New Music Friday: The best albums out Aug. 1

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4.4 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Newcomer Emily Hines. Hardcore collective The Armed. A Susumu Yokota boxset. WDET's Liz Warner joins NPR Music's Stephen Thompson to dive into their favorite albums out this week.

The Starting 5:

• Emily Hines, 'These Days'

• The Armed, 'THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED'

• Mal Devisa, 'Palimpsesa'

• Caimin Gilmore, 'BlackGate'

• Susumu Yokota, 'Skintone Edition Volume 1' (box set)

The Lightning Round:

• Buddy Guy, 'Ain't Done With The Blues'

• René Najera, 'Painted Life'

• Hieroglyphic Being, 'The Sound Of Something Ending'

• Spafford Campbell, 'Tomorrow Held'

See our long list of albums out August 1 and sample dozens of new records via our New Music Friday playlist on npr.org.

Credits:
Host: Stephen Thompson
Guest: Liz Warner, WDET
Audio producer: Noah Caldwell
Editor: Otis Hart
Executive producer: Suraya Mohamed

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Happy now and then in a far off land, familiar but foreign, a liminal feeling.
0:17.0	Happy Friday, everyone, from NPR Music. It's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson here with Liz Warner of
0:24.5	Public Radio Station, WDET, in Detroit. Welcome to the show, Liz. Hi, Stephen. It is a pleasure to have you.
0:31.0	Now, I want to note up front, the song we are hearing is from Haley Williams of Paramore. On Monday, Haley Williams dropped 17 new
0:39.7	songs in an unusual fashion. Access to these songs was sent out via passcodes through Haley
0:46.0	Williams' Hairdye Company, Good Die Young, that's D-Y-E. That allowed people to access a link
0:52.2	to download the songs, but those links were pulled
0:55.0	soon afterward.
0:56.5	It turns out there is a new Haley Williams album out today, though its title remains murky
1:02.3	as of this taping.
1:03.7	It does contain all 17 of those songs that were cryptically released and then unreleased
1:08.1	earlier this week.
1:09.5	So we wanted to acknowledge the news about Haley Williams, a good friend of public radio, by the way.
1:14.7	And of course, we've also got a ton of other great records to get to on this week's show.
1:19.5	All of them are out today, August 1st, including new albums from the Armed, Mal DeVisa, and our lead-off artist Emily Hines.
1:28.2	Emily Hines has a new album called These Days.
1:34.7	I'm in my own way again.
1:42.8	I'm in my own way
1:46.0	watching the wheel spin
1:53.0	I'm in my own way Emily Hines is a songwriter.
2:03.6	Emily Hines is a songwriter who came from Ohio, rural Ohio.
2:25.3	And this record, it's just a really interesting, wonderful, comfortable spot when I was looking into what her approach was for this record, because it's her debut.
	...

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