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 Kevin Morby, Drake, Smerz, and Jeff Parker. 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.)
Kevin Morby: Little Wide Open [Dead Oceans]
Little Wide Open, Kevin Morby’s eighth solo LP, looks back on his time on the road as an adult, swishing between the freedom it offers, the unknowns that always come knocking, and a new factor: looming fatherhood, which puts it all in perspective. By his side is the National’s Aaron Dessner handling production, as well as Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Lucinda Williams, Muna’s Katie Gavin, and Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath.
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Drake: Iceman, Habibti, Maid of Honour [OVO Sound/Republic]
The public plan was to drop a new album called Iceman on May 15. Then Drake went ahead and dropped two more. The now-trilogy—including Habibti and Maid of Honour—totals 43 songs. It plays both like a data dump and a State of Drake address, with the rap star tackling a little bit of everything: the Kendrick beef, the Pusha T beef, DJ Khaled’s silence over Israel’s continued attacks on Palestinians—plus mentions of crypto, Stake, and, for some reason, getting Sam Bankman-Fried released from prison early. Your ability to get through it all will depend on your tolerance for pettiness and how many Polymarket bets you make in a day.
Iceman:
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Habibti:
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Maid of Honour
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Jeff Parker, ETA IVtet: Happy Today [International Anthem]
Happy Today, Jeff Parker’s third album with his ETA quartet, is a spellbinding document of his role at the heart of the Chicago hub where diverse players “have converged to create wildly accessible improvised music,” as Grayson Haver Currin writes in a new profile of Parker. Happy Today materialized instantaneously on stage, during a show last August at Lodge Room in Los Angeles, where Parker, drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson were locking into an improvisation when they realized a new album was writing itself in real time. The subsequent 44-minute set will double as a concert film, coming May 29.
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Smerz: Easy EP [Escho]
Smerz were wrapping up last year’s Big City Life when “Easy,” a darkly alluring ballad that wound up on the album, presented a fork in their creative path. Although the title track is absent from this six-track EP, the song’s impressionistic glow served as a North Star, as the Norwegian duo swapped the storytelling of their 2025 album for “a more open-ended process—almost like a daily journal,” they say of the EP in press materials.
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Dua Saleh: Of Earth & Wires [Ghostly International]
Dua Saleh teed up their I Should Call Them follow-up with a pair of luminous Bon Iver duets that originated, of all places, in a session for Travis Scott. A spirit of diverse collaboration may have helped incubate the LP, but Of Earth & Wires feels singularly vivid and introspective, the sound of soul, folk, rap, and soft rock winnowed down to a few abstract parts and recomposed as sophistipop gold. Gaidaa and Aja Monet also feature.
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The Field: Now You Exist [Studio Barnhus]
Axel Willner makes such sprawling loops as the Field that it only feels right for fans to have waited eight years for his next album under the alias. Now You Exist is five songs of meditative techno and drone stretched out for 40 minutes, all of which takes on the subtle hypnotism of the Field’s signature sound. While his last Field full-length, Infinite Moment, manipulated the human voice with chilling effects, his latest finds flecks of darkness in thudding electronics and extended ambiance, reaching out just far enough into the pitch black to find everything and nothing residing there simultaneously.
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Rostam: American Stories [Matsor Projects]
There’s no singular American experience. Rostam offers up his own slice of the pie with American Stories, his first new album in five years. It begins with an acoustic guitar solo and Rostam’s warm voice on “Like a Spark,” then the ex-Vampire Weekend member lifts off from there, merging Americana with traditional Persian influences. Collaborating with fellow Iranian-American musician Amir Yaghmai of the Voidz and tapping Clairo for the single “Hardy,” Rostam sounds hopeful not just in what lays ahead, but how to navigate the pathway to get there.
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Genesis Owusu: Redstar Wu & The Worldwide Scourge [Ourness]
While working on his third studio album, Genesis Owusu followed in the footsteps of countless skilled artists before him, including Nina Simone. Namely, he honed in on her famous observation that “the purpose of an artist is to reflect the times they live in,” aiming to capture a fraught global moment of cross-cultural wreckage and imperialist neglect through a melange of hip-hop, indie rock, electro, and synth funk. Lead single “Big Dog” is an apt thesis for this pursuit, conjuring the sound of a dance party at the end of the world with the same aplomb as Nourished By Time’s The Passionate Ones. In Owusu’s own words: “It’s important to remember what all that fighting is for: we’re fighting to be able to live life to the fullest.”
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Spencer Krug: Same Fangs [Pronounced Kroog]
Despite his vaguely eccentric reputation, Spencer Krug has always zigzagged between the little and large, the cosy and bombastic. As with his Moonface output, Krug’s music under his own name tends to pinball from quiet, piano-led compositions into chamber-pop swells that rise to meet his florid voice and lyrics. Following in that tradition, Same Fangs channels the maximalist spirit of Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown into more stripped-back environments. The album was recorded with producer Jordan Koop on Canada’s Gabriola Island, where the two reworked demos posted during Krug’s song-a-month Patreon series.
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Touch Girl Apple Blossom: Graceful [Perennial/K Records]
The cheeriness soaring through Touch Girl Apple Blossom’s Graceful makes it obvious they were destined to join the K Records roster. But what helps them stand against other earnest twee and indie pop is the guitar twang punching up their melodies. Whether it’s the kicked-up dirt in “The Springtime Reminds Me of…” or the lively bass that verges on a punk idea gone reckless in “Vacation,” the Austin four-piece stays on its toes while laying on the charm.
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Porches: Mask [Many Hats Endeavors]
Over the years, New York’s Aaron Maine has used his Porches alias to explore exultant dance pop, thrashy guitar rock, and brutal balladry with a low-key approach to songwriting. He has a knack for coming off like a friend of a friend who plays you a few loosies over High Lifes on a fire escape. His new mixtape Mask was made entirely on a four-track in his basement, and mixed directly from the tape machine. “I feel like a special spirit was captured in these recordings by embracing their imperfections,” he said.
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Suss: Counting Sunsets [Northern Spy]
Maybe it’s because every member of Suss is now over the age of 60, but their ambient country on Counting Sunsets sounds wiser than ever. Even though they’re juggling a number of instruments—pedal steel, piano, slide guitar, autoharp, synths, harmonium, acoustic guitar, tape loops, and a good old fashioned harmonica—Suss stretch one note into the next like ripples spreading across that sunset-colored pond from the album cover. Within those slow stretches are contemplative bursts that get you to lean back and observe your surroundings.
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Lucki: Dr*gs R Bad [Empire]
Formerly the patron saint of underground-trap mopes, Lucki reasserts his place in the contemporary rap firmament on the follow-up to 2024 album Gemini! As is his trademark, the Chicago rapper drawls through the hazy beats and cloud-rap fantasias of Dr*gs R Bad as if on the perpetual brink of some great epiphany. Across 26 tracks, he sleepily spars with guests including Lil Yachty, Chynna, Lil Baby, and, on the Mary J. Blige-sampling single “No Stars in Maybachs,” Veeze and Rylo Rodriguez.
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