Thursday Music News

New York punk quartet Parquet Courts are back with a vengeance! Last month they shared the lead single off their forthcoming albumWide Awake!, "Almost Had to Start a Fight/In and Out of Patience" and today they've shared the boisterous title track. It comes with a colorful video directed by Brother Willis that features the band dressed in the nines in purple tuxedos, messing around New Orleans. Wide Awake! is rather notable in that it was produced by Danger Mouse. The album will be out May 18th via Rough Trade Records. [ Consequence of Sound ]

Formerly Seattle-based surf rock band La Luz moved to LA a couple of years ago and they're rubbing it in our faces today with the new single "California Finally." It's the second single from their upcoming album Floating Features and follows lead single "Cicada." With lyrics like,  “I made up my mind some time ago / No one’s gonna tell me where I can go / California finally, my golden dream / Feels so good walking down the street," we're happy to know that they're happy and not at all bitter that they're soaking up the sun while we're living in eternal grey. Floating Features is out May 11 on Hardly Art. Catch La Luz at either of their two Seattle dates, Thursday, May 17 at the Crocodile and Friday, May 18 at the Vera Project. [ Stereogum ]

Jasamine White-Glutz of Canadian shoegaze band No Joy and Peter Kember of Sonic Boom (and formerly Spacemen 3) are releasing a collaborative EP aptly titled No Joy / Sonic Boom. We've already heard one track from it, "Obsession," and today we've got the atmospheric "Slorb." White-Glutz says of the song: "The song was influenced by 90s trip hop such as Sneaker Pimps and was written mostly in laptop while on tour in Europe in 2016. Influences include: not sleeping because you are on a long tour and the drives are crazy, using your voice as a main instrument instead of relying on volume or guitars, and that weird time of year when it’s almost spring but in Montreal you never know if it might snow again." No Joy / Sonic Boom is out May 30 via Joyful Noise. No Joy are on tour with Baths and will be in Seattle on Saturday, March 31 at Neumos. [ BrooklynVegan ]

Ambient songstress Liz Harris has announced a new Grouper album called Grid of Points and shared its first single "Parking Lot." The lovely song doesn't stray from Harris' typically hushed, piano-based prior material. She says of the new album: “I wrote these songs over a week and a half; they stopped abruptly when I was interrupted by a high fever. Though brief, it is complete. The intimacy and abbreviation of this music allude to an essence that the songs lyrics speak more directly of. The space left after matter has departed, a stage after the characters have gone, the hollow of some central column, missing.” Grid of Points is out April 27 on Kranky. [ Pitchfork ]