Written by With so much good music being released all the time, it can be hard to determine what to listen to first. Every week, Pitchfork offers a run-down of significant new drops available on streaming services. This week’s batch includes new albums from Iceage, Boards of Canada, Kurt Vile, and more. Subscribe to Pitchfork’s New Music Friday newsletter to get our recommendations in your inbox every week. (All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our affiliate links, however, Pitchfork earns an affiliate commission.)
Iceage: For Love of Grace & the Hereafter [Mexican Summer]
Iceage’s first album in four years is filled with poetic, electric lyrics and pinballing riffs—a return to the delirious earworms that first anointed the Danish band as post-punk torchbearers. When the reunited band returned to the studio—after Elias Rønnenfelt’s recent solo sidelines—they aimed for songs that were “immediate, urgent, raw and fast and they couldn’t be too long,” Rønnenfelt explained. “We wanted to try to shed any unnecessary weight.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Board of Canada: Inferno [Warp]
After teasing fans for weeks with cryptic VHS tapes, Boards of Canada return with an hour of textured, psychedelic IDM and ambient. Thirteen years after their last album, Tomorrow’s Harvest, the Scottish brother duo composed Inferno from blunted loops that travel in and out of vintage vocal recordings, eventually feeding into warmer, melodic pathways. You might feel like you’re swimming through a discombobulating dream—only to wake up and find that you’re safe and sound. In Pitchfork’s review, Philip Sherburne calls it their most welcoming and gratifying album since Geogaddi, using themes of faith and existentialism to tease “the revelation of great secrets against a backdrop of some of the most spellbinding music of their career.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Kurt Vile: Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me [Verve]
Lately, Kurt Vile has found inspiration in familiar places. “I’m more emotional,” he told Sam Sodomsky in a recent profile. “I like when music takes me back.” The singer-songwriter’s forthright and wistful new record, Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me, is an exercise in revisitation that yields expanding, not diminishing, returns. Recorded and self-produced largely in Philadelphia, the LP imbues his musing, psychedelic roots rock with grounded reflections on family, friendship, and the City of Brotherly Love he still calls home. Opener “Zoom 97” might as well be a thesis statement—as he put it, “It’s about life. It’s about my orbit.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Buy at Rough Trade
Paul McCartney: The Boys of Dungeon Lane [MPL/Capitol]
Paul McCartney has spent the past several weeks bigging up Liverpool, cracking jokes on late-night TV shows, and generally reaffirming his status as an indefatigable cheeky chappy. The reason for all this is—well, because he’s Paul McCartney, but also to promote his first album in six years. The Boys of Dungeon Lane surveys the Beatle’s childhood in post-war Liverpool, a time he evokes in fond but unvarnished tones on songs like “Home to Us,” his first-ever duet with Ringo Starr. Another track touches on his friendship with a young John Lennon, but there are plenty of off-concept McCartneyisms too: silly love songs, LSD yarns, and songs you can barely decipher through their mind-meltingly gorgeous melodies.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Buy at Rough Trade
Ear: Rumspringa [A24 Music]
In Amish culture, a “rumspringa” is a period in a teenager’s life when they have the opportunity to engage with all the bacchanalia and conveniences of the modern world. For the New York electronic duo Ear, that served as a perfect framework for their debut on A24 Music, an album they say interrogates what it means to “choose life.” The follow-up to 2025’s The Most Dear and the Future deploys their strand of blushing folktronica—often categorized as “laptop twee”—in comfortingly classic formats. The result is a set of hooky, hooded songs that love and flounder in equal measure: the adolescent experience rendered exquisitely.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Feeble Little Horse: Bitknot [Saddle Creek]
In the three years since Girl With Fish, Pittsburgh outfit Feeble Little Horse have parted ways with founding member Ryan Walchonski, read some Marcuse, and come back with an album that lazer-focuses their capitalist and technological ennui into songs that oscillate between storming synth-pop and rallying alt-rock. Bitknot, they elaborate in press materials, concerns “being American and being embarrassed of being American. It’s being quietly conditioned and harvested, like walking mouths and wallets.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Greg Mendez: Beauty Land [Dead Oceans]
Throw on Beauty Land and forget that it’s Greg Mendez’s Dead Oceans debut. Surely, you would think, this must be a trove of long-lost Elliott Smith demos recorded by candlelight. The average song is under two minutes, and each instrument other than Mendez’s guitar—a toy organ, a death-rattle tambourine—sounds like it’s stretching an shoestring budget by virtue of its mere inclusion. Penning a tearjerker in only six words, as he does on “Frog,” is a neat party trick (take that Hemingway), but what sets the Philadelphia singer-songwriter apart is, as Jayson Greene wrote in Pitchfork’s new review, “the empathy of someone who has navigated broken nervous systems his whole life, his own and others’.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
RaiNao: Marcriá [Rimas]
You might recognize RaiNao from her sumptuous verses on “Perfumito Nuevo,” the hit song from Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos. The fellow Puerto Rican native is ushering in a diverse era for the reggaeton scene, championing queer and feminine performances within the male-dominated genre. On Marcriá, RaiNao expands her range, threading her island’s bomba and plena music through bassy reggaeton beats and orchestration. Her choice of collaborators aligns the album with the reggaeton canon, including reggae band Cultura Profética, bomba fusionists El Laberinto del Coco, and salsa vocalist Andy Montañez.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Kikù Hibino / Merzbow: Rococo ∞ Echomatter [Superpang]
The first time Kikù Hibino heard Merzbow’s music, he instinctively pressed stop halfway through. “It wasn’t rejection or fear,” he told Loudness Blog. “It was a feeling that I wasn’t ready yet to face a sonic extreme of that magnitude.” Nearly three decades later, the Chicago sound artist has caught up to that sonic extreme. After putting out the Japanese noise musician’s 2025 album Sedonis, Hibino is releasing this cross-continental collaboration of supercolliding, texturally volatile noise and spoken word on his Signal Noise label. Partly inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s editing techniques, the album features contributions from Patrick Shiroishi, Alexandra Cupșa, and Matchess’ Whitney Johnson.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Latto: Big Mama [RCA]
Call it standing on business: on the same day Latto announced her fourth album, Big Mama, she also revealed her first pregnancy with partner 21 Savage (a baby we expect to be toddling around the studio, if not setting up a BandLab account, in no time). If the Atlanta rapper’s imminent new motherhood looks anything like her album rollout, you can expect it to be a chosen family affair. Features across the release include GloRilla, 21 Savage, her recent tourmate Mariah the Scientist, Wizkid, Teyana Taylor, Sexyy Red, and Jelly Roll. It takes a village!
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
