New Music Friday: 13th Floor New Album Picks: April 28, 2023

New Music Friday is here again and there’s a bounty of excellent new releases out today. Here are our top 5 picks. Check them out!

The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda has chosen these 5 new albums for your consideration released today.

1. Josh Ritter – Spectral Lines (Thirty Tigers) A truly exceptional album. “I think it’s important for us to share some of our most basic and common experiences with each other, however we can,” Josh Ritter said in a press release. “That’s what we really, really need right now. I know we have common experiences, and it’s important to telegraph those back because they don’t have to be lonely experiences.” Click here to read the 13th Floor review of Spectral Lines

2. Tiny Ruins – Ceremony (Ba Da Bing) Ceremony is the band’s highest achievement, an album about confronting confusion, loss, dislocation and ultimately realising the beauty of life’s unpredictable paths.

3. The National – First Two Pages Of Frankenstein (4AD) Bryce Dessner said that the band eventually “managed to come back together and approach everything from a different angle, and because of that we arrived at what feels like a new era for the band.”^[5

4. Rickie Lee Jones – Pieces Of Treasure (BMG) Reunited with producer Russ Titelman Rickie says, “This album is as much about being human, the view of surviving—which means aging, and loving relentlessly—as it is about anything,” says Jones, now 68 with an acclaimed memoir, Last Chance Texaco. “We love ‘til the day we die, love our lives, our families, and finally ourselves.” Click here to watch the 13th Floor interview with Rickie Lee Jones

5. Terrible Sons – The Raft Is Not The Shore (Nettwerk) Ōtautahi/Christchurch husband-and-wife, Terrible Sons have released their anticipated debut album. The duo attempted to “write closer together, about what we know, what was moving us at the time, and putting ourselves in vulnerable spaces,” says Matt Barus. Click here to read the 13th Floor album review.