Ten Huge Albums We're Looking Forward To In 2019
By Ed Biggs in Music / Festivals on 12 January 2019
Ten huge new album releases coming up in 2019!
Happy New Year, music lovers! 2018 was a cracker for great albums, and the coming 12 months also promises to shape up. Here’s just ten of the most exciting new album releases scheduled for 2019.
Lana Del Rey has been teasing the release of her fifth studio album, with the working title Norman F***ing Rockwell, since the end of the summer. This week, she trailed it with the release of new single and video, with the unwieldy title ‘hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me…but I have it’, representing the fourth cut from the LP. There’s no release date as yet, but the last we heard LDR5 was going to appear in the first half of 2019.
Having scored a massive hit way back in the distant mists of time (i.e. 2014) with ‘Take Me To Church’, Irish songwriter Andrew Hozier-Byrne has been frustrating his fans over a follow-up for the best part of half a decade. Last June, he teased that his first new music in four years would finally arrive imminently, only to drop another EP, Nina Cried Power, instead. The sophomore effort does at least have a title – Wasteland, Baby is set for an unspecified date in 2019.
We haven’t heard from this immensely talented New Jersey songwriter in a pretty long time, ever since her 2014 album Are We There. Now, having appeared in Netflix show ‘The OA’ and David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’ return, as well as welcoming her first child into the world in the interm, Sharon Van Etten is back with her fifth album Remind Me Tomorrow this year. Singles ‘Comeback Kid’ and ‘Seventeen’ have already been released, and the album itself arrives on January 18th on Jagjaguwar.
Originally conceived of as a kind of hip-hop superduo six years ago, rap veterans Killer Mike and El-P are set to bring their much-beloved Run The Jewels back in 2019 for a fourth round of woke party-starters. Officially untitled as yet, but likely called Run The Jewels 4 like their other numbered albums, RTJ is set to return at some point in the summer.
It really has been an exasperatingly long wait for Vampire Weekend fans for the band’s fourth record. Their last outing, Modern Vampires of the City, came out way back in 2013! Since then, there’s been only scraps of information, with keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij quitting the group in 2016. Finally, last year saw lead singer Ezra Koenig put out some firmer details and progress reports, and the end result, possibly titled Mitsubishi Macchiato, looks set to arrive before the summer.
SIGRID
This Norwegian pop upstart has been on several new music radars since 2017, when her fantastic debut single ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’ got tongues wagging and a further single, ‘Strangers’, hit the UK Top Ten later that year. Despite winning the BBC Music Sound of 2018 award, Sigrid had a rather quieter year, but her first album, Sucker Punch, is set to drop on March 1st 2019.
Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands’ modus operandi is pretty well established by now – catchy hooks and bleeps, beats that expertly balance radio-friendliness with the demands of hardcore ravers, and guest vocalists galore. So while we kind of know what we’re going to get with their ninth album No Geography, scheduled for the spring of 2019, that doesn’t make it any less exciting, particularly as the Chems will be bringing it to life on the festival circuit in the summer.
2015’s Art Angels took Canadian producer Claire Boucher from critics’ darling to mainstream concern, with collaborators queuing round the block and including the likes of Janelle Monae. Recently escaping the clutches of a relationship with billionaire loon Elon Musk, Boucher has spent a lot of time working on her fifth Grimes album, which is apparently now complete and will arrive at some point later in the year.
Abel Tesfaye may have released a mini-album, My Dear Melancholy, just nine months ago, but he’s already working on a follow-up proper to 2016’s Starboy, rumoured to be titled Chapter 6. Just this week, French producer and DJ Gesaffelstein teased the possibility of a collaboration on YouTube. Information still very sketchy on this one, but the roll-out could be very quick given how Tesfaye dropped his last two efforts by surprise.
It was pretty amazing how English indie-poppers The 1975 managed to go from the band that everybody loves to hate to the band that everybody loves virtually overnight, but that was down to the star-making quality of their third album A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, which appeared at the end of November. Even better, it was just the first half of a two-part series, with the other, Notes On a Conditional Form, set to be released in May.
More: All the Mercury Prize winning albums, ranked from worst to best
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