Author: Eric Saeger

Alter Bridge, Alter Bridge (Napalm Records)

One could argue that this Orlando, Florida, band amounts to nothing more exciting than Creed 2.0, given that three-fourths of the members were in Creed and Myles Kennedy’s vocal sound is basically the same as Scott Stapp’s, i.e. like Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell but with no soul. One could also argue that releasing an eponymous album after having already put out several others was a phase that should have died out in the Aughts, but bless ’em, there are people who love these guys (and professional wrestling intro songs, which is what this stuff is best suited for), and they do try to thrash it up here, with songs like “What Lies Within,” in which Kennedy’s Cornell karaoke is used to decent effect, despite its failure to evoke the extreme-metal gravitas for which it aims. In case you’re the type that plans ahead: They’ll be at Citizens House of Blues in Boston on May 10. C —Eric W. Saeger

Diane Coll, Strangely In Tune (self-released)

It’s probably hellaciously difficult for an Americana-folkie to get noticed these days without resorting to gimmickry (singing like a lost orphan moonbat/deploying obscure instruments, etc.), but this Atlanta native does make an effort. I’ve covered her before in these pages, which is pure luck of the draw; her releases seem to wiggle to the top of my overstuffed emailbox when I’m actively looking for something to write about). Nothing odd goes on here, I assure you; although she does gravitate to using mellotrons and harmoniums, they never detract from the songs, and her real strength — strumming clever open guitar chords — does a lot of the heavy lifting. This time she offers a bigger, wider sound in tunes like “Better Fly Me Right,” a loping, really pretty jangler that evokes Loreena McKennitt trying ’70s radio-pop on for size. “Carolina Wren”’s from-the-mountaintop vibe is a great fit for her Carla Olson-ish vocal range. Plenty of goodness here. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• The new albums of Friday, Jan. 9, are being loaded into your Spotifys as we speak, there oughta be a law, you know? As we embark on the blah blah blah of the upcoming new year, I suppose I could give a nod to some of the albums that touched me in 2025, but to be honest, the albums I actually liked were obscure ones, except for the Hives’ new album The Hives Forever Forever The Hives. Actually, whatever, I’ll be honest, friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny had asked me to contribute to his Substack column on The Best 2025 Albums, so in order to oblige him I did put together a short list (sample: “Idle Heirs, Life Is Violence: What it’d sound like if Deftones, Mogwai and Crowbar threw a party and then promptly headed out to destroy the planet”). Now, Dan wanted to know my favorite metal/punk albums of 2025, which was impossible to do; not that I’ve looked very hard, but to my knowledge we haven’t had any real breakthrough metal band since (spoiler) Meshuggah forever ago (Dan’s favorite, Babymetal, is just a weak imitation of Meshuggah as sung by the Powerpuff Girls in my opinion), so if you really want to know what music I liked last year, there were only two things really: every demo song sent to me by local pop/hard-rocker Kris Montgomery Pedersen, and Wayne Wilkinson’s mellow-jazz holiday album Holly Tunes, which I still have in my car as I pen this super-important missive thingamajig (mostly because I’m not ready to move on to the horrors 2026 is going to bring; like, can’t we just pretend it’s still 2025 and we don’t have to reckon with the final bosses that are coming our way in America’s last days?). Sure, Taylor Swift put out an album, but I still haven’t listened to it, nor have I sampled anything from the KPop Demon Hunters movie, given that I assume it’s just the same entertainment matrix that manufactured Babymetal but they’re singing insanely catchy bubblegum tunes. So what do we have to look forward to in 2026, friends? More nepo babies, I’m sure, reflecting the massive wealth-inequality gap that’s characterized everything about our current era, like maybe the lady who does the voice of Bart Simpson on The Simpsons has another relative who can support her niece Sabrina Carpenter on tour so that American art finally hits rock bottom and we can just reboot rock ’n’ roll entirely, maybe starting with bands of marketing dropouts beating logs with dinosaur bones and playing reed flutes completely off-key. I mean, not to be an intolerable nihilist, but wouldn’t that be sooo good at this point?

• English post-punk band Dry Cleaning is mostly known for employing a semi-famous producer, and their newest album Secret Love is no different, because it was produced by Cate Le Bon, who’s famous for — OK, nothing any of you nice people would know. The single “Cruise Ship Designer” is stupid but not annoying, featuring a catchy early Rolling Stones guitar line while some lady, probably Le Bon, whisper-speaks some fashionable nonsense over it.

• Let’s Eat Grandma’s Jenny Hollingsworth’s solo project Jenny On Holiday releases its debut album Quicksand Heart this Friday. “Good Intentions” starts out as a shoegaze tune, then turns into a Belinda Carlisle synthpop song that’s totally ’80s. I liked it well enough.

• Finally it’s U.K.-based pub-indie band The Cribs, with their newest LP, Selling A Vibe. The single, “A Point Too Hard To Make,” is as tuneless as anything you’ve ever heard from Kaiser Chiefs but even worse than that (use your imagination). —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Alter Bridge, Alter Bridge (Napalm Records) & Diane Coll, Strangely In Tune (self-released)

W.E.B., Darkness Alive (Metal Blade Records)

Oh boy, could there be anything more important than making symphonic metal even more “extreme?” That’s what this Athens, Greece-based fivesome is doing, plastering synth-crafted orchestral maneuverings with Cookie Monster vocals from (apparently) a guy and a girl who’re both equally capable of pulling off an exquisite twin-punch karaoke of Bathory and Cannibal Corpse at a kid’s birthday party. This is a live set, just so you know, and thankfully the synthesizer making all the super-epic symphonic sounds didn’t melt down to ruin everyone’s vibe; essentially it’s a barrage of slightly out-of-date thrash metal ravings with bursts of faux-John Williams soundtracking doing epic things here and there. I was promised that “Into Hell Fire We Burn” has a chorus that “will make you want to sing along,” but there’s no melody to it, just demonic chanting over some bonk-bonk-bonk power chords, occasionally interrupted by [place name of literally any thrash band here] hamster-wheel shredding. And people are worried about AI barfing out hilariously disposable music (eyeroll). C —Eric W. Saeger

genCab, “Open Graves” (Metropolis Records)

I can’t come up with a single reason why any self-respecting goth shouldn’t give this dark-techno trio’s new extended single a listen. The driving force behind it is Bucks County, Pennsylvania’s (fine, he obviously wants me to say he’s a Philadelphia-based act, so whatever) own Dave Dutton, a big Elden Ring player who sure loves him some Trent Reznor, at least the harder, more rock-based, Gravity Kills-type stuff. He’s working his way up the ladder, having spent some time in Los Angeles working on various projects and refining his art, which required getting a new computer when his old one kept running out of memory when he was putting tunes together. With regard to the music, yeah, we’re definitely in Trent territory, but he’s an ’80s kid who’s obviously been exposed to tons of synthpop and has a decent sense of song structure; the tune does slap pretty hard in the manner of KMFDM but with much less sampling. Plus he likes Wumpscut, which earned him my rubber stamp from the jump. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• OMG no way, it’s a new year, are we even still standing, holy crow. Jan. 2 is the first new-CD-Friday of 2026, so, as we all try to remember to date our work-email messages with 2026 instead of 2025, it’s a good idea to think about what monstrosities are heading music’s way in the coming — you know, year. Most importantly, it will be a year in which music turns to artificial intelligence (AI) to produce new hit songs and full albums, and many are already complaining about the situation, declaring it somehow bad or “wrong.” In an interview with the Jacobin podcast, overexposed nincompoop and registered mediocre bass player Anthony Fantano, aka “Needle Drop,” professed concern that the “owners” (corporations like Disney and such) of machine-generated music will issue licenses to platforms like Spotify so that said platforms will have the right to use computer-generated voices and songwriting styles at will (which I’m sure will lead to a period when people start rejecting anything AI-generated). As well, like most people who don’t get the point of something, Fantano dismissed last year’s AI-generated song “Walk My Walk” (by the fictitious country-rock artist Breaking Rust, the creation of Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, a semi-anonymous, Burial-like content creator) as having “not actually broken big” because the tune “only” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, a chart that would be “very easy” for bots to mess with. I’ll let you finish your Fritos while you think about how stupid that is (hint: YouTube used to — and probably still does — count views of commercials for Lady Gaga’s singles as actual listens, and we’ve all seen bot-like behavior in YouTube comments sections for disposable divas like Sabrina Carpenter), but in the meantime, yes, the song was digitally created, which Fantano knew, so he knew automatically to write it off as “terrible” and “the most reductive parody of a popular genre you could imagine.” Personally, I’d say T Bone Burnett had already cornered that particular market (the song has a mud-blues sound a la Howlin’ Wolf), but it’s not any more “reductive” or redundant than Burnett’s depleted soil output, especially when he was trying to barf out as much music as he could to capitalize on his Aughts-era period of popularity. So no, we could argue these points all day, but the fact is that AI is coming to replace a lot of workers, including debatably original artists, but what I’m more concerned about is the fact that established rock stars are definitely going to deploy AI themselves to save time producing albums. But that might actually be good in some ways: Lady Gaga ran out of ideas after The Fame Monster, so why wouldn’t she program a robot to produce “something that Cher would sing but that would appeal to fans of Lorde” instead of stealing directly from Madonna like she did on “Born This Way?” Interesting times, eh?

• Devon Allman is the son of Greg Allman, so he’s automatically relevant and I’ll just leave it at that rather than whine about nepo babies again. His new album, Nightvision, is said to be an “alt-rock” album, but it’s actually a prog-rock album, going by advance single “Dead Sea Scrolls,” which is like boring-era Rush but with better guitar shredding.

• Paleface Swiss is a “beatdown hardcore” band from Switzerland with a new EP titled The Wilted. Basically like Fields Of The Nephilim meets Killing Time, it’s OK.

• We’ll wrap it up with Los Angeles-based indie-folk singer Miya Folick, whose new album Erotica Veronica reminds me of Oceanlab and Lisa Loeb: gentle, waifish singing over ambient niceness and strummy ’90s-pop that don’t mix all that well together. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: W.E.B., Darkness Alive and genCab, “Open Graves”

Kris Davis and Lutosławski Quartet, The Solastalgia Suite (Pyroclastic Records)

Canadian pianist/composer Davis won the Best Jazz Instrumental Album Grammy in 2023; she’s known for “intricate, rhythmically complex yet connected compositions” that touch on many genres, including improv, modern jazz, rock and techno. She’s joined here by Poland’s Lutoslawski (string) Quartet, which has no problem keeping up with and elaborating on Davis’ busy-pensive-busy pieces, so much so that busier, more intricate, time-change-riddled pieces like opener “Interlude” would sound mechanical if they weren’t so obviously heartfelt. “Towards No Earthly Pole” is wonderfully unearthly, desolate in spots (recall we’ve got Eastern Europeans on board here) and eerily alien in others; “The Known End” sounds like something that was considered for the edgier scenes of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But wait, folks, it gets more unsettling, with the appropriately titled “Ghost Reefs,” and then the tumultuous “Degrees of Separation,” which demands that the listener acknowledge its presence. Here there be serious, mathematically ambitious stuff, appropriate for absorptive vegging or summoning a creative brainstorm. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Gavial, Thanks, I Hate It. (Exile On Mainstream Records)

Instantly compelling band here from Germany; oddly enough it was sent to me by a public relations crew that usually specializes in thrash metal, and after reading the one-sheet — which promised “minimalism” and things like that — I was expecting something like Boris or even retro like Zodiac Mindwarp, but nothing could be further from the fact. It’s a massive curveball, starting with leadoff track “Control,” comprosed of grunge/noise sounds futzing with a roots-bluesy Moby idea, and yes, I mean like “Honey,” but quite a bit dirtier, in the vein of All Them Witches meets Fantastic Negrito’s Last Days Of Oakland (those references won’t be on the test, no worries, you’ll have to give me a second to compose myself; this is a thousand times more cool than I was expecting). “Koru Mindset” comes next, and it’s even more impressive, combining Trail Of Dead and Nick Cave. As if it wasn’t already pegged enough, the reverb goes to Jerry Lee Lewis level on “Pretender,” the longest tune here, which exposes these guys as Pink Floyd/Spacemen 3 fans. Lot of filthy fun, this one. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Ho ho ho, it’s the least wonderful time of the year for us music journalists with columns to fill, because I’m sure there are no new albums coming out this Friday, Dec. 26, the day after Christmas, that would be like trying to sell gaily colored eggs on the day after Easter, you know? No, I know I whined about all that last week, but this week’s the worst one of all, let me go on my fool’s mission, armed only with my new best friend, Google’s AI bot, to find new albums! Well look at that, the new album from Busta Rhymes, Dragon Season, will be out on the 26th, I can’t even believe someone who’s that renowned would ever — oh wait, I see, it’s the follow-up to two Dragon Season EPs from back in January, which received some pretty stinky reviews, because boring, so he’s releasing this full-length on the day that everyone’s returning stuff and not buying anything. But you know what, in the spirit of Saint Nick, I will go listen to a track from this probably uneventful album and tell all you nice people about it, eeny meeny miny whatnot, let’s try listening to — OK, it’s all top secret, so there are no advance tracks, and I don’t blame him, because the critics all fell asleep during the two advance EPs, both of which sounded OK to me, except for there being too much Auto-Tune here and there. Have fun discovering the wonders of this boring album, and if you go to one of his shows, don’t say anything about how he looks exactly like Tracy Morgan, because he really doesn’t like that, so don’t.

• Not a lot else going on, but I suppose we could look at the vinyl re-release of John Williams Conducts The Star Wars Trilogy, because these new vinyl versions come in colors, for your favorite Star Wars geek, who will of course never listen to them, because colored vinyl is more valuable than — OK, most everything, but you know how Star Wars geeks roll. The original album was released in 1990, and all the tunes are from the first three movies, which had interesting music but not as cool as the music in 1998’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, there, I said it. Wait, don’t leave, hear me out, nerds: Remember the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when the giant “asteroid beast” (the “Exogorth”) tries to chomp on the Millennium Falcon but misses, and the music is kind of epic but not really? Well, in The Phantom Menace, Williams had 20 years to make that same piece definitely epic, so that’s what he did during the “There’s always a bigger fish” scene. Shut up, it’s the same tuneage, just a million times better, so give me the soundtrack to The Phantom Menace, not the first trilogy, I will delete any hate mail on sight, just saying.

• Next it’s Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso, a hip-hop-EDM singing duo from Argentina, whose new album Top of the Hills actually came out on Saturday, Dec. 20, but I’m including it because I’m desperate it’s interesting maybe, oh whatever just let me watch my shows and eat chocolate Santas. So, at least they’re serious musicians who studied music, and moreover their October 2024 Tiny Desk Concert for NPR went viral, and most importantly, they opened a show for Kendrick Lamar this year. The new album’s teaser track “Gimme More” is a lot of fun, a Latin-infused pop thingamajig with some calliope emulation and plenty of mindless boasts about their decadence.

• We’ll wrap it up with literally the only thing left, the split EP featuring the bands Tsunami Bomb and Hammerbombs, titled Bombs Away! “Things Aren’t Going Well” is a no-wave/oi-infused tune that would’ve slapped harder if Tsunami Bomb’s singer weren’t so vanilla, she sounds like my fifth-grade music teacher. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Kris Davis and Lutosławski Quartet, The Solastalgia Suite and Gavial, Thanks, I Hate It.

Pentatonix, Christmas in the City (Pentatonix Records

Fine with me, there’s plenty of room for more from the flood of holiday albums that washed over this desk this year. This one was brought to my attention by friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny, who was trying to get me to pay attention to a violin-metal band named Silenzium, which had done a Kiss cover for the purposes of getting mindless clicks or something. At any rate, in 2011 this Austin a cappella group won the third season of NBC’s The Sing-Off, a show I’d never heard of, and it turns out that this instrument-less group (which I’d similarly never heard of) had done a bunch of Christmas albums, including this latest one. The scatty title track is annoyingly listenable if you like Miami Sound Machine, but thankfully they cover a few traditional carols, starting with an Andrews Sisters-sounding “Holly Jolly Christmas,” along with a few Irving Berlin staples. There’s an overly busy Great American Songbook medley (“Moody Rudy”) which is obligato with these guys; the originals are mostly awful (I went straight to screensaver 15 seconds into “Elf”). If you’re interested, Wayne Wilkinson’s Holly Tunes, a collection of deeply mellow jazz covers of carols and such, has been the only holiday album I’ve listened to for the past month, please go get it. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Tracy Bonham, “Un-F*k This F*kt Up Christmas” (A Woody Hollow Records)

This Eugene, Oregon, native became a legend of Gen X/late-millennial lore when her first album, 1996’s The Burdens of Being Upright, yielded the slacker anthem “Mother Mother,” which stapled Alanis Morissette existentialist oatmeal to the coda riff from Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” This one-off novelty tune is an unburdening of sorts, addressing 2025’s epic horribleness by peering at it all through a Reality Bites lens, accepting the grim, inescapable facts of the matter, and knowing that even worse is surely coming, so why not deal with it in the blithe, disaffected manner that generational cohort has been perfecting since birth? In less capable hands this could have been pretty — you know, lame, but Bonham bandies the NSFW word around as if it were as common as dirt, which it is nowadays, let’s face it, but the beauty touch is that she apes Billie Burke’s lilting voice from 1939’s The Wizard Of Oz, as if to say “Fiddlesticks! There’s no such thing as a forbidden word!” I got a kick out of it anyway, and you should know by now I never go in for such stuff. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Public apology for my blurb about the new Peter Criss album last week; Metacritic said quite clearly that it’s coming out Dec. 19, which is our next general CD release Friday, but I messed up, because somehow when you start getting old enough to start taking serious interest in buying a camera-equipped bird feeder, these things happen. I totally regret the error and have already mumbled five Hail Marys as penance, no worries, but what’s worse is that this is the last CD release Friday before Christmas Day, so according to Metacritic no serious band or musician or even William Shatner is putting out an album for me to comment on this week, or until Jan. 9 for that matter. Or are they? As we discovered this year, if there’s anyone who can tell us about new CD releases during freakin’ Christmas week, it’s a robot, so being the consummate professional journalist that I am, I shall now endeavor to blah blah blah with Google’s AI while they still have one, before computer scientists realize how stupid the idea of non-renewable-energy-powered AI was to begin with, let me microwave this mug of English Breakfast tea back into semi-usefulness and see what’s even going on here. Yes, tally ho, here’s one that’s due on Friday, the Her Name Is Love EP by Jamaican singer/DJ Masicka, real name Javaun Fearon, a fixture in the dancehall and reggae genres! His 2012 single “Guh Haad and Done” was a reggaetronica hit in that country owing to its rapid-fire lyrics, which centered on surviving the harsh streets of Kingston. This EP’s lead single, “Deep Love,” has the same sort of ingredients: trap riddims, Auto-Tuned vocals and whatnot, but it’s more soulful at least, if unoriginal.

• According to Genius.com, Megzsoul’s new album The Teenage Tragedy Show actually was set for release on Thursday, Dec. 18, for some idiotic reason, so technically it does belong in this issue, just give me a break already, I don’t even have Peter Criss to laugh at this week, would you prefer I talk about Al Jolson records again, I didn’t think so. OK, actually I probably should devote this space to Al Jolson, because this Megzsoul is obviously a teenager who successfully trolled the ironically named Genius.com into believing she has a legitimate album coming out; the only available information is some lyrical content where she imagines having a boyfriend who pays more attention to her than his TV and then she makes fun of him for becoming obsessed with her, kids these days, am I right folks?

• OK, don’t give up on me yet, here’s a legitimate album from a legitimate music person, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s Thoughts on the Future! She is a Pacific Northwest-based composer/performer who has put out a bunch of albums, including this newest one for Nettwerk Records; she mostly works with old Buchla synthesizers, which were analog modular synths that did all kinds of weird stuff owing to their sensitivity, like if you turned a light on in some other room the synth would respond by making sounds, so it was kind of like a prehistoric Furby in a way, I suppose. There is no music available to hear yet, but she put out another album called Gush a few months ago, which included the track “Everything Combining,” which sounded like Oompa Loompas singing around a Martian campfire, there’s no other way to describe it.

• We’ll end with a remix album from Trensum Tribe, regarded as “Scandinavia’s finest reggae-and-beyond soundsystem,” who futzed around with Axel Boman’s LUZ / Quest For Fire double album. The originals were glitch-techno with Jose Gonzalez vocals; Trensum Tribe’s obsession with dub simply makes the songs, you know, dubbier. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Pentatonix, Christmas in the City and Tracy Bonham, “Un-Fk This Fkt Up Christmas”

Ski Team, Burnout Boys (self-released)

New York native Lucie Lozinski looks (and often sings) like an awkward twee-waif Zoomer, but she’s been around the block quite a bit. Her father owned a backyard studio, and that somehow led to her singing backup for the likes of Tony Bennett and Queen Latifah before she turned 10. She’s pretty excited about releasing this debut album under her stage name Ski Team in January, but as promised in the Playlist column, there’s holiday music afoot this week, and she was able to eke out a rough-ish draft of “Santa” just before my deadline. There’s a light, frosty elegance to the beginning of it, in which she toys with covering “The First Noel” and then switches gears into epic/country-fied Chappell Roan mode, while introducing some world-class sampling into the mix. The push track is “Thirst Trap For Diego,” which combines wood-paneled ’80s disco with spaceship incidentals and some pretty odd found sounds. “Gilroy” has elements of Taylor Swift and Sheryl Crow within its pretty-crunchy-pretty pattern. Lots of decent melody here. A —Eric W. Saeger

Brian Sumner, Christmas (self-released)

This jazz guitarist has racked up a pretty impressive 400,000 Spotify listens this year on the way to making a name for himself as an improv specialist; his previous record For What explored a variety of emotions and themes, but this one is, as you’d venture to offer if pressed by the Spanish Inquisition, more focused on the holidays: “Within the context of his own mind, Sumner puts himself in the family room, at the dinner table, near the front door waiting for guests to arrive, in fights, away from home and in a myriad of other situations, and then freely improvises to the thoughts and feelings that are invoked,” and — waitwhat, “in fights?” Well, those come with the holidays too of course, in case you tend to avoid the news (which is always a good idea), but in all honesty, tension and emotional discomfort of any sort are rare commodities here. It’s mostly upbeat; if the idea of having a highly trained expert noodling around on a barely plugged electric guitar as you stare into a fire appeals to you, you’ll want this. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Look out, fam, I’ll be talking about holiday records again this week. Of course, I should have been talking about that in Hippo’s holiday issue, but like I told you people last week or whenever it was, I wasn’t deluged with holiday albums until after I’d written the column for the holiday issue, so I have an excuse. Just making you aware that I actually do pay attention to what I’m doing once in a while, and speaking of that, I also haven’t forgotten that I promised to pop into some local-to-Manchvegas clubs and talk about some of our struggling artists, and I do plan to do that once I’m not crazy-busy with a million-billion stupid things in my “semi-retirement” from work hell, but toward all this nonsense, I’ll have you know that I took my nephew to this year’s Trans Siberian Orchestra concert at SNHU Arena, on Black Friday, a family ChristmaHannuKwanzaa tradition! We were seated dead center in the 10th row, and it literally doesn’t get better than that; Petunia couldn’t go because she was sick, so I took my nephew. He’d never been to a big concert, let alone sat so close to the stage that one of the guitarists tried to throw a pick to him, so I expected him to be all full of young Millennial enthusiasm afterward, you know how they get. But the first thing he said? “Boy, pretty old crowd, huh?” so I was all like “What?!” and he goes like “All the old people!” so I was like “You’re walking home, Bucko!” and he was like “No way!” No, I’m kidding, he had to be in Maine the next day, so I did unlock the passenger door and let him in, but it got me thinking about older people who go to shows at giant hockey arenas. They really don’t want to stand up, even when there are lasers and flying flame-balls and they’re playing super-old songs, and yes, it bugged me too during one song, when we and two teenagers were the only ones standing up. Look, man, if you’re at a concert, push yourself up somehow and start getting your jam on, you know? Right, so that is today’s rock ’n’ roll lesson, and now we can look at the albums coming out this Friday, Dec. 12! We’ll start with English EDM-pop singer-producer Fred Again, whose new album USB002 is the follow-up to USB001, I don’t know what it all even means! There is a rehearsal video that shows him smoking butts, nodding his head a lot and playing his ProTools Tamagotchi thing, maybe you’ll find it interesting. OK fine, whatever, there’s some decent trance and tribal house that sounds fine if terribly 2010s to me, let’s continue.

• Many of you hip-hop scamps love the collaborations you’ve heard over the years between Nas and DJ Premier, and guess what, they’re releasing an album together! Titled Light Years, it starts with “Solar Scriptures,” which features a piano-driven old-school hip-hop beat. It’s uneventful, but what else would you expect?

• Nate Amos, more famously known as This Is Lorelei, is from Vermont, and his second album, Holo Boy, spotlights the title track, a slow grungy tune that has a lot of melody and weird guitar sounds. If Pavement didn’t suck they’d sound like this.

• We’ll close with former Kiss drummer Peter Criss, whose eponymous album is on its way! Lol, he put it out through Bandcamp, but don’t judge, maybe it’s better than his absolutely awful 2007 LP One For All, which included an actual cover of “Send In The Clowns,” let’s go see! Yup “Creepy Crawlers” is a cool hard-rock song, you’ll like it! —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Ski Team, Burnout Boys and Brian Sumner, Christmas

Tom Smith, There Is Nothing In The Dark Which Isn’t There In The Light (Play It Again Sam Records)

First solo album for the leader of The Editors, a Birmingham, England alt-rock band with whom you may be familiar for such semi-hits as “Papillon,” a really sturdy tune that sounded like Elbow with a more liberal dollop of Bruce Springsteen and more sweeping orchestration. For this one, Smith originally started constructing the songs with long-time collaborator Andy Burrows (they’d already done two albums together), but he ultimately decided to go it alone with producer Iain Archer, whose credits include Snow Patrol’s Final Straw LP. Thematically it’s about loneliness and resilience, its half-plugged guitars driving that obvious point home, which is to say it’s in no way an Editors album, more a songwriting showcase, but then again Smith’s writing for Editors was always top-drawer. That ability’s on full display here with “Leave,” an Americana-drenched slow-burner, and the finger-picking “Broken Time,” which could be mistaken for Coldplay in acoustic mode. One couldn’t say it’s a good start, more a next-phase statement by a well-established songwriter. A —Eric W. Saeger

TEED, Always With Me (Nice Age Music)

This Los Angeles producer (real name Orlando Higginbottom) goes by the TEED acronym nowadays after having spent a few years performing as Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, a nym that bespeaks a lot more upbeat fun than he delivers. He’s a thinking dude who’s “yearning for connection at the end of the world,” publicly posing such questions as “How do we find happiness in the chaos of our world? How do we release music in a broken, toxic industry?” etc. As such, he and his unapologetically ’80s-tinged sounds fit in well in a shattered world that has no choice anymore but to face its mortality. I agree with the sentiment of course, but the execution feels like defeatism at times: “My Melody” borrows its sadly resigned, minor-key-driven vibe from Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode and The Motels, but on the other hand he’s obviously influenced by MGMT, Gorillaz and things like that, and that side of him sees plenty of light at the end of the tunnel, as “Desire” attests. Nice, melodic stuff here. He’ll be at Bsmt in Boston on Friday, Dec. 5. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Wow, just look at this year, running toward its finish line as fast as it can, and who could blame it, if I were the year 2025, I’d be doing the same thing, hiding my face in shame and trying to forget I ever even happened, wouldn’t you? But hold it, 2025 isn’t quite done tormenting us, because it looks like there are more albums coming out this Friday, Dec. 5! And look at that, this week I didn’t even have to resort to asking the AI gods what albums are coming out, because there are enough serious albums that are coming out that I don’t have to risk it, which is good, because as wonderful and omniscient as AI is, it has wrought chaos, like the time Zillow had to fire 2,000 employees because their AI-powered home-value-forecasting program screwed the pooch completely, or the time New York City’s MyCity chatbot got caught encouraging business owners to perform illegal activities. And plus, with my luck, when it’s the dead of Christmas week and there are literally no new albums coming out, I’ll ask Google’s AI droid for a handy list of records I can tell all you nice people about, and the AI will glitch out in the manner of the Year 2000 software bug, and I’ll be telling you about “new records” that literally came out 100 years ago, like Vernon Dalhart’s “Puttin’ On the Style,” which came out in December 1925. Now, if something like that ever does happen, I hope you’ll be nice and write it off as a little technical glitch that wasn’t my fault at all, it was our robot matrix overlords, and you’ll tell me you’re actually super-glad that you bought an album that was recorded by a military bandleader who played the coronet. Who knows, it might lead people to buy Al Jolson records instead of video game soundtracks, which would be a massive win-win all around, don’t you think? Whatever, either way, we don’t have to worry about any Terminators at the moment, because look who has a new album coming out on Friday, none other than Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds! What’s that? No, silly, Nick Cave only started making records in the 1970s, so he wasn’t the one who recorded the original version of “Yes Sir That’s My Baby” in the 1920s, you’re thinking of Gene Austin, can you not be insolent for one second, that’d be great. All right, this new Nick Cave album is called God Live, which led me to assume that it’s a live album, which it is, which proves once again that I am the best music journalist in our state and you should buy me a coffee on my Patreon. Nick still looks like the Tall Man from the 1979 film Phantasm and he still sings like Dr. Frank N. Furter in the new live version of “Wild God,” so all is bright this holiday season!

• Commercial-bluegrass outfit Zac Brown Band’s most famous song is “Chicken Fried,” which has been my personal national anthem recently, given that it’s all I’ve really wanted to eat for many a fortnight. Their new album Love & Fear includes the single “Let It Run,” which features Snoop Dogg doing some rapping, because it is a song about the “devil’s lettuce” or whatever you little monsters call it nowadays, the end.

• Since 2012, dream-pop princess Melody Prochet’s main project has been Melody’s Echo Chamber, whose new LP is Unclouded. The single, “In The Stars,” is a slow, bug-eyed tune that is “distinctly Sixties,” a phrase no one can say 10 times fast.

• We’ll call it a week with Anna of the North’s new album, Girl In A Bottle! Anna is from Norway, which is fine by me since we’re not at war with them at the moment (yet); lead single “Dream Girl” is a cross between New Young Pony Club and TLC (yes, that TLC). It’s agreeable enough. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Tom Smith, There Is Nothing In The Dark Which Isn’t There In The Light and TEED, Always With Me