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 Bladee, Fakemink, and Eli. 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.)
Bladee: Sulfur Surfer [Trash Island]
From the opening bars of Bladee’s eighth studio album, the stakes are as high as heaven. “I hereby declare war on the evil star, I demand it’s defeat,” he repeats as a mantra on the opening title track, delving further into the spiritual imagery he’s toyed with over the past decade. Produced in full by fellow Drain Gang member Whitearmor, Sulfur Surfer toes the line between the introspective, blown-out doomerism of Cold Visions and the softer, more ethereal tones of 2022’s Crest.
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Fakemink: Terrified [EtnaVeraVela]
After announcing his frenetic, flex-heavy mixtape The Boy Who Cried Terrified in January, Fakemink unloaded another surprise: he also had an LP, Terrified, on the way. The rollout preceding the album has been all theatrics, no brakes, from his comparison of its structure to Dante’s Inferno to the release date announcement, which arrived courtesy of a British Royal Guard marching onstage at Rolling Loud with flags boasting “May 22.” For anyone who has followed the not-so-bedroom-anymore rapper’s rise, this pastiche of showmanship and secrecy will come as no surprise—and the music itself synthesizes a similar mix across textures pulled from bloghouse, indie rock, cloud rap, and more.
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Eli: Girl Of Your Dreams (Not a Dream Anymore) [Zelig/RCA]
Of all the pop princesses ruling benevolently over the airwaves these days, Eli comes the closest to capturing the fabulous girl-next-door flare of Lindsay Lohan in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen or the one and only Hannah Montana. Sonically, though, she’s all about vocal runs and lush ‘00s R&B that wouldn’t be out of place among Mariah Carey and Ariana Grande’s demos. After arriving with her 2025 debut, Stage Girl, which she paired with a fictional American Idol-style reality TV show, Eli is back with a deluxe edition, Girl Of Your Dreams (Not a Dream Anymore). This collection expands neatly on the classic Eli melange: part “first kiss at a school dance,” part “he ain’t shit,” and 100% packed with high notes you will happily try and fail to hit.
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Veeze: Y’all Won [Navy Wavy]
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Detroit rapper Veeze is an expert at building tension through well-deserved hype. By the time his simultaneously goofy and gutting 2023 debut Ganger officially dropped, the murmur master had already been in demand for years, largely thanks to some formidable features and hard-to-forget loosies like 2020’s “Law N Order.” His new mixtape, Y'all Won, manages to be both a surprise release and a long-awaited collection: it gathers leaks and snippets, some of which have been circulating for a minute, into one concise package without a guest in sight.
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Aja Monet: The Color of the Rain [Drink Sum Wtr]
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Rain makes a nice metaphor for the stylings of Grammy winner Aja Monet: jazz, soul, hip hop, and blues all refract through the prism of her poetic constructions, revealing new shades of her sound while maintaining a unifying fluidity and immersiveness. The Color Of Rain, the follow-up to her 2023 debut, upscales her characteristically lyrical musings with full-band live instrumentation and a vibrant cast of featured players including Georgia Anne Muldrow, Mick Jenkins, and Vic Mensa. Meshell Ndegeocello, who co-produced the LP with Monet and Justin Brown, also appears on the track “Elsewhere,” which reads like a definitive passing of the torch.
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Marisa Anderson: The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music [Thrill Jockey]
Marisa Anderson’s latest album of epic, horizon-gazing guitar compositions pulls from an international songbook that includes work from Afghanistan, Vietnam, Yemen, and Cambodia. No coincidence that these are all sites of U.S.-instigated conflict: The Oregon-based composer worked on the album alongside a period of intensive study of music from the collection of the late record collector (well, everything collector) Harry Smith, gravitating towards music improperly documented in typical U.S. collections. In her sun-blistered, inquisitive guitar style, Anderson found a through line between these disparate sounds, while acknowledging that the record might also serve as an “illustration of what is lost in the transposition of music from the east to the west.”
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Car Seat Headrest: Teen of Denial: Joe’s Story [Matador]
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Teen of Denial: Joe’s Story turns the angsty catharsis of Will Toledo and Car Seat Headrest’s breakout album into something akin to a concept album about that angst. The full-length rerecording—now shorn of expletives—celebrates the record’s 10th anniversary (with the unintended consequence of sparking a discourse about Toledo’s ostensible religious views). The result, says Toledo in press materials, “feels more like the album Teens of Denial was meant to be”: some new lyrics, new overdubs, and a newfound sense of rising above it all to proudly claim the mantle of generational indie-rockers.
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Duval Timothy and Carlos Niño: Rain Music [Carrying Colour]
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Percussionist Carlos Niño and pianist Duval Timothy have moved in the same artistic circles for years, establishing themselves among a new wave of eclectic musicians with a knack for jazz improvisation. But with Niño based in Santa Monica and Timothy operating between Sierra Leone and London, face-to-face collaboration was never in the cards—that is, until one especially soggy London afternoon last November, when Niño took advantage of a day off tour and made his way to Timothy’s studio. The result of that impromptu and wildly generative session, Rain Music, foregrounds each musician’s strengths—Niño’s verdant and atmospheric percussion lines, Timothy’s nesting-doll chords and ambient-minded constructions—without ever playing favorites. With support from frequent Niño collaborator Nate Mercereau, the duo lands on a set of compositions as expressive as they are open-ended: an always-welcome reminder that, sometimes, going with the flow yields the most formidable work.
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Ecca Vandal: Looking for People to Unfollow [Loma Vista]
Although South African-born artist Ecca Vandal’s sharp-elbowed music jumps with authority between alternative rock, hip-hop, hardcore, and even bhangra, the molten core of her new album Looking for People to Unfollow is punk through and through. Recorded and produced over the course of two years by Vandal and Richie Buxton from the latter’s childhood bedroom, the raucous record is playful, brazen, and proudly disillusioned by anything and everything algorithm-friendly. “I find empowerment in being loud and noisy especially as a woman in this global moment who grew up in a culture that told me I could not be those things,” Vandal said in a press release.
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Mabe Fratti and Bill Orcutt: Almost Waking [Unheard of Hope]
Mabe Fratti and Bill Orcutt’s new collaborative album began, as so many modern meetings of the minds do, with some unexpected internet chat. After the pair connected online, Orcutt sent the Guatemalan multi-instrumentalist a series of guitar solos to bounce off of, with arrangement support from Fratti’s Titanic bandmate I. La Catolica. Ultimately, Orcutt and Fratti landed on a set of compositions that conjure an aching sense of nostalgia and familiarity through cello and guitar melodies that interweave and blossom like a trellis-climbing vine.
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Visible Cloaks: Paradessence [Rvng Intl.]
From kissa bars to city pop, Western fascination with Japanese musical tradition is a well-worn trope at this point. But Portland ambient duo Visible Cloaks have set themselves apart from the trend-chasing masses through their genuinely meaningful contributions to Japanese genre kankyō ongaku, or “environmental music.” Last year, Spencer Doran, who makes up the group alongside Ryan Carlile, curated the Grammy-nominated compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990; and the duo’s latest album, Paradessence, continues to build on kankyō ongaku’s praxis by making music for the world we’re in, as opposed to the futurist utopias. Their first album in nine years, Paradessence, surveys a global landscape defined by genocide, climate catastrophe, and post-pandemic disorder with clarity, weaving unnerving builds with gorgeous, blooming moments best listened to in one fell swoop.
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Ed O’Brien: Blue Morpho [Transgressive]
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Radiohead may be back in the touring mix, but that’s not stopping guitarist Ed O’Brien from continuing to nurture his solo work—and, in doing so, grappling with some of life’s hard truths. In a press statement, O’Brien said that his new album Blue Morpho, which follows his 2020 debut Earth, was written during one of “the most challenging periods” of his life, earmarked by a deep depression that wracked him in late 2020 and the hours of daily guitar playing that led to a light at the end of the tunnel. Produced by Paul Epworth and featuring Shabaka Hutchings and composer Tõnu Kõrvits, the album arrives alongside an accompanying short film, Blue Morpho: The Three Act Play.
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Thomas Dollbaum: Birds of Paradise [Dear Life]
Florida-born, Louisiana-based songwriter Thomas Dollbaum’s specific strain of heartland rock is all about place. He has the type of rich baritone that reverberates throughout a room, outlining its every identifying nook and cranny in the process. However, on his second album, he draws inspiration from the great American pastime of roaming, revisiting past relationships and old wounds like familiar haunts. Recorded in Oxford, Mississippi over the course of a week, the record features a backing band of Josh Halper, Nick Corson, and MJ Lenderman, the latter of whom tackles drums, guitar, and backing vocals.
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