Image: Jamie Wdziekonski

Welcome to the new music review where we connect you with some of the best new music spinning on Breakfast, The Daily and Drive programs.

ALBUMS:
MOD CON – Modern Condition (FEATURE ALBUM)
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The Allergies – Promised Land
BADBADNOTGOOD – Talk Memory
Baker Boy – Gela
Bedouine – Waysides
Hard-Ons – I’m Sorry Sir, That Riff’s Been Taken
Indira Elias – Songs From a Moon//Songs by the Sun
Parquet Courts – Sympathy for Life

SINGLES:
Catcall – Feel the Fear
Cate Le Bon – Running Away
Jack Davies & The Bush Chooks – Penguin
The Laurels – Ex-Sherpa
Molly Nilsson – Absolute Power
Tanya Ransom – Breakdown to Breakthrough

Whether it’s as Palm Springs or as a member of Tropical Fuck Storm, Melbourne musician Erica Dunn has been at the centre of some of Australia’s most exciting music in the few last years. Dunn now returns to her punk trio MOD CON for Modern Condition, a blistering feminist punk rock album that spits barbs at male privilege and dodgy politicians. With its angular guitar riffs and bouncing drum beats, the record feels in conversation with ’70s English punks like the Slits and the Raincoats, while also sounding undeniably modern.

On 2018’s Wide Awake!, New York indie rock group Parquet Courts took inspiration from the dance scenes of their home island to create a party album that ’80s dance punks like Liquid Liquid and ESG would’ve been proud of. They shift source of their inspiration one decade later and across the Atlantic for Sympathy for Life, their latest album. Taking their cues from ’90s Madchester and Britpop, and working with British producers Rodaidh McDonald and John Parish, the record is a pretty seamless appropriation and redeployment of this specific regional sound (and a more successful attempt than one of their contemporaries’ recent effort at doing the same thing) into a new context. A real, proper dance for post-lockdown euphoria.

After a decade as one of the premier hip-hop live bands, Toronto trio BADBADNOTGOOD have indulged their weirder side and decided to make a jazz fusion album. Working with producer Floating Points, saxophonist Terrace Martin, and strings composer Arthur Verocai, Talk Memory evokes the psychedelia of Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew without ever quite reaching those musicians’ experimental chaos. Nonetheless, this is still a strong record from a group looking to expand their sound.