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 Dijon, Cass McCombs, Chance the Rapper, Marissa Nadler, Protect, Pile, Recoechi, Mondo Lava, Pool Kids, and Racing Mount Pleasant. 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.)
Dijon: Baby [R&R/Warner]
Dijon’s back, baby! Since releasing his debut album, Absolutely, in 2021 and the one-off single “Coogie,” in 2023, the songwriter with an unmistakable rasp has lent his voice and pen to Bon Iver’s SABLE, fABLE, Justin Bieber’s surprise-released Swag, and Two Star & the Dream Police by longtime collaborator Mk.gee (who also guests here). His new album, Baby, was heralded only by a website with a countdown clock, but it’s as bold as the rollout was minimal, complete with Princely flourishes, chintzy gated snares, and double title tracks to boot.
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Cass McCombs: Interior Live Oak [Domino]
Cass McCombs’ recent reissue campaign prompted him to get back to the basics on Interior Live Oak, his solo follow-up to 2022’s Heartmind. As well as reuniting with past collaborators like Matt Sweeney, Papercuts’ Jason Quever, and Deerhoof’s Chris Cohen, the august singer-songwriter strips down to the elemental sensibility with which he made his classic early albums, while elaborating on the more personal lyricism of Heartmind with some of his most intimate observational detail to date.
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Chance the Rapper: Star Line [self-released]
Chance the Rapper returns, six years on, with The Big Day follow-up Star Line. With some Lil Wayne and Smino assistance, he introduced the album with “Tree,” a chill treatise on the “government scam” of dispensary weed that doubles as a tribute to the high moms of the world. Additional guests on Star Line include Vic Mensa, Jamila Woods, BJ the Chicago Kid, Joey Bada$$, Jazmine Sullivan, Young Thug, and TiaCorine. He’ll promote the album on the And We Back Tour starting next month.
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Marissa Nadler: New Radiations [Sacred Bones]
Marissa Nadler’s fingerpicked lullabies seem designed to induce the sort of sleep that hovers on the precipice between dream and nightmare. New Radiations—the follow-up to The Path of the Clouds and its companion EP, The Wrath of the Clouds—tells stories of surreal and introspective adventure in tones at once heavenly and subterranean, with mixing engineer Randall Dunn on hand to further enhance its drone undercarriage.
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Protect: 500 Days of Summer [℗ 2025]
Off the back of a string of viral successes pegged to last year’s Ball Hog for Life mixtape, Protect returns with this dreamy 19-track manifesto announcing the Ball Hog collective founder as a driving force in Buffalo rap. Inspired by the “cinematic sequencing” of the film of the same name, 500 Days of Summer mixes introspective lyrics and astral, ad hoc hooks, as Texas producer Cade keeps him on his toes with volleys of otherworldly beats.
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Pile: Sunshine and Balance Beams [Sooper]
Sixteen years in, Pile are cemented as a post-hardcore institution and bellwether for DIY rock bands everywhere. The Boston stalwarts present Sunshine and Balance Beams as their latest showcase of wily hooks, textural invention, and high-tension basslines, as Rick Maguire meanders across the high wire with vocals by turns gruff, plaintive, and endearingly daydreamy.
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Recoechi: Flavaz [Closed Sessions]
Recoechi’s debut album, Flavaz, represents a breakout moment for an artist whose respected standing in his native Chicago has long outweighed his relatively modest output. The record’s nuance and soulfulness deliver on the promise, as Dash Lewis notes in Pitchfork’s review. “His thick tenor and syrupy Chicago drawl strain under the weight of his words,” Lewis writes, “which oscillate between clear-eyed notes on the struggles of American life—especially for Black people in his perpetually embattled and belittled city—and the burning, unbreakable belief that a better world is possible.”
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Mondo Lava: Utero Dei [Hausu Mountain]
Utero Dei is the latest in a string of ecstatic, tape-deck recordings Mondo Lava have made for experimental label Hausu Mountain. The duo of James Ketchum and Leon Hu worked with vocalist and keyboardist Obese Parchís to summon the currents of dubbed-out ambient new-age and nostalgic hauntology that run through the new record, while a percussive network of congas, tumbas, pandeiros, shakers, and claves conjures tropicalía and the proto-disco of South American dance music.
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Pool Kids: Easier Said Than Done [Epitaph]
Pool Kids came through Florida’s DIY emo scene, but, on Easier Said Than Done, set designs on a pop breakthrough that strips at least half a layer of irony from the band name. The reinvention sacrifices none of their madcap energy, and Christine Goodwyne is still on prime form, roaring lyrics with all the wry wit and arch humor one expects of a band whose signature tune is called “$5 Subtweet.”
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Racing Mount Pleasant: Racing Mount Pleasant [R&R]
Racing Mount Pleasant are the Dijon labelmates (and now release-day twins) formerly known as Kingfisher. The Michigan septet previewed its self-titled debut with “Call It Easy,” “Racing Mount Pleasant,” and “Your New Place,” showcasing a style of baroque pop that’s not a far cry from the rambling grandeur of Black Country, New Road.
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