Jenny Owen Youngs/Emily Kinney

In the decade since Jenny Owen Youngs last released a full-length album, she’s toured the world, co-written a #1 hit single, launched a wildly popular podcast, landed a book deal, placed songs in a slew of films and television series, moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, then to coastal Maine, gotten married, divorced, and married again. She’s done everything, it seems, except release another album...until now. Avalanche, Youngs’s exceptional debut for Yep Roc records, offers up an achingly beautiful exploration of loss, resilience, and growth from an artist who’s experienced more than her fair share of each in recent years. Produced by Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, The Hold Steady, Cassandra Jenkins, Josh Ritter) and written with a series of friends including S. Carey, Madi Diaz, The Antlers’ Peter Silberman, and Christian Lee Hutson, the songs are deceptively serene here, layering Youngs’s infectious pop sensibilities atop lush, dreamy arrangements that often belie the swift emotional currents lurking underneath. Her performances, meanwhile, are riveting and nuanced to match—gentle-yet-insistent as they reckon with the pain of regret and the joy of redemption, sometimes in the very same breath. The result is the most raw and arresting release of Youngs’s remarkable career, a brutally honest, deeply vulnerable work of self-reflection that learns to make peace with the past as it transforms doubt and grief into hope and transcendence.
 

Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and actress Emily Kinney mines for inspiration on her new album, the aptly titled Swim Team. Produced by Kinney’s longtime collaborator Benjamin Greenspan, Swim Team follows 2021’s Supporting Character and 2018’s Oh Jonathan. The songs on the new LP grapple with, among other themes, the end of a relationship and Kinney’s conflicted feelings about surviving in the acting industry as well as her love for making music. Recalling early-career Rilo Kiley, Swim Team is an expert showcase of Kinney’s vocals, which are both vulnerable and wry. “It's a breakup album,” Kinney says of Swim Team. “Supporting Character was very much more about my artistic spiritual life, and some of those spiritual themes do show up in the lyrics on Swim Team. But I would say it's more of a breakup album, and also an album about shame and embarrassment.”