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 xaviersobased, Shackleton, and Joyce Manor. 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.)
xaviersobased: Xavier [1-chance / Surf Gang Records]
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To call xaviersobased’s debut album “long-awaited” might be an understatement. Over two years into a killer run of mixtapes, EPs and load-bearing loosies, it’s hard to fathom that the crown prince of New York underground rap hasn’t dropped an official LP until now. But he takes care to set the 20-track Xavier apart from past releases, foregrounding his own production (on lead single “iPhone 16”) and keeping the features list as selective as it is inspired. OsamaSon, Yung Sherman, and Zaytoven under one roof? Consider us enthused.
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Shackleton: Euphoria Bound [AD 93]
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British producer Shackleton has spent over a decade pushing percussion to thrilling highs (and, of course, lows). His label Skull Disco was on the front lines of dubstep’s UK explosion in the mid-2000s, and in recent years he has sought out a diverse array of collaborators, from Tectonic boss Pinch to Italian avant-garde performer Ernesto Tomasini to leftfield Polish composer Waclaw Zimpel. Despite the high bar, his new album Euphoria Bound still finds new frequencies to vibrate on, pairing the experimental spirit of jazz with serious bass-weight and spectral vocals. He’s found a pocket that’s both texturally and tonally exciting.
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Joyce Manor: I Used to Go to This Bar [Epitaph]
Three and a half years have passed since Joyce Manor’s last album, 40 oz. to Fresno—the longest gap between LPs since the California pop-punk greats careened into immortality with their self-titled 2011 debut. While age can bring a change of pace, no such slowdown is evident in I Used to Go to This Bar. Led by the title track’s scrum of hurtling guitars and nostalgic earworms, the LP zips through West Coast anthems that crackle with the excitement of their return to touring (work on the record began as pandemic restrictions eased in early 2023). Bad Religion’s Brett Gurewitz produces, and Enema of the State engineer Tom Lord-Alge makes several contributions.
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fakemink: The Boy Who Cried Terrified [EtnaVeraVela]
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One day, the brainrot-fluent bards of the future will spin yarns about the rise of fakemink: the singles that just kept getting better, the Frank Ocean and Playboi Carti cosigns, the Nettspend beef, the countless IG Lives. The UK rapper came out swinging in 2024 with a debut titled London’s Saviour, and The Boy Who Cried Terrified maintains the inertia of a rocket mid-blastoff. The mixtape, which sets the table for his much-hyped forthcoming album Terrified, confidently steps into underground eras past. From sampling Burial’s 2013 track “Rival Dealers” on a single to throwing out bars about inspiring Britain’s next generation, he’s pulling out all the stops.
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Geologist: Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? [Drag City]
Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? is the Geologist album we were all waiting for: a sprawling, prog-spirited opus designed to answer the question of how it would sound if punk producer Ethan James had made a hurdy gurdy album for SST. Inspired by a Keiji Haino performance he saw in 1998, Brian Weitz made the new album as a roundabout attempt to fulfill his childhood dream of becoming the next Greg Ginn. “I still can’t play or write like my favorites, but the hurdy gurdy got me closer than guitar ever did,” he says in press materials. Fellow Animal Collective member Avey Tare and Weitz’s son Merrick are among the contributors.
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Don Toliver: Octane [Cactus Jack/Donway & Co/Atlantic Records]
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Two years after the release of Hardstone Psycho, Don Toliver returns to Travis Scott’s label with a new album inspired by rally racing culture and, more broadly, his passion for cars. Aptly titled Octane, it’s another showcase of the rapper’s melodic, R&B-inflected trap that plants his voice front and center—across 18 tracks, there’s not a single feature. He’ll pressure test the record live later this year when he headlines Rolling Loud alongside Playboi Carti and YoungBoy Never Broke Again.
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The Soft Pink Truth: Can Such Delightful Times Go on Forever? [Thrill Jockey]
On his latest solo LP as the Soft Pink Truth, Matmos’ Drew Daniel applies his usual puckish sensibility—and a flex of compositional largesse—to a suite of chamber music that uplifts the anxiety and horror of recent years in a late-Romantic sweep. Presented as his “queer refuge” and performed by a transcontinental cast of musicians, Can Such Delightful Times Go on Forever? is Daniel’s great exhale of beauty into authoritarian times, overflowing with emotions so vast and pulsing they form a temporary shield around those seeking shelter.
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By Storm: My Ghosts Go Ghost [DeadAir]
When their Injury Reserve bandmate Stepa J. Groggs died in 2020, Parker Corey and Ritchie With a T retired the moniker, explaining in a statement that they wanted to “respect the specificity of all three of us.” The duo’s first album under new alias By Storm is instinctive and inextricable from a profound sense of forced metamorphosis—it’s also a pretty intimate affair, with only billy woods contributing a verse to “Best Interest.” Whether art is imitating life or the other way around, this is a new chapter worth tuning into.
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Lande Hekt: Lucky Now [Tapete]
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Since her 2021 debut, Going to Hell, Lande Hekt has carved a niche equally rooted in British twee-pop and the ecstatic yearn of indie-rock. Written and produced with latter-day Wire guitarist Matthew Simms, Lucky Now is the Bristol singer-songwriter’s first album in four years and follow-up to House Without a View. “I wanted to try and push for something slightly more positive,” the former Muncie Girls frontperson says of the lyrics, “which I’m trying to do more of generally—just to not fall apart.”
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Blackwater Holylight: Not Here Not Gone [Suicide Squeeze]
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Three years ago, hard-rock trio Blackwater Holylight moved south from Portland to Los Angeles, a transition that left them with a blank slate and a sunnier outlook on production. Their new album digs into that transition, adding light synth work to heavier shoegaze riffs and exploring all the emotions associated with a big move—but mostly, the time it takes to settle in. “If there were to be a theme to the album, it would be patience,” vocalist, guitarist, and bassist Sunny Faris said in a statement. Frequent TV on the Radio and Run the Jewels producer Dave Sitek also features, contributing the beat for instrumental track “Giraffe.”
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Zukenee: ZUMINATI [SlayLife]
Zukenee has long approached the Atlanta rap underground like his own medieval round table—in an average year, you can find him brandishing swords, lighting spliffs with candles, and referencing blood pacts. His last album, 2025’s Slaytanic, built his breakout Birth of St. Slay into a whole odyssey of pounding hooves, flute melodies, and woodland trysts with fair maidens. On his latest, ZUMINATI, he's tackling a new secret society with a lot more Hollywood clout, but keeping his inner circle hyperlocal—the album’s only guest appearance is fellow Georgia upstart Sk8star, who hops on “Glock Backshots.”
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