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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I’ve Given You Everything by Year of October

I’ve Given You Everything stakes its claim as a bold, emotionally textured rock record. Year of October, the Nashville-based trio with vocalist Phlecia Sullivan fronting, deliver a set of eleven tracks that mix grit and melody.

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Fish by Shitkid

From the very first track of Fish, it’s clear that ShitKid isn’t interested in glitzy production or playing it safe. Swedish artist Åsa Söderqvist (the brain behind ShitKid) delivers a debut that is feral, raw, playful and defiantly singular. The lo-fi approach — recorded on a laptop, GarageBand and minimal studio gloss — immediately sets the tone: edgy, intimate, and a little ragged around the edges.

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