With large-scale tours and festivals still nowhere in sight, getting pumped about new music this fall means getting pumped about the season’s upcoming albums. Fortunately, there are plenty to stoke our excitement, from the highly anticipated debut by K-pop’s biggest girl group to a timely return from a veteran club queen. Here are the LPs we can’t wait to hear.
• The Neighbourhood, “Chip Chrome & the Mono-Tones” (Sept. 25): A character-driven concept album is a counter-intuitive conceit for a rock band in the age of TikTok’s streaming firehose. But OC-formed rockers the Neighbourhood are more in tune with modern tastes than most, and their R&B-influenced, big-budget indie sound has proved both adept and incredibly popular with Gen Z years into their career. Singles like “Devil’s Advocate” and “Cherry Flavoured” show how the band can still carve room for ambitious rock around the top charts. (August Brown)
• Sufjan Stevens, “The Ascension” (Sept. 25): Two years after the exquisitely wispy “Mystery of Love” (from “Call Me By Your Name”) carried him to the Oscars, Stevens has returned with a furious and densely arranged electro-folk album about what he views as the “diseased” state of American culture in the age of Trump. (Mikael Wood)
• SuperM, “Super One” (Sept. 25): A K-pop supergroup featuring members of EXO, SHINee, NCT127 and WayV, Super M was built with the express purpose of producing the biggest records and stadium shows possible. They got there almost immediately with the instantly meme-able techno-pop single “Jopping,” a Billboard 200-topping EP and sold-out Forum dates, and now they’re prepping a full-length debut, preceded by a pair of high-octane singles, “100” and “Tiger Inside.” (AB)