No Expectations 102: Plate Numbers
Five stellar new albums from Monde UFO, Raisa K, Saba and more. Plus, ‘Red Rooms’ and ‘Palo Alto.’
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Headline song: Oldstar, “Plate Numbers”
Thanks for being here. Over the past month, I had several days where I just embraced quiet time. During my free hours, I’d pick up a book or watch sports on mute instead of scouring for interesting artists and catching up on new releases. I wouldn’t call it a musical rut but I have unplugged and taken breaks more than usual. Sometimes balance is needed and the cool thing about having interests is that they’ll be there whenever you return to them. Last week’s roundup featured albums so great that I decided to take a break from my break and fully immerse myself in listening. It turns out that music still rules. I compiled five recent favorites below.
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5 Excellent LPs For Your Week
Jonathan Personne, Nouveau Monde
Jonathan Robert co-fronts the great Montreal post-punk band Corridor, which added more electronic textures on their 2024 LP Mimi than the Omni and Deeper-evoking clanging guitar riffs of their earlier oeuvre. On Nouveau Monde, which Robert recorded around the same time as his solo project Jonathan Personne, leans into shimmering power-pop. Like his main project, the songs here are sung in French but the palette here is much breezier and more playful. Standout “Deuxième vie” is anchored by an ebullient “ba-ba-ba” vocal hook while the wistful title track recalls the Zombies or the Beach Boys. While there’s a lightness to each track with the way Robert can deconstruct pop music for something kaleidoscopic and lived-in, this LP is the kind of sturdy album with so many hidden delights that unfold after each repeat listen. Robert compiled and rerecorded several tracks from disparate eras in his creative life. Instead of feeling like a collection of b-sides and scrapped demos, it’s more of a spiritual greatest hits, a tour of his idiosyncratic and ecstatic tastes.
Monde UFO, Flamingo Tower
Flamingo Tower, the latest full-length from the Los Angeles experimental outfit Monde UFO, is an album that’s better experienced than explained. It’s so chock-full of seemingly disparate ideas that any attempt to transcribe what’s going on in a particular track probably sounds insane. Simultaneously mellow and chaotic, euphoric and menacing, ambitious and casual, avant-garde and inviting, bandleader Ray Monde delicately guides his collaborators through what would be fraught territory with lesser musicians. Somehow it all coheres into one of the most psychedelic, beguiling, and thrilling releases of 2025. It’s bookmarked by a haunting organ motif on the ghostly opener “Gambled House We’re Wiping Fire” and the slightly less eerie closer “Psalm 3.” After the dirgelike first tune, it unfurls into propulsive pop that careens from sunny melodies to intrusive jolts of saxophone and percussion into the mix. More welcome surprises ensue across its 11 songs. When the hooks get too bubbly (highlights “Samba 9” and “119” are great entry points), the band finds a way to add wonkiness and menace. Hypnotizing and innovative, no recent record has felt more like a rollercoaster and more of a hopeful glimpse into the future of indie rock.
Oldstar, Of the Highway
I recently pitched the Florida band Oldstar to a friend that their raucous country rock was “as if MJ Lenderman listened to Steve Earle instead of the Drive-By Truckers.” While those alt-country icons are kindred spirits, the sonic distinction between them is subtle but significant: Earle’s voice has more of a throaty swagger and his songs are more straightforward. Where Lenderman threads the needle between humor and heart or wit and winsomeness, Oldstar is far more earnest, plainspoken, and unselfconsciously Americana. Though Of the Highway is not the first album front the Panama City Beach-based outfit, it is their studio debut. The overdriven guitars have a meaty crunch, and the fiddle and acoustic instruments pair perfectly with 21-year-old singer Zane Mclaughlin’s outlaw warble. Songs like “California” evoke Being There-era Wilco while “Plate Numbers” channels their state forebears Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The youngsters Oldstar are firmly in a solid tradition but it’s clear they are one of the genre’s finest and most immediately resonant practitioners.
Raisa K, Affectionately
Since 2008, the U.K. songwriter Raisa Khan has collaborated with Mica Levi as a founding member of Good Sad Happy Bad (fka Micachu and the Shapes). Considering how confident and immersive Affectionately is, I was shocked to find out that this is Khan’s debut solo effort as Raisa K. Released on the great Danish label 15love (ML Buch’s Suntub, CTM’s Vind), these 12 tracks are exemplary doses of airy and enveloping left-field pop. Gusts of organs and drum machine blasts pepper each tune as Khan’s soothing alto floats above the mix. Fans of Suntub will find a lot to love here but Khan’s sensibility is more off-kilter. Khan’s Good Sad Happy Bad bandmates join her on several tunes: Levi provides looped guitars on “Stay” and background vocals on “Hello” while drummer Marc Pell (Mount Kimbie) provides percussion on a third of the tracklist. From the wonky yet fascinating bass groove on “Tall Enough” to the mechanical whirr that elevates “Come Down,” Raisa K’s world is warped, illuminating, and wholly mesmerizing.
Saba and No ID, From the Private Collection of Saba and No I.D.
A decade ago, I was the music critic for RedEye Chicago, the now-defunct free culture daily from The Chicago Tribune. It was an incredible time for local music, especially for hip-hop and indie rock, and I got to document these burgeoning scenes as a 23-year-old reporter. Of the many artists I wrote cover stories on during that two-and-a-half-year run, there are few I listen to more than Saba. Though many of his peers had fast ascents and fizzled, the West Side-raised rapper has had a more patient, thoughtful, and painstaking approach. He takes time between albums, doesn’t tour as much as he could, and slowly tinkers on new material that, when released, is always an Album of the Year contender. A thoughtful lyricist and an unconventional producer, he’s firmly at the sweet spot of my tastes. For his latest full-length, he’s teamed up with the legendary Chicago producer No I.D. for From the Private Collection of Saba and No I.D. Here, each track is eclectic and singular, a cross-generational collaboration that melds soul, hip-hop, new sounds and old. Saba sounds especially comfortable as a rapper, displaying a staggering confidence that allows him to broadcast his lyrical dexterity by ceding the primary production duties to his elder. There are collabs from Ibeyi, Kelly Rowland, Raphael Saadiq, as well as No Expectations favorites Joseph Chilliams and Eryn Allen Kane. The perfect album for walking around Chicago on a summer day.
What I listened to:
The No Expectations 102 Playlist: Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal
1. Neu Blume, "Wood Pile"
2. Hannah Cohen, "Dusty"
3. Maia Friedman, "Russian Blue"
4. feeble little horse, "This Is Real"
5. Monde UFO, "Sunset Entertainment 3"
6. Oldstar, "Plate Numbers"
7. Cash Langdon, "Magic Again"
8. Daughter of Swords, "Strange"
9. Raisa K, "Tall Enough"
10. Bon Iver, "If Only I Could Wait"
11. JONI, "Still Young"
12. Eliza Niemi, "DM BF"
13. Jonathan Personne, "Nuage noir"
14. beaming, "slow sinkin" (feat. Field Medic)
15. Saba, No I.D., "Every Painting Has a Price" (feat. BJ The Chicago Kid and Eryn Allen Kane)
What I watched:
Red Rooms (directed by Pascal Plante, AMC+)
When you’re watching a horror film and you know that there’s going to be a jump scare, the tense anticipation of waiting for the monster to pop out is far more terrifying than when it actually does. Sometimes it’s a relief to be confronted with an ugly evil head-on than to know that it might be lurking behind a corner. Red Rooms is not a horror in the traditional sense, but few films have captured a sense of dread better than this courtroom psychological thriller. Set in Montreal, the movie follows a woman who is unhealthily obsessed with a grotesque serial killer case. She arrives early to enter the courthouse and observe the trial, trades theories with others, and spends her free time perusing the internet and gambling online. She lives a sad, app-dependent, and solitary life. As the details of the case unfold, her inner world becomes just as unsettling as the horrifying details of the murder. I was enthralled and disturbed. Juliette Gariépy deserved an Oscar nod.
What I read:
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (by Malcolm Harris)
Malcolm Harris’ sprawling and exhaustive 2023 tome Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World is more engaging and compulsively page-turning than its well-over-700-pages length would suggest. The Occupy Wall Street-alum and writer behind Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials and Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History uses his hometown and the city’s Stanford University as a vessel to explain why things are the way they are now. He covers the Gold Rush to Silicon Valley and everything in between from Hoover, Reagan, and more underknown figures that make up U.S. and California history. It’s massive in scope and dogged in its research. For a book so massive, it’s funny that my biggest complaints come from its exclusions. While I understand why Stanford-alum Ken Kesey gets more attention than say, the Grateful Dead, I would’ve loved to have seen more of a dissection of Bay Area counter-culture and how parts of that were subsumed into techno-optimism and big business. The same goes for Cesar Chavez, who is conspicuously absent. Still, this is Yeoman’s work from Harris. That I breezed through it in a week is a testament to how deftly he can string a centuries-long narrative together.
The Weekly Chicago Show Calendar:
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Great playlist on this one. Yeah, I'm a few weeks behind.
Red Rooms rocked, may be my 2024 fav, love a fascinating protagonist that keeps you guessing.