Maggie Rogers, Dawes, The Cure, Bottlemoth, Sapling

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Maggie Rogers: In The Living Room

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Just six months after her Don't Forget Me album, the singer-songwriter releases another track that could easily have fit in that collection. (We're guessing it's destined for a "deluxe edition.") "Like so much of the album, it’s a song about the beauty and pain of memory, and the way that interweaves with reality when you’re processing the exit of a person in your life," Rogers says.

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Dawes: Front Row Seat

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We've previously featured a couple of its singles, and with the full release of Oh Brother, we're picking this track for our New Music bin. It's a rocker that takes a break midway for a jam-band interlude. The lyric suggests anxiety about the U.S. political situation, then takes a fatalistic attitude: "But if that’s the ball game / If the experiment’s complete / And we both stand around / To watch it all come down / At least we got a front row seat."

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The Cure: A Fragile Thing

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Robert Smith & Co. are back with Songs of a Lost World, sounding as cheery as ever. Billboard says of this track: "The swirling, midtempo rocker is classic Cure, with a morose, nearly minute-long instrumental intro that sets up a most on-brand tale of devastating love." Smith says the song "is driven by the difficulties we face in choosing between mutually exclusive needs and how we deal with the futile regret that can follow these choices.”

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Bottlemoth: Everything Works Out in the End

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How about we inject some optimism into the mix? The debut album by this indie-folk quintet from the UK, Even Us Ghosts, comes out this week. Singer-songwriter Ethan Proctor says of this song's title and key lyric: "I can’t recall who said it first to me, perhaps my parents or grandma said a lot when I was growing up. It’s a sentiment that has stuck; our biggest problems now won’t matter in 6 months, and that is a calming ideal. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end yet."

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Sapling: Rabbit Hole

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This synthy and very catch single is first we've heard from Sapling, a native of Dumfries, Scotland, now based in Glasgow. "Having been influenced by early folk and protest music growing up, she now turns to her own expression of emotion and protest mixed with the inspiration of dance, pop and soul," per her Bandcamp page. 

U2, Dear Rouge, Monica Moser, The Wild Feathers, Sarah Jarosz land in our New Music bin

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U2: Picture Of You (X+W)

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If this sounds like a U2 track from the early 2000s, that's because it is. The boys from Dublin are marking the 20th anniversary of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb by releasing a batch of previously unreleased songs from that album's recording sessions. The Edge says "I went into my personal archive to see if there were any unreleased gems and I hit the jackpot. ... Although at the time we left these songs to one side, with the benefit of hindsight we recognize that our initial instincts about them being contenders for the album were right, we were onto something."

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Dear Rouge: Cutting Teeth

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We dip again into Lonesome High, released last month, for this high-energy track that songwriter-vocalist Danielle McTaggart says "embraces the thought that even negative experiences can be where you get your strength, and your chance to succeed in life." "Got something to cut my teeth on," she sings. "I've sharpened up and I'll bite down."

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Monica Moser: Find You Yet

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This singer-songwriter - a native New Yorker previously based in Nashville and now part of the Austin, Texas scene - has been in our mix for a half-dozen years now. Her latest collection is 27teen, which includes previous singles like "Shortcut" and "Headlines" along with new tracks such as this one, which Kindline Magazine calls "a seamless fusion of indie-pop and introspective songwriting. The lyric suggests a desire to desire to meet a soulmate, but having other priorities that come first: "You're all I want in the end / I just don't want to find you yet."

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The Wild Feathers: Stereo

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Nashville meets Los Angeles on Sirens. The Feathers, based in Nashville, traveled to LA to record the new album with Shooter Jennings producing - and the result is country-rock with echoes of Laurel Canyon. Bassist/singer Joel King says this track "began as an instrumental soundcheck jam while on tour, and we knew we had to make it a finished song ... We loved the idea of an explosive harmony/chorus right up front in the song, then followed by fun musical idiosyncrasies throughout. Lyrically, it struggles with the duality of life. How can life be both beautiful and depressing at the same time?"

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Sarah Jarosz: Just Like Paradise

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Unlike U2, Jarosz didn't wait 20 years to release extra tracks from Polaroid Lovers, her seventh album. Eight and a half months after its release, she has issued a deluxe edition with two additional tracks - Wildflowers In The Sky and this song, co-written with Nashville-based Daniel Tashian. "We were overlooking the Gulf of Mexico and taking in the cool ocean breeze," she said in a post. "The way the sunlight was sparkling on the water led us to imagine a place where you never have to be cold or worried or lonesome and you can let go of all your darkness and fears.

(Photo: Jarosz at the Ryman Auditorium, by Erika Goldring via Facebook)

New Music Variety: Future Islands, Dangermuffin, Golden Dimes, Lights, Suki Waterhouse

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Future Islands: Glimpse

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Samuel Herring and his band from Baltimore are back with a stand-along single, recorded during the sessions for the People Who Aren't There Anymore LP that came out earlier this year. Stereogum calls it a "zippy yet nostalgic tune." The lyrics make references to "memories lost" - a press release says they focus on a family home burning down - mixed with darker images of gallows and graves.

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Dangermuffin: New Sol

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A folky jam band from South Carolina, this foursome is best known for live shows there and in nearby states. They've released several albums since 2007, but their latest (self-titled) is the first one to reach our ears (sorry to say). The group says "this song embodies the Dangermuffin vibe - lighthearted, liberating music. Lyrically, we’re touching on how being in-the-moment in your life keeps you young and vibrant."

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Golden Dimes: Gotta Start Somewhere

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It seems fair to call this New Jersey band's music "dad rock" since they bill themselves as five suburban dads brought together by a love of making music. On their just-released third EP, Helicopter, they bring a classic adult-album-rock vibe and strong musicianship to their original songs. Along with our pick for the New Music bin, other highlight tracks are "Seafarer" and "You Don't Love Me Like You Used To."

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Lights: Damage

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This electro-pop singer-songwriter from Toronto has a new album coming next year, and this is the first taste. She posted that "this marks the beginning of new music that I am very excited to share with you," adding that "all of it is a very little machines/early lights coded" - referring to her music from a decade ago, including Little Machines, winner of the Juno for pop album of the year in 2014.

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Suki Waterhouse: Supersad

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The idea of a model-turned-actress releasing an album titled Memoir of a Sparklemuffin* might seem off-putting, but it's hard to deny that this single is a solid piece of pop-rock (hat tip to a SiriusXM DJ we heard making this point). Paste Magazine calls the 18-song LP "overstuffed," with "too many unadventurous tracks" - but some "bright and scrappy highlights" like this number that gives a "middle finger to depression." (*No relation to Dangermuffin)

Bright Eyes, Steve Forbert, The Heavy Heavy, Rubblebucket, Austin John: New music variety!

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Bright Eyes: Bells and Whistles

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"As depressive as Conor Oberst's songs often are," writes AllMusic, the sound of the new album with his Bright Eyes band, Five Dice, All Threes, "is largely bright and lively." So it is with this track, which "kicks off with a childlike melody played on xylophone and mirrored by a chorus of whistling." (The LP title refers to a game called Threes in which the lowest score wins and 3s count as zeros.)

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Steve Forbert: Purple Toyota

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On his 21st album, Daylight Savings Time, the Mississippi-born singer-songwriter, now based in Asbury Park, N.J., celebrates life's simple pleasures - such as that extra hour of evening sun, and having "a place to stay and ... a place to park." Even when he sings about how "the lowdown blues won't let you be," he offers hope: "You'll have to wait 'em out as best you can." We're featuring this lighthearted track that asks a question that's often on our mind when driving: Why do automakers churn out cars in boring colors "that look like rainy weather?"

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The Heavy Heavy: One of a Kind

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Here's the title track from the debut full-length album by multi-instrumentalist William Turner and vocalist Georgie Fuller, retro-pop-rockers from Brighton, UK. Glide Magazine calls the track "a winner with slapping drums, bubbling bass, and huge crescendos." 

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Rubblebucket: Stella The Begonia

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We can't get enough of the Brooklyn outfit's new album, Year of the Banana. So as "Moving Without Touching" rotates out of our New Music bin, we're popping in this track. A love song to a plant? Why not?

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Austin John: Survive Each Other

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This title song from the new album by Todd Austin John Elsliger's band is clearly based on pandemic claustrophobia - although it could apply to any couple for whom togetherness has gone a little too far. "Boxes of things that we ordered, left by the door / To a world that we don’t visit anymore ... Both working from home for the last 2 or 3 years ... If the TV goes down, we’ll have nothing left to say."

New Nada Surf, Dear Rouge, The Ramona Flowers, Valley, Magdalena Bay added to our big mix

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Nada Surf: The One You Want

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The New York band's new album, Moon Mirror, "represents a step forward for the band, with lush layered vocals and more melodic arrangements than on previous efforts," writes No Depression. "Lyrically, it’s familiar, with frontman Matthew Caws delivering the same literate musical poetry that has made the band popular for three decades."

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Dear Rouge: Garbage

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Danielle and Drew McTaggart and their band call this song "probably the most important track to us" on their just-released album, Lonesome High. It was inspired by the couple's struggle with infertility and the eventual birth of their son. But the lyric is more universal, about not giving up in the face of adversity: "I believe nothing is a waste / Don't go and throw it all away."

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Valley: Let It Rain

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On their latest album, Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden, the Toronto group seems to be coming to grips with the fleeting nature of youth. Frontman Rob Laska says this song deals with "acceptance of growing old and learning to be ok with that." But he adds: "The whole album but specifically ‘Let It Rain,’ feels like us just playing a song in a room together like we did when we were teenagers."

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Magdalena Bay: Image

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The Los Angeles electro-pop duo that Rolling Stone calls "wonderfully strange" recently released its sophomore album, Imaginal Disk. Stereogum writes that this track "feels both futuristic and nostalgic. It begins as a mellower, vaporwave-meets-pop diva jam, until a delightfully blown-out bass crashes into the final chorus." The accompanying video has singer Mica Tenenbaum about to get a "brand-new image" installed via a disk drive in her forehead.

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The Ramona Flowers: Dangerous

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The band from Bristol, UK, says this song is about risky and addictive behavior - "about dancing with danger. There are times in life when you give into temptation. You know you shouldn’t do it, but you do it anyway.”