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 21 Savage, This Is Lorelei, Fred Again.., Nas & DJ Premier, Conway the Machine, Hercules & Love Affair, Leif, and Fucked Up. 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.)
21 Savage: What Happened to the Streets? [Slaughter Gang/Epic]
Announced at Art Basel with cover art by the Nigerian artist Slawn, What Happened to the Streets? is 21 Savage’s return to an underworld of nihilism and menace after the more reflective American Dream. The Atlanta rapper proceeds through these 14 tracks in a hypnotic drawl, sinking into night-crawling beats and rallying guests—Drake, GloRilla, Young Nudy, G Herbo, Latto, and Lil Baby among them—to join him in the murk.
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This Is Lorelei: Holo Boy [Double Double Whammy]
With dozens of homespun projects, some dating back over a decade, Nate Amos’ Bandcamp back catalog presents a daunting prospect. For his second proper LP as This Is Lorelei, Amos—also half of Water From Your Eyes—combed through the archives and re-recorded 10 songs that span yacht rock (“I Can’t Fall,” “This is a Joke”), power pop (“Dreams Away,” “Name the Band”), and more experimental directions (“Mouth Man”). As Sue Park writes in Pitchfork’s review, “what’s most impressive about Holo Boy is how breezy and self-assured it sounds. Few of these songs were intended to live together originally, but it still feels like Amos is coasting in a sweet spot; his sense of humor and ear for hooks shine through.”
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Fred Again..: USB002 [Atlantic]
Fred Again.. calls USB his “infinite” album. Dating back to 2022, the project once comprised only eight tracks but now numbers more than 30. USB002, the second official iteration, adds some names both predictable (Caribou, Floating Points) and totally out of left field (Danny Brown, Amyl and the Sniffers).
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Nas & DJ Premier: Light-Years [Mass Appeal]
Light-Years is the first full-length document of the totemic rap partnership between Nas and DJ Premier, minted on Illmatic and sustained through the ensuing decades. Talked up for more than a decade and finally announced last year—with the release of throwback single “Define My Name”—the album puts a bow on the duo’s on-off collaborations, closing out Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It series with a statement record that animates three decades’ lore in real time.
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Conway the Machine: You Can’t Kill God With Bullets [Roc Nation]
Conway the Machine stakes his claim in the upper echelons of East Coast rap on You Can’t Kill God With Bullets, growing at once bolder and more vulnerable with each release. The Buffalo-born rapper and Griselda graduate coasts through a suite of vintage, sample-heavy productions on the formal follow-up to Slant Face Killah, with producers and guests including G Herbo, Timbaland, the Alchemist, Roc Marciano, and AraabMuzik.
Hercules & Love Affair: Someone Else Is Calling EP [Stratasonic]
Hercules & Love Affair enlist Icelandic singer Hips & Lips, aka Elín Ey, as de facto frontwoman on the Someone Else Is Calling EP, putting their longtime collaborator front-and-center of four hypnotic, vaguely acid-frazzled techno workouts. “Elín’s voice is one of the purest, most magical voices I’ve worked with,” says the band’s Andy Butler, who co-produced the EP with Paranoid London’s Quinn Whalley.
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Leif: Collide [AD 93]
Cult London label AD 93 caps a banner year with this album of otherworldly experimental compositions from Welsh producer Leif. With shades of ambient, library music, neopsychedelic dance, and free jazz, the record resists classification yet moves with a singular sense of purpose, evoking fellow travelers of the pastoral kosmische like James Holden. Leif composed the record while experimenting with an old, intemperate Aria Pro II electric guitar from his childhood, embracing its damage and unpredictability to put vintage sounds in service of the unimaginable.
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Fucked Up: Grass Can Move Stones Part One: Year of the Goat [Tankcrimes]
Few bands have started recurring projects as ambitious as Fucked Up’s Zodiac series, and even fewer bands have seen those through to the very end. Nearly 20 years after they started the project, in which the Canadian hardcore band recorded albums and EPs inspired by each animal in the Chinese zodiac calendar, Fucked Up are beginning to conclude the series with Grass Can Move Stones Part One: Year of the Goat. The ten-part finale begins with this album of epic proportions, complete with grandiose choral harmonies, thundering percussion, and a punk approach to prog-rock structures. The Monkey and Rooster companion pieces—which tell one connected story tied to the Goat album—will reportedly follow next year.
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