New Music Friday: The best albums out Aug. 23

By Stephen Thompson,

Sheldon Pearce

Published August 23, 2024 at 8:41 AM EDT

NPR Music's Stephen Thompson and Sheldon Pearce are your guides to seven anticipated albums out Aug. 23. During the second half of the episode, the two dig into the mercurial nature of the album format in 2024.

Featured albums:

Sabrina Carpenter, Short n' Sweet
Lainey Wilson, Whirlwind
Illuminati hotties, POWER
Fontaines D.C., Romance
Heems, Veena
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Woodland
Magdalena Bay, Imaginal Disk

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Stephen Thompson

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)

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Sheldon Pearce