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 the Smile, the Hard Quartet, Yasmin Williams, Caribou, Geordie Greep, Blood Incantation, Dawn Richard & Spencer Zahn, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tony Vaz, and Wild Pink. 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.)
The Smile: Cutouts [XL]
The Smile’s second album of 2024 is the already eclectic project’s most bombastic yet, ranging from homespun folk to orchestral ballads, indie-rock whirlwinds, electronic elegies, and slow-burning, Can-inspired freakouts. It also has a little something for fans of pretty much anything Thom Yorke has released since OK Computer. There’s the Atoms for Peace jitters of “No Words,” the Moon Shaped Pool reflection “Bodies Laughing,” the Smile-ishly Afrobeat-driven “Eyes & Mouth,” and plenty more—all backed by Tom Skinner’s delightfully vexing drum patterns and performed, in Yorke and Greenwood’s reliable way, with an uncanny twist of the unfamiliar.
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The Hard Quartet: The Hard Quartet [Matador]
The Hard Quartet is the new band from Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus, Chavez’s Matt Sweeney, Dirty Three’s Jim White, and the Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly. The songwriterly supergroup introduced its self-titled record with the Malkmus-led indie-rocker “Earth Hater,” the Sweeney-sung “Rio’s Song” (complete with a Rolling Stones–homage video full of Easter Eggs), and the Kelly-fronted “Our Hometown Boy,” which the songwriter called a “conversation about what paradise looks like peering out the window of a bar to a blizzard.”
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Yasmin Williams: Acadia [Nonesuch]
Yasmin Williams is a guitarist and composer embedded in the roots between folk, jazz, and fantasy—a meditative virtuoso who fingerpicks benign worlds into existence. For all its harmonic intricacy, her fretwork on Acadia leaves room to consider what emotional curveball or narrative twist might have led to this modal lurch, or that deviation from the folk equilibrium. As well as her native acoustic guitar, the follow-up to 2021’s Urban Driftwood, harnesses Williams’ aptitude with the kora, harp guitar, banjo, electric guitar, and bass, with input from various guest players and vocalists.
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Caribou: Honey [Merge]
Four years after his last Caribou album, Suddenly, Dan Snaith returns to the project to synthesize its festival-friendly, aquatic-summer vibe-aciousness with the dancefloor hijinks of his other project, Daphni. Following the latter’s 2022 album, Cherry, Snaith released multiple drops of serotonin supplies in the form of Honey’s title track (with its flamingo-themed video), the “Pump Up the Volume” rework “Volume,” a song called “Broke My Heart” that came to him in a dream, and a pop spin on French touch, “Come Find Me.”
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Geordie Greep: The New Sound [Rough Trade]
Black Midi are on hiatus—and their nouveau-prog prognosis is not especially promising. But if the wily British hell-raisers weren’t extra enough for you, co-frontperson Geordie Greep is here to save the day with his debut solo album. The New Sound activates emergency Greep mode: Arcane allusions, oratorial proclamations, and sex gags festoon an album of tumbling tirades borne on helter-skelter hooks and salsa soliloquies strung together by knotty narrative threads. If any of that sounds unappealing, there is a strong chance you will hate it. Yet, as with Black Midi’s best, this is a record that punishes the musically icky while rewarding the curious.
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Blood Incantation: Absolute Elsewhere [Century Media]
Absolute Everywhere, said Paul Riedl of the Colorado death metal quartet Blood Incantation, is “our most potent audial extract/musical trip yet; like the soundtrack to a Herzog-style Sci-Fi epic about the history of/battle for human consciousness itself, via a 70s Prog album played by a 90s Death Metal band from the future.” What is left to say? The album is divided into two songs, each a little over 20 minutes. And it accompanies a documentary, All Gates Open: In Search of Absolute Elsewhere, for which you can find a trailer here.
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Dawn Richard & Spencer Zahn: Quiet in a World Full of Noise [Merge]
R&B maestro Dawn Richard continues to venture into the experimental pop vanguard, alongside composer and multi-instrumentalist Spencer Zahn, on Quiet in a World Full of Noise. Spartan songs bridging jazz, ambient, and outer-limits R&B combine in a record that Richard said she hopes people will “put on when they need the opportunity for reflection, when they need the stillness in their lives.”
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Godspeed You! Black Emperor: “No Title As of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead” [Constellation]
Three years after G_d’s Pee at State’s End!, Godspeed You! Black Emperor make a relatively swift return with their latest, “No Title As of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead”—its title a timestamped death toll of Palestinians reported by Gaza’s Health Ministry, amid Israel’s ongoing assault of the region. The record mixes post-rock elegies with fuzzy drones, ambient collages, and disarming moments of relief in the form of surging crescendoes and—uncharacteristically—rousing 4/4 hooks.
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Tony Vaz: Pretty Side of the Ugly Life [Jubilee Gang]
New York singer-songwriter Tony Vaz can’t help pining for the past and the future. On Pretty Side of the Ugly Life, his debut full-length album, Vaz turns his attention towards every direction at once and longs to move everywhere simultaneously. Existing in a middle ground between Alex G and Arthur Russell, the LP utilizes acoustic instrumentation and electronic beats to build something touching, human, and inspired. As Pretty Side of the Ugly Life blurs indie-rock, it starts to make sense of all it can see clearly—pop, country, experimental—on the other side.
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Wild Pink: Dulling the Horns [Fire Talk]
After John Ross transposed his cancer diagnosis and treatment into Wild Pink’s striking 2022 album, ILYSM, the frontman collided headfirst with exhaustion. On Dulling the Horns, the band’s fifth LP, Wild Pink strike the matchbox repeatedly until their creativity lights up, ablaze once again with classic rock–indebted jams. The record scorches like a live album: driving guitars, spirited drumming, and the type of loose horns and keys and make a crowd move. As Ross suggests in the title track, sometimes there’s a thrill to learning how to move on.
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