Toadies return with The Charmer, their long-awaited eighth studio album and most personal and visceral work to date. One of the last recordings by late, legendary producer Steve Albini (Nirvana, PJ Harvey etc.), record captures the Texas foursome live in the studio bottling their raw, Southern-tinged grunge with unfiltered immediacy. Formed in Fort Worth in 1989, Toadies marry the band’s love for the Pixies and Talking Heads to the old-school country, ZZ Top, and classic rock they all grew up on. It’s a sound intoxicating but uneasy, cathartic yet always searching. Frontman Vaden Todd Lewis channels years of selfreflection into The Charmer, a concept born from pandemic isolation and a reckoning with selfdoubt. Released via Austin’s pioneering Spaceflight Records (The Sword, Die Spitz, Heartless Bastards), the world’s first nonprofit label, The Charmer embodies true creative freedom: made on their own terms, with Steve Albini their dream producer. The Charmer is the most defiantly “Toadies” Toadies album yet.

The collection of songs on Vandoliers’ fifth album, Life Behind Bars, offers a window into frontwoman Jenni Rose's journey through addiction and gender dysphoria — a journey that has culminated in her decision to come out as a trans woman while working in the macho worlds of Texas country and punk rock. Ten years into their career, the band’s latest work is as upbeat and sing-along ready as ever, but with a little more stripped-down and intimate feel than their typical fare, in addition to being lyrically more substantive and, at times, more politically pointed. Bars is fearless and fun, a bold entry in a musical space that is still too often hidebound by tradition.