8 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Diiv, Queens of the Stone Age, and More

Despite writing the new Diiv album in a period of chaos, welcoming his second child amid fallout from the destruction of his home in the Altadena wildfires, Zachary Cole Smith went into ZIRP ! in a spirit of unbridled, determined fun. Buoyed along by an unlikely producer in A. G. Cook, the band compacts its trademark shoegaze sound into nuggets of electro-pop joy, the smothering haze coexisting with effervescent hooks that go down as easily as pop-punk alcopops.

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For Andy Stott ’s music to hit hardest, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and envision the world in slow motion. The electronic producer moves carefully through every song, as if reducing listeners’ heartbeats is the trick to making them see everything around them. On his first album in five years, Late Loop , Stott transformed experimental drone into downtempo trance songs by enlisting vocalists Alison Skidmore and Elaine Howley to articulate a few observations, how pressure leads to escape, or mirrors can extend forever, that turn into mantras.

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Do you miss when rock bands were mostly teenagers pissing off their parents by practicing too loud in the basement? If the answer is yes, you’re primed to love the debut album of 23-year-old Heath Michael Thomas, who performs under the name Heathers. Thomas has been making music since he was 11, and recorded the bulk of his 14-track debut at home in Missouri. Driving and dextrous garage rock riffs get their hooks in quick and deep, and that’s before Thomas even graces the mic, whether he’s screaming, snarling, or whispering. He channels the distinct euphoria-meets-malaise of school being out for summer.

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Head-to-toe Aritzia. Kill Bill murder techniques. Dirty Hokas. The notorious crack-smoking Toronto mayor Rob Ford. All these influences and more converge on the Toronto-based artist and reformed Berlin DJ Brat Star ’s debut album Southern Ontario Gothic , which pairs the deadpan chatter-sing of Sidney Gish and Frankie Cosmos with muted Drain Gang swagger and 2010s pop radio production courtesy of collaborators Loukeman and Dyltwosix.

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Dream Unending , the duo of Tomb Mold’s Derrick Vella and Innumerable Forms’ Justin DeTore, do doom metal a little differently. Their third album, Certain Uncertainties , often spends minutes sounding like a lost '70s prog record, old Western soundtrack, or roots rock demo EP before Detore’s rumbling vocals and death-drop drum lines descend onto Vella’s extended guitar solos like a Balrog. Although they get assists from trumpeter Leila Abdul-Rauf, percussionist Benny Grotto, and vocalist Brendan Radigan, they primarily go toe-to-toe, underscoring their delightfully odd-couple pairing.

Last year, Lydia Loveless began releasing a song a month on Bandcamp, challenging themselves to stick to a steady routine and stay creative at the same time. This attention to craft resulted in a number of songs featured on their new EP Accolades , a collection of alt-country and classic rock tunes backed by a sturdy enough band, get a load of that Farfisa organ on “What We Learned”, to let Loveless really flex as a songwriter. There‘s a touch of Billy Joel to “Avoiding Highways,” and some Tom Petty optimism on the title track “Accolades,” resplendent with little lyrical gems like “I guess I'm just looking for a way to be as bored as the good old days.”

In the world of Queens of Stone Age , nobody’s perfect, but you can be perfecth. For a band that’s been around for three decades, and spent much of their 2023 album, In Times New Roman …, discussing how twisted, messy, and dark life can get, coming to terms with the inevitability of your own blemishes seems like the logical next step. On Perfecth , you can hear the band loosening their shoulders after a long, grueling battle with acceptance. In some of the stoner-rocker’s most relaxed and spacious music in years, they muse on heartbreak, sex, and purifying catharsis.

J.S. Bach spent the last 27 years of his life working as the music director at Thomaskirche, a Lutheran church located in Leipzig, Germany. It’s the same location Kali Malone recorded music on two late nights in August with cellist Lucy Railton and Stephen O’Malley, who joined on bowed acoustic guitar. The session has now become Burning Song , a ruminative album that reveals its quiet beauty layer by layer, like ocean water slowly breaking down rock.