From arena titans to critical darlings, there’s no shortage of albums to look forward to this year.
By Christopher R. Weingarten, Jon Freeman, Brittany Spanos, Suzy Exposito, Joseph Hudak, Mosi Reeves, Kory Grow, Keith Harris, Richard Gehr, Ben Freeman and Jonny Nail.
Arcade Fire
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
This year looks to be a busy one for the Canadian rock ensemble. On January 27th, they’ll release a documentary of their 2014 Reflektor tour and Tim Kingsbury is preparing his solo album as Sam Patch for the following month. Then there’s the matter of the Arcade Fire’s fifth solo album. Win Butler and Co.’s latest is currently untitled, and reportedly includes material like “I Gave You Power,” which Butler and multi-instrumentalist Régine Chassagne debuted during a surprise set at the Louvre in Paris last May. In a June Reddit AMA for his Friday Night album, Butler said that the next Arcade Fire disc would arrive “probably in the spring.” He added that Owen Pallett — his collaborator on the Oscar-nominated soundtrack for Her — would “most likely be involved.”
Beck
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
You wouldn’t know it by hearing it, but Beck’s lush, Grammy-winning 2014 album Morning Phase was a rush job, released quickly so he’d have new material to play on the road. Months before, the singer began work on another project that he says is both more ambitious and more pop-wise. For that album, he even brought in Greg Kurstin, who played in Beck’s backup band more than a decade ago and has gone on to produce huge hits like Sia’s “Chandelier” and Adele’s “Hello.” As Beck told Rolling Stone last July, the new music is inspired by the “communal, celebratory” mood he experienced on the festival circuit. “I wanted to take that into the studio, a kind of energy or joy,” he said. “The thing that wakes you up a little bit.”
Bernard Fanning
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
The sequel to 2016’s ARIA Award-winning Civil Dusk — while no longer confirmed as carrying the title Brutal Dawn — is still expected to be released this year. First though, Fanning heads out on the road for a co-headline tour with Kasey Chambers, the first of what has been confirmed as a busy touring year for the former Powderfinger frontman.
Bruce Springsteen
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
The Boss had a busy 2016, performing his 1980 classic The River in its entirety night after night, campaigning passionately for Hillary Clinton, and releasing the acclaimed memoir Born to Run. And all that time, he’s been sitting on a new solo album. Springsteen broke the news to Rolling Stone last February, saying he’d begun recording the new material even before the release of Wrecking Ball in 2012 and finished it in summer 2015. But Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau tells fans not to expect a 21st Century Nebraska. “When I say solo record, I’m not talking about an acoustic record,” he said in a Billboard interview last July. “It is, in fact, a very expansive record, a very rich record.” So when is it coming? “The next opening I have, we’ll slot it in and get it out,” the 67-year-old rocker says.
Charli XCX
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
The UK’s punkiest pop export is ready for a revamp with her forthcoming, as-yet-untitled third album. Following up her early 2016 EP Vroom Vroom — which featured collaborations with PC Music affiliates Sophie and Hannah Diamond — XCX has revealed to Rolling Stone that she has not only continued to work with PC to redirect her sound but also create a party-ready club album inspired by Britney Spears’ 2007 electro-pop romp Blackout. Lead single “After the Afterparty” featuring Lil Yachty, previews a bubbly side of a turn-up. She’s also reached out to Diddy and R&B singer Abra about contributing as well. “It’s a champagne shower of badass pop,” she teases.
Circa Waves
Album: Different Creatures
Release Date: March 10
After a string of EP’s, singles and an obvious likening from taste-making outlets such as NME and BBC 1 radio, Liverpool rockers Circa Waves signalled the dawn of a heavier sound with new track, “Wake Up” in December. Different Creatures was co-produced by CW frontman Kieran Shuddall and Alan Moulder (NIN, Foo Fighters, Arctic Monkeys). Moulder’s connection to the band was born after a radio listen, to which he said to his engineer “Didn’t this band want to work with me? Why the fuck am I not doing their second record?”.
Chuck Berry
Album: Chuck
Release Date: TBA
Rock & roll legend Chuck Berry stunned fans on his 90th birthday when he announced his first new album in 38 years. “This record is dedicated to my beloved Toddy,” Berry said in a statement last October, referring to his wife of 68 years, Themetta. “My darlin’, I’m growing old! I’ve worked on this record for a long time. Now I can hang up my shoes!” He’s backed by “the Blueberry band,” the same players he’s performed with for two decades at his Blueberry Club in St. Louis: his children Charles Berry Jr. on guitar and Ingrid Berry on harmonica, along with pianist Robert Lohr, drummer Keith Robinson and bassist Jimmy Marsala, who’s played with Berry for 40 years. According to Berry’s son Charles, “These songs cover the spectrum from hard-driving rockers to soulful, thought-provoking time capsules of a life’s work.”
Cloud Nothings
Album: Life Without Sound
Release Date: January 27
Cloud Nothings’ critically acclaimed 2014 album Here and Nowhere Else piled on indie-rock catchiness at blistering speed and cemented this Ohio outfit’s place in the genre’s upper echelon. But on their fourth album, the band — who have added touring guitarist Chris Brown to their lineup — is going to chill out a bit. Frontman Dylan Baldi called the album “my version of New Age music”; and while the first two previews of the record, the chugging “Internal World” and the sprightly “Modern Act,” aren’t awash in arpeggiated synths, they do hint at a slightly more mellow feel. “Things kind of slowed down, and so did we,” Baldi told Columbus Alive.
Dan Auerbach
Album: TBA
Release Date: Autumn 2017
Black Keys leader Dan Auerbach is prepping his second solo album, a star-studded affair that features legends like guitar icon Duane Eddy, Johnny Cash bassist Dave Roe, Mark Knopfler and Elvis Presley session men Gene Chrisman and Bobby Wood. Co-writers on the record include John Prine and David “Fergie” Ferguson, who engineered Cash’s acclaimed American Recordings albums. “It’s reflective of the stuff I’ve listened to my whole life,” Auerbach tells Rolling Stone. “It’s equal parts Working Man’s Dead, Beatles, Lovin’ Spoonful. It feels like all that music to me, in a way. Without sounding retro, and it jumps around a little bit. It’s acoustic, and high rhythm section horns.”
Depeche Mode
Album: Spirit
Release Date: Autumn 2017
The goth-pop stalwarts’ follow-up to 2013’s Delta Machine will be assisted by new blood. “We’re working on the album with a new team: It’s produced by James Ford [of Simian Mobile Disco], and he’s helped us to make what we feel is a very incredible sounding record,” Depeche Mode singer Dave Gahan told Rolling Stone in October. “He was able to really guide us.” Depeche Mode’s European tour in support of the album begins May 5th in Stockholm, and all proceeds will support the clean-drinking-water-focused nonprofit Charity:Water.
Drake
Album: More Life
Release Date: TBA
Dubbed a “playlist” as opposed to an “album” or a “mixtape,” Drake began previewing his forthcoming More Life project on his 30th birthday in October. He released three singles on the birthday edition of his OVO Sound radio show, including the 21 Savage collaboration “Sneakin,” and though it was originally intended for a December release, the “playlist” will now be dropped early on this year. The ever-cryptic Drake has not revealed too much about it, or if he’ll even be the primary artist, though it will feature all new music. Also supposedly on the docket for the prolific hit-maker: a collaborative album with Kanye West, confirmed by both artists late last year, though little has been said by either of them since.
Eminem
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
When Marshall Mathers dropped “Campaign Speech,” his tongue-twisting Donald Trump protest, in October, he Tweeted, “Don’t worry I’m working on an album!” The as-yet-unconfirmed new record will be Eminem’s first studio release since 2013’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2.
Father John Misty
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
Father John Misty’s deeply ironic sincerity has taken a political tack since late last summer, when he cut short a Camden, New Jersey concert to deliver a Kanye-esque rant about the uses and abuses of entertainment in the Trump era. Subsequent SoundCloud releases — including his cover version of Tim Heidecker’s droll kamikaze tune “Trump’s Pilot” and the surprisingly somber new tune “Holy Hell” — suggested that dark political themes would be emerging in his work. He debuted three new songs at a December benefit concert in Seattle and announced the completion of his third album.
Gorillaz
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
Jamie Hewlitt, the artist for cartoon band Gorillaz, shared Instagram videos of himself with Damon Albarn in the studio back in April — but the 2016 release date for new music he’d promised earlier was not to be. To tide fans over, there was a 10-chapter multimedia story “The Book of Noodle,” about the band’s fictional guitarist, along with two Soundcloud mixes indicating the music that had influenced the upcoming album. “We actually sat down with Damon two weeks ago and he played us some of the new Gorillaz album, and it sounds amazing,” Posdnous of De La Soul told the Guardian in August. “He played us a track that he wants us to get off on his album, so we got to get in the studio and put that down.” In that same interview, Pos revealed another of the album’s guests: Snoop Dogg. Earlier today, Albarn and co. revealed a new track, “Hallelujah Money”, but also stressed it’s not the album’s first official single.
Holy Holy
Album: PAINT
Release Date: February 24
Holy Holy’s sequel to impressive 2014 debut, When The Storms Would Come, was introduced via a pair of singles — “Darwinism” and “Elevator” — both of which suggest the duo are now skewing closer to the pop side of their psych-folk sound. On “Elevator”, lead guitarist Oscar Dawson says: “I can’t recall how it germinated, but before we knew it we were playing this same two chords, over and over. And it built from there, like a conversation; starting softly, then bouncing around to become louder and louder… It had been caught on a phone when we were touring in Europe, and back in Australia we put it together and decided that, in fact, it is a song.”
HAIM
Album: TBA
Release Date: Summer 2017
In 2016, Haim toured North America, rebooted their merch store and showed up in a slew of Taylor Swift’s Instagram photos — but the long-awaited follow-up to 2013’s Days Are Gone remained M.I.A. “We write everything, we play everything and we help produce everything,” Danielle Haim told Entertainment Weekly. “These things take time, and we refuse to put out anything we’re not 100 percent in love with.” The trio began work on their new album, which is still untitled, in the family living room. Bassist Este Haim told EW that she plays a fretless five-string bass (“I haven’t played a fretless five-string since I was a 12-year-old listening to Korn,” she said); and pop savant Rostam Batmanglij and Days Are Gone producer Ariel Rechtshaid lent a hand in the studio.
Japandroids
Album: Near to the Wild Heart of Life
Release Date: January 27
It’s been five years since this Vancouver duo released their second album, the aptly titled Celebration Rock. But the title track to their new disc, “Near to the Wild Heart of Life,” shows they haven’t lost the ability to craft an indie-rock anthem that swells as much as it snarls. They’ve put a lot of thought into how album three flows. The first four songs and the second three “each follow their own loose narrative,” the band states on their site. “Taken together as one, they form an even looser narrative, with the final song … acting as an epilogue.” Even the number of tracks isn’t arbitrary: “Eight songs is the standard template for a great rock n roll album,” they write, supporting their thesis with multiple examples, including the Stooges’ Raw Power and Talking Heads’ Remain in Light.
Kanye West
Album: Turbo Grafx 16
Release Date: TBA
“My next album is titled Turbo Grafx 16 as of now…” West tweeted in February, right after the release of The Life of Pablo. “Just on some super nerd vibes … one of my favourite gaming systems when I was a kid.” This announcement could have been filed away as just one of many impulsive Kanye blurts until December, when old-school production giant Pete Rock posted an Instagram video with the caption “playing 45s in da lab with Kanye West.” That clip revealed what looked like a track list for a new project named after that ill-fated, off-brand early Nineties game console, with each of the songs titled for a video game. What that portends is still unclear: Kanye projects have a tendency to change some before their release. Or, as his obsessive post-Pablo track-tweaking indicated, even after.
Kehlani
Album: SweetSexySavage
Release Date: January 27th
Since emerging in 2014 with her Cloud 19 mixtape, Kehlani has gathered over 2.7 million Instagram followers while scoring Hot 100 hits like “Crzy” and “Gangsta” (from last year’s Suicide Squad soundtrack). She’s drawn praise from industry figures like Puff Daddy, who claim that her iconoclastic, tattooed image and honest, confessional lyrics have “redefined and saved R&B.” As a result, SweetSexySavage is one of the most anticipated R&B debuts of 2017. “This one, I really took my time like, ‘Every song, I not only have to write really intensely, but I have to make sure that I push myself to get the sonics correctly,'” she said in an interview last year.
Kesha
Album: TBA
Release Date:TBA
In the years following the release of her sophomore album, 2012’s Warrior, Kesha has been entangled in a vicious legal battle against producer/label executive Dr. Luke. Her music career has been largely put on hold as she has attempted to exit her contract with Sony, but after a court denied her injunction, the singer-songwriter has begun focusing her energy on relaunching her music career. Little has been known about what she’s been working on, but live covers of Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop as well as a “dirty rock & roll” tour with her band the Creepies — reimagining her dance-pop hits as country and rockabilly ditties — indicates a return to her Nashville roots. Plus, she’s teased A-List collaborators on social media, noting that she’s been working with a Grammy winner that many have assumed is Taylor Swift.
King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard
Album: Flying Microtonal Banana
Release Date: February 24
While famous for their productivity, this year the King Gizzard collective take it up a notch. In an audacious move, the band are set to release four albums in 2017, the first of which being Flying Microtonal Banana. The Melbourne psych-lords are set to take their experimentation to new heights as well, focusing predominantly on microtonal tuning (utilising a music interval smaller than a semi-tone).
The Killers
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
The Las Vegas glam-pop kings began writing their fifth album in late 2015, a process that’s involved collaborators ranging from pop tunesmith Ryan Tedder to U2 producer Jacknife Lee. In an interview with Noisey, drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr. said that listening to the 2006 album Sam’s Town, which received the deluxe-reissue treatment last year, may have helped nudge the band’s writing process a bit: “There are lots of ideas and theories from Sam’s Town that I can see finding their way back in,” Vannucci said. “We’re going to subconsciously soak in some of that old way we used to do it. The old vibe.” In November, Flowers told KROQ that his band would “definitely have a record in 2017.”
Kingswood
Album: After Hours, Close to Dawn
Release Date: March 3
Teased with the release of lead single “Creepin'” back in October, Kingswood confirmed details of their anticipated follow-up to 2015 debut, Microscopic Wars, in early December. Expect plenty of twists and turns as well, with guitarist Alex Laska warning that “any perspective on what we should sound like has been thrown out the window.”
LCD Soundsystem
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
Last year, LCD Soundsystem reunited less than five years after they famously disassembled at Madison Square Garden, playing a series of well-received festival performances. The Brooklyn unit was supposed to drop their comeback album in 2016, their first since 2010’s This is Happening. The band reportedly canceled a tour of Asia and Australia in order to work on the as-yet-untitled project.
Lorde
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
Lorde, the pop star who went to Number One with a song she wrote and recorded when she was 16, has yet to follow up her 2013 debut LP, Pure Heroine. With a Coachella appearance announced this week, it looks like it may be coming soon. On the cusp of her 20th birthday, the pop star wrote about her upcoming LP on Instagram: “Writing Pure Heroine was my way of enshrining our teenage glory, putting it up in lights forever so that part of me never dies, and this record — well, this one is about what comes next. I want nothing more than to spill my guts RIGHT NOW about the whole thing — I want you to see the album cover, pore over the lyrics (the best I’ve written in my life), touch the merch, experience the live show. I can hardly stop myself from typing out the name. I just need to keep working a while longer to make it as good as it can be. You’ll have to hold on. The big day is not tomorrow, or even next month realistically, but soon. I know you understand.”
Mac DeMarco
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
The follow up to Demarco’s dainty 2015 EP Another One is officially finished, with the singer-songwriter posting a video of himself popping a bottle of champagne with a new track playing in the background, along with the caption proclaiming, “#that’s a #wrap. Just finished #Mixin the new #disc. Time for some #champers.”. Listeners cannot #wait.
Marilyn Manson
Album: Say10
Release Date: TBA
Last year, Marilyn Manson returned to Louisiana, where he’d worked on 1996’s Antichrist Superstar, to film the witchy, since-canceled TV show Salem, and something creative clicked inside him. “I found the supernatural element of the show to be very authentic when I lived in New Orleans: the hoodoo, voodoo, all the Santeria, it was all very much a part of my surroundings when I was making the music I made down there,” he told Rolling Stone. “Maybe that kickstarted my mojo into making a new album.” It will be a departure from the sleek goth-rock of his last album, 2015’s The Pale Emperor, to make for a sound he has likened to the gnarliness of Superstar. “It’s pretty violent in its nature for some reason,” he said. “And it’s not emotional in the same way. It’s got a chip on its shoulder.”
Mastodon
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
Mastodon will grapple with the big C on their seventh album, according to drummer-lyricist Brann Dailor. “It’s about going through cancer, going through chemotherapy and all the things associated with that,” Dailor told Rolling Stone. “I didn’t want to be literal about it. But it’s all in there.” Crack the Skye producer Brendan O’Brien worked with the Atlanta quartet at the Quarry in Kennesaw, Georgia, where the heavy rockers applied their raw riffage and progressive tendencies to songs about a character whose death sentence is imposed by “a desertlike version of the Grim Reaper.” Tracks such as “Show Yourself,” “Your Own Blood,” “Steambreather” and “Precious Stones” will chart the protagonist’s struggle with time and mortality until “the person simultaneously dies and is saved,” says Dailor.
Major Lazer
Album: Music Is the Weapon
Release Date: TBA
Much like past Major Lazer efforts, Diplo, Jillionaire and Walshy Fire’s homage to post-millennial global pop will be a dancehall-and-electronic-tinged all-star affair. Its first single, the Justin Bieber and Mø showcase “Cold Water,” was one of the biggest hits of 2016. Other guests mentioned so far: the Weeknd, Ariana Grande, Nicki Minaj, Partynextdoor, Sia, Travis Scott and Konshens. “The record has a lot of moving parts,” Diplo told Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 show last July. “It’s like a big family, we do it all together.”
Meg Mac
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
There’s a hint of déjà vu here, with Meg Mac’s anticipated debut, previously predicted for 2016, never eventuating. There’s more promise for 2017 though, with the goth-pop songstress sharing a video in November accompanied with the description “I have finished my album”. The first song from which is expected any day now.
Modest Mouse
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
When Strangers to Ourselves was released in 2015, there was a lot of speculation about why the first Modest Mouse full-length since 2007 didn’t include the track that the indie rock veterans had reportedly recorded with Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic. No worries — that cut had been saved for later, not scrapped, along with enough songs for a second album. “We basically made two records at the same time,” frontman Isaac Brock told Hot Press in March 2015. “Which, if people look at it that way, cuts down the amount of time it took us to make this record in half, man!” In that same interview, Brock promised a 2016 release, so it’s likely we’ll see something soon. As for the Novoselic track, Brock exclaimed, “It sounds like a bunch of boulders falling down a mountain!”
My Morning Jacket
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
My Morning Jacket’s follow-up to 2015’s The Waterfall was interrupted by frontman Jim James’s second solo album, Eternally Even. The Waterfall sessions produced 24 tracks, enough for two albums, but James has promised that more new material will be recorded for its successor. MMJ released “Magic Bullet” as a violence-awareness statement last July, and “The First Time” ended up on Cameron Crowe’s canceled Showtime series Roadies. But as with any MMJ project, what ends up coming through your speakers may have no connection to what the musicians planned before entering the studio. “As I know from past records,” James told Rolling Stone, “you’ll walk in with these rock & roll songs, and you’ll walk out with a record of the saddest, dreamiest ballads.”
Nine Inch Nails
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
Trent Reznor made good on his promise to release new Nine Inch Nails music in 2016 by the skin of his teeth, putting out the fuzzy-sounding five-song EP, Not the Actual Events on December 23rd. He’s been busy — he also worked on soundtracks for the climate-change doc Before the Flood and Boston-bombing movie Patriots Day — but it was only after the EP release that he revealed just how busy he and partner Atticus Ross have been. They revealed that they’d revamped The Fragile, remastered Nine Inch Nails‘ catalogue for vinyl and began formulating more new releases. “I’m teeing up the next quote I’ll have to live up to, but the idea has been to do two new major [Nine Inch Nails] works come out [in 2017],” Reznor said in an interview with Zane Lowe. He also said he and Ross had been discussing a Nine Inch Nails tour. When Rolling Stone asked about new music in a recent interview, Reznor gave a vague answer: “That will be part of the reveal,” he said. “I don’t want to spoil it. If I’m interested in a film, I prefer not to watch the trailer. We live in overstimulated times.”
Nick Murphy
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
The artist formerly know as Chet Faker is set to make his birth-name debut in 2017, telling Triple J in November that his new album is “basically done”. So far, Murphy has previewed just a pair of tracks from the release — lead track “Fear Less” and eight-minute opus follow-up, “Stop Me (Stop You)” — both suggesting the record is set to race full speed ahead into new territory. Look for him to preview more during his headline slot on the forthcoming Laneway Festival tour.
The Offspring
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
Early in 2015, when these pop-punk veterans released “Coming for You,” their first new song in three years, it whetted an appetite for an 11th album that the band has thus far been slow in satisfying. “We want to do a record, that’s the plan,” guitarist Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman told the Aspen Times in July 2015. “But it’s taking forever. … We released this song because we felt good about it immediately. It was one of the first one or two songs we finished, so we were like, ‘If we wait on this it might be another year, year-and-a-half. Why don’t we just put it out and see what happens?” Frontman Dexter Holland offered a simple explanation to Loudwire for the project’s long, slow gestation: “We’re just lazy. Every other time we’ve done a record, we hunker down and go into the studio for a year or however long it takes. We just decided not to do it that way this time.”
Paul McCartney
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
After announcing his return to Capitol Records, for whom the Beatles famously recorded, 74-year-old Paul McCartney wrapped up his 2016 tour and began work on his first album since 2013’s New, going into the studio with producer Greg Kurstin, known for his work with Adele. (McCartney has also recorded tracks, including at least one with Lady Gaga, for an unnamed animation project.) “I’ll put out my next album, but I won’t think I’m gonna sell a lot,” he told Rolling Stone last year. “I’m putting it out because I have songs that I like. And I will do my best job. The scene has changed, but it doesn’t disturb me, because I had the best of it.”
Ryan Adams
Album: Prisoners
Release Date: February 17
After his marriage to Mandy Moore fell apart in 2014, Adams returned from Los Angeles to New York, where he recorded 80 songs in a therapeutic frenzy. “I needed to shut everyone off for a while and completely destroy myself. I needed to become totally lost,” Adams told Rolling Stone Australia in the recent cover-story. “I went inside and said, ‘OK, Ryan Adams, who are you in this moment? Can you accurately describe your internal surroundings?” With titles like “Do You Still Love Me?” and “To Be Without You” suggesting the end of a relationship, listeners will inevitably wonder how much of the new album is autobiographical, a question that Adams has been reluctant to answer directly. “The fairest way to answer that is, as a writer, I literally work with what I have at the time,” he says. The first track from Prisoners, “Doomsday”, emerged on January 20th.
Sampha
Album: Process
Release Date: February 3
Just in the last year, Sampha has garnered an extremely impressive resume, featuring on Kanye’s Saint Pablo, Frank Ocean’s Endless and Solange’s A Seat at the Table whilst working on his own, anticipated full-length debut, Process. The London-based producer/vocalist recently told Rolling Stone for a forthcoming Future Is Now profile that creating the LP was a “quite cathartic” way of dealing with the death of his mother who, following a long battle with cancer, passed away midway through the recording sessions. “I guess part of my reasons I called the album Process was because it was me processing what I was going through, so that was important that I had that avenue or I had that space to do that in. It was like a documentation really of that time.” An internal wrestle highlighted through the pair of preview tracks — “Timmy’s Prayer” recalls the soulful rawness of his Dual EP, while “Blood On Me” elevates his rhythm-and-minimalism to a new anthemic scale.
Sky Ferreira
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
Whether or not Ferreira’s follow-up to 2013’s Night Time, My Time will still be called Masochism, as she once told Dazed, is up in the air, but one thing is for sure: Its songs will be true to its singer’s intentions. “I refuse to put out something that isn’t honest,” Ferreira wrote on Instagram a year ago. “It’s not something that I can force out. If I was to do it any sooner I either would have been compromising myself & anyone listening.” And it’s still very much in the works: “These anticipated album list things are cool & stuff because I’m actually really excited for the songs I’ve made so far,” Ferreira Tweeted earlier this month, a wording that hints at more songs in wait.
The Shins
Album: Heartworms
Release Date: March 10
The Shins’ follow-up to 2012’s Port of Morrow is also the first time since 2001 and Oh, Inverted World, that bandleader James Mercer produced a full album himself. (Well, almost a full album — former bandmate Richard Swift is behind the boards on one track). “I made a concerted effort on certain songs … to use the palette that I’ve used historically for the band.” Mercer told Portland radio station KBOO 90.7 last August. “And then on other songs, I really jumped off. … I was able to do some stuff that is a bit more synth-oriented.” You can hear what Mercer means on two advance tracks: “Name for You,” inspired by and addressed to Mercer’s daughters, and “Dead Alive,” which first surfaced with a Halloween-themed video last year.
The Smith Street Band
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
While Melbourne’s the Smith Street Band spent a significant chunk of 2016 taking their unique brand of confessional punk rock to the international masses, they still found time to lay down their fourth full-length album, due early in the year via their own newly-established label, Pool House Records. Still untitled, the band revealed the first track “Death To The Lads”, in November. Complete with the measured balance of heart-sleeved honesty and middle-finger salutes, and topped with an infectious hook chant, hopefully an apt indicator of the album’s live performance focus.
Spoon
Album: Hot Thoughts
Release Date: March 17
Since Spoon stopped touring in support of 2014’s They Want My Soul, the band has been lying low, offering little more than a few teases – including an acoustic live debut of angsty new number, “I Ain’t the One”. All that changed this week with the reveal of the title track lead single title track and tracklisting for Hot Thoughts.
St. Vincent
Album: TBA
Release Date: Autumn 2017
In a December interview with Guitar World, shredder-songwriter Annie Clark said that the follow-up to her self-titled 2014 album would show off “a real sea change” in her sound. The politically charged offering, which doesn’t have a title yet, will be released in the spring. “I think it’ll be the deepest, boldest work I’ve ever done,” Clark said. “I feel the playing field is really open for creative people to do whatever you want, and that risk will be rewarded — especially now that we have such high stakes from a political and geopolitical standpoint.”
SZA
Album: A
Release Date: TBA
Besides racking up songwriting credits for Rihanna and Beyoncé, Solána Rowe has been hard at work on her own highly-anticipated full-length, A, the third release in a series that may be her last. In 2013, the same year she signed to Top Dawg Entertainment, the 26-year-old neo-soul singer released S, a glitter-trap opus fit for an ice princess. Her 2014 EP, Z treaded murkier waters, with TDE labelmate Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper at her side on tracks like “Babylon” and “Child’s Play.” Yet in October 2016, all bets seemed off for A after SZA fired an acerbic tweet aimed at Top Dawg Entertainment co-president Terrence “Punch” Henderson. “I actually quit,” she said. “@iamstillpunch can release my album if he ever feels like it. Y’all be blessed.” Fans panicked: Was she quitting her label? Or music as a whole? The singer later told Complex there was no beef to be had with her label, and that ample time she spent with Rick Rubin and Frank Ocean would inform her ongoing work. “I’m definitely committed to completing this,” she says, “And… We’ll take it from there.”
Thundamentals
Album: Everything We Know
Release Date: February 10
With 2014’s So We Can Remember debuting at #3 on the Australian album charts, the fourth LP from the Blue Mountains hip-hop collective, Everyone We Know, is sure to be one of the biggest local releases within the genre this year. The group have described the album as conceptual, featuring “conversations with people from our lives (past and present) that we have had and those we wish we’d had”, adding that it’s designed to serve as a continuation of So We Can Remember. The confirmed guest list for the new LP includes Peta and the Wolves, Hilltop Hoods, Mataya and Laneous.
Tired Lion
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
What began as an acoustic folk project between enigmatic front-woman Sophie Hope, guitarist Matt Tanner, bassist Nick Vasey and drummer Ethan Darnell, over the past two years Perth’s Tired Lion have slowly transformed into one of Australia’s most promising punk acts. Their full-length debut is set to arrive off the back of a big 2016 that saw them release radio-loved singles “Not My Friends” and “Agoraphobia”, alongside tours of Australia and Europe. While expected in the first quarter of the year, little more is known about the album at this stage other than the teasing announcement of a “big surprise, yet to be announced producer”.
Tool
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
It’s been nearly 11 years since Tool put out their last album, 2006’s 10,000 Days, and the wait continues for a follow-up. The band revealed in 2014 that they’d been battling a soul-sucking lawsuit regarding an insurance claim that had demoralised their creativity, but said they’d been jamming on some long, new songs. Then, in 2015, they debuted a new instrumental, dubbed “Descending”, while toward the end of 2016, bassist Justin Chancellor told Bass Player that the band was “deep into the writing process” and that they’d narrowed down what they were working with to a group of ideas. “Everyone knows we take our time,” he said. “We’re really trying to be responsible with ourselves in trying to discover ideas that haven’t been discovered before. It’s kind of an alchemy, how we experiment.”
U2
Album: Songs of Experience
Release Date: TBA
No sooner had U2’s 2014 album Songs of Innocence materialised than the Edge was already discussing an additional album he referred to as “a companion piece,” which William Blake fans could have told you right off would be called Songs of Experience. “Early on it became obvious that we were working on two separate albums,” the Edge told Rolling Stone in September 2014. “The majority of the unfinished songs are worthy of becoming part of Songs of Experience and some are already as good or better than anything on Songs of Innocence.” That album didn’t appear in 2016, as was originally planned — as the Edge told the Spanish fan site U2 en España last summer, the band was still finishing the album. But the guitarist promises it will hold its own against the band’s classics. “In terms of lyrics it is stronger than War,” he said. “It has more clarity.”
The War on Drugs
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
Via his Instagram, War on Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel has been teasing fans with the possibility of new music since September last year, leading us to believe that the follow up to 2014’s Lost in the Dream is set to surface this year.
Wolf Parade
Album: TBA
Release Date: TBA
While reuniting in early-2016 there was barely a whisper from the Wolf Parade camp until December when guitarist/vocalist Dan Boecner shared some studio shots, ahead of confirmation last week, Tweeting they were “done tracking for WP LP 4”. At this stage, however, little more is known about the new record, set to be the Canadian group’s first full-length release in over six years.
