7 albums you need to hear this week

In the age of streaming, it’s never been easier to listen to new music — but with over 60,000 new songs added to Spotify every day, it’s also never been harder to know what to put on. Every week, the team at Rolling Stone UK will run down some of the best new releases that have been added to streaming services.

This week, we’ve highlighted records by High Vis, Kylie, Porridge Radio, Bon Iver, Japandroids, Confidence Man and Kelly Lee Owens.

Confidence Man – 3AM (LA LA LA)

On their first two albums – 2018 debut Confident Music for Confident People and 2022’s TILT – Janet Planet and Sugar Bones toed the line of satire on electro pop hits full of sass, making them festival favourites and a word-of-mouth success. If the band’s beginnings painted them as a humorous curiosity, truly excellent new album 3AM (LA LA LA) sees them hurtle more intentionally towards the dancefloor and onto festival main stages. Sugar told Rolling Stone UK: “[TILT] was about having to get into our own heads and out of reality. This time, we were just like, ‘Let’s make the world a fuckin’ party and stay right here!’”

Read Rolling Stone UK’s full five-star review of 3AM (LA LA LA) here and read our interview with the band about the album here

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music

Kelly Lee Owens – Dreamstate

“Ballads and bangers was the ethos,” Kelly Lee Owens told Rolling Stone UK of fourth album Dreamstate. Both are on brilliant show on an album that stretches the Welsh producer’s sonic wings even further than before. Bubbling techno remains her forte on the album’s huge title track and soaring opener ‘Dark Angel’ but it’s on tender closer ‘Trust & Desire’ that a new naked vulnerability shows itself.

Read our full interview with Kelly Lee Owens about Dreamstate here 

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music

High Vis – Guided Tour

Across two brilliantly received albums, London band High Vis transcended their hardcore roots sonically, while firmly sticking to them from an ethical standpoint. Guided Tour is their most sonically diverse album yet, touching on shoegaze and dance as well as the baggy Madchester sound they have inhabited from the start. It’s a unique cocktail, especially when fronted by the brilliance of lyricist Graham Sayle, who sings of despair, desolation and what might lay on the other side of it.

Read our full interview with High Vis about Guided Tour here.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music

Japandroids – Fate & Alcohol

Nearly eight years after their last album, Near to the Wild Heart of Life, and with almost total radio silence in that time, most assumed that Canadian two-piece Japandroids were dead. This year, they then revealed that this fate will soon become true, but not before they bow out with Fate & Alcohol, a fourth album that sends them off into the abyss with the same raucous racket as they mastered across their near-20-year career. A band who burned brightly and fiercely before retreating into the shadows each time, it’s a fitting end.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music

Kylie – Tension II

Kylie Minogue may have said that Tension II contains the offcuts of last year’s predecessor, but there’s no sign of half baked leftovers to be found here. Instead, it’s a record that proves to be every bit as party-starting as the last one. ‘Taboo’ has every bit the potential to become the hit that ‘Padam Padam’ was, while her collabs – including the pulsating house of Blessed Madonna collab ‘Edge of Saturday Night’ will instantly beckon you to the dancefloor.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music

Bon Iver – SABLE EP

On his first project in five years, Justin Vernon makes a return to the raw folk that first enraptured a legion of fans on 2007’s For Emma, Forever Ago. There’s an unabashed meeting with guilt on the raw ‘S P E Y S I D E’, while the slow-burning optimism of ‘Awards Season’ feels like the catharsis that Vernon truly needed to exercise. In one sense, it’s a return to his roots. In another, it’s a beautiful reflection of where he finds himself in the here and now.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music

Porridge Radio – ‘Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me

On Porridge Radio’s latest, frontwoman Dana Margolin weaves a powerful thread of resistance. It’s there on the unrepentant power of ‘God of Everything Else’, which sees Margolin deliver a defiant shout of “Don’t need to know where you are. You’ll be hit by a wave of me“. This brilliant pairing of post break-up confessionals and spiky guitars fits them like the snuggest of gloves.

But late on, songs like the tender ‘Pieces of Heaven’ show they’re equally capable of more intimate, raw moments too. The result is a multi-faceted, constantly intriguing look at relationships in all their messy and beautiful glory.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music