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 Oneohtrix Point Never; Tobias Jesso Jr.; De La Soul; Sharp Pins; the Hellp; Aya Nakamura; Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover; Wrens; Fabiano do Nascimento; and Max Richter. 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.)
Oneohtrix Point Never: Tranquilizer [Warp]
Daniel Lopatin made his name on degradation, but when a library of commercial sample CDs from the 1990s vanished from the Internet Archive, the producer went on a preservationist kick. Tranquilizer may be the densest Oneohtrix Point Never album yet, evoking trips to the dentist’s office and the laser light show, Pure Moods informercials and Sunday morning cartoons. Though, as Philip Sherburne wrote in Pitchfork’s review, “Lopatin appears less interested than usual in investigating the cultural codes inherent in specific eras or subgenres; instead, he seems to be working largely intuitively, motivated by the sheer expressive potential of his sounds.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Tobias Jesso Jr.: Shine [R&R]
Shine is Tobias Jesso Jr.’s second solo album, but, in the decade since his debut, Goon, the Canadian singer-songwriter has become an industry veteran. In notching up co-writing credits for Adele, Dua Lipa, Bon Iver, and Haim, as well as a Grammy-winning turn on Harry Styles’ Harry’s House, Jesso has nonetheless shied from the spotlight. Shine returns him to center stage, albeit with minimal fanfare: recorded live at the piano, with occasional guest input from old collaborators like Danielle Haim and Justin Vernon. The combustible ballad “I Love You” led the album, with a video starring Dakota Johnson and Riley Keough.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
De La Soul: Cabin in the Sky [Mass Appeal]
Nine years after And the Anonymous Nobody..., De La Soul return with Cabin in the Sky, a new album of social commentary and comic observation set to beats poised between feel-good nostalgia and quirky experimentation. “The music on this record is not old, just seasoned,” Maseo said in press materials. “It’s what we call adult hip-hop: something rooted in the culture but speaking to where we are now.” DJ Premier, Super Dave, and Pete Rock come through on production, with guests including Killer Mike, Little Dragon’s Yukimi, Common, Nas, and the Roots’ Black Thought.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Buy at Rough Trade
Sharp Pins: Balloon Balloon Balloon [K/Perennial]
A Sharp Pins album is a crash course in power-pop history, with plenty of space on the syllabus dedicated to Brian Wilson, Alex Chilton, and Robert Pollard. If Radio DDR—originally released in 2024 but reissued this year—was the introductory lecture, Balloon Balloon Balloon is Kai Slater’s two-semester seminar. Across 21 tracks and at least twice that many hooks, the Lifeguard guitarist and co-vocalist fills in the blank encyclopedia entries between, say, the Beatles and the Byrds, or Girls and Guided by Voices. These songs are timeless enough to have been written any time in the last 60 years, and vital enough that only a twentysomething could have written them.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
The Hellp: Riviera [Anemoia]
Almost exactly a year ago, the Hellp released LL, a major-label debut that was much-touted, albeit mostly by the Los Angeles duo itself. On Riviera, Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy’s no-nonsense electropop achieves the crowd-pleasing, high-stakes magnitude that major labels promise. “Riviera is more solemn, restrained and impassioned than anything we’ve done before,” they said in press materials. “But it’s still got that visceral, almost desperate feel, that’s really what the story it tells is—the desperate story of the disparate Americana, our American dream.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Aya Nakamura: Destinée [Nakamura Industrie]
During the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics last year, Aya Nakamura launched a thousand TikTok imitators when she strutted across a gold catwalk on the Pont des Arts, flanked by sparkler fountains and dancers as she performed her Afrobeats-fusion hits on one of the grandest stages imaginable. Now, the French Malian singer is taking a well-deserved victory lap with fifth album Destinée. Kali Uchis, Shenseea, Kany, JayO, and Joé Dowèt Filé make up a globe-trotting guest list that amps up Nakamura’s signature, melodic sound with flourishes from the worlds of R&B, kompa, and reggae.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover: What of Our Nature [Fat Possum]
Singer-songwriters Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover make good on the promise of their 2018 EP, Among Horses III, with the spry, conversational folk of follow-up What of Our Nature. Written on opposite coasts and recorded, straight-through and direct to tape, in Vermont, the album is imbued with the spirit of Woody Guthrie, whose writings the pair studied as they dreamt up the inquiries into colonialism, generational identity, and commercialism that comprise the album.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Wrens: Half of What You See [Out of Your Head]
Not to be confused with the beleaguered New Jersey indie-rock band, Wrens are a free jazz four-piece based in Brooklyn, New York, whose second album, Half of What You See, unifies an improvisatory assemblage of electronics, drums, cello, trumpet, and lyrics in service of radical, avant-garde upheaval. Said the band’s Ryan Easter in press materials, the album entailed “painting a landscape of feverish dissonance and tunnels of matted, hairy sonic architecture” in a studio “filled with laughter.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Fabiano do Nascimento: Cavejaz [Leaving]
The inspiration for the title of Fabiano do Nascimento’s Cavejaz was simple: The album “kind of sounds like music coming from a cave with water and organic elements,” the Brazilian American guitarist and composer said in press materials, thanking his sometime collaborator Sam Gendel for the suggestion. The image bears out in a series of limpid compositions that sequester knotty bundles of guitar, tabla, and percussion in cavernous productions. Fellow spelunkers Paulo Santos (of Uakti) and U-zhaan dip in and out of the LP, and Jennifer Souza and Tiki Pasillas also feature.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Max Richter: Hamnet (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [Decca]
In Hamnet, a film adaptation of the Maggie O’Farrell novel, director Chloé Zhao imagines the relationship between Agnes (played by Jessie Buckley) and William Shakespeare (portrayed by Paul Mescal) and the cataclysmic loss of their young child, an event that forms the genesis for Hamlet. Zhao tapped prolific composer Max Richter for the score, who has no problem building intricate, enveloping music to match the grief-stricken tale’s intense gravity. His music for Hamnet appropriately touches on Elizabethan musical practices throughout, swelling with mournful strings and delicate choral arrangements that draw on the story’s deep sense of familial loss.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Buy at Rough Trade
English (US) · 