New Music Friday: Jack White, Suki Waterhouse, Kelela, Baby Rose and Show Me the Body
July's mid-month Friday is a genre buffet, and a good one: a garage-rock elder statesman and an indie-pop shapeshifter, two very different visions of modern R&B, and one of hardcore's most uncompromising bands, all arriving on the same day. If there's a thread, it's artists at their most self-assured — records that sound less like reinventions than like people finally settling into who they already were. Here are five worth your weekend.
Jack White — Frozen Charlotte (Third Man, rock). White's seventh solo LP takes its name from a creepy little Victorian porcelain doll and treats its thirteen tracks the same way: cheap thrills that unlock the imagination. Recorded live at Third Man's Nashville studio with a full band, it extends the raw, frenetic energy of 2024's surprise-dropped No Name, but hands even more of the storytelling to the guitar itself. Consequence gave it a B+ and called it a record where "White's guitar can do the talking," full of riff repetitions built for the club stage rather than the headphones — the sound of an icon loosening his tie.
Baby Rose — YEARNALISM (Secretly Canadian, soul/R&B). Few voices in contemporary soul are as immediately identifiable as Baby Rose's — a smoky, cavernous instrument that draws easy comparisons to Nina Simone and Etta James. Following 2023's Through and Through and a scene-stealing NPR Tiny Desk set, YEARNALISM is a study in love across its stages, from romance to self-regard, threaded through soul, gospel, jazz and rock. Lead single "Friends Again" (with Leon Thomas) has already crossed 14 million streams, and the album makes good on the title's implied thesis: yearning as a way of life, given a home.
Suki Waterhouse — Loveland (Island, indie-pop). After 2024's sprawling double album Memoir of a Sparklemuffin, Waterhouse tightens the frame to fourteen songs about the gap between infatuation and something sturdier. Motherhood — she welcomed her first child not long before recording — reshapes the emotional weather, and the collaborator list is a murderers' row of pop craft: Amy Allen, Aaron Dessner, Dan Wilson, Joel Little. "'Loveland' to me lives in the distance between a former self who felt most alive in romance, fantasy and momentum, and a present self reaching for something steadier, more intimate and more true," she said — a mission statement the record largely honors.
Kelela — new avatar (Warp, R&B/electronic). The perennial critics' darling returns with her third studio album, produced largely by Oscar Scheller and studded with guests including A.K. Paul, PinkPantheress and Fousheé. A follow-up to 2023's Raven, it continues Kelela's project of dissolving the borders between club music and intimacy. "When it comes to genre, so much of what we compartmentalize isn't natural; it's something institutions and structures impose on us," she has said, framing the record as an act of integration.
Show Me the Body — Alone Together (Loma Vista, hardcore/punk). The New York noise-hardcore trio has never been in the business of comfort, and Alone Together — thirteen tracks including "Eat for Peace" and "Dance in the USA" — trades atmosphere for directness. The band frames the album as a study in praxis, turning ideals into action: "radical love compels me to fight," runs its opening ethos. It's a call to galvanize, delivered with the banjo-scarred abrasion and hip-hop-adjacent low-end that's made the group a fixture of the DIY underground since 2016. Nearly a decade in, they remain gloriously incapable of making a record that goes down easy.
Five records, one Friday, zero filler — a garage-rock lifer, a soul singer with a voice like a cathedral, a pop star turning motherhood into melody, an avant-R&B auteur, and a hardcore band that still means it. Start with whichever genre you already trust, then let the algorithm — or better, a friend — talk you into the rest.
Sources: NPR New Music Friday; Secretly Canadian; DIY; Rated R&B; Show Me the Body (Bandcamp)