Release Day Roundup: 7/18/25

Top Picks

Laura Jane Grace in the Trauma Tropes – Adventure Club (punk)

I have a confession to make: I don't really like Transgender Dysphoria Blues (2014) that much. It's obviously an extremely important album and I completely understand why it's so pivotal and personal to Laura Jane Grace and her listeners, as well as just the general history of popular music itself, but—as someone to whom its trans-narrative didn't necessarily speak to, and is a picky punk fan at best—I've never really liked listening to it that much, even if I very much enjoy Against Me!'s other, more melodic, mid-period output. Maybe it's just a time and place thing, since, at the time it came out, I was backpacking around Europe in the middle of the Summer, and found Rise Against's contemporaneously released, upbeat and oddly maligned Black Market (2014) much more to my taste. Since then, both bands have dropped away from the forefront of my consciousness and listening habits, while Grace herself has embarked on a bunch of largely-acoustic folk and indie-leaning records which I (and many others, it seems) have had increasingly less interest in as the years roll on. Adventure Club, however, demands your attention as it delivers Grace's most infectiously electrified and outwardly aggressive offering in over a decade.

The "Trauma Tropes" constitutes a collaboration with Grace's wife, singer Paris Campbell Grace, along with bassist Jacopo Fokas, and drummer Orestis Lagadinos, who they picked up while working on a documentary about prisoners in Greece—as you do—and the invigoration and excitement Grace is obviously having alongside her new comrades cannot be ignored. Adventure Club is not only the punkiest thing Grace has done in a long time, but one of the more traditionally punk things she's done for her entire career. The album's collection of catchy songs harks back to the Ramones' nursery rhyme-style construction. Most notable is "Your God", which demands to know: "Does your god have a big fat dick? 'Cos it feels like he's fucking me!" to the tune of "Do your balls hang low, do they wobble to-and-fro?" Then there's also "Wearing Black" [to the Pride Parade]'s surprisingly sticky shout-out to Jojo Siwa, which has lodged itself irreparably in my temporal lobe, along with the rest of the song's lyrics, even if I'm definitely not allowed to sing any of them (although, as someone who once accidentally found themselves in the middle of a Swedish Pride Parade while wearing his best Converge shirt—around the same time I was listening to Rise Against—I do find it at least somewhat relatable).

The album is unrelentingly elating and celebratory while still being consistently confronting in its aggressive and often extremely personal presentation of gender, sexuality, drug use, persecution, trauma, self-loathing and even attempted suicide—at times all within the same song. Perhaps her only pulled punch is provocatively titling a song “Fuck You Harry Potter”, rather than directly calling out the character’s reprehensibly transphobic creator. Even then though, the fun being had on Adventure Club is utterly palpable, but it's that added personal depth that stops it from being pure fluff and which sets Grace apart within the genre, even when here output has been perhaps subpar otherwise. Here though, that cognitive dissonance isn't a problem. This is by far the most I've enjoyed any of Grace’s material since White Crosses (2010) and maybe even any punk-aligned album since then as well (or at least since that Rise Against one...).

Abigail Williams – A Void Within Existence (progressive? black metal)

The popular narrative around Abigail Williams is that they started as a metalcore band before going legit (but were still somehow posers or something, idk). But I listened to In the Shadow of a Thousand Suns (2008) the other day, and it sounds a lot like what Dimmu Borgir were doing at the time to me. Sure, the Legend EP (2006) has some melodeath riffing and sounds a bit more like The Black Dahlia Murder, but also a lot like Cradle of Filth (who some might call posers, but definitely aren't metalcore), and they made the switch to trve black metal almost instantly after that now largely overlooked debut. ...call it the Darkthrone gambit. A more controversial contention might be that, while Abigail Williams may have gotten much "better" at being a black metal, they've also gotten a lot less interesting. Their last outing A Walk Beyond the Dark (2019) is a very good black metal album, but it also sounds a lot like a lot of very good black metal albums, whereas Legend remains a lot more interesting that whatever Lorna Shore are doing these days—although it also turns out that people don't seem to really like the only Abigail Williams album I've ever gone back to before this, being 2010's In the Absence of Light (I just think the riffs are neat!).

With A Void Within Existence though, Abigail Williams take a stab at being both a very good and very interesting black metal band. Moreover, while this is largely to do with all of the progressive, symphonic and atmospheric flair they've to their songwriting, it's also in no small part due to bringing back some of their more core-ish undertones. Opener "Life, Disconnected" starts off sounding like something Gatecreeper might have come up with, and there are more than a few almost djent-like, downtuned riffs and rhythms that find their way into the mix toward the end. In between the band bring a more progressive edge to the atmospherics they've been honing over their past couple of albums. "Nonexistence" even ends on a Pink Floyd-style solo, with much of its surrounds also bringing to mind mid-period Nachtmystium and Enslaved, or even Chapel of Disease's most recent records. What's really impressive though, is the way they weave all of these seemingly disperate ideas together into a continuous and compelling whole—all of which is to say that, A Void Within Existence is absolutely the best Abigail Williams record to date and maybe the best black metal album of the year so far as well.

Also, PSA: The reason why we don’t do embeds for every album these days is because having too many meant the posts kept crashing on mobile. It’s not some “lazy” way of going through and sampling, tagging and linking literally hundreds of releases every week for your convenience. So, if you’re thinking of sending a cunty email about it, maybe stop and ask yourself: “y tho?”