New Music Friday: The best albums you missed from December

All Songs Considered

NPR

Music

4.4 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

There's been some great music released since the last New Music Friday episode in late November. So, on this slow January release day, NPR Music's Stephen Thompson and WRTI's Nate Chinen catch you up on the best albums we heard in December in between "All I Want For Christmas Is You" and "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer."

Featured Albums:
• ROSÉ, 'rosie'
• Lauren Mayberry, 'Vicious Creature'
• Brad Mehldau, Mark Turner & Peter Bernstein, 'Solid Jackson'
• The Innocence Mission, 'Midwinter Swimmers'
• SAULT, 'Acts of Faith'

Visit npr.org/music to see the long list of albums you might have missed in December, and stream our New Music Friday playlist.

CREDITS:

Host: Stephen Thompson, NPR Music
Guest: Nate Chinen, WRTI
Producer: Simon Rentner
Editor: Otis Hart
Executive Producer: Suraya Mohamed
Vice President, Music and Visuals: Keith Jenkins

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Happy Friday, everyone. It's New Music Friday from NPR Music. I'm Stephen Thompson. Joining me is Nate Chenen from the wonderful public radio station, WRTI, in Philly.
0:12.2	Hey, Stephen. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you, too. What are we listening to? This is a terrific track by salt, getting us into the groove with the 2025 vibe.
0:24.1	Wonderful. Well, we're going to get to Salt a little bit later in this episode. We've got a
0:28.2	terrific show for you today. Before we begin, I want to give a quick update on kind of how we're
0:32.3	going to handle New Music Friday going forward. We're going to invite a guest from NPR's
0:37.1	network of public radio stations
0:38.7	across the country to join me in kind of a quick rundown of the week's best new albums.
0:44.7	I love this idea. You know, the people working across public radio really do have their
0:50.0	ear to the ground. They know what's happening. And yeah, big ears. It's going to be great to welcome
0:55.2	them in. Yeah, and we're going to sample as much new music as possible to kind of soundtrack your day
1:01.0	and get you into the weekend. You can find streaming links to every album we talk about in the
1:05.1	notes section for this episode in your podcast app. So I want to acknowledge that the number one
1:10.8	album in the country right now
1:12.2	came out on December 20th, or at least part of it did. Siza put out a deluxe edition of her
1:18.2	22 album SOS. It's called SOS Deluxe Lana, and that deluxe edition with 15 new tracks is what just
1:27.1	hit number one on the Billboard Albums chart. Now, it turns out that that deluxe edition with 15 new tracks is what just hit number one on the Billboard
1:28.3	albums chart.
1:29.3	Now, it turns out that that deluxe edition is apparently still being expanded.
1:34.3	Siza has posted on social media that more tracks are dropping in the next few days, so we're
1:39.3	going to table it for discussion right now.
1:41.3	But I wanted to acknowledge the existence of SOS Deluxe, Lana, and to
1:45.7	briefly revel in the fact that we're about to get still more new SZA songs. So instead, we're
	...

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