Notable Releases of the Week (12/12)

It’s the second week of December, the year-end lists keep coming (our list of the 50 best punk albums of 2025 went up today), but the year is still not over yet. I highlight five new albums below.

On top of those, this week’s honorable mentions include 21 Savage, Joe Newman (of alt-J), Bun B & Statik Selektah, Kramer, Bonner Kramer, Max B, Matt Kivel, the Dorothy (Sorry, Saint Jude, etc) EP, the Vulture Feather EP, the Private Hell EP, the Fat White Family live album, Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here 50th anniversary box set, and the 30th anniversary edition of Blur’s The Great Escape.

Read on for my picks…

Nas & DJ Premier – Light-Years (Mass Appeal)

Nas wraps up his Legend Has It… series (which has already included new albums this year from De La Soul, Slick Rick, Mobb Deep, Big L, Ghostface Killah, and Raekwon) with an album from the man himself. Light-Years is a full-LP collaboration with DJ Premier, the boom bap pioneer responsible for producing three tracks on Illmatic (“N.Y. State of Mind,” “Memory Lane (Sittin’ in da Park),” and “Represent”), and who continued to work with Nas on later fan faves like “Nas Is Like,” “N.Y. State of Mind Pt. II,” and “I Gave You Power.” It comes in the midst of a hot streak for Nas, who’s been extremely prolific this decade with the King’s Disease and Magic trilogies, and it’s actually DJ Premier’s third collaborative project of 2025, following records with Roc Marciano and Ransom.

Conway The Machine – You Can’t Kill God With Bullets (Drumwork)

If you love the ’90s East Coast boom bap that Nas and DJ Premier helped pioneer, then you should check out the new Conway the Machine album too. Conway and his fellow Griselda members been keeping that sound alive and well for the past decade, and even without changing up his style much, he’s still coming up with new knockout punchlines.

This Is Lorelei – Holo Boy (Double Double Whammy)

This Is Lorelei followed up a decade-long run of lo-fi recordings with his first “proper” album, Box For Buddy, Box For Star, and it proved to be a slow-burning breakthrough that revealed bandleader Nate Amos as one of the strongest indie rock songwriters of his generation. It was one of our favorite albums of 2024, and the 2025 deluxe reissue also gave us one of our favorite songs of 2025: the MJ Lenderman version of “Dancing in the Club.” Now, Nate has taken 10 of his older lo-fi tracks to the studio and beefed them up for Holo Boy, which he’s calling his “sort-of-second sort-of-album.” It’s a very cool project, and as endearing as the lo-fi versions are, these songs clean up good.

Juliana Hatfield – Lightning Might Strike (American Laundromat)

As Bill wrote in his review of Juliana Hatfield’s 2021 album Blood, “Juliana Hatfield has maintained a quality level that few of her late-’80s/early-’90s peers can match, and remains in possession of one of indie rock’s best, most versatile voices.” Lightning Might Strike is Blood‘s followup (with an ELO covers album in between), and that sentiment remains as true now as it was then. The album was inspired by a series of hardships, including the death of one of Juliana’s best friends, the death of her dog, and her mother’s cancer diagnosis, and its title is a metaphor for the ideas contained within these songs.

“My mother’s younger brother was struck and killed by lighting at the age of 16 and when I asked her how this affected her worldview, she told me that it made her believe that there is a predetermined plan for each of us,” Hatfield wrote. “With this album I was contemplating these ideas–fate, powerlessness (“Popsicle”), the effects of trauma (“Wouldn’t Change Anything,” “Fall Apart”,” Strong Too Long”), the ways we can’t and don’t change.”

HEALTH – Conflict DLC (Loma Vista)

Noise popsters turned industrial revivalists HEALTH are back with a followup to 2023’s Rat Wars, which was also a December release. That album was the band’s most metal yet, and Conflict DLC picks up where it left off. It often finds the band churning out their heaviest, darkest, most heart-pounding music yet, and even the most abrasive parts are juxtaposed by Jake Duzsik’s damn-near-angelic voice.

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