Taylor Swift, Sparks, Brandi Carlile

If you want to feel utterly hopeless for approximately 45 minutes, Blight, The Antlers’ first LP in four years, arrives this October. Singer-songwriter Peter Silberman says this album retreats from the “extended metaphors” that defined his past work in favor of a more “direct approach.” That means the multitude of dead animals in lead single “Carnage” aren’t a stand-in for a failing relationship like in Burst Apart‘s “Putting The Dog To Sleep”; they’re just dead animals. Blight is about “all the ways that nature is under threat,” Silberman continued. “The smell of wildfire smoke on a sunny afternoon, the sound of chainsaws on a hike through the woods—these contradictions became impossible to ignore.” [EK]

Since Kevin Parker’s last Tame Impala album, 2020’s The Slow Rush, we’ve only heard from him a few times, and most of them have involved Dua Lipa (including the Barbie soundtrack). But don’t take this as a sign that Parker has completely gone pop or that the impala has been tamed; Deadbeat, so far, sounds a lot like the psychedelia we’ve come to expect from the project. Even if the seven-minute “End Of Summer,” the lead single from the album, has something resembling a dance breakdown in the middle, it feels like a new layer beneath Parker’s murky vocal than a wholesale pivot. [DG]

Brandi Carlile is the story on her new LP, Returning To Myself. It’s her first solo album in four years (she’s worked with Elton John, Joni Mitchell, and more in the meantime), and it sounds like she could have gone four more if she had her druthers. “I’m not my favorite person to spend my time with,” the singer-songwriter said in a statement, per Rolling Stone. “Returning to myself is not just a lonely, but a painfully boring thing to do.” Still, she leans into all that unwanted solitude on the album’s powerful title track, which features her undeniable vocals over a sparse, folky melody. It’s a little painful (and cathartic in equal measure), but it’s far from boring. [EK]

Evan Dando, The Lemonheads’ only permanent member, has been on a very long hiatus. The group hasn’t released original music in almost two decades (since 2006’s self-titled LP), but that changes with October’s Love Chant. Singles like “In The Margin,” “Deep End,” and “The Key Of Victory” deliver all sorts of fuzzy pop-rock goodness. Dando has also recruited an army of friends and collaborators for this record, including Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis, Juliana Hatfield, the Moldy Peaches’ Adam Green, and more. [EK]