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 albums available on streaming services. This week’s batch includes new ones from Grace Ives, Underscores, and BTS. 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.)
Grace Ives: Girlfriend [True Panther]
We first got a taste of Grace Ives’ new album Girlfriend last November, when she shared three singles (in her terminology, a “thringle”) and a blog post detailing her state of mind: “Stop dwelling. The only path is forward.” The record, produced by Ariel Rechtshaid and John DeBold, details this journey in hues of mid-2010s pop, folk, and indie rock. The Roland 505-fluent Ives may be working in a leveled-up studio (she marveled at Rechtshaid’s Mellotron in a recent interview), but Girlfriend holds tight to the affability of her songs, which feel like secrets spilt over a few too many at your local dive.
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Underscores: U [Mom + Pop]
Underscores’ transformation into full-blown pop star over the past few years has been a blast to watch. Her new album U builds the momentum of three killer singles and a year of teasing glitched-out, atmospheric pop with the confident kick of big-room EDM. A nice mélange of influences, from Grimes to Cascada to Beck, pop up across this suite. But her earnest embrace of the emo roar of American dubstep is straight out of Skrillex’s playbook. No wonder she dressed up as him for Halloween.
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Anna Calvi: Is This All There Is? [Domino]
Anna Calvi’s new EP swaggers out of the shadows with the gothic cabaret barnstormer “God’s Lonely Man,” Calvi’s wraithlike falsetto writhing around a gruff lead from Iggy Pop. The EP’s three remaining tracks also feature guest vocalists, namely Perfume Genius—on a Nick Cave and PJ Harvey-worthy cover of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “I See a Darkness”—Matt Berninger, and Laurie Anderson, who threads her deadpan into a choral spin of Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” that somehow ends up sounding like a Lost Girls track. Billed as the first part of a trilogy, Is This All There Is? finds Calvi interrogating her own identity, inspired by recent motherhood. “I want to exist in the best way for my child,” she says in press materials. “I wanted to ask the most basic human question—is this all there is?”
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Green-House: Hinterlands [Ghostly International]
Green-House duo Olive Ardizoni and Michael Flanagan make their Ghostly debut with Hinterlands, an appropriately spectral collage of beguiling compositions that stretch New Age timbres to world-building scale. Lysergic, woodwind-dappled folk mingles with baroque toplines and a digital grotto of ambient undulations, resulting in music that can soothe, haunt, or help incubate little ideas, as you require. “I’m an anarchist and an artist,” Ardizoni says in press materials. “I don’t have to explain that. I can just put the emotion in and hope that it can be used as a tool, to be comforting or inspiring for people.”
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BTS: Arirang [HYBE]
Has it really been four years since BTS, the biggest boy band in the world, broke the news they were going on hiatus so all seven members could complete mandatory service in the South Korean military? The answer: technically it’s been three years and nine months, which matters when millions of fans are counting. The group’s fifth album, Arirang, drops them right back in the saddle, tapping Diplo and Tame Impala to craft appropriately stadium-sized pop and trap production. They’ve also got a comeback concert scheduled for March 21 in Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square that will also stream live on Netflix.
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Mike WiLL Made-It: R3set [Eardrummer]
Mike Will Made-It has had nearly a decade to exhaust his Rolodex for R3set, his first standalone album since 2017’s Ransom 2. The pop/rap superproducer’s guest list for the LP is accordingly hectic: J. Cole, 21 Savage, Swae Lee, Young Thug, and Monaleo are among the contributors. The long gestation period paid off, he told Associated Press. “If I know this recipe, and I know it’s gonna work, and I know I gotta put it in the Crock-Pot and it gotta sit in there…. I just gotta deal with you telling me, ’Man, it’s taking too long. But I know once you taste it, it’s gonna slap you upside the head.”
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CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso: Free Spirits [5020 Records]
CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso’s new record follows their breakthrough PAPOTA, which channeled Caribbean diasporic rhythms, jazz, and funk into one wild, party-made blend. Free Spirits pads out their world with a madcap mix of samples and new trancey undertones, and stays remarkably true to its title. In a moment when they could have stuck to the beaten path and rehashed a formula that works well for them, the pair instead chose to indulge their curiosities and keep things loose. Where’s the Grammy category for “Still Having Fun With It?”
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Mclusky: I Sure Am Getting Sick of This Bowling Alley [Ipecac Recordings]
Less than a year on from the Welsh punks’ pleasingly true-to-form reunion album, Mclusky have compiled a six-track mini-LP of songs with titles like “Hi! We’re on Strike” and “That Was My Brain on Elves.” Single “As a Dad” parlays Andrew Falkous’ Future of the Left-era predilection for a great bridge and euphoric reprise into another litany of gnomic one-liners (“You’re eight foot seven, bitch”; “As a dad, you are fine”) that somehow sound like damning indictments of the modern world. More of the same; still better than most.
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Dylan Brady: Needle Guy [Dog Show/Atlantic Records]
Dylan Brady’s first solo release in nearly a decade slots into the paradigm of the 100 Gecs musician’s trickster DJ sets, establishing heavy, body-moving rhythms before blurting into the leftfield. Needle Guy follows his recent collaborations with Charli XCX and Skrillex, two superstars with little in common, but whose anarchic, future-pop spirits are equally tangible in floor-fillers like “Throat Song” and “Stay High
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More Eaze: Sentence Structure in the Country [Thrill Jockey]
On the beguiling Sentence Structure in the Country, More Eaze plants a flag in the hitherto unexplored no man’s land between labyrinthine folk, subterranean ambient, contemporary classical, and Sparklehorse-style psych-pop. Made with a suite of collaborators including Wendy Eisenberg and Jade Guterman, the Austin musician’s follow-up to the Claire Rousay link-up No Floor evolved over several years, tugged to and fro between the baroque, minimalist, and otherworldly. “There are ways Jade or Wendy choose to voice chords that are not how I’d play them in this context, but that’s kind of the point,” she says in press materials. “Their voices redefine what I’m making but also help me define my own.”
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Avalon Emerson & the Charm: Written Into Changes [Dead Oceans]
In 2018, the average Avalon Emerson fan likely couldn’t predict where their favorite big-name touring DJ—known for relentless and inventive live techno sets—was headed next. But in 2023, her debut with her band the Charm revealed new multitudes within the polymath producer—the kind of multitudes with a serious penchant for dream pop, Balearic house, and post-punk. Her latest offering Written in Changes adds big beat into that eclectic blend, even leaning a little honky-tonk with song titles such as “How Dare This Beer.” If the album cover is any indication, she’s also got a talent for hawking now. What can’t this woman do?
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Ladytron: Paradises [Nettwerk]
Electroclash is back. Well, sort of. The new album from Y2K stalwarts Ladytron—best known for the immutable 2002 single “Seventeen”—has far more in common with Pet Shop Boys or Roxy Music than it does the likes of Fischerspooner. Paradises’ grand, new-romantic pop accomplishes something far more impressive than easy nostalgia-baiting: meaningful artistic growth for a group who, over two decades into their lifespan, could’ve coasted into one-hit wonder status several times over.
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