Magic Frog Records, A Hippo Happening

Deluxe version of Kassi Ashton's long-awaited, full-length debut album, Made From The Dirt, now featuring 5 additional tracks, including "Sounds Like Somethin' I'd Say (feat. Parker McCollum)." Made From The Dirt not only showcases Kassi's one-of-a-kind signature style front and center, but it also tells her story so far. She holds nothing back on these ten tracks - from the knockout title track "Made From The Dirt" to the exhale of the finale "Juanita." Spiking her brand of country with rock 'n' roll spirit and unabashed vulnerability, she proudly wears her heart on her sleeve.

d4vd’s debut album, WITHERED, is one of the most hotly anticipated albums of the year. It completes the story laid out in his 2023 EPs, Petals to Thorns and The Lost Petals, as he continues to articulate a relationship’s ricocheting emotions: the coruscating highs and bleak lows, all set to music that’s intimate, hook-heavy, and refreshingly direct. Created primarily on Bandlab, WITHERED brought d4vd back to the place his music journey began: his sister’s closet, alone with his iPhone. To finish the record, d4vd journeyed to London with a trusted crew of collaborators to create a cohesive, intimate record that’s meant to be listened to sequentially — the songs consumed like chapters — that spotlights his evolution as a deft and dynamic vocalist.

Dream Into It, Billy Idol's ninth studio album and first full-length record in over ten years, tells a rich and deeply personal tale of Billy's voyage from young punk rock dreamer to his reset as an MTV leather-gloved icon; then on to all his well-publicized hits, highs, lows, overdoses, and accidents; culminating with a devastatingly honest assessment of the price of fame and the wisdom accrued by getting your act together and embracing family. And even though Dream Into It tells a story it is also, on a track-to-track level, a completely satisfying old school/new school pumping, rocking punk/pop odyssey, as only Billy Idol and longtime guitarist/collaborator Steve Stevens can create, with the able assistance of producer Tommy English and features with rock mavens Joan Jett and Alison Mosshart.

Florilegium, the debut album from songwriter Uwade, winds through genre, through death, break-ups, friendship, and failure. Here, she wanted to honor as much of herself as she could — her family and Nigerian heritage, her scholarly tendencies, her background in choirs, the literature that moves her, the melodies of artists like Fela Kuti, Yebba, and Julian Casablancas of the Strokes, who inspired her to start writing songs at the inception of her music-making. Cerebral and curious, each musical moment feels tactile, deliberate, and thoughtful — but also fresh, like something just discovered. A shimmering anthology that finds sweetness and light in sorrow, an amalgamation of disparate influences and recording sessions seamlessly fitting together through her expressive, expansive voice.

Bloodless is the daring new full-length from beloved indie singer-songwriter Samia. Produced over 2024 with longtime collaborator Caleb Wright and Jake Luppen of Hippo Campus, it is the follow-up to 2023's breakthrough Honey, the Libera Award winning Best Pop Album of the Year. Mixed by Wright & Alex Farrar (MJ Lenderman, Indigo De Souza, Snail Mail). Music videos for all singles directed by Sarah Ritter (Frost Children, Cherry Glazzer, Surf Curse). Art direction by David Kramer (Low, Hippo Campus, PUMA). Will be paired with an extensive US headline tour, announcing in February. Thematically, the album is a study of womanhood, societal expectation, voyeurism via social media, and the identities we create for others. Past press support from Rolling Stone Future of Music, New York Times, NPR Tiny Desk, Late Night w/Stephen Colbert, Pitchfork, Guardian, Evening Standard, NME, Line of Best Fit, etc. Past radio support from Sirius XMU, KCRW, KEXP, KCMP, BBC Radio 1, BBC 6 Music, etc. Extensive DSP support - including New Music Friday @ Spotify, New Music Daily @ Apple, outdoor billboard via YouTube, etc. Extensive artist endorsements from Phoebe Bridgers, Ethel Cain, Arlo Parks, Maggie Rogers, Clairo, girl in red, Grimes, CHVRCHES, Father John Misty & more.

Face Down In the Garden is the seventh LP from the critically acclaimed duo Tennis. Offsetting intuitive melodies with unusual arrangements, Tennis returns with music that feels familiar but resists convention. Lead singles Weight of Desire, At The Wedding and Sister highlight Tennis' range as writers and producers, evolving beyond their girl-group roots into what is their most fully-realized effort to date. Bone White Vinyl with Gatefold packaging and booklet insert.

Sunflower Bean’s fourth album, and follow-up to their self-produced EP ‘Shake’, is their most accomplished work yet. A 10-song powerhouse that elegantly merges arena-rock, art pop, and new wave into a truly unfettered manifestation of their one-of-a-kind artistry. A record that bursts with vitality and vulnerability it both celebrates their history whilst hurtling towards their future. Mixed by Caesar Edmunds (The Killers, St Vincent) & engineered by Sarah Tudzin (Illuminati Hotties, boygenius).

1931 was the breakthrough year for 32-year-old Hungarian immigrant Eugene Ormandy. First, he was engaged by the Philadelphia Orchestra to deputize for his idol Toscanini, who was briefly indisposed. Then, a few months later, he was asked to step in for the conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, also indisposed – but in this case permanently. Soon Ormandy was hired to take over that rising Midwestern orchestra. At the end of his five-year tenure in Minneapolis, which produced a considerable discography for RCA Victor (available in an 11-CD Sony Classical box set), Ormandy was called back to Philadelphia, this time to become its co-conductor with Leopold Stokowski. In 1936, he began recording regularly for Victor with his new orchestra, picking up the pace in 1938 when he became its sole music director. Sony Classical is pleased to continue its comprehensive documentation of Eugene Ormandy’s discography with a new 21-CD release of everything he set down in Philadelphia before the ban on commercial recording instigated by the musicians’ union in 1942. By the time the strike ended in 1944, Ormandy and the orchestra had moved to Columbia Masterworks.

 

As connoisseurs have long known, these early Philadelphia albums are among the most impressive performances Ormandy set down in over 40 years at the orchestra’s helm. The first to be released – fittingly enough for a Russian music specialist – was Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony, recorded by Victor on December 13, 1936. That three-hour session in Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, the orchestra’s home, was the first of more than 400 led by Ormandy. And it was highly productive – Ormandy had a reputation as a fast worker – yielding not only the Tchaikovsky, but also two Bach arrangements by Lucien Cailliet, a Philadelphia Orchestra clarinetist and its staff arranger, the first three movements of Schumann’s Second Symphony and, most importantly, Fritz Kreisler’s arrangement of Paganini’s D major Violin Concerto, with Kreisler himself as soloist. 

 

More Tchaikovsky followed during this early Victor stint: in 1941, Ormandy and the Philadelphians recorded the Fifth Symphony and the Nutcracker Suite. The latter’s matrices suffered from processing problems that rendered them too noisy to release until now. The orchestra’s contract, however, allowed them to re-make the recording for RCA in 1945, even though they’d already gone over to Columbia, and it has been possible to include both versions here.

 

Ormandy recorded Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, one of his most celebrated interpretations, in 1937, but not in the familiar Ravel orchestration that he would always use later. Having just taken over as sole conductor of the orchestra after Stokowski’s resignation, he wanted his own version of the Pictures, so he commissioned a new score from the orchestra’s house arranger, Lucien Cailliet.

 

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s most famous Russian connection was with Sergei Rachmaninoff, who premièred a number of his works with them during Stokowski’s tenure. When Ormandy assumed the music directorship, he was thrilled to continue the partnership – especially as he had developed a friendship with the composer at his 1931 Minneapolis SO début concert, in which Rachmaninoff was the soloist. The partnership reached its height in late 1939 when Ormandy mounted a “Rachmaninoff Festival” at the Academy of Music and New York’s Carnegie Hall to mark the 30th anniversary of his Philadelphia Orchestra début. They also took advantage of the opportunity to record three of Rachmaninoff’s concertos for RCA, the First, Third and Fourth, legendary performances that have never been out of the catalogue and are, of course, reissued here.

 

At the Budapest Academy, Ormandy had studied the violin with a pupil of Brahms’s great friend Joseph Joachim – who also encouraged Ormandy as a child, so Brahms’s music was in his blood from the beginning. As a conductor, Brahms’s symphonies were at the core of his repertoire, and he gave more performances of them with the Philadelphia Orchestra than any other conductor in American musical history. He first recorded the Second with the Philadelphians anonymously for the “World’s Greatest Music” series in March 1939, and nine months later conducted a tauter, “official” version for release on RCA. Both are included here along with Ormandy’s other recordings for “World’s Greatest Music”, all made in 1938: the Mozart G minor, Beethoven’s Fifth, Schubert’s “Unfinished” and the Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 2 and 3.

 

Two other famous Brahms recordings from 1939 are the Alto Rhapsody with Marian Anderson and the Double Concerto with Jascha Heifetz and Emanuel Feuermann, about which Gramophone’s original reviewer wrote: “Rarely can the powers of two string players have been so fully extended, so richly proved … The whole thing is tremendous: a manifestation, for all who have an ear of the soul, of the composer’s greatness of heart and mind.”

 

Soloists revered Ormandy throughout his career. Said Isaac Stern: “There was not a single conductor who was a greater colleague in the making of a concerto record.” In addition to the Brahms Double and the Paganini First Concerto with Kreisler, mentioned earlier, the new Sony collection reissues the Mendelssohn and Spohr’s No. 8 with another famous violinist, Albert Spalding, and the Grieg Piano Concerto with Arthur Rubinstein: “A glittering specimen and exuberantly played … The best of the modern readings” (Gramophone).

 

Sibelius was another leading composer Ormandy knew personally and performed regularly – he also visited him in Finland and brought him to Philadelphia. For an album to mark the composer’s 75th birthday in 1940, he recorded three tone poems, while the next year saw a new recording of the First Symphony (Ormandy’s earlier one was made in Minneapolis in 1935), which he identified as “the first of the master’s symphonies I ever conducted”. Two further versions would follow, in 1962 (for Columbia) and in 1978 (for RCA).

 

Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra were Victor’s chief Richard Strauss exponents during these years, making the first electrical recording of the Symphonia Domestica in 1938, followed in 1939 by Ein Heldenleben and in 1940 by Don Quixote, with Emanuel Feuermann. Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” Symphony was still a new work when Ormandy recorded it in 1940, only six years after the composer introduced it with his own Berlin Philharmonic recording. Strauss family waltzes had already featured in Ormandy’s Minneapolis recordings. The three waltzes in this Philadelphia set earned praise from Gramophone in 1942: “You will enjoy the brilliance of the combinations of tone, and their balance – one of the exciting things about all the best American recordings … Here is full-voiced tonal splendour.”

 

American music was a prominent feature of this conductor’s repertoire – he was always eager to promote the composers of his adopted homeland. Here we find the first recording of any work by Gian Carlo Menotti, his Amelia Goes to the Ball Overture, and the earliest recording of an orchestral work by Samuel Barber, his First Essay for Orchestra, as well as pieces by Roy Harris and two Sousa marches from the orchestra’s last session before the musicians’ strike shut down commercial recording for the next three years. But not before Ormandy and his Philadelphians had amassed the treasures brought together here for the first time.

For their 4th full-length studio album, Everything Must Go, Goose teamed up once again with D. James Goodwin, who produced their critically-acclaimed 2022 studio effort, Dripfield. As before, the band pushed themselves to create another cohesive effort representative of their unique brand of irresistible songcraft, fluid musicianship, and spirited improvisational performance.

Blur celebrate the 10th anniversary of The Magic Whip with a special edition vinyl release, featuring new cover artwork by original designer Tony Hung. A reimagining of the iconic ice cream cover with added gold foil and embossed details, the new format is presented in a gatefold sleeve and available as a half-speed mastered, single gold disc for the first time. The Magic Whip is Blur's eighth studio album and includes the tracks Ghost Ship, Go Out, Lonesome Street, and Ong Ong.

Sunflower Bean’s fourth album, and follow-up to their self-produced EP ‘Shake’, is their most accomplished work yet. A 10-song powerhouse that elegantly merges arena-rock, art pop, and new wave into a truly unfettered manifestation of their one-of-a-kind artistry. A record that bursts with vitality and vulnerability it both celebrates their history whilst hurtling towards their future. Mixed by Caesar Edmunds (The Killers, St Vincent) & engineered by Sarah Tudzin (Illuminati Hotties, boygenius).

One of the most formidable guitarists in recent history, Samantha Fish brings both mind-blowing power and extraordinary emotionality to everything she creates. For help in shaping Paper Doll’s magnificently rowdy but deeply nuanced sound, Fish reunited with Detroit garage-rock icon Bobby Harlow and enlisted the core members of her live band (bassist Ron Johnson, drummer Jamie Douglass, keyboardist Mickey Finn), marking the latest entry in an uncompromising and adventurous catalog. Clear Smoke vinyl has a SIGNED 12x12 ART PRINT shrink-wrapped to the vinyl jacket

Glasgow-based twin-sibling duo Cloth return with their third album "Pink Silence". Exploring themes of relationships, heartbreak, loss and self-acceptance, the album sees the band move into poppier, upbeat territory whilst retaining their trademark haunting, ethereal vocals. Recorded in the UK's coolest city Bristol with producer Ali Chant (Katy J Pearson, Kid Carpet, Perfume Genius), "Pink Silence" is the follow up to 2023's critically acclaimed "Secret Measure".

TRAIN Available for the first time on vinyl, Train is the platinum-certified debut album from the band Train. The album features their breakout hit, 'Meet Virginia,' plus fan favorites, "Free," "I Am," and more.

Willie Nelson - Oh What A Beautiful World - Willie Nelson's new album (his 77th solo studio album and his 154th album overall) is an album that focuses on the songs of Rodney Crowell, the latest in Nelson's storied history of focusing entire albums on a single songwriter's work. Willie Nelson and Rodney Crowell are two Texas singer-songwriters whose careers have intersected often since Crowell first heard Nelson's earliest songs on the radio and saw his shows in Houston in the mid-1960s. Willie first recorded a Rodney Crowell song in 1983 and last did so 40 years later for 2024's The Border. Produced by Nelson's longtime collaborator Buddy Cannon and featuring an amazing backing band of Nashville gunslingers accompanying Nelson's vocals and inspired guitar work on Trigger, the album handpicks 12 songs from the last 50 years, including the title track as a duet between Nelson and Crowell. From early tracks like 1976's "Banks Of The Old Bandera" (recorded by Jerry Jeff Walker) and 1981's "Shame On The Moon" (a hit for Bob Seger) to 90s tracks like "What Kind Of Love," (co-written by Will Jennings based on a Roy Orbison melody), "Stuff That Works" (co-written with Guy Clark), from early 2000's cuts written for hit albums by Keith Urban and Tim McGraw to four cuts from Crowell's beloved 2010s albums and a cut released as recently as 2021.

Miranda Lambert - Kerosene - Vinyl

Kerosene, the #1 debut studio album from Miranda Lambert, is celebrating its 20th anniversary with its first ever vinyl pressing. The platinum-certified album features the hit, "Kerosene," as well as fan favorites, "Me and Charlie Talking," "New Strings," and more.

Kenny Burrell / Art Blakey - "On View At The Five Spot Café: The Complete Masters (Blue Note Tone Poet Series)" [180gram 3xLP] Kenny Burrell's 1959 live album - featuring Art Blakey, Tina Brooks, Roland Hanna, Bobby Timmons and Ben Tucker - is expanded with this Blue Note Tone Poet Series edition. On View At The Five Spot Café: The Complete Masters includes 6 previously unreleased tracks. Produced by Joe Harley, the 3 LP set is all-analog cut directly from the original master tapes by Kevin Gray, pressed on 180g vinyl at RTI and packaged in a deluxe, tip-on trifold jacket with a booklet featuring never-before-seen Francis Wolff photos, a new interview with Burrell in conversation with Don Was, and more. Capitol Music Group; Blue Note; Jazz; Catalog.

Vinyl LP pressing. For Lullaby, Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick draws on the quartet formation in a program that includes some of his most exploratory and improvisatory qualities to date, with a cast of ECM familiars Kristjan Randalu and Ole Morten V?gan on piano and bass, and new arrival Hans Hulb?kmo on drums. There's a sense of abandon within these deeply melodic songs, as the musicians flow smoothly between harmonies, collectively building momentum from within the forms. Eick's immediately recognizable and soothing tone is often confronted by Randalu's in turns lyrical and energetic keyboard flights, soaring above a propulsive, always engaging rhythm section. The album was recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo.