New Music Friday: Stream projects from Spirit of the Beehive, Fontaines D.C., Uniform, and more

American Standard is the darkest album I’ve heard all year. The Brooklyn metal doomsayers have matched up pound for pound with some of the heaviest bands out there, splitting an album with The Body and bills with the likes of Thou and Panopticon; this record surpasses all of those band’s recent releases in heaviness by a mile. Weight is, in fact, a central topic to AS, a record that deals with Uniform frontman Mike Berdan’s struggle with bulimia. Its opening, title track is 21 minutes of direct confrontation with his disorder, delivered at first in a military call and response and then over mounting guitar, drums, and bass. The following three tracks are not nearly as long but are each titanic in their own right, building out the record’s nightmare universe. Uniform’s inclusion in this roundup conclusively marks the end of our Songs of the Summer week, and probably the summer in general. This fact holds true any way you slice it, but a more positive spin is also possible: If you live in New York, as Uniform do, August is often the hottest month of the year — the dog days, if you will. There’s a visceral catharsis in Berdan’s emotional purge that hints at a hard-won peace in the distance, peaking over the horizon line. — Raphael Helfand

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Confident, playful, heartfelt, and filled with new discoveries; Fontaines D.C.'s fourth album marks a major step up for the Irish band. "Starburster" is perhaps the biggest swing, all swagger and cockiness with frontman Grian Chatten half-rapping his verses about a debilitating panic attack. The heavy riffs on "Here's The Thing" and "Death Kink" both hit hard, too, but it's the narcotized ballads that elevate the group's fourth album. "Desire" sways into its dreamlike stagger, hazy but still profound. "Horseness Is The Whatness," meanwhile, offers up tender meditation on new fatherhood and features a sample of Carlos O'Connell's newborn baby's heartbeat. Don't be fooled by Fontaines D.C.'s newly fluorescent dye jobs and Korn name-dropping, Romance isn't a Y2K reinvention as much as it is the band honing their stormy and poetic indie rock into arena-sized shapes. — David Renshaw

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Spirit of the Beehive have a fascination with finality. Their last album, 2021’s Entertainment, Death, was a brilliant concept record imagining the collage rock band’s lives flashing before their eyes just before dying in a car accident. You’ll Have To Lose Something, the Philly trio’s follow-up, almost didn’t happen, after bandmates Rivka Ravede and Zack Schwartz ended a decade-long relationship; instead, they decided to write a breakup album. From that precipice, the band return with You’ll Have To Lose Something, a project that dives into their appreciation for pop. By amplifying the accessible sounds that were always present in their discography, Spirit of the Beehive make the surrounding disruptions feel even stranger, more unsettling. You’ll Have To Lose Something is the sound of the band unlocking a cheat code to realize its full potential, creating a playlist from the rock radio station of your last fever dream. — Jordan Darville

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On his solo debut, Starchris, Body Meat’s Chris Taylor is a chaotic and captivating storyteller, recounting the ancient lore of an RPG hero’s journey towards self-realization. Every chapter brings him one step closer to his goal: there’s “High Beams’” frenzied boss battle, fought through aggressive redlining and nü metal-trap; the brief-lived calm of “North Side,” where tsk-ing tongues and R&B-indebted crescendos suddenly explode into a dialogue between a shrill hyperpop glitch and dancehall-inflected rap; and the paranoid reckoning of “Electrische’s” dutty wine-style delivery and the percussive trot of a deconstructed Jersey club beat. Moments of catharsis and sheer clarity that cut through the hostile, head-spinning noise, like “Crystalize,” where Taylor shuffles through brief moments of clipped bass and warped IDM until, finally, there’s a sublime moment of understanding. — Sandra Song

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp