Earlier this year, Lucy Dacus released Forever Is A Feeling, her first solo album since she broke through to true mainstream fame as a member of boygenius. Right now, Dacus is touring North America, and she’s got a lot going on. She’s officiating fans’ weddings onstage. She joined the Killers at Osheaga. She served as a surprise guest at the Las Culturistas Culture Awards, where she sang Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing.” Now, she’s releasing a couple of new songs and changing the cover art of Forever Is A Feeling. In the streaming era, you can do that.

You have to live some life to write like Alexandra Levy. Some musicians come out with a new album because it’s been a few years since the last one, but the songs on when i paint my masterpiece — the multi-disciplinary artist’s new album as Ada Lea, out today — seem to have emerged out of necessity. The album strikes a difficult balance in that it feels like an outpouring of Levy’s heart and soul but is also carefully considered at every turn. Not that it’s a perfectionist project; the music is pleasingly loose and shaggy, and Levy sings like a real human being rather than a cursive-voiced machine. But you can tell how much thought went into the lyrics, the arrangements, the sequencing.

In a few weeks, Deftones, a band whose staying power is the stuff of legend, will unleash private music, their 10th studio album. It’s part of a whole wave of Deftones-related activity. Earlier this year, they toured North American arenas with the Mars Volta and Fleshwater. They’ve got more North American shows coming up, including stadium shows with System Of A Down and their own Día De Los Deftones fest, with a bill that includes Clipse, 2hollis, Rico Nasty, and Deafheaven. Next year, Deftones will tour European arenas with Denzel Curry and Drug Church. These guys have good taste in opening acts, and they have the weight to turn all of their shows into real events. They can do that because they make heavy, powerful music with serious reach, and you can hear that in their new song.

This week has been full of outdated indie discourse about whether or not Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros’ 2009 hit “Home” is the worst song of all time. A clip of the group’s Tiny Desk performance has been recirculating on X with many strong opinions about “Home,” the “stomp clap” era, and whether “Home” is “stomp clap.” Now bandleader Alex Ebert (who also fronted the dance-rock group Ima Robot before Edward Sharpe) has weighed in.

Cloud Time is a great album title, not least of all because it appears to be a truth-in-advertising situation. Emily A. Sprague, the synthesist and songwriter perhaps best known for leading Florist, wrote Cloud Time during “a profoundly healing and impactful journey” through Japan last fall. Opening track “Tokyo 1,” out today as the lead single, is an ambient synth piece that will indeed have you levitating skyward, submerged in cirrus, stratus, and cumulus. Listen below via V Haddad’s official visual for the song.

Jeff Tweedy and Jack White, two great veteran Midwestern rockers, are both baseball guys. And you know how baseball guys are. They love stats and random achievements and personal missions. Tweedy and White have both set themselves missions in the world of Major League Baseball, and both of them have now completed those missions.

We’re a week into August, the season’s colloquial Dog Days, which means by now you should have some ideas about what constitute’s this year’s Song Of The Summer. As we always do at this time, we’re asking you all to help us decide. Our 2025 Song Of The Summer readers’ poll is live.

Hot Mulligan’s new song “Island In The Sun” is not a Weezer cover, which is probably for the better. That would probably be boring, and this track is not boring. It’s a nice dose of the band’s typical rapid-fire, neurotic pop-punk that never gets old.

Today, NYC artists Anysia Kym and Tony Selzter announced their collaborative album Purity, out next month via 10k. The pair first met while Selzter was working with labelmate MIKE, producing 2024’s Pinball. According to a press release, their creative relationship bloomed when they “bonded over their mutual love of the drums.” Kym and Selzter’s new single “Speedrun,” previewing the forthcoming project, is centered around thin skittering percussion.

Israel is still killing people in Gaza. The Palestinian genocide continues to escalate; the region has reached two out of three famine thresholds (plummeting food consumption and acute malnutrition) according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) platform. Topshelf Records — the label whose roster includes artists such as Ekko Astral, Weatherday, Parannoul, Peel Dream Magazine, and Mal Devisa — has announced that they are raising funds for aid in Gaza and released a statement urging fellow music peers “to join us in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and to take up the fight for their freedom wherever possible.”