Looking Ahead to 2025: Five Albums We’re Excited to Hear
It’s time to take a little peek around the corner into 2025 to see what’s coming up in the world of good music. Here are five new albums scheduled to release between January and March that we’re looking forward to; enjoy!
###
On February 28, 2025, Them Coulee Boys roar into life again with their rollicking blend of bluegrass, folk, and rock and roll on their fifth album, No Fun in the Chrysalis. The Wisconsin band’s follow up to 2021’s Namesake reflects the warmth, honesty, and intimacy of the band’s live shows on reflective numbers such as “I Am Not Sad” to the rollicking folk pop of “Up Close” to the soaring rocker “Mornings Like Mountains.”
In her eloquently measured vocals, Canadian singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Rose Cousins accompanies listeners on a journey through the ups and downs of love on Conditions of Love—Vol. 1 (March 14, 2025). Her new single “Denouement” evokes the excitement of new love and the complicated feelings that pull us away from and back to love. As Cousins shares in her notes, Falling in love, being in love and staying in love are all such different things. Being human is emotionally complicated enough without attempting to relate to another who is just as complex, and in the most vulnerable of arenas: romance. Love is wondrous and absurd (and very hard).
Mary Chapin Carpenter and Scottish artists Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart collaborate for the first time on their new album, Looking for the Thread, out on January 24, 2025. The three met in January 2023 to perform with Robert Vincent and then headed to a writing retreat at Kinlochmoidart House where they wrote the songs that appear on this album. Carpenter recalls: “That first visit to Kinlochmoidart helped us feel that we had some things that might serve us. We’d gather in the beautiful room where the fire was, play and sing together, and then go off to our little corners and work on stuff on our own, come back together, and get to the next step.” The lead single, “Hold Everything,” written by Polwart, highlights the deeply introspective lyrical ingenuity of the trio as well as their stunningly gorgeous blend of resonant vocals.
On March 7, 2025, New England-based singer and songwriter Kris Delmhorst releases her tenth album, Ghosts in the Garden. Her evocative lyrics navigate the shadowy corners of life, and her single, the airy and dreamy “Something to Show,” conveys the shimmering states between sleep and wakefulness. As she reflects in her notes, “I tend to spend the middle of the night ruminating on things, and this song is the story of my consciousness leaving my body lying there, floating out the window out into the night, rowing across a dark lake of sky, looking for answers.”
Jordan Tice, a guitarist’s guitarist and member of the band Hawktail, offers four of his favorite covers and originals on the EP Badlettsville, out on January 17, 2025. He’s joined on the album by friends Aoife O’Donovan, Andrew Martin, and Paul Kowert. Layers of cascading guitar and mandolin picking flow beneath the harmonies of ’Donovan, Tice, and Marlin on Tice’s spaciously unfolding anthemic original “Mean Old World.”
