It happens every year: Before spooky season even really gets rolling, musical artists start announcing new Christmas albums. If you're the type of person who despises Christmas music, the early onset yuletide onslaught might fill you with terror, which makes it a perfectly perverse annual Halloween-week feature here at Stereogum. Here is this year's potentially frightening holiday rundown.
Let's start with the album Stereogum's indie-leaning listeners are most likely to care about. The new comp Worst Christmas Ever! brings together the best of Sufjan Stevens' myriad Christmas releases onto one disc. The 16-song tracklist includes one new song, "On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better)." It's Stevens' first new holiday tune in 15 years and first new song of any kind since recovering from Guillain-Barré syndrome. [Out 11/6 on Asthmatic Kitty.] For several years now, Alanis Morissette has been releasing new holiday songs every time the season rolls around.
Her first Christmas album, the cheekily titled Good Weather For Immaculate Conception, combines those tracks with new recordings. Guests include 2/3 of the Only Murders In The Building cast (sorry Selenators, it's Steve Martin and Martin Short), Brandi Carlile, Joy Oladokun, Amythyst Kiah, and Trans Voices. Morissette teased the album with a version of the bluegrass Christmas traditional "Beautiful Star Of Bethlehem" featuring Carlile and banjo enthusiast Martin. [Out 11/6 on Epiphany Music.] Here's what I know about HBO's The Gilded Age: It's set in 1880s New York City, it was created by Downtown Abbey's Julian Fellowes, and the GOAT Carrie Coon is in it.
The show is not a musical, but its cast is full of Broadway veterans, and apparently some fans have clamored for a musical episode. The next best thing: a Christmas album on which the actors perform a slew of holiday standards, plus two new tunes composed by veteran hitmaker Desmond Child. Coon plus castmates Ben Ahlers, Christine Baranski, Laura Benanti, Denée Benton, Jordan Donica, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Donna Murphy, Kelli O’Hara, Taylor Richardson, Morgan Spector, Taylor Trensch, and Adrienne Warren all sing on the album, and the results sound way more 20th century than 19th century to me. [Out 11/6 via Concord Theatricals.] Alt-R&B singer Niia's new Christmas With Niia is a new entry in the canon of jazzy, self-consciously "cozy" Christmas albums.
She worked on it with producer Spencer Zahn, which should immediately perk your ears up. The lead single was a cover of Paul McCartney's divisive "Wonderful Christmastime" that replaces the original version's playful quirkiness with a wistful smoothness that's really working for me. This one might end up in my holiday rotation. [Out digitally 10/30 and physically 12/4 via Candid Records.] There will always be a market for Michael Bublé types.
Ryan Peter Murphy is a 24-year-old Connecticut-born Berklee student who bills himself as a "swooner" ("Gen Z’s answer to the crooner," explains a press release). That makes him a prime candidate to record a Christmas album, and so he has. Unlike fellow young traditionalist Laufey, Murphy is not putting any kind of nouveau twist on his trad-pop pastiches.
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