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 releases available on streaming services. This week’s batch includes new albums from Kehlani, Loukeman, Gia Margaret, 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.)
Kehlani: Kehlani [Atlantic]
For Kehlani, love is war and the fight never quite ends, even after you’ve both called it quits. You can hear the singer’s perpetual state of longing in “Folded,” the lead single off her new self-titled LP, as they beg an estranged beau to pick up their abandoned clothes and perhaps reconcile their differences. On “I Need You,” love withdrawal is unbearable, and Kehlani can’t resist ruminating about an old flame. “Call Me Back” has them on a few too many tequila shots and stuck on the wrong side of limerence. A little toxic, yes, but how else would you survive an earth-shattering breakup?
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Loukeman: Sd-3 [September Recordings]
A lot has changed for the Toronto producer Loukeman since he off-handedly recorded and released the first installment of his Sd trilogy in 2021. Now, in-demand by artists from PinkPantheress to A$AP Rocky, he closes out the three-peat of atmospheric, pop-minded beat tapes with a final flourish. Tapping local collaborators like Jump Source’s Patrick Holland ( cameo’s, Sd-3 is an ode to the city that nurtured Loukeman’s creative practice, composed with errant strands of late-2010s indie folk, trance, psychedelia, and downtempo.
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Gia Margaret: Singing [Jagjaguwar]
When Gia Margaret lost her voice after a 2018 tour, she wasn’t sure she’d ever sing again. Man plans, and God laughs, right? Margaret’s new album, Singing, sees her return full-throated to the thrumming, delicate indie folk that enlivened her debut, There’s Always Glimmer. To complete her new work, she recruited Frou Frou’s Guy Sigsworth to craft an appropriate atmosphere for her rediscovered voice, weaving traditional chorales with lucid dream pop and a DJ’s ear for seamless sequencing.
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Carla dal Forno: Confession [Kallista]
After a career spent spinning post-punk in Australian bands F Ingers and Tarcar, Carla dal Forno went solo to find her voice merging dreamy-pop ambiance with a cool-toned remove. Now on her fourth album whittling that style, dal Forno holed up in the shadows and isolation of a disused hospital in her remote, 8,000-person capacity town in Australia to record Confession, pushing her sound to embrace bigger and more haunting effects. Don’t be fooled by her steady vocals or the drum machine’s soft thudding; this go-around, she flips her soothing beats into an unnerving admission of obsession gone sour.
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Friko: Something Worth Waiting For [ATO Records]
Friko are ready for business on Something Worth Waiting For, the all-guns-blazing follow-up to the Chicagoans’ beloved 2024 debut, Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here. Having picked up two new members and recruited superproducer John Congleton, the quartet mainlines indie-rock feels via toothsome psych-pop and good old-fashioned pre-choruses, alloying anything-goes riffs with a twist of prog bombast. As Grace Robins-Somerville writes in Pitchfork’s review, the album straddles the line “between the crafty pluckiness of the Chicago DIY art collective that birthed it and the big-stage theatricality of its forebears” in millennial indie-rock.
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Fatboi Sharif and Child Actor: Crayola Circles [Backwoodz]
The latest release on billy woods’ label Backwoodz Studios pairs two of the imprint’s most sleeper lodestars: rapper Fatboi Sharif and producer Child Actor, the latter of whom has also worked with Cavalier, Open Mike Eagle, and Earl Sweatshirt. Their new joint LP, Crayola Circles, is a dynamic set of jazz and folk-influenced tracks, characterized by Child Actor’s minimalist touch and Sharif’s heavyweight, off-kilter bars. The record boasts no features, skits, or interludes—just pure tristate area realness.
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Foo Fighters: Your Favorite Toy [Roswell/RCA]
The title of the Foo Fighters’ 12th album has a certain literalism to it—after all, as frontman Dave Grohl told Classic Rock earlier this year, it’s “the most fun we’ve ever had making a record.” Recorded across the rockers’ respective home studios and co-produced by Oliver Roman, it marks the recorded debut of new drummer (and former Nine Inch Nails member) Ilan Rubin, who traded places with Josh Freese last May. (Freese had been filling in for the late Taylor Hawkins for two years.) The result is a ten-track, 36-minute “powder keg” of music that finds every band member firing on almost every cylinder.
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Quiet Light: Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2 [True Panther]
Ever heard this one: A high school prom queen, a med student, a Texan, and a thoroughly beguiling new voice in American indie pop walk into a bar? Probably not, because all those tropes come together then break apart in the singer-songwriter-producer Quiet Light, the latest signee to Oklou and Grace Ives’ label True Panther. Her debut album with the imprint, Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2, fleshes out one of her first self-released mixtapes into a poignant reflection on looking back to look forward, drenched in Badalamentian dreaminess and warranting comparisons to Grimes, Imogen Heap, and even Olivia Rodrigo’s deep cuts.
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Mikaela Davis: Graceland Way [Kill Rock Stars]
The harpist and songwriter Mikaela Davis describes her new album, in press materials, as “canyon country:” a mix of modern Western drama, timeless Laurel Canyon folk, and the heyday of American FM radio. Tackling corporate greed, learned loneliness, and urban sprawl with equal zeal, Graceland’s Way finds novel inroads into Davis’ sound without straying from the high-gloss, existential honky-tonk where much of her ouvre lives. Madison Cunningham, Tim Heidecker, Neal Francis, Karly Hartzman, and more feature across the track list; Davis wrote the record with longtime collaborators John Lee Shannon and Dan Horne. “The songs were written from our personal experience, but together they tell the arc of humanity,” Davis said.
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Angelique Kidjo: Hope!! [Parlophone / Warner]
Quavo, Charlis Wilson, Nile Rodgers, and Pharrell have select few reasons to pause busy solo schedules to come together: a new Angélique Kidjo record is one of them. The Beninese musician’s first new album since 2021’s Grammy-winning Mother Nature is dedicated to her late mother, but it’s far from a funeral dirge. Like so much of Kidjo’s best work (and the album title itself), Hope!! is celebratory and defiant—and, yes, it does include a cover of “Jerusalema.” If Kidjo can keep on smiling through the years, there’s hope for the rest of us yet.
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White Fence: Orange [Drag City]
Ty Segall produces Tim Presley’s first White Fence album in seven years, a collection of classic pop ditties filtered through a wistful haze. The homespun LP comprises 11 tracks that channel the sound of wayfaring through addiction, loss, and self-reflection to embrace the squidgier sentiments in life—nowhere more than on the penultimate track, a cover of Simply Red’s “So Beautiful.”
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