Month: November 2025

Virgin by Lorde

Released on June 27, 2025, Lorde‘s fourth album, Virgin—produced with Jim-E Stack and touches from Dan Nigro—marks a seismic shift. Ditching Jack Antonoff‘s polished sheen, Lorde dives into synth-pop’s gritty underbelly, evoking Melodrama‘s euphoric pulse but laced with the unflinching intimacy of a 28-year-old reckoning with her body, identity, and industry scars. The cover, an X-ray of her pelvis revealing an IUD, screams transparency: this is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor stripped bare, not some virginal archetype, but a “raw, primal, innocent” force reclaiming femininity on her terms.

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Peak Experience by Sydney Sprague

Phoenix-based indie rocker Sydney Sprague has always worn her heart like armor—raw, witty, and unyieldingly honest. Her third album, Peak Experience (self-released, September 26, 2025), distills that ethos into eight tracks of stripped-back vulnerability, marking her first independent full-length after parting with Rude Records. It’s a hushed reckoning with anxiety, obsession, and the elusive highs of existence, born from home-studio sessions amid relentless touring and personal reinvention. If her prior works—2021’s apocalyptic maybe i will see you at the end of the world and 2023’s sardonic somebody in hell loves you—were defiant anthems, this is a quieter unraveling: tender odes to spiraling thoughts, where pop-punk edges soften into folk-tinged introspection.

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Gemma by OvO

Italian duo OvO—Stefania Pedretti‘s razor-wire vocals and guitar, Bruno Dorella‘s percussive electronics and drums—have long been sonic saboteurs, dismantling noise rock and avant-doom since 2000. Their eleventh album, Gemma (Artoffact Records, October 3, 2025), arrives as a 25th-anniversary manifesto: a seed bursting through concrete, promising regeneration amid entropy. It’s their boldest fusion yet—industrial grind meets electronic pulse, birthing “new weird life” from elemental chaos.

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