New Music Friday: 13th Floor New Album Picks: February 21, 2025
Well, it’s Friday somewhere! New Music Friday that is. Here are The 13th Floor’s picks…five new albums, released this Friday, that we believe you can’t live without…including new titles by Patterson Hood, Youth Lagoon and Matthew Bannister.
The 13th Floor’s Marty Duda picks these five new releases for your consideration:
- Patterson Hood – Exploding Trees And Airplane Screams (ATO) With a title as relevant as today’s headlines, its a solo album by Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood. Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams marks the singer-songwriter-guitarist’s most expansive and ambitious extracurricular effort to date, supported by a stellar cast of friends and fellow musicians including Waxahatchee, Brad and Phil Cook (Megafaun), Kevin Morby, Wednesday, Brad Morgan and Jay Gonzalez (Drive-By Truckers), Steve Berlin (Los Lobos, The Blasters), David Barbe (Sugar, Mercyland), Nate Query (The Decemberists), Steve Drizos (Jerry Joseph and The Jackmormons), Daniel Hunt (Neko Case, M Ward), and Stuart Bogie (The Hold Steady, Goose). That’s quite a support team!
2. Cash & Skye – Just A Stranger (Little Record Co) Here’s one that we’re excite about…Cash & Skye are a Los Angeles duo comprised of Henri Cash and Sophia Skye who have been casually writing and recording songs together for almost 7 years. Henri is a member of Starcrawler and Skye is the daughter of Rilo Kiley bassman Pierre de Reeder. They met in high school and are finally recording together. Some of the songs on Just A Stranger were recorded with just Henri and Sophia, and some were joined by the tight-knit musicians from Cash‘s prolific and beloved band, Starcrawler. This long-awaited chronicle of songs were recorded in spare moments over the years between international tours, college classes, and eight-hour shifts. It explores modern recording techniques combined with classic analog tape recording in an attempt to naturally capture the music in a way that stays true to the sounds of the classic records that influenced them. Watch for a 13th Floor MusicTalk interview with Cash & Skye very soon…meanwhile click here to read The 13th Floor Album Review.
3. Youth Lagoon – Rarely Do I Dream (Fat Possum) Rooted in love and childhood memoir, Rarely Do I Dream is a triumph of American gothic imagination — where storybook innocence dissolves into a radioactive billow of teenage drifters, drug-addled hustlers, and old-world folklore. Drifting between propulsive electronica and hallucinatory rock songs, Trevor Powers’ singular voice always glows front and center as the neon road sign pointing home.
4. Matthew Bannister – The Dark Backward (Powertool) On Matthew Bannister’s new album The Dark Backward, he plays in and out of time, on a musical journey back and forth across decades. Matthew Bannister’s musical backstory includes the much-loved Flying Nun 80s band Sneaky Feelings. On The Dark Backward he offers up a series of original songs, some new and a few old, woven together with the theme of time. This isn’t a retrospective, he says. “It’s about time…”
5. Sunny War – Armageddon In A Summer Dress (New West) Sunny War, also known as Sydney Ward, found inspiration for her latest album, Armageddon In A Summer Dress, while living in her late father’s 100-year-old house in Chattanooga, TN. She initially thought the house was haunted. Eerie sounds and visions led her to write the song Ghosts. However, she later discovered that hallucinations were caused by gas leaks, shifting her understanding of those experiences but not her artistic focus. Armageddon In A Summer Dress explores themes of memory, loss, and the ghosts of past selves.
