![Arlo Parks](https://www.vinylchapters.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/arlo-parks-33-750x420.jpg)
From Madlib & Four Tet’s hook-up to Dodie’s debut, Michael Sumsion looks ahead to the great new music due to be unleashed in the new year.
2020 was a tense, anxious and challenging year. Covid has exerted an influence upon the cycle of new music releases, yet we’ve still been inundated with a plethora of challenging and interesting sounds across a multiplicity of genres. Casting a glance forward in 2021, with a stock-taking of 2020’s aural pleasures done, a vaccine to be rolled out and the world tentatively creeping towards normality, it’s time to explore the most anticipated LPs of the next twelve months.
![Madlib and Four Tet](https://www.vinylchapters.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/four-tet-madlib.jpg)
Madlib & Four Tet: Sound Ancestors (January)
As one of modern music’s maverick producers, Madlib’s eagerly anticipated collaboration with English electronica doyen Four Tet promises to become one of 2021’s signature records. A couple of years in the making and hailed as a masterpiece of digital psychedelia in thrall to Serge Gainsbourg and Can, Sound Ancestors is built from the latter’s shaping and remoulding of the former’s mercurial sketches, beats and loops.
![Billie Eilish](https://www.vinylchapters.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/billie-eilish-22.jpg)
Billie Eilish: ‘TBC’
Eilish’s smash hit debut, When We All Fall Asleep…, bagged five Grammys and a slew of rave reviews in 2019. In 2020, the eighteen-year-old singer-songwriter has kept herself busy with the Therefore I Am, My Future and No Time To Die singles and writing a great deal more. Whilst there have been no confirmed release dates in the offing, she has been readying a batch of new material in the studio with her brother Finneas and a new album is said to be imminent.
![Arlo Parks](https://www.vinylchapters.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/arlo-parks.jpg)
Arlo Parks: Collapsed In Sunbeams (January)
The precocious West Londoner’s follow-up to 2019’s Super Sad Generation – a startling collection of EPs which cemented her status as the breakthrough star of that year – promises to garner a wider audience for her candid, poetic narratives about wellness, despair and same-sex love.
![Dodie](https://www.vinylchapters.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/dodie-22.jpg)
Dodie: Build A Problem (March)
The twenty-five-year-old singer-songwriter from Epping has been steadily building up a fanbase on her YouTube channel since 2011 and she courted effusive notices in 2020 with her Cool Girl single. Her hotly tipped debut album promises melancholy, folk-tinged confessional pop radiating a worldly- wise maturity beyond her years.
![Lana Del Rey](https://www.vinylchapters.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/lana-del-rey.jpeg)
Lana Del Rey: Chemtrails over the Country Club (TBC)
Originally slated for 2020 and postponed due to Covid-related vinyl manufacturing delays, the American balladeer’s seventh, Jack Antonoff-produced album is due in the new year; if the taster, Let Me Love You Like a Woman, is anything to go by, it will be another masterwork of American myth, moody piano, poetic imagery, wistful atmospherics and elegant torch song.
![Tindersticks](https://www.vinylchapters.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/tindersticks.jpg)
Tindersticks: Distractions (February)
At the start of December, the chamber-pop veterans’ follow-up to 2019’s acclaimed No Treasure but Hope was trailed by a suitably brooding, and dare I say funky, cover of Television Personalities’ You’ll Have To Scream Louder. Details of the new long-player’s contents have been thin on the ground, but I for one am hoping this mesmeric single presages a long-coveted Tindersticks covers album.
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