After twenty years of musical partnership, both Jeremiah Fraites and Wesley Schultz, now dads, fully embraced the life-altering, unromantic challenges and rewards of family life. Their fifth album features a new vulnerability, sly humor and acknowledgements of need – for love, respect, and connection in an increasingly chaotic world.

Plus One represents the duo’s first full-fledged attempt at carving a space in mainstream country music. Tunes that reference country roads and chugging double shots of whiskey sit alongside their trademark message of fostering hope and connection. “We knew that Nashville had something to offer us,” says Michael Trotter, “but we also knew that we’ve got something to offer Nashville.”

Throughout the record, Strange lays down one difficult truth after another, all over a sonic pastiche of music he loved as a kid. His dad hipped him to Parliament Funkadelic, Fleetwood Mac, Teddy Pendergrass, and Neil Young. Those influences merged with Strange’s interest in hip-hop, country, indie rock, and house, culminating in a record that feels completely original.

The Velveteers’ explosive sophomore album is loaded with blistering rock anthems infused with melodic indie songwriting. With producer Dan Auerbach at the helm, the trio encapsulates the raw, forceful, and profoundly heavy power of their live performances and laser-focuses a spotlight on tightly crafted songs as they carve out their own distinctive niche.

Over the last three decades, singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer Gary Louris has built a deeply compelling body of music whose artistry and integrity has won the loyalty and respect of both critics and his peers. Best known for his seminal work with The Jayhawks, he is one of the most acclaimed musicians to come out of Minnesota's teeming rock scene.

Dream Theater’s first release with the classic lineup since 2009 rarely takes the simple route. Head-spinning solos and rhythmically complex musical passages were essential to defining the prog metal master’s reputation and they're no less exciting here. The 16-year break from each other rarely reveals any cobwebs, shaking off any doubts about their return.

Michigan-born and Nashville-based Jason Singer leaves one chapter in the rear-view and turns the page on another with uplifting instrumentation, and plainspoken heartland storytelling punctuated by alternative flare. It’s a deft balance of rock energy, alternative adventurousness, and heart-on-his-sleeve songcraft.

The punk/alternative supergroup’s (members of Thursday, My Chemical Romance, Coheed and Combria, and Circa Survive) debut, Past Lives, navigated through dark, thunderous clouds—each song a lightning bolt illuminating the raw, untamed experimentation of the band. Violet, on the other hand, is the radiant dawn that breaks after the tempest, bringing with it a new hope with its profound lyrics and melancholically hopeful melodies.

Forever is a raw, unvarnished work of love and trust that walks the line between alt-rock muscle and singer-songwriter sensitivity. It is a bold, guitar-driven, exploration of maturity and adulthood that grapples with growth and change, escape and anxiety, self-loathing and self-love, and the songs are intensely vulnerable, full of diaristic snapshots.

Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and Eric Johnson inaugurated the G3 Tour concept 28 years ago which put them on stage together for the first time ever. In 2024, G3 reunited for a sold-out run of US dates. “Reunion Live” much more than just a live album, containing a new album from each artist plus a new LP from the certified supergroup.

Beautifully varied and richly rendered, Lefty is an album that wanders from theme to theme, style to style, exultation to tragedy. Yet it is never lost. If anything, it is at play. Lefty feels like not just a celebration of their journey beyond the bounds of their traditional genre, but as if they have rediscovered the joy in music by honoring the sounds that inspired two boys growing up in Texas to one day make the damn stuff themselves.

On her first studio album in five years, the ever-experimental artist searches for transcendence in her own inimitable language. As promised, twigs’ long-awaited third album is inspired by techno – it’s also her warmest and brightest material to date. The hazy underground equivalent of BRAT summer with a massive injection of purified sex.

Backed by a seven-piece band, Iggy breathes new fire into Stooges classics like “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “T.V. Eye” and ignites the adoring crowd with visceral run-throughs of “The Passenger” and, of course, “Lust for Life.” Live At Montreux… captures the avant-garde icon and punk pioneer in a performance that could only happen here. A singular moment in a singular career.

Recorded in 2014 but never released, Mac Miller’s second posthumous album is the missing link between the earnest rapper he was and the evocative songwriter he would become. Feeling distinct from his broader catalogue, Balloonerism equally tethers itself to other points in Mac’s work. It’s a rather wonderful, albeit unsettling, reminder of a talent lost.

If peppering political songs with humor is like sticking a sparkler in some bread, then Who Let The Dogs Out is like a fireworks display in the factory itself: strange, dangerous, exciting. Sirens blare over a heavy distorted bass and a live drum breakbeat. The band dance between upbeat pop punk, dirty grunge tones and discordant post-punk. A take-no-prisoners debut from one of the UK’s most fun and fearless bands.

Mark Tremonti levels up all around on his 19th overall album, joined by bandmates Eric Friedman [guitar], Ryan Bennett [drums], and Tanner Keegan [bass]. The End Will Show Us How charges with inspirational lyricism, metallic barrages, and Tremonti’s most incisive displays of fret fireworks - a testament to his legacy of ceaseless creativity and a certified triumph!

The band’s sixth full-length album showcases Franz at their most immediate, upbeat and life-affirming, unashamedly going for the pop-jugular in classic Franz style. Recorded at AYR studios in Scotland, the 11 songs on The Human Fear all allude to some deep-set human fears and how overcoming and accepting these fears drives and defines our lives.