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 Sabrina Carpenter, Cash Cobain, Fontaines D.C., Spirit of the Beehive, Illuminati Hotties, Magdalena Bay, the Softies, Body Meat, Jaeychino, J. Mamana, and Fake Fruit. 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.)
Sabrina Carpenter: Short n’ Sweet [Island]
Sabrina Carpenter is a veteran of the pop industry, but Short n’ Sweet is the most anticipated album of the 25-year-old pop singer’s career. She caught the public’s attention, in the spring, with “Espresso,” and she built on the momentum with “Please Please Please,” a chart-topping single that came with a flashy video co-starring her boyfriend, the acclaimed Irish actor Barry Keoghan. Carpenter co-wrote Short n’ Sweet with Amy Allen, Julia Michaels, Steph Jones, and producers John Ryan, Julian Bunetta, and Jack Antonoff.
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Cash Cobain: Play Cash Cobain [Giant Music]
Cash Cobain is the face of sexy drill, the strain of hip-hop with sample-laden beats and ludicrously raunchy lyrics. Play Cash Cobain is billed as the New York rapper and producer’s second solo studio album, following 2023’s Pretty Girls Love Slizzy, and it features the standout singles “Fisherrr” and “Problem.”
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Fontaines D.C.: Romance [XL]
Fontaines D.C.’s new album, Romance, is in part about “falling in love at the end of the world,” said singer Grian Chatten in press materials. “The bigger armageddon looms, the more precious it becomes.” Accordingly, the Irish rock shapeshifters sound more expansive than ever on their fourth studio album, and sometimes cheerier, too. The record cannonballs from industrial psychedelia to alt-rock screamers and, on finale “Favourite,” one of the sweetest dream-pop confections in recent memory—Chatten likens it to a “song that welcomes you through the gates of heaven.”
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Spirit of the Beehive: You’ll Have to Lose Something [Saddle Creek]
Spirit of the Beehive lump together some of the most familiar sounds in underground rock and somehow carve out an enthralling genre of their own. On You’ll Have to Lose Something, binge-worthy indie-rock hooks and alt-rock crescendos get sucked into a maelstrom of proggy psychedelia, haunted by vocals that might sound like haywire computer music or a psych-pop summer breeze, depending on their whim. Opener “The Disruption” features fellow hell-raisers MSPaint.
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Illuminati Hotties: Power [Hopeless]
Since 2018, Sarah Tudzin’s Illuminati Hotties project has polished her scrappy, self-coined “tenderpunk” origins without sacrificing the wit or intensity that built her cult. Her fourth album, Power, corrals stories of love, grief, joy, and sorrow into an indie-pop powerhouse designed to encapsulate the three hectic years since Let Me Do One More in their totality. Cavetown feature on the single “Didn’t.”
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Magdalena Bay: Imaginal Disk [Mom+Pop]
Magdalena Bay follow their addictive debut, Mercurial World, with another batch of playful, silky synth-pop on Imaginal Disk. The single “Image” came with a characteristically psychedelic, vaporwave-aligned video, and the album follows suit with moreish hooks and sprightly compositions that sound exorcised from a pop netherworld.
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The Softies: The Bed I Made [Father/Daughter]
When Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia started writing songs together again as the Softies, the ideas—and, in the aftermath of loss and grief, heavy emotions—poured out of them. The indie-pop musicians who helped define the Pacific Northwest scene in the 1990s return with their first new album in 24 years, The Bed I Made, with the same earnestness they built their name on. With stacked vocal harmonies (“I Said What I Said”) and heart-tugging arrangements (“23rd Birthday”), the new album is a bonus lap celebrating Melberg and Sbragia’s subtle creativity, in-tune emotional awareness, and everlasting friendship.
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Body Meat: Starchris [Partisan]
When Chris Taylor formed the rotating collective Body Meat, he vowed to make a project where he could “change the genre and anything about it whenever I want,” as he put it in press materials. In that fashion, Starchris explores a sort of hallucinatory noise-pop, the latest stop in Taylor’s ongoing tour of bewildering sounds and styles. Led by “High Beams”—a four-minute psychological thriller about a guy who discovers his own digital replica in the game he is programming—Starchris is gleefully absurd, as likely to evoke underground club or rap as the vanguard of R&B-tinged radio pop.
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Jaeychino: Watch the Throne [PRNLDOCC]
There’s a new wave of DMV street rap, filled with artists who’ve spun the region’s apocalyptic drill into something soft and emotional. On that list are KP Skywalka and his lover-boy antics, HavinMotion with his sample-happy thrills, and Nino Paid, who’s made his name with therapy raps. Now, there’s Jaeychino, who merges introspection with D.C. aggression on his fourth project of the year, Watch the Throne. Joined by internet staples like Evilgiane, Lil Xelly, and Protect, Jaeychino uses the traditional choppy DMV flow like a Swiss Army knife. The real appeal of the tape, however, is his beat selection: random samples galore, destructive DMV drums, and an unexpected taste for noise.
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J. Mamana: For Every Set of Eyes [Holy Family]
For Every Set of Eyes, the singer-songwriter and composer J. Mamana’s follow-up to Nothing New in the West, opens with a fugue for string quartet and proceeds with at least one foot firmly rooted in the opera house: Theatrical vocals document memoirs of tragedy and grief, dancing across orchestrations that span baroque folk, synth-pop, and classical, but never threaten to overwhelm him. His notes on crisis—namely the death of his best friend and partner—are filled with curlicues and marginalia, a bounty of passionate overspill. “Losing someone too young, it’s horrible, but it feels like a joke,” Mamana wrote in press materials. “It is as strange as it is sad, and there is something freeing about that strangeness and the lull that descends on your life.”
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Fake Fruit: Mucho Mistrust [Carpark]
Oakland post-punks Fake Fruit return with Mucho Mistrust, their first new album in three years and second full-length LP Much like the mathy title-track that dips its toes into indie-rock, Mucho Mistrust is full of explosive freakouts, spunky saxophone, and rhythmic dance moves just cool enough to honor the Blondie lyric from which it gets its name. For lead singer Hannah “Ham” D’Amato, the new album was a way to collaborate with her bandmates, rope in DJ influences, and find humor amid the stress of life. “I’m managing us while I’m in between changing diapers in my day job as a nanny,” she said in a statement. “Everyone in the band still believes in it and is motivated to keep wading through the bullshit.”
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