Nine New Albums I'm Loving Right Now

But most of these are well-kept secrets

I keep looking for new music in all the wrong places.

I still listen to the superstars, but I spend more time with self-produced and small indie releases. There’s a wild world out there, and it’s often totally different from contemporary music as defined by the major labels.

But that’s where I find most of my favorite new albums nowadays.

Today I’m recommending nine outstanding recent releases. As usual, I cover a wide range of geographies and genres.

Many of these are total secrets, ignored elsewhere. But now you know about them too.

Happy listening!

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Niloy Ahsan: Breathing Raga
Hindustani Vocal Music in the Ancient Dhrupad Tradition

How do you learn to sing like this? How do you even learn to breathe like this?

I’ve been studying ways of bending and sliding notes for a donkey’s age (i.e., around 50 years). Along the way I’ve heard the best, and all the rest. But these long tracks—with an average duration of 15 minutes—are still a revelation.

I even tried singing along, hoping to learn how these phrases move to the outer edges of tonality, yet still feel so centering. At a certain point I stopped thinking about the music, and just wondered how joyous life would be if I could start every morning by singing like this.

No, I can’t even begin to do it. But I can listen. And so can you.

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Cerys Hafana: The Bitter
Incantatory Folk Ballads

So much folk music is a snooze—lifeless, bloodless, a nostalgic hankering after a past that never was. But it doesn’t have to be that way. When you hear a musician who really inhabits that soundscape, the music doesn’t even feel old anymore.

But make no mistake, these songs are time tested. The opening track “The Bitter Withy” was first written down in the 1800s—transcribed from a 70-year-old man who learned it from his grandmother. But now listen to Hafana’s version (below) which sounds totally in-the-moment and even in-your-face.

And she does this while playing the Welsh triple harp. I don’t think the folks at Billboard magazine would even recognize one if they saw it.

Cerys Hafana will tell you that she mangles the folk tradition. But that’s just modesty. This is how you keep a cultural tradition alive—you make it so immediate that it feels like it’s starting life all over again.