Stream Kelora’s Sleepers and more albums for New Music Friday

Glasgow duo Kelora’s music has a hushed majesty to it, the kind that tempts you in to glimpse their ornate and private abode. On their second album Sleepers Kitty Hall and Benedict Salter continue to filter British folk traditions through a modern lens, tapping into the unsettling and eerie side of mythology and capturing it via a thicket of acoustic guitars and gauzy synths. “I Call To You” and “Something Else” feel like Beach House songs in miniature, showing beauty in life’s dimly lit corners. “St Magdalene’s Wood,” meanwhile, creates nostalgic feelings via field recordings of pouring rain as Hall writes ambiguously about a major life change. Sleepers isn’t an album that benefits being broken up into smaller moments, though. It’s something to play on an endless loop, with each repetition pulling you closer and closer to the immersive world Kelora have created.

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Jules Reidy treats their instruments the way wind does wind chimes, colliding with them to produce harmonies and patterns with a gentle yet titanic energy. It renders their chief instrument, the guitar, as something almost entirely new, both a vessel for otherworldy melodies fusing post-rock, jazz, and pop, and a conductor of the surrounding avant-garde soundscapes. “I fell into your atmosphere / An asteroid that’s drawing near,” Reidy sings at the beginning of “Maybe,” her lyric meant to capture the feeling of falling in love, but also summarizing her transportive new project. — Jordan Darville

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

In the fall of 2021, looking for a pre-war harmonica in his parents’ basement in Idaho, Trevor Powers stumbled on a shoebox full of home videos captured between 1989 and 1993. Watching these VHS tapes and eight-millimeter reels from the first four years of his life lit a spark inside of him. His new Youth Lagoon album, Rarely Do I Dream, was born, and the songs came flooding out — sports-themed piano ballads, grunge anthems for racing death, dance tracks for coming to terms with it. Songs about home. Clips from the tapes anchor the record at both ends and appear like friendly ghosts throughout. Living in total silence during a mental health crisis that rendered him unable to speak, Powers was forced to learn to be comfortable with himself at the deepest level. He now meditates for an hour every day. “I could have everything taken away tomorrow — my voice, my legs, my vision — and I’d still be whole,” he says. — Raphael Helfand. Read our interview with Youth Lagoon here

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Anna Shoemaker makes the sort of music that makes you want to get in a car and escape the city while belting your heart out. She moved to Los Angeles last year but I know of her from Brooklyn, where her extremely specific, pummeling pop-rock songs earned her a reputation of being a Rodrigo-type truthsayer. Her latest album, however, is a special achievement. Her sound has gone more country/folky rock, and her lyricism even more concise, diagnosing a certain type of young adult mania: “I love you more than money,” goes one line and “All I think about is Jacob Elordi and if my personality’s getting boring, it’s no surprise.” Songs like “Fields,” “Back Again,” and “Gas Station Parking Lot” are so therapeutic to hear but even better when you scream along. —Steffanee Wang

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music