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 Ratboys, J. Cole, Mandy, Indiana, and more. 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.)
Ratboys: Singin’ to an Empty Chair [New West]
.jpg)
Ratboys have been slinging alt-country indie rock for nearly 16 years now, but the Chicago band has never sounded better, or more true to itself, than on Singin’ to an Empty Chair. Produced by ex-Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla and recorded in a remote Wisconsin cabin they all called home for a while, their sixth album is an exercise in chemistry, trust, and just letting it rip. As Walla told Nina Corcoran for Pitchfork’s recent profile: “Some [bands] are fractured and tormented and ultimately unsustainable, and the discord fuels the work until it doesn’t. Some are blissful and lucky and just happy to be there. Ratboys work because they work.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Mandy, Indiana: Urgh [Sacred Bones]
.jpg)
I’ve Seen a Way, the debut album from Mandy, Indiana, blended bloghouse, industrial, and post-punk into gospel for a society on the verge of breakdown. On their follow-up, URGH, their sound stretches to even greater extremes. Valentine Caulfield spits out the lyrics in her native French, yowling and rapping while percussion gallops, electric guitar croaks like crushed steel, and delirious synth arpeggios fan out like neon strobes. Recorded while Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall recovered from multiple surgeries, the album has violence embedded into every shocking note.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton: Anata [Puro Fantasía]
Less than a year after the revelatory, self-titled debut of Los Thuthanaka, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, one half of the duo, returns with a solo follow-up to his 2024 album Estrella por Estrella. Where Los Thuthanaka induced a state of chaotic mesmerism, Anata mixes divine soundscapes with heavy riffing that thrashes right through them, whipping tendrils of harmony into a concussive maelstrom. The title, says Chuquimia Crampton, refers to an Andean celebration of Mother Earth staged each year before rainy season, which he evokes with a production style akin to capturing “a ceremony or a natural phenomenon with a phone camera.”
Beverly Glenn-Copeland: Laughter in Summer [Transgressive]
.jpg)
When Beverly Glenn-Copeland announced his dementia diagnosis in 2024, he said in a joint statement with his wife Elizabeth, “We want to challenge the mainstream image of this illness, which focuses on loss. We are actively asking the universe to show us where the life is here.” More than a year later, the pair’s new collaboration Laughter in Summer charts that course, acting as a mutual love letter and a firm embrace of the future. (A new arrangement of Glenn-Copeland’s 2007 track “Children’s Anthem” is dedicated to the couple’s granddaughter.) Recorded with engineer Howard Bilerman and a Canadian choir, it’s improvisatory and theatrical while remaining grounded in Glenn-Copeland’s rich, singular tenor. The title draws inspiration from a phrase Beverly sang to Elizabeth while at work on a still-unreleased project, Songs Without Words: “Laughter in summer, how I remember.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Daphni: Butterfly [Jiaolong]
.jpg)
Can an artist collaborate with themselves? On Butterfly, Dan Snaith’s first Daphni album since 2022, he makes a worthy case for it. The Canadian producer’s new endeavor under his dance alias includes one song, “Waiting So Long,” which “features” vocals attributed to Snaith’s other project, Caribou. In press materials, Snaith says the improbable match-up embodies the synchronicity of his artistry these days, and Butterfly finds him in step with his inner selector. Opening in an elegant blitz of house and post-EDM metered by interludes of dub and jazz, Butterfly flutters into funkier, stranger territory as the tracklist fades out. But it never loses the free-associative, peak-time spirit that the Daphni moniker embodies.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Asher White: Jessica Pratt [Joyful Noise]
Asher White’s new album is one long Jessica Pratt cover: a full-length reimagining of the singer-songwriter’s self-titled debut. What began as a “procrastination tactic” became, says White, a celebration of Pratt’s masterful songwriting on the LP (“like if Elliott Smith wrote a full album of ‘Say Yes’s”) and its shades of harmonic suggestion. Pratt herself approves: “White’s curiously inventive renditions took me by surprise,” she says in press materials. “A broad sweep stylistically and production-wise. Not just homage but a record in its own right.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
J. Cole: The Fall-Off [Interscope]
.png)
Whether or not J. Cole’s long-teased seventh album is actually his swan song, The Fall-Off certainly marks some sort of culmination. Ahead of the two-disc release, hip-hop’s self-proclaimed “middle child” has wound down his Dreamville festival and Kendrick Lamar beef—though a few strays find their way in here—and even squeezed in some surprise-mixtape joyrides that could be perceived as last hurrahs. In a typically verbose note he shared with the music video for “Disc 2 Track 2,” Cole explained that The Fall-Off is a downgrade in name alone; nearly two decades after dropping breakout tape The Come-Up, he intends to go out on a high. “For the past ten years, this album has been hand crafted with one intention: a personal challenge to myself to create my best work,” he wrote. “To do on my last what I was unable to do on my first.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Ella Mai: Do You Still Love Me? [Interscope]
.png)
Ella Mai has courted born-in-the-wrong-generation romantics since the “Boo’d Up” days; the UK singer thrives in the lush, laidback space between ’90s R&B and retro pop, where good love is simple, sweet, and starry-eyed. Her new album Do You Still Love Me? maintains this outlook with added poise, thanks in part to executive production from everyone’s favorite Kendrick ad-lib Mustard. Wise without feeling too world-weary, Do You Still Love Me? is warm and methodical in both composition and content. On the single “100,” she promises to stay true to a lover far less financially flush than her, even if the scales never quite even out. Love is patient, right?
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Buy at Rough Trade
English (US) · 