The kids are bringing back early-’00s metalcore. I didn’t see this development coming, but it’s been very fun to watch. There’s a whole scene that’s developed around Ephyra, a Connecticut-based label that only came into existence in 2022. Bands like Balmora, Since My Beloved, Azshara, and Blow Up The Outside World are fully steeped in the complicated song-structures and bone-deep guitar-crunches that Poison The Well and Prayer For Cleansing brought into the game many years ago. And then there’s I Promised The World, a Texan band that seems to have beamed in directly from 2003, before any of the band members were actually born.

Remember Sports haven’t released an album since 2021’s Like A Stone, though there was an EP called Leap Day in 2022. Still, when new album The Refrigerator drops next February on the band’s new label home Get Better Records, it will essentially mark the Philly indie mainstays’ first new music in half a decade. That’s reason to rejoice, and new single “Bug” will only increase your anticipation.

Next Month, the Liverpool Band To Watch King Hannah will release a new limited edition 7″. “This Hotel Room” b/w “Look At Miss Ohio” follows this year’s “Leftovers,” which itself was an outtake from last year’s Big Swimmer. The B-side is a Gillian Welch cover. Today we hear A-side “This Hotel Room,” a smoldering folk-rock slow jam buoyed by powerful harmonies from bandmates Hannah Merrick and Craig Whittle. They sound like a band fully capable of doing justice to a Gillian Welch song.

Back in March, Chrystia Cabral, the Bay Area art-pop musician who records under the name SPELLLING, released her extremely cool album Portrait Of My Heart, one of our favorite records of the year’s first half. One of that LP’s highlights is a vast, dreamy ballad called “Destiny Arrives.” Today, SPELLLING shares a brand-new version of “Destiny Arrives” that features Weyes Blood, someone who knows how to make a vast and dreamy ballad.

Cat Power’s seventh studio album The Greatest turns 20 next year, and to celebrate, the musician born Chan Marshall is releasing a new three-song EP in January called Redux. As a preview, one of those songs is out today, a newly recorded cover of James Brown’s 1958 classic “Try Me.”

Based on name alone, you might assume that deathcrash was a 19-year-old rapper who dressed like a bat and whose beats sounded like the modem-connector static noise. Nope! Instead, deathcrash come from the the fertile South London post-punk scene, and they make majestic ’90s-style slowcore. The first two deathcrash albums, 2022’s Return and 2023’s Less, came out during a busy six-minth stretch. Now, they’re back with their first new single in a couple of years.

The young New York-based singer and producer April Grey makes jittery but confident hyperpop under the name underscores. She’s a prolific collaborator these days, appearing on recent tracks from Oklou, Yaeji, and Danny Brown, and she’s about to join Brown on tour. As for underscores’ own music, her last album was 2023’s Wallsocket, and she seems to have a new one in the works. Over the summer, underscores released a single with the very simple title “Music.” Today, she’s got a new one with the possibly even simpler title “Do It.”

Philly pedal-mashers Nothing basically deserve credit for kicking off the recent boom in heavy shoegaze, and they’re about to return with new music for the first time in a while. The band’s last non-collaborative album was The Great Dismal, which came out almost exactly five years ago. In the time since then, Nothing teamed up with Full Of Hell for the excellent collaborative LP When No Birds Sing, and they kicked off their series of shoegaze-centric Slide Away festivals. (They’ve got Hum and Chapterhouse reunions coming up at next year’s edition.) Now, Nothing are ready to return with a new LP called A Short History Of Decay, and that appetizing image that you see above is the cover art.

Esteemed emo veterans Jimmy Eat World were recently played Best Friends Forever in Las Vegas, where they were presumably greeted as heroes. Frontman Jim Adkins has been popping up some fun places, featuring on a brilliant new Jay Som track and guesting with fellow Arizona greats the Format at their reunion show. Today Adkins’ band is back with their first new song since the non-album single “Telepath” in 2023.

Lô Borges, the Brazilian singer-songwriter who recorded the 1972 album Clube da Esquina with Milton Nascimento, has passed away. According to Mix Vale, Borges died today in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where he was recently hospitalized for a medication-related infection.