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 projects from Mavi, Jessie J, Plosivs, Crimeapple, Pink Siifu, and Blut Aus Nord. 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.)
Mavi: The Pilot [Loma Vista]
Mavi made his name as a master stylist of intense, hermetic, lo-fi rap that rewarded scrutiny and contemplation. The Pilot is a change of pace for the North Carolina rapper: In the year since his last project, Shadowbox, Mavi got sober and inculcated a more freewheeling philosophy of music. Part of that shift entailed opening himself to collaboration: This year’s singles with Earl Sweatshirt and Smino—“Landgrab” and “Potluck,” both included here—were the first Mavi singles with features, and Kenny Mason and MIKE join proceedings elsewhere on The Pilot. While the album is his most limber and effusive yet, it sacrifices none of his quiet virtuosity.
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Jessie J: Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time [D.A.P.]
A Jessie J song once guaranteed vocal pyrotechnics on the scale of the Disneyland fireworks extravaganza. That’s mostly still true on Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time, but the British singer’s first album in eight years—which balances R&B jams with misty 1980s pop—does more with less. On lead single “No Secrets,” Jessie J turns in one of her most restrained performances as she wrestles with life in the public eye. “I’m standing here naked/But I chose the spotlight,” she croons. “Sometimes I hate it, sometimes it feels nice.”
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Plosivs: Yell at Cloud [Swami]
In 2022, the San Diego punk-rock supergroup of Pinback’s Rob Crow, Rocket From the Crypt’s John Reis and Atom Willard, and Mrs. Magician’s Jordan Clark released a debut album as Plosivs. By that time, the band had already started work on its follow-up, albeit in less than ideal circumstances. Already hemmed in at a Winnipeg studio due to COVID-19 lockdowns, the band was stranded by a massive Arctic storm and forced to work by candlelight in below freezing conditions. (To quote the label copy, “Imagine a band trying making a record in John Carpenter’s The Thing.”) But record the group did, eventually overcoming the dark period of the album’s creation to complete the claustrophobic recordings and release them, as Yell at Cloud, on Reis’ stalwart label Swami.
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Crimeapple: Hanzai [Manteca Music]
Hanzai is New Jersey rapper Crimeapple’s fifth project of the year, following Escama, Jaguar on Palisade 3, Rose Gold, and the wonderfully titled Bulletproof Chicken. He previewed the new one with “Zipfile” and “Forever,” both produced by Loman, and he invited underground Massachusetts rapper RLX to feature on the mixtape’s “Talmbout.” Don’t expect surprises on Hanzai, just spacious, golden-era-style beats and more high-level rap music from Crimeapple.
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Pink Siifu: Onyx’! [Dynamite Hill]
Onyx’! is the expansion suite of Pink Siifu’s January album, Black’!Antique, which gets its deluxe release today. “If the original was chaotic this is more of the fun based in that chaos, the energy of the first half dialed in more, with a melancholy and dark atmosphere,” Pink Siifu said in press materials. Guests include Armand Hammer, Valee, and, on a pair of songs including the single “Nun+,” Kal Banx.
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Blut Aus Nord: Ethereal Horizons [Debemur Morti Productions]
Now on their 16th album, the outré French metal band Blut Aus Nord is running out of rock kingdoms to conquer. The quartet steers its black metal behemoth into post-rock, prog, and even European kosmische and darkwave territory on Ethereal Horizons, taking unlikely twists and genre-busting turns at every corner. The result is an album that honors the fundamentals of black metal by showing the vast universes that such music can contain.
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