Every month: five records worth owning. Deep cuts you might not have heard, topical and trending music, and the classics.
Every month I put together a shortlist of records that I’d actually recommend buying right now.
Not “important” albums for the sake of it necessarily, but records that are worth your money, available to buy and suited to different tastes and budgets.
Some are trending, some are deep cuts, some are just brilliant.
This is June‘s list. New picks go up, first week of every month.
🔴The Fresh Drop
Slayyyter – WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA
Slayyyter spent years stuck in the grey zone between cult artist and mainstream success.
This is the album where she stopped caring about that and just made the record she wanted. Y2K electroclash, punky club energy, Britney-meets-Kesha swagger, but entirely her own. The vinyl pressing has been getting great reviews too, reportedly dead silent with no surface noise.
It’s raunchy, it’s weird, it’s naughty and it’s incredibly loud. Most importantly, it’s infectious and once you get a taste, you can’t get enough of WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA.
Start with DANCE… and see if you can stop there.
🟡The Essential
Billie Eilish – HIT ME HARD AND SOFT
On HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, Billie’s music sees a hard turn in her career.
Pivoting away from her previous sound, which was edgy and encompassed her “mysterious, strange and famous party girl” energy, she opts to embrace her emotional songwriting fully on her newest release, and it shows.
Quiet where it needs to be quiet, heavy where it needs to hit. If you’ve been on the fence about whether vinyl makes a difference for modern pop records, this is the one that settles that argument.
My personal favourite? CHIHIRO. A fantastic, emotional journey spanning 5 minutes and 3 seconds, where Billie explores her feelings for others, herself, her sexuality and her willingness to embrace vulnerability.
Widely available, still reasonably priced, and it absolutely rewards a full sit-down listen.
🟠The Deep Cut
Khruangbin — Con Todo El Mundo
If you don’t know Khruangbin yet, start here. Genre-less in the best way — part soul, part psychedelia, part Thai funk, completely its own thing.
The guitar tones on this are wonderful, with slick licks and dreamy riffs. The record incorporates elements of Middle Eastern Funk & Soul, Psychedelic Rock and Texan Soul in the best ways possible. A fantastic and wide soundscape of experimentation and creativity, Con Todo El Mundo showcases excellent musicianship on an otherwise criminally underrated record.
Practically designed for vinyl. Still affordable, not yet overpriced. Put it on when you have no idea what mood you’re in and let it decide for you. I promise you, you won’t regret it.
🔵The Grower
Floating Points, Pharaoh Sanders & the London Symphony Orchestra – Promises
One continuous piece across two sides of a record, structured as nine movements that flow into each other without stopping.
Jazz pianist and producer Sam Shepherd (Floating Points) wrote the whole thing as a meditation, recorded it with jazz legend Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, and somehow it holds together completely.
It starts quiet — almost too quiet — and never really gets loud, but by the end it feels like something has shifted.
It sounds noticeably different on vinyl than it does on streaming, in the way that only the best records do. Not for every mood. For the right mood, there’s nothing else like it.
🟣The Big One
Raye – THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE.
Divided into four sections based on the seasons, this sprawls across a fast-moving 70 minutes, 17 songs and nearly as many styles.
It balances the swaggering soul of “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” with Raye’s overt vulnerability — traversing love, heartbreak, resilience, euphoria and the comedown, infidelity, and the powerful value of family.
Highlights include “Fields” — a soulful conversation with her own grandfather — and “Goodbye Henry”, featuring Al Green, which works precisely because it resists the record’s usual grand gestures.
The deep cut is “Nightingale Lane” — introduced by Raye herself as a song about the greatest heartbreak she’s ever known, and it earns every second. The double vinyl comes in a gatefold with a playbill-style booklet that slots neatly inside the sleeve — one of the better physical packages of the year.
And that’s the records for June! Loads of capitalized names here, huh? If you want my personal favourite from the list, I’d have to go for WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, it’s way too much fun to listen to.
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