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 Olivia Rodrigo, Kelsey Lu, YHWH Nailgun, Horse Lords, 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.)
Olivia Rodrigo: You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love [Geffen]
Olivia Rodrigo made a name for herself as the pop star embracing ballads and bubblegrunge influences in equal doses. You Seem Pretty Sad For a Girl So in Love, her third album, proves she’s much more than that. The follow-up to 2024’s Guts is brash and bold, flinging heartbreak around until it becomes an art medium set to ’80s new wave, string-swollen hooks, and aughts Britpop. While “Drop Dead” and “The Cure” set the album’s tone, it’s the duet “What’s Wrong With Me” with Robert Smith of the Cure that gives it an extra jolt. After debuting it live with Rodrigo at Primavera, Smith gushed about how much he admires her: “She is genuinely fantastic as a songwriter and as a singer and performer.”
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Kelsey Lu: So Help Me God [Dirty Hit]
Although multi-hyphenate Kelsey Lu might seem adept at handling her music with meticulous care, her latest record, So Help Me God, is an ode to not having everything together. “This isn’t really a healing album,” the Los Angeles-based singer and cellist said in a statement. “It’s more of a reckoning. It’s about facing the parts of myself I tried to move past, and realising they were still shaping everything.” Enlisting Jack Antonoff and Yves Rothman as co-producers and tapping Sampha, Kamasi Washington, and Kim Gordon for features, Lu burrows into the darkest corners and sharpest edges of her grief, emerging with a record that charts devotion and devastation through layers of new wave pop, orchestral R&B, and lush electronic. This is the sound of discovering who you are, idiosyncrasies and all.
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YHWH Nailgun: Magazine [4AD]
The members of YHWH Nailgun move as one piece. That seems like it would be standard for a band, especially one intricately stitching yelps, rolls, and flyaways as tightly as the New York experimental rockers do. But listening to Magazine—their new 10-track, 11-minute album—that artful density becomes singular, swaying as much as whipping between its frantic ideas. While their debut 45 Pounds stemmed from electrified math rock, Magazine blooms with expansive jazz and complex forms that feel like a daydream.
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Horse Lords: Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! [Rvng Intl.]
Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!, a typically knotty follow-up to Horse Lords’ 2022 LP Comradely Objects, continues the Baltimore-founded quartet’s quest to meld contrasting milieus—the minimalist and maximalist, childlike and intellectualized, earthy and science-fictional—into music that blends improv rock aesthetics with contemporary classical structure. The closer and title track serve as a belated mission statement, at once tonally busy and capaciously arranged, as if to make the frequency spectrum itself a character in the songs. More than formal tinkering, it plays like a heartfelt project to unseat us from complacent pessimism and reawaken a psychedelic curiosity about the future.
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Ruth Garbus: Profound [Orindal]
Ruth Garbus begins Profound “as relaxed as a woman can be when she’s filled with blood,” as she sings on “I Think I’m Ready Now,” melodies writhing from the dusty glow of her lo-fi, keys-and-guitar backdrop. The Vermont singer-songwriter’s follow-up to 2023’s Alive People spends much of its runtime tweezing such poetic gems out of complex, knotty harmonies that can intensify like haunted orbs or burst like piñatas. Garbus writes with an almost violent clarity—as well as a happy, playful sensibility she attributes to starting medication for depression and anxiety—as she locks in with bandmates Nick Bisceglia and Elie McAfee-Hahn to interrogate the modern condition.
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Wiki: Ancient History [Wikset Enterprise]
When Wiki wrapped production on his new album Ancient History, the New York rapper couldn’t have known just how electric a moment in the city’s history it would be born into. But longtime Knicks fans and bandwagoners alike will appreciate this record’s dedication to the sounds of his hometown—more specifically, its parks system, a place that has brought him refuge, community, and inspiration over the years. Fellow New Yorkers Your Old Droog, duendita, and Salimata feature, and jazzy, often-introspective production from MIKE and Navy Blue builds out Wiki’s solo universe. By the end, it really does feel like New York or nowhere.
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Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer: Purity (Flips) [10K]
New Yorkers Anysia Kym and Tony Seltzer make for a dynamic duo., but they both know a bigger team can create magic. On Purity (Flips), they curate a killer lineup of producers spread far across their taste profiles, including Traxman, Loraine James, Popstar Benny, Bored Lord, Umru, Black Noi$e, and AceMo. 454 and Vayda also hop on for features, and MIKE represents for the home team with a remix credited to his alias DJ Blackpower. It’s a testament to not just Kym and Seltzer’s flexible sound, but their formidable profile in the underground.
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CFCF: L.U.V. [CFCF]
CFCF, the project of Montreal club lynchpin Mike Silver, returns with its first album in five years and first since Silver moved to Los Angeles. L.U.V. barrels headlong into a world that straddles sleazy techno and post-SOPHIE dance-pop, full of neon-balloon textures, deadpan mantras, and synth hooks blurted out like smoking-area confessions. As much as it consolidates the advances of modern club pop—see the Cecile Believe-assisted “Bad Song” or the four-on-the-floor, dance-pad beat of “Babes”—Silver resists pure bubblegum cynicism with counterintuitive melodic arcs that draw you ever deeper into the album’s seemingly flat, shining surfaces.
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