Photo of Nate Amos of This Is Lorelei by Al Nardo
First Thought Fridays is a (mostly) weekly column offering quick-hit takes on some of the albums released this week, serving up first impressions, favorite or least favorite songs, and whether or not they’re worth a second listen. Check back for more each Friday night or Saturday morning.
It’s the holidays. Things are busy around these parts so I naturally planned on keeping this week’s column short, but the release calendar ended up being pretty light so it would have been a shorter column anyway. I almost said I kept it short and sweet, but we’re still clocking in around a thousand words. Oh well. Anyway, what I did check out went three-for-three, so there’s still some excellent audio gems for your earholes in this week’s column. Here’s what I listened to this week, in the order in which I listened to ‘em. I’m taking the rest of the year off from this column to prep for year-end-list season, but in the meantime, check out these three great new albums, and I’ll see you back here in the new year!
This Is Lorelei, Holo Boy (Double Double Whammy): Nate Amos is one of those classic “it only took a dozen years to be an overnight success” stories. Since 2013, he’s been writing, recording, and releasing EPs and one-off singles as This Is Lorelei via Bandcamp, as well as collaborating with singer Rachel Brown as the duo Water From Your Eyes. His profile started to rise with the release of his first formal full-length album, last year’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star, but 2025 was when he really exploded—an expanded version of Box for Buddy, Box for Star included new versions of a pair of his songs featuring MJ Lenderman and Snail Mail respectively, plus Matador released Water From Your Eyes’ latest, It’s a Beautiful Place, garnering Amos ample airplay on the indie rock satellite radio station Sirius XMU and a profile in Rolling Stone.
But with a daunting discography (his Bandcamp page has a whopping 69 entries on it), where’s a new fan to start? The standard record label move in the old days would have been a “greatest should have been hits” album (think the Chili Peppers dropping What Hits?! after “Under the Bridge” blew up). Amos took a slightly different path, selecting 10 of his favorite songs from his back catalog and re-recording them rather than presenting the original recordings, to make them more of a piece. The resulting Holo Boy offers up an excellent primer, showcasing Amos’ chiming acoustic guitars and sheepish, downcast vocals. The songs have a very early-2000s indie rock feel to them, with Elliott Smith, Ben Kweller, and Death Cab for Cutie being sonically similar if not quite on-the-nose comparisons to Amos’ sound. The songs are catchy and ear-pleasing, and hang together as a piece (other than the weirdly aggressive, electronic-sounding “Mouth Man”) and are just so up my alley. If this were a collection of originals, it’d be destined for my year-end top 10 list. As it is, it’s a guaranteed resident in my regular rotation, and a highly recommended addition to yours as well. Will I Listen Again?: Absolutely.
Juliana Hatfield, Lightning Might Strike (American Laundromat Records): Though primarily known for early ‘90s alt-rock hits like “My Sister,” “Spin the Bottle,” and “Universal Heart-Beat,” Juliana Hatfield is, as I discussed with her when I interviewed her last year, “more than an artifact”: she has continued to work consistently, amassing a massive discography, 21 albums strong on the solo side, not to mention her time with the Boston alt-rockers the Blake Babies and collaborations with the Lemonheads and Paul Westerberg, among others. In recent years, she’s taking to alternating between original music and albums of covers by the likes of Olivia Newton-John, the Police, and, most recently, Electric Light Orchestra.
Hatfield returns to original material on Lightning Might Strike, leaving the grungier guitars of her early days behind in favor of jangly, mid-tempo grooves paired with catchy pop melodies that suit her still-girlish voice to a T. In classic spoonful-of-sugar fashion, these sunny melodies hide some pretty heavy emotions with songs that tackle the death of a close friend, the death of a beloved dog, her mother’s cancer diagnosis, and the loneliness brought on by a move to a new, rural town.
But though it tackles hard topics, the album isn’t a relentless downer, thanks to the attitude summed up in its title, a reference to Hatfield’s mother, whose younger brother died at a young age after being struck by lightning, and how that taught her that fate may be uncontrollable but you can’t prevent that from giving your life meaning and finding your purpose. Hatfield has certainly found her purpose, and that purpose is creating fine albums like this one every few years. Twenty-one albums and counting into her career, Hatfield is still as artistically curious and as fine a tunesmith as ever. Favorite tracks: the 1-2-3 punch of “Long Slow Nervous Breakdown,” “Popsicle,” and “My House Is Not My Dream House” (I can hear a little bit of the Jeff Lynne influence sneaking in on that one). Will I Listen Again?: Yes.
Nas & DJ Premier, Light-Years (Mass Appeal): Mass Appeal has been releasing albums from their “Legend Has It…” series all year, big releases from overlooked hip-hop legends like Ghostface Killah, Slick Rick, Raekwon, and last month’s phenomenal comeback album from De La Soul. They wrap up the series for 2025 with the main event: the reunion of Brooklyn emcee Nas and producer DJ Premier. The pair collaborated on tracks from Nas’ legendary first five albums (1994’s Illmatic through 2001’s Stillmatic), but this collaborative album is their first major project together in nearly a quarter century. As somebody whose favorite rap era is, well, basically 1994 to 2001, this album is so in my sonic wheelhouse: Premier’s beats are born of that era, kind of aggressive and kind of creepy and just feel like a city late at night. Nas brings his A-game to his conscious rhymes, giving a pep talk to anyone who wants to speak their mind through the written word with “Writers,” offering a guide to raising the next generation right in “Sons (Young Kings),” and shouting out all the women who made his life what it is in “Bouquet (To the Ladies).” Other favorite tracks include “My Life Is Real,” “GiT Ready,” and the Steve Miller-sampling “It’s Time.” Will I Listen Again?: Yes.
