Amoeba Music

Adrianne Lenker's Bright Future is a testament to growth, resilience, and the transmutation of emotions. That's transmutation in both the musical and the emotional sense: the second track is titled "Sadness as a Gift," if you needed a case in point. There's a tears-in-your-eyes clarity to the heartbreak detailed in these songs with their keening strings, tender guitars, and Lenker's sweetly bitter vocals. Bright Future is an album that finds meaning in the temporality of both pain and pleasure. An album that feels like a companion for the days you're looking for something or someone to hold onto. More

Sufjan Stevens's Javelin is a beautiful heartbreaker. These tracks feel like some of his deepest, most vulnerable, devastating work, yet this album is no downer. Buoyed quite literally by the lovely backing vocals of his five-part vocal choir of friends (adrienne maree brown, Hannah Cohen, Pauline Delassus, Megan Lui, and Nedelle Torrisi), the tracks embody the incredible human ability to reach up from the gutter, towards the stars. Javelin is a soft-voiced companion for tough times, gifted with a sense of the sacred and sublime. More

Taking its name from the infamous Georgia recording studio, Capricorn is a big step in the evolution of Atlanta bluesman Eddie 9V. Whether it’s the N’awlins funk of lead single “Yella Alligator” or the simmering ‘70s soul of “Are We Through” or “How Long,” Eddie 9V spreads his wings and flies across the genres and decades on Capricorn . More