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 Taylor Swift, Malibu, Kelly Moran, Snooper, Nala Sinephro, Thirteendegrees º, Peel Dream Magazine, Blue Lake, Klein, Prewn, and Agriculture. 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.)
Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl [Republic]
Still fresh off her engagement and a year after The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift is back with her 12th album: The Life of a Showgirl. Swift wrote and produced the 12-track LP with two of pop’s most decorated producers, Max Martin and Shellback, reuniting with the duo for the first time since 2017’s Reputation. “This album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour, which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant,” said Swift. “It just comes from like the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life. And so that effervescence has come through on this record.” The title track closes the album, with a guest appearance by Eras Tour opener Sabrina Carpenter.
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Malibu: Vanities [Year0001]
Malibu’s ambient confections have been swirling through the underground (and NTS airwaves) for several years now, but Vanities, her debut album, is the French producer’s most concise and crystalline project yet. Part of a network that includes tourmate Oklou, radio-show guest ML Buch, and new label home Year001, Malibu spends Vanities carving out catacombs of ambient space and pouring in tidal vocals, creating an interzone between Gregorian chant and vaporwave. The album follows her 2022 EP Palaces of Pity, a collaboration with Merely.
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Kelly Moran: Don’t Trust Mirrors [Warp]
Kelly Moran started work on Don’t Trust Mirrors in a period of chaotic energy, a cycle of playing sets and clubbing that was brought to a halt by the pandemic in 2020. The pianist and composer responded by refocussing on solo piano, as showcased on her kaleidoscopic 2024 album, Moves in the Field. But Don’t Trust Mirrors, now six years in the making, continued to grow in her imagination. The album is a return to synth and prepared piano, full of cascading organic tones and digital basslines that spiral together into grand compositions evoking orchestral post-rock as much as minimalist contemporary classical. Moran’s Warp labelmate Bibio features on the title track.
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Snooper: Worldwide [Third Man]
Even without the paper mache puppets and rabble-rousing crowd antics, Snooper catch your attention with the sheer creativity of their music itself. On their anticipated follow-up to 2023’s Super Snõõper, the Nashville egg punks gather up their most immediate riffs and plug them straight into the fuzz pedal, amplifying the type of moshpit-starting rock that Jack White probably hoped they would churn out when he signed them to Third Man. Snooper co-founders Blair Tramel and Connor Cummins tipped their heads together under the watchful eye of producer John Congleton to create Worldwide—a brash collection of haywire punk songs like “Pom Pom,” “Guard Dog,” and the title track—with their other equally rowdy bandmates.
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Nala Sinephro: The Smashing Machine (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [Warp]
Benny Safdie’s debut as a solo writer-director is a drama about the emergence of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, centring on mixed martial artist Mark Kerr, played by Dwayne Johnson. The natural choice to soundtrack this film was, of course, the meditative jazz maestro Nala Sinephro. Coming off the revelatory Space 1.8 and Endlessness, the synth composer’s debut score is a disarmingly rich, romantic sweep of starlit strings and yearning synths, dotted with jazz-drum solos (played by Natcyet Wakili and Black Midi’s Morgan Simpson) and her typically understated harp filigree and pendulous arrangements. Revisit Pitchfork’s profile “Nala Sinephro Is Subverting Jazz Tradition One Immaculate Note at a Time.”
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Thirteendegrees: Black Fridayz [self-released]
Since his breakout mixtape Clique City, Vol. 2, Thirteendegrees º has hurtled into the rap consciousness in a swirl of neon hooks and Tumblr aesthetics (this tape was originally titled Hood Tumblr Love). Pegged as a revivalist of mid-2010s rap, the Southside Chicago rapper rattles through feel-good beats and euphoric, half-yelled bars on Black Fridayz, with Lil2Posh and BNYX joining him on “Chirag Child” and “Palace.”
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Peel Dream Magazine: Taurus [Topshelf]
There’s a comfort in hearing a band sprawl so confidently within its genre; it’s akin to hearing that style of music for the first time again. On Taurus, Peel Dream Magazine fall right back into the rhythm of last year’s Rose Main Reading Room, continuing to twirl that lush kaleidoscope of indie rock they inhabit. From the warm breathiness of the Belle & Sebastian–like vocals on opener “Venus in Nadir” to the glimmering kosmische groove reminiscent of Stereolab on “Seek and Destroy,” Peel Dream Magazine know indie rock reaches its full potential when stacked vocal harmonies and guitars make room for every reverberation of a vibraphone, hum of a clarinet, and light tap of a cymbal—especially when they all combine for a standout track like “Believer.”
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Blue Lake: The Animal [Tonal Union]
Blue Lake is the instrumental project of peripatetic Texan composer Jason Dungan, now based in Copenhagen. Like William Tyler, Dungan mixes intricate, journeying Americana with ambient sound design and heady grooves, in this case infused with the wintry blush of Scandinavian folk. He made Sun Arcs follow-up The Animal with an eye on the kinship between people and the natural world, “thinking about humans more as part of the animal environment and not as something that’s so separated into a ‘human’ realm, or sitting on top of a hierarchical pyramid,” he says in press materials.
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Klein: Sleep With a Cane [Roc Nation]
Klein’s new mixtape of spectral ambient compositions is notable a change of pace and mood after the pop and nu metal–flecked noise mixtape Thirteen Sense. Arriving with an eerie short film to accompany the 11-minute ambient epic “Informa,” Sleep With a Cane is a sort of sound memoir of London life, its barren piano-and-synthscapes layered with occasional harmonica, guitar scherzos, and field recordings. Space Afrika and Drain Gang’s Ecco2k feature on “Trident” and “Young, Black and Free.”
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Prewn: System [Exploding in Sound]
Izzy Hagerup makes the type of music as Prewn that almost feels like you shouldn’t be hearing it: confessional, raw, and entirely unguarded. The Los Angeles-based musician bares her soul once again on System, although this time she beckons you to join her in the practice. As grunge-inflicted folk-rock singles “My Side” and “Dirty Dog” suggest, which build off the groundwork she laid on 2023’s Through the Window, there’s clarity to be found in purging oneself. That sentiment is propped up by the album’s remarkably candid and affecting lead single “System.” “Just give your life away,” Hagerup sings over a cello’s crescendo and her own multi-tracked wails. Prewn makes it sound just worthwhile enough to try it on a whim.
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Agriculture: The Spiritual Sound [The Flenser]
From the squealing guitar solo that opens The Spiritual Sound in “My Garden” on through to the towering sludge riffs in “Bodhidharma,” Agriculture sink their fingers into the mucky dirt to see what they can pull up. Sorting through queer history, Zen Buddhism, and immense suffering, the Los Angeles–based band’s main songwriters Dan Meyer and Leah Levinson cover subjects as shadowy and weighty as their slurry of noise rock guitars, double kick drum, and black metal vocals. Agriculture hoped to confront the moment, and The Spiritual Sound rises to the occasion in both sound and lyrics.
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