Royal Mounta

Jakob Armstrong (youngest son of Green Day frontman Billie Joe) began playing guitar at age 7 and honed his craft privately until he met friends with like-minded tastes in music and Ultraman action figures. Produced by Chris Coady (TV on the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Beach House), Ultra Q's My Guardian Angel offers a deep sonic palette that varies between pop-punk and synth-pop, displaying Armstrong's songwriting talents with the musicianship of Kevin Judd and brothers Chris and Enzo Malaspina.

Louis Wyatt C.: Chandler [CD]

At only 23, McLamb has already lived multiple lives. In her late teens, McLamb found success via co-hosting the podcast Binchtopia and sharing songs on TikTok. She soon pulled back from the platform, feeling it didn't represent her actual ethos as a songwriter. Instead, she signed to Royal Mountain and released her 2024 debut Going Through It, a document of a complex, traumatic childhood that led to searching phases - dropping out of college during the pandemic in favor of working on Midwest farms, eventually leaving her North Carolina hometown behind for Los Angeles. It all gave her plenty of stories to tell on Going Through It. And now on Good Story, she wonders how that process affected her. Yet the homemade trophy of Good Story's cover is far from a jocular consolation prize alone. It's a symbol of the layered, accomplished writing McLamb arrived at as she interrogated everything she thought she was about as an artist.

Ducks Ltd.: Harm's Way [CD]

Ducks Ltd.: Modern Fiction [CD]

Wild Pink: A Billion Little Lights [CD]

The fourth full-length from Wild Pink, ILYSM unfolds with all the fractured beauty of a dreamscape. Over the course of 12 chameleonic tracks, the New York-bred rock band build another world inhabited by ghosts and angels and aliens, inciting a strange and lovely daze as the backdrop shifts from the mundane (subdivisions, highways, hotel parking lots) to the extraordinary (deserts, battlefields, the moon). But within its vast imagination lies a potent truth-telling on the part of singer/guitarist John Ross, whose lyrics closely examine his recent struggle with cancer. The follow-up to 2021's A Billion Little Lights-a critically acclaimed effort praised by the likes of Pitchfork, NPR, Vulture, and Stereogum, who named it "one of the prettiest rock records of the past decade"-ILYSM emerges as a truly revelatory body of work, transforming the most painful reflection into moments of transcendence.