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 King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard; Buscabulla; Maiya Blaney; Skaiwater; Annahstasia; FearDorian; Lyra Pramuk; Lil Tecca; Brandee Younger; and James Holden & Wacław Zimpel. 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.)
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Phantom Island [(P)Doom]
Strings, horns, and woodwind add a veneer of regal fanfare to King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s 27th studio album, reaffirming their joint status as rock court jesters and jam-band royalty. The Australian sextet has scarcely sounded more celebratory than it does on Phantom Island, an album of uber-psychedelic soft rock garnished with disco, prog, and fiddly folk flourishes. It is absurd, orchestral, and typically adventurous, but also more “introverted” than usual, says singer-guitarist Stu Mackenzie, the ensemble’s shaggy-dog lyrics dotted with notes of existential wonder.
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Buscabulla: Se Amaba Así [Domino]
Much of Se Amaba Así, the sophomore album from Buscabulla, is concerned with vision: how we view the past through a contemporary lens, how we see our romantic relationships, and how we spot a pathway forward. The Puerto Rican synth-pop duo brings an upbeat grounding to those subjects on the long-awaited follow-up to 2020’s Regresa. “El Camino” warps disco guitar into a mellow song of romance, while “Te Fuiste” subdues a thudding kickdrum beat until the cascading synths over it infuse listeners with a calming energy. Putting an eye to the viewfinder can feel a little destabilizing, but, in Buscabulla’s grip. on Se Amaba Así, listeners can look farther and deeper without losing balance.
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Maiya Blaney: A Room With a Door That Closes [Lex]
Though its breakbeats and splashes of drum’n’bass could prep for a natural high at the club, A Room With a Door That Closes isn’t all that chipper. New York producer and singer-songwriter Maiya Blaney considers the album to be a “a love letter to her blue,” where her soulful vocals can turn acoustic guitar or drum breaks into melancholic moments of reflection. The change of tempos backlights her sadness against crisp instrumentation and blurry rhythms, like Blaney is staring out a foggy bus window on the ride home. Bolstered by the singles “Honey I,” “Fumbled,” and “Recognize Me,” A Room With a Door That Closes is her debut full-length.
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Skaiwater: PinkPrint 3 EP [GoodTalk]
British rapper-producer Skaiwater can’t stop churning out purse-laden projects like they’re curating an art exhibit of sparkly, pitched-up plugg. Following February’s #MIA and May’s double dose of PinkPrint and PinkPrint 2, Skaiwater is back already with the PinkPrint 3 EP. Fusing the glitchy electronica of underground pop from the aughts with alt-R&B and trap, Skaiwater once again sings as much as they rap, completing a flash trilogy of airy Auto-Tune songs almost as quickly as it appeared.
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Annahstasia: Tether [Drink Sum Wtr]
Debuts rarely sound as composed, bold, or downright intense as Tether, the decade-in-the-making LP from Annahstasia. After years of craft, exploration, and industry tumult, the singer-songwriter enlisted producers for Frank Ocean, ANOHNI, and Moses Sumney for a record that shares those artists’ pop instincts, as well as their steely nerve, threading outsider artistry into compositions that range from haunted folk laments to gothic outpourings like closer “Believer”—the kind of song, said Annahstasia in press materials, that “some teenager in the midwest plays on repeat for two hours straight high off his mind laying on the shag rug, staring at the basement ceiling, dreaming and crying.”
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FearDorian: Out the Past With a Window [self-released]
A few months after Leaving Home, FearDorian is back with a new, self-produced record of bitesize rap odysseys. The rapper-producer and Surf Gang associate brings along guests Ladé and Prblem for Out the Past With a Window, recorded between New York and his Atlanta hometown and in the spirit of his sometime stomping ground of Milwaukee.
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Lyra Pramuk: Hymnal [7K!/pop.soil]
Five years after making a splash with the oceanic vocal symphonies of Fountain, Lyra Pramuk returns with a similarly intricate, newly baroque suite of compositions themed around the “socially connective ritual between humans, animals, and the Earth,” as she put it in press materials. Pramuk composed the songs of Hymnal in collaboration with the Sonar Quartett, using her dance chops to reconfigure the ensemble’s cascading strings into abstract rhythms.
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Lil Tecca: Dopamine [Galactic/Republic]
When Lil Tecca went viral and broke out in 2019, he was still a kid. The New York rapper has since matured in the literal sense since, as well as with his music, shifting from the playful flow and melody-forward verses he was known for towards a more even-tempered, cool delivery. That evolution over the course of four studio albums has led him to Dopamine, where Lil Tecca still indulges in fun choices—single “Owa Owa” isolates and loops the backup vocal harmonies from the 1979 classic “Video Killed the Radio Star”—with a little more finesse.
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Brandee Younger: Gadabout Season [Impulse!]
If you judge an album by its title, then Gadabout Season delivers on its promise. Carefree in motion and charmed by its surroundings, Brandee Younger’s eighth album gets lost in a dreamlike blend of lightweight jazz, classical precision, and the soulfulness of old-school R&B, all anchored by Younger’s graceful harp. Spanning 10 songs with guest features from Shabaka, Courtney Bryan, Niia, and Josh Johnson, Gadabout Season reignites the joy of self-discovery and perseverance, with Younger turning toward Alice Coltrane’s own restored harp, which she now stewards, for a through line.
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James Holden & Wacław Zimpel: The Universe Will Take Care of You [Border Community]
James Holden and Wacław Zimpel join forces for the first time on The Universe Will Take Care of You, an album built upon the kosmische kinship between the British underground dance don and Austrian clarinetist and sound artist. Evocative of Holden’s recent turn to transcendent psychedelia, the album of six improvisations bounds and rebounds through an odyssey of serrated and arpeggiated synths that build to moments of rapture, while Zimpel alternates percussive alto clarinet with electric piano, organ, lap steel guitar, and other instruments.
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