New Music Friday: The best albums out July 11

All Songs Considered

NPR

Music

4.4 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

NPR Music's Stephen Thompson is back with Celia Gregory of Nashville public radio station WXPN to talk through this week's best new music.

Intro:
• Bruce Springsteen, 'Tracks II: The Lost Albums' (Read our guide to the box set on npr.org)
• Lorde, 'Virgin' (Read our review on npr.org)

The Starting 5:
• Wet Leg, 'moisturizer'
• The Swell Season, 'Forward'
• Clipse, 'Let God Sort Em Out'
• Allo Darlin', 'Bright Nights'
• Burna Boy, 'No Sign of Weakness'

The Lightning Round:
• Ólafur & Talos, 'A Dawning'
• Martha, 'Standing Where It All Began - Singles and B-Sides 2012-2025'
• Open Mike Eagle, 'Neighborhood Gods Unlimited'
• Petey USA, 'The Yips'
• Tony Njoku, 'All Our Knives Are Always Sharp'

Check out our Long List of new albums out June 27 and sample more than 50 of them via our New Music Friday playlist on npr.org.

Credits
Host: Stephen Thompson
Guest: Wonway Posibul, KALW
Producer: Simon Rentner
Editor: Otis Hart
Executive Producer: Suraya Mohamed

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A quick note before the show, this podcast contains explicit language.
0:07.2	Happy Friday, everyone from NPR Music. It's New Music Friday. I'm Stephen Thompson here with
0:12.3	Celia Gregory from WNXP in Nashville. Hey, Celia. Hey, it's so good to be back, Stephen. Happy
0:17.6	middle of the summer to you. Happy middle of the summer to you. It's kind of the pop culture doldrums. You know, we've kind of gotten through the middle of the summer. Happy middle of the summer to you. It's kind of the pop
0:22.0	culture doldrums. You know, we've kind of gotten through the meat of the summer movie season.
0:26.5	The pop hits are kind of already cemented. A lot of the kind of summer monoculture has already
0:31.7	passed us by by the time we get to mid-July. Musically speaking, at least in our world, that is not the case.
0:38.5	Yes, absolutely. I love it being an outlier this summer. Give us something to latch on to.
0:42.9	We've got some big, big, amazing records this week, including wet lag and clips and the swell
0:49.7	season and a bunch of other great stuff. Plus, you've been hearing a little bit of music
0:53.8	from the beta band. The beta band's kind of other great stuff. Plus, you've been hearing a little bit of music from the beta band.
0:56.0	The beta band's kind of classic three EPs was reissued today on vinyl.
1:02.0	Yeah, Steven, of course, I'm like so many folks that first learned of this band because of high fidelity,
1:06.0	even though this album was now then a couple years old.
1:09.0	But this many years later, I feel like it really holds up.
1:11.4	And I think the virtue of this band is that they were so short and potent. It was like eight years,
1:16.0	three albums, basically. And so to hear this with fresh years and done in a really nice way
1:21.2	for audiophiles is going to be really special today.
1:35.2	One of the great things about these reissues is it's never too late to discover these artists.
1:45.2	If you weren't around, you know, during this band's heyday, if you're kind of picking it up later, you know, it's actually one of the really nice things about, you know, the, the TikTok generation and streaming is that these things are just sitting there waiting for people to revisit them
1:50.3	and rediscover them. And the fact that this record is kind of getting this official, you know,
1:55.2	vinyl reissue. It's a beautiful thing. Let's kick off the show officially with one of the biggest records out today, July 11th.
	...

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