New Music Friday: The best albums out Aug. 29

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4.3 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Sabrina Carpenter. The Beaches. Margo Price. This week, Stephen Thompson chats with NPR Music's Hazel Cills and WMOT's Jessie Scott about the best new albums out this new music Friday.

The Starting 5:

• The Beaches, 'No Hard Feelings'

• The Beths, 'Straight Line Was A Lie'

• Margo Price, 'Hard Headed Woman'

• Rodney Crowell, 'Airline Highway'

• Anna Tivel, 'Animal Poem'

Read more about WMOT's live webcast from AMERICANAFEST 2025.

The Lightning Round:

• Blood Orange, 'Essex Honey'

• Jaelee Roberts, 'Let Me Be Lonely'

• Brad Mehldau, 'Ride Into the Sun'

• CMAT, 'EURO-COUNTRY'

• Tiwa Savage, 'This One Is Personal'

See the long list of albums out Aug. 29 and sample dozens of them via our New Music Friday playlist on npr.org.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A quick note before the show, this podcast contains explicit language.
0:04.2	Oh, boy.
0:08.8	Happy Friday, everyone from NPR Music. It's New Music Friday. I am Stephen Thompson.
0:14.5	We are going to do the show a tiny bit differently this week.
0:18.0	We're going to split it into two parts with two very special guests.
0:23.2	Later in today's episode, we're going to have a conversation with Jesse Scott from WMOT, a station
0:28.9	serving Nashville and Middle Tennessee. We're going to talk about a little rush of new releases
0:33.4	in the Americana world. But first up, my NPR music colleague, Hazel Sills, is here, and we are going to talk
0:41.8	bangers. Big pop and power pop records that are out today, August 29th, that we are extraordinarily
0:49.8	excited about. Hazel, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It is a pleasure. So the first record that you and I wanted to talk about, Hazel, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.
0:55.2	It is a pleasure.
1:00.5	So the first record that you and I wanted to talk about is man's best friend by Sabrina Carpenter.
1:01.9	A huge pop star had, you know, one of the biggest breakthroughs of last year, you know,
1:07.7	with a string of hits like espresso and please, please, please, please, and taste,
1:12.1	and she's already back with a new record. Which is crazy to me. Crazy to me to put out two albums
1:17.8	back to back over the course of two years, but I feel like she's just kind of trying to ride
1:23.0	that same high of last year and piggyback on that success, and it is kind of smart.
1:27.9	It stands to be mentioned. This used to be commonplace. You know, a lot of, you know, legacy
1:32.7	artists who were kind of around for the early days of pop and rock and roll were putting out,
1:37.9	you know, multiple albums a year. But in this particular landscape, a quick cycle is usually
1:43.9	two years.
1:45.3	Yeah. I'm extremely excited to see what she does on this album,
	...

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