November's most anticipated albums: Dolly Parton rocks, a deluxe box set for Tina Turner, and more

Bar Italia, the enigmatic and effortlessly cool London trio made up of Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi, and Sam Fenton, already released one of the best albums of the year with their excellent Matador debut Tracey Denim back in May. They’re blessing us with a second helping of genre-hopping indie rock before the year is out, dropping The Twits, recorded over eight weeks from a makeshift home studio in Mallorca, Spain.

Calling all Cymbals Eat Guitars fans! Former CEG leader Joseph D’Agostino is back with a new album from his Empty Country project. Empty Country II was recorded with LOSE producer John Agnello at R.E.M. producer Mitch Easter’s studio in North Carolina, and like its predecessor, it puts an empathetic, distinctly American heartland rock twist on D’Agostino’s sprawling indie-rock epics. No one writes about loss like D’Agostino, and no one makes it sound so good.

“Margaritaville” legend Jimmy Buffett recorded one final album before he died of skin cancer in September at the age of 76. His forthcoming Equal Strain On All Parts features collaborations with Paul McCartney, Emmylou Harris, Angelique Kidjo, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. “I was very happy to have played on one of his latest songs called ‘My Gummie Just Kicked In.’ We had a real fun session and he played me some of his new songs,” McCartney wrote in a tribute on social media. “One, in particular, I loved was the song, ‘Bubbles Up.’ And I told him that not only was the song great but the vocal was probably the best I’ve heard him sing ever.”

While Brockhampton are on indefinite hiatus, Kevin Abstract is forging ahead with a solo album. “Blanket,” the lead single and title track off of the new record, is an alt-rock-inspired song that charts an intriguing new course for the hip-hop crew’s former leader. “I wanted to make, like, a Sunny Day Real Estate, Nirvana, Modest Mouse type of record,” Abstract explains. “But I wanted it to hit like a rap album.”

Not counting KDAP’s 2021 instrumentals collection, Aging is Broken Social Scene co-founder and vocalist Kevin Drew’s first proper solo album since 2014’s Darlings. Influenced by the passing of friends and mentors and the declining health of close family members, it’s a contemplative collection of vulnerable indie rock ballads meditating on the love, loss, and the inexorable passage of time.

Every song on Laura Veirs’ new album Phone Orphans comes from a collection of 900 voice memos that the folk singer-songwriter recorded on her phone, and that homespun simplicity is part of their power. “These songs have been hiding out on my phone, some of them for over eight years. They are about my family, my lovers and me,” Veirs says. “I recorded them alone in my living room into my voice memo app. I like their relaxed feel. These songs were mastered but we made no edits to the recordings. I hope you enjoy this intimate glimpse into my artistic process.”

Finger-tapping guitar wizard Marnie Stern is The Comeback Kid on her new album of the same name. “It was so great to be able to start being myself again, and when I would think, ‘Oh, is that too weird?’ I’d remember I’m allowed to do whatever I want! This is mine. It’s me,” Stern says. “I’m trying to go against the grain of this bullshit that when you get older, you lose your sense of taste. I want to empower people to not be so homogenous and go against the grain a little bit.” Full of gleefully weird math-rock shredding, her first album in a decade is against the grain in the best way possible.

You may or may not know that Dan Wilson, frontman of ’90s “Closing Time” hitmakers Semisonic, has found steady work as an in-demand songwriter whose resume includes collaborations with the likes of Taylor Swift, Adele, the Chicks, Mitski, Celine Dion, John Legend, and Weezer. Little Bit Of Sun, his Minneapolis alt-rock trio’s first full-length album in 20 years, features guest appearances from Jason Isbell and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James and co-writes with Lori McKenna and Amy Allen.

Genre-melting Chicago polymath Sen Morimoto makes idiosyncratic music that draws on hip-hop, jazz, prog, and indie rock and ends up sounding like nothing and no one else. “While the songs on my third album range in topic from love to radicalization to spirituality and the internal effects of life under capitalism, every song on Diagnosis is, at its core, an attempt to flip the lens around,” he says. “To hold a magnifying glass over the systems we live in and empower us to investigate them with the same scrutiny.”

Flume, Kaytranada, and Stint all contributed production to Australian rap queen Tkay Maidza’s new album Sweet Justice, her second proper studio LP. “Sweet Justice was a way for me to channel my emotions from what I’ve experienced in the last two years,” she explains. “It’s a diary of things and thoughts I’ve kept to myself. Making the record was a healing experience and I’m grateful to have worked with producers who have inspired me throughout my career.”

Integrated Tech Solutions, wordy underground rap veteran Aesop Rock’s first solo LP since 2020, is a corporate jargon-streaked concept album about a fictional company that offers “lifestyle- and industry-specific applications designed to curate a desired multi-experience.” Aes produced most of the record himself, and he tapped kindred spirits like billy woods, Hanni El Khatib, Rob Sonic, Nikki Jean, and Lealani to help out.

Beirut’s first album in nearly five years, Hadsel is named after the remote island in northern Norway where Zach Condon retreated in early 2020 to write new music in a small cabin and an octagonal 19th century church. “During my time in Hadsel, I worked hard on the music, lost in a trance and stumbling blindly through my own mental collapse that I had been pushing aside since I was a teenager,” he explains. “It came and rang me like a bell. I was left agonizing many things past and present while the beauty of the nature, the northern lights and fearsome storms played an awesome show around me.”

Last November, Cat Power performed a song-for-song recreation of Bob Dylan’s infamous half acoustic, half electric 1966 Royal Albert Hall “Judas” Concert. This November, she’s releasing a full recording of the tribute show as a live album. “More than the work of any other songwriter, Dylan’s songs have spoken to me, and inspired me since I first began hearing them at 5 years old,” Cat Power’s Chan Marshall says.

Impressively bearded country singer Chris Stapleton, whose success helped paved the way for recent stars like Zach Bryan, is following up 2020’s Starting Over with a new album called Higher. Co-produced with Stapleton’s wife Morgane and longtime collaborator Dave Cobb, the album features instrumentation from bassist J.T. Cure, pedal steel guitarist Paul Franklin, pianist Lee Pardini, and drummer Derek Mixon alongside Stapleton’s soulful growl.

That’s right: after being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Dolly Parton is making a rock album. It’s called Rockstar, and it features a murderer’s row of genuine rockstars. Dolly got Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the two surviving Beatles, to do a “Let It Be” cover with Peter Frampton and Mick Fleetwood. There’s a Heart Cover with Ann Wilson, a Police cover with Sting, a Journey cover with Steve Perry, a Creedence cover with John Fogerty, a Blondie cover with Debbie Harry, and a “Stairway To Heaven” cover with, uh, Lizzo. There are nine original tracks and 21 covers. Richie Sambora, Steven Tyler, Stevie Nicks, Joan Jett, Chris Stapleton, Miley Cyrus, Pink, Brandi Carlile, Elton John, Melissa Etheridge, Rob Halford, Nikki Sixx, Simon Le Bon, Linda Perry, Emmylou Harris, Sheryl Crow, Pat Benatar, Michael McDonald, and goddamn Kid Rock are on this thing.

Juliana Hatfield has recorded full-length tributes to Olivia Newton-John and the Police, and now she’s putting her own spin on Electric Light Orchestra classics with her new Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO covers album. “Sonically, ELO recordings are like an amusement park packed with fun musical games with layers and layers of varied, meticulous parts for your ears to explore; production curiosities; huge, gorgeous stacks of awe-inspiring vocal harmony puzzles,” Hatfield says. “My task was to try and break all the things down and reconstruct them subtly until they felt like mine.”

Long-running Texan psychedelic pop choir the Polyphonic Spree, who have a tendency to dress up in cult-like robes, are back. Frontman Tim DeLaughter describes their new album Salvage Enterprise, their first collection of original material since 2014’s Psychophonic, as a “rising-from-the-ashes record,” adding, “There’s an acoustic current running through the whole body of work, and we tried to embrace it as a thread. It has a lot of space to contemplate what we’re going through.”

Vince Clarke, the British synth-pop pioneer behind Erasure, Depeche Mode, and Yazoo, has somehow never released a solo album. That’s about to change with the arrival of the instrumental Songs Of Silence, which Clarke began writing during lockdown while experimenting with the Eurorack modular synthesizer format. Every sound on the album was made by Eurorack, and every song is based around one note and stays within a single key. “The infinite shades of sounds you can create with just the tiniest tweak of a knob or slider continues to fascinate me,” Clarke says.

The iconic Tina Turner, who died in May at 83, is having her enduring legacy honored with the Queen Of Rock ‘N’ Roll box set. The career-spanning posthumous compilation features all 55 of her solo singles, presented chronologically from 1975-2023. “From obscurity to the stages of the UK and Europe, I credit Tina for changing the course of my life and I’m so grateful to have had some of her precious time,” Bryan Adams writes in the collection’s foreword. “She was a force of nature, no one had her energy or her voice, I suppose it’s fitting to say, it’s only love, and that’s all.”