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 Vince Staples, horsegiirL, Death Cab for Cutire, 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.)
Vince Staples: Cry Baby [Loma Vista]
Vince Staples is ushering in his independent era with Cry Baby, the Long Beach rapper’s debut for Loma Vista, released in partnership with his own label, Section Eight Arthouse. Staples returns with unconventional beats—from the rock riff behind “Blackberry Marmalade” to the soulful funk of “White Flag”—and pointed music videos to boot, in which Staples tries to prevent a mass shooting and later paints an American flag white before gunning it down with an assault rifle. He’s fired up in spirit but laid back in his delivery, toeing the line between provocative, honest, emotional, and blasé. Don’t let that range fool you, though: Cry Baby wrestles with its subjects with serious thought and gravity.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
horsegiirL: Nature Is Healing [RCA]
horsegiirL shows her range on Nature Is Healing. Expanding beyond the Eurodance and cheeky hyperpop of her releases with Berlin label Live From Earth, the half-horse, half-human extraordinaire trots through IDM, Jersey club, trip-hop, and dusty 808s on her debut album. With production help from hyperpop maestros Casey MQ and A.G. Cook, the 15-track LP praises the rivers, beaches, and fungi of our world over a kaleidoscope of electronic sounds.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Death Cab for Cutie: I Built You a Tower [Anti-]
I Built You a Tower marks Ben Gibbard’s return to the studio after years touring the anniversaries of albums from his acknowledged heyday with Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service. With John Congleton on production, he and the band composed the new album as a sort of mission statement for a new era, conjuring up synthpop anthems like “Riptides” while waging war on the lyrical crutches that have made Gibbard a patron saint of cardigan-clad, emo-leaning indie kids for decades. “The fact that I enunciate, arguably too much, means that I can’t get away with the kind of stuff that Matt Berninger gets away with,” he told The New Yorker. “I’ve been making a conscious effort to break out of a couple of the jails that I built for myself lyrically.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Modest Mouse: An Eraser and a Maze [Global Pace]
Good news for people who love music from the Pacific Northwest: Modest Mouse just released their first independent album in nearly 30 years. On An Eraser and a Maze, Isaac Brock and his bandmates look around with confusion at how they got this far and question what their band’s identity boils down to. For Brock, that meant leaning into his gut instincts and seeing where they lead him. The murky rhythms return, as do Brock’s caterwauling wail and ragged guitar riffs. Surprises lay in store, too, including Janet Weiss drumming on “Look How Far…” and a burst of aughts indie rock on “Speak ‘N Spell (Or Not)” that you’d be forgiven for mistaking as a We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank cut.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Tara Clerkin Trio: Somewhere Good [World of Echo]
Tara Clerkin Trio specialize in a homemade blend of jazz, folk, library music, and kosmische that channels psychedelia not with expensive pedals or woozy synths but a perpetual attunement to the newness of simple sounds, assembled just so. Somewhere Good is their second full-length and first in six years, after the mini albums In Spring and On the Turning Ground; it sometimes evokes the haunted music-box quality of Broadcast or a constellation of the extended Mica Levi universe, as well as the dubbed-out streetside lullabies of their Bristol base. As fan and stand-in biographer Ryan Davis writes in press materials, “The hazy, unmappable skyline-mirage of droning harmonium, upright bass, peculiarly accentuated wind instruments, acoustic guitar, and hushed yet literally mighty keys combine to hypnotizing effect.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Six Sex: Ultra [Dale Play]
True to her Argentinian heritage, Six Sex was raised on guaracha. But her sexed-up, flashy, bratty music found a natural home in Mexico, where perreo rave is all the rage. Ultra—out June 6—blends strands of both into a soundtrack for a debaucherous night out filled with Virginia Slims, champagne on the beach, and joints tucked away in cash-filled wallets. This is an album best enjoyed obnoxiously loud in a club swarming with baddies—no boyfriends allowed.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Protect: Slimedude2003 [Ball Hogs/Atlantic]
Fresh from the apparently accidental leak of 50 of his songs in April, Protect proves mercifully concise on Slimedude2003, a 12-track mixtape that presents his versatile flows and slacker humour at astral scale. The Buffalo rapper, Ball Hog founder, and prolific gamer named the tape after his gaming tag and navigates his beats with a suitably deft touch, dashing into waves of trap cymbals and skirmishing synths as if through a musical bullet-hell. Meanwhile, songs like “Last of Us” (of course) apply his inventive melodies to club-ready laments that swap dazzling neon for a melancholy glow.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Jake Muir: Pareidolia [Enmossed]
Ambient and heavy metal converge on the latest album from Jake Muir, a Los Angeles DJ, sound artist, field recordist, and seasoned explorer of the spaces in between. Inspired by his 2022 collaboration with Evan Caminiti, Pareidolia upturns Muir’s many hats and uses them to cook up a cosmic brew of twinkling metallic tones and irradiated drone, primarily drawn from atmospheric passages of black- and death-metal records.
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Beatrice M.: Sinking [Tectonic]
Dubstep has always been the genre of choice for Beatrice M.. On the Paris-based producer’s debut album, the dubstep connoisseur puts their own stamp on the genre, threading uplifting sounds like deep house and disco into dubstep’s dusky contours. At moments, as the album peels away from the solitary, midnight feel of dubstep, you might forget that was originally the focal point. On songs like “Motion” and “Disco Corner,” dubstep is more like the hazy aura forming around other club genres rather than a definitive and singular category.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Zoh Amba: Eyes Full [Matador]
Long embroiled in the blurts and abrasions of New York’s improv and avant-garde worlds, Zoh Amba arrives as a singer-songwriter of bolshy, clattering folk with Matador debut Eyes Full. Raised in Tennessee before reaching New York via San Francisco, Amba applies a freewheeling, people-watcher’s eye to their portraits of characters otherwise unnoticed. On Eyes Full, drums from Dirty Three’s Jim White race beneath guitars as much slashed as strummed, bathed in a warm aura of distortion. The result is an album of riotous compassion, likely to strike a chord with fans of Big Thief and the Microphones.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Widowspeak: Roses [Captured Tracks]
In their sixteen years as a working band, Widowspeak have trekked from noirish dream-pop to the more raggedy folk rock that characterizes their new album, never losing their quiet wit or homespun languor. Roses is a romantic record, sometimes coated in syrupy yearning, others, like the torchlit “If You Change,” jangling with the melancholy faith of a power-pop anthem.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Of Montreal: Aethermead [Polyvinyl]
Kevin Barnes regrouped Of Montreal in Brooklyn to work on Aethermead, writing songs in the wake of a breakup with his fiancée that are confessional “to an embarrassing degree,” he said in press materials. Business as usual, then—not just for those diaristic outpourings (“I just wanna fuck you again!” he groans on lead single “When”) but also the bamboozling melodies, lysergic hues, and winning quips that have always lifted his music out of its lyrical doldrums. Aethermead continues in that Of Montreal spirit, from the indie-rock chug of “Take the Form” to baroque-pop ballad “Already Dreaming,” a song with a “clairvoyant quality,” Barnes says, that predicted his relationship’s end just before he watched it “dissolve into nothingness.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Lyra Pramuk: Hymnal (Resung) [7K!]
This adaptation of Lyra Pramuk’s Hymnal capitalizes on the record’s orchestral, maximalist construction as the basis for radical reconfigurations by some of Pramuk’s peers in mystical, forward electronic music. Led by a Djrum rework that turns Pramuk’s “Ending” into a giant wormhole gobbling up his hyperspeed, skittering drums, Hymnal (Resung) features remixes from an international array of beatmakers and time-twisters including Colombian TraTraTrax head Verraco, Catalan duo Tarta Relena, and, working in tandem, left-field techno producers Laurel Halo and John Tejada.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Lee “Scratch” Perry, Mouse on Mars: Spatial, No Problem [Domino]
Given that dub legend Lee “Scratch” Perry is one of the most mercurial and inventive musicians to have ever walked the earth, it should come as little surprise that, five years after his death, his purported “final” album has surfaced in such unlikely form: a full-length collaboration with Mouse on Mars. Nonetheless, this pearly assemblage of sidewinding, monologued jams certainly is unexpected—just as it was to the German kosmische duo themselves. “We hardly spoke about what we were doing. We met and got going,” Jan St. Werner said of the collaboration in a press release. “He was laughing a lot and we laughed along. We also cooked and ate fish soup and papayas.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
