a broad range of her work made between 1994 and 2018 and is linked to a retrospective museum exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in early 2018. The title Showcaller is a theatrical term which references the performative aspects of Chetrit’s work, the power dynamic between subject and photographer, and, ultimately, between the photographer and her audience. (MACK)

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With rumors percolating for months on fansites, Reddit boards and Twitter, fans of Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst got a huge treat last night when the pair dropped an entire album, Better Oblivion Community Center, essentially announcing their partnership for the first time. The pair had kept their plans under wraps for months as they wrote and recorded in Los Angeles in the summer and fall of 2018. Within an hour of the album’s surprise release, the band were performing—for the very first time—on network television, on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert. (Dead Oceans)

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