Fall Music Preview 2024: The 15 Best Albums for Grownups

As summer’s end brings a welcome chill, the fall music season is heating up. September has brought us Indoor Safari, a rockabilly comeback album by Nick Lowe, 75, and the U.K. No. 1 solo album by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, 78, Luck and Strange, which he calls “the best album I’ve made since Dark Side of the Moon.” Music sales surged 3.9 percent in 2024 — old-school vinyl record sales are up 10.7 percent — and some of the best releases are yet to come. Here are 15 new and upcoming albums worth a grownup’s time.

Herb Alpert, 50 (Sept. 20)

Alpert, who created the Tijuana Brass at 27, is going strong at 89. His 50th album ranges from bossa nova (“Corcovado”) to surf rock (“Sleepwalk”). He covers the Chords’ 1954 doo-wop hit “Sh-Boom,” Elvis Presley’s timeless “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and “Baubles, Bangles & Beads,” from 1953’s musical Kismet. We like the Alpert originals, including “Where Do We Go From Here.”

Courtesy Universal Music Group

​Keith Urban, High (Sept. 20)

Australian country star Urban, 56, said the title of his new album, full of revelry, guitar solos and the hits “Wildside” and “Messed Up As Me,” is intentionally ambiguous. “What makes you ‘high’ can mean whatever you want it to mean. It might be physical, spiritual, herbal, meditative, chemical or musical, but it’s definitely a place of utopia.”

Courtesy Evil Love Press

​Kate Pierson, Radios and Rainbows (Sept. 20)

B-52s singer Pierson, 76, who’s grown her famous red beehive into a wilder coiffure, fills her second solo album with enough frisky, high-energy pop to make a rock lobster dance. She teams with Sia for the rocking duet “Every Day Is Halloween” and with Bleu on the revenge-themed dance tune “Evil Love.” In the funk-tinged “Living in a Monet,” about the 1970s Athens, Georgia, music scene that spawned the B-52s and R.E.M., the harmony, vocals and bass are by David Bowie’s old bandmate Gail Ann Dorsey, 61.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Chain of Light (Sept. 20)

A trove of recordings by the late Pakistani legend Khan were rediscovered in the archives of Real World Records, the label of Peter Gabriel, 74, in 2021. Sufi Islamic devotional songs are performed with his eight-piece ensemble. Discover the powerful singer who wowed the Rolling Stones, Eddie Vedder, Madonna and Jeff Buckley, who called Khan “my Elvis.”

Van Morrison, New Arrangements and Duets (Sept. 27)

Morrison, 79, delved into his archive to release recordings you’ve never heard: big band arrangements with Paul Moran and Chris White and duets including “Steal My Heart Away” with Willie Nelson, 91, “Someone Like You” with Joss Stone and “Broken Record” with Kurt Elling. The tune “Choppin’ Wood” pays homage to Morrison’s late father, who lived a “life of quiet desperation … you always did the best you could.”