Professionally trained jazz vocal performer Molly Burch burst onto the scene last year with her breakout album, Please Be Mine, which earned her high praise from critics for her smoky, effortless vocals and bleeding-heart lyrics. She now gives us First Flower, a bright, beautiful album peppered with moments of triumph. The album’s singles impressed music blog Pitchfork, which says of Burch: “she is both feminine and in charge.” (Captured Tracks)

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›› ISSUE Feature: Interview and performance by Molly Burch.

As a photographer, Dave Naz’s experience and perspective are singular, and his books are collaborations with a full spectrum of individuals who desire to be seen naked by the world at large. In his latest book, Natural, Naz applies generous allotments of curiosity, identification and revelation. All of it is natural; this exchange cannot be anything but natural. Naked interest has always been the most natural thing in the world. (Issue, Inc)

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›› ISSUE Feature: Interview with Dave Naz by Allan MacDonald

Winner of a Special Jury Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A. chronicles the extraordinary rise to fame of British musician and human rights advocate M.I.A. (“Paper Planes,” “Galang,” “Bad Girls”). Drawn from a cache of never-before-seen personal video recordings from the past twenty-two years, director Steve Loveridge’s film is an intimate and eye-opening profile of M.I.A.‘s remarkable trajectory from young Tamil refugee to global pop star. (Abramorama)

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Following the release of 2016’s acclaimed Strangers, Boston-based musician and fine artist Marissa Nadler returns with her eighth album For My Crimes. Featuring cameos by Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten, the album stares down the dark realization that love may not be enough to keep two people together through distance and differing needs. Despite having demoed more songs than she needed, Nadler wrote many of the album’s singles in a flurry of creativity a week before recording in Laurel Canyon, California. The result is some of the most indelible music of Nadler’s career. (Sacred Bones & Bella Union)

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›› ISSUE Feature: Live Performance & Interview with Marissa Nadler

Lala Lala—the Chicago-based project of London-born musician Lillie West— releases her new album The Lamb.  Named a ‘Band to Watch’ by Stereogum, Lala Lala started as an outlet through which West could process her new experiences at art school and in LA and Chicago’s DIY music communities. On The Lamb, her second LP, West illustrates a nuanced look at her own adulthood—her fraught insecurity, struggles with addiction and the loss of several people close to her. (Hardly Art)

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Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Outstanding First Feature at Sundance Film Festival, Monsters and Men is the debut feature-length from writer and director Reinaldo Marcus Green. In this chilling portrait of race, family and consequence, a young father witnesses the police shooting of an unarmed black man—pushing the the tight-knit community of Bed-Stuy to the brink. (NEON)

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Australia’s foremost maverick poet Peter Bibby returns with new album Grand Champion, out via Spinning Top Records (Pond, Tame Impala). The video for the album’s third single, “Long Baby,” was filmed on a property way out in Western Australia, and depicts an ill-fated love story between two cockatoos. The result is what Bibby describes as “My weirdest video to date,” but the album itself paints a deliciously perturbing picture of Australian shambolic chic. (Spinning Top/Caroline)

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Recently signed to RCA Records, Winnetka Bowling League deliver finely tuned guitar pop bursting with cinematic California imagery on their debut self-titled EP. Displaying an impressive cornucopia of pop culture references, Winnetka Bowling League‘s first single “On The 5”—which premiered in the Los Angeles Times—captures dazzling sunshine and baked asphalt in a melancholy love song just made for freeways. (RCA)

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