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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 MJ Lenderman, Nala Sinephro, Laila!, Toro y Moi, Max Richter, the Dare, Dummy, Hinds, Isik Kural, Chow Lee, Masayoshi Fujita, and Molchat Doma. 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.)
MJ Lenderman: Manning Fireworks [Anti-]
MJ Lenderman continues his ascent on his latest solo album, Manning Fireworks. As showcased on the twangy singles “She’s Leaving You,” “Joker Lips,” and “Wristwatch,” the guitarist and singer-songwriter performs nearly every instrument on the album while singing about self-doubt with the humor and affability that’s earned him so much adoration. Manning Fireworks is not just a worthy follow-up to 2022’s Boat Songs, but also a reintroduction to Lenderman as a guitar virtuoso, Wednesday bandmate, and in-demand session musician who, as Jeremy D. Larson writes in his review, comes off “so endearing he could convince you to savor the feeling of a warm beer.”
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Nala Sinephro: Endlessness [Warp]
Nala Sinephro smooths her songs until it’s hard to tell where one instrument begins and another ends—just the way she likes it. On Endlessness, the follow-up to 2021’s lauded Space 1.8, the Belgian Martiniquais jazz composer melds pedal harp, modular synthesizer, percussion, and keyboards around a continuous, pulsing arpeggio that represents the cycle of existence. Helping bring the album to life are musicians including Black Midi drummer Morgan Simpson and tenor saxophone phenom Nubya Garcia.
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Laila!: Gap Year! [IIIXL Studio]
Laila! sings chatty R&B over flips that range from vintage classics to ambient soundscapes. Her self-produced debut album, Gap Year!, follows her In Ctrl! mixtape (also self-produced) and a guest-packed Cash Cobain remix of her jerk-R&B loosie “Not My Problem.” You’ll find both “Not My Problem” and her initial breakout song, “Like That!,” among the new record’s 17 tracks.
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Toro y Moi: Hole Erth [Dead Oceans]
Toro y Moi dreams up a playful musical equivalent to gorpcore on Hole Erth, enlisting an array of guests—Benjamin Gibbard, Kevin Abstract, and Glaive among them—for volatile, gleefully impulsive compositions that churn together rap-rock, SoundCloud rap, and 2000s emo. “I hope you enjoy this suburban anthem,” Chaz Bear said in press materials. “Growing up, the often-controversial-line between mainstream and underground artists was so defined but now that line has become so blurred I can’t even tell what I like anymore… sometimes.”
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Max Richter: In a Landscape [Decca]
Max Richter tapped into a library of influences when working on In a Landscape, his ninth studio album, ranging from composers like Johann Sebastian Bach and Henry Purcell to poets Anne Carson and John Keats—and, in recent years, even Kali Malone and Mitski. This is the first album that the pianist and composer has recorded at Studio Richter Mahr, the Oxfordshire studio that he and his wife, visual artist Yulia Mahr, designed and operate. Electronics and acoustic instruments live side by side, as on 2004’s The Blue Notebooks, only now Richter delves deeper into themes of connectedness, humanity, and intimacy from a perspective fostered over the past 20 years. Read the new interview “Max Richter on the Music That Made Him.”
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The Dare: What’s Wrong With New York? [Republic]
From hype magnet to underground bête noire and, now—via his work on Charli XCX’s Brat bonus track “Guess”—back in the alt-pop good books, the Dare has survived considerable cultural whiplash to arrive at his debut album, What’s Wrong With New York? Leading with the typically divisive single “Perfume,” the new doyen of dance-punk sleaze builds on his debut EP, The Sex, with another record seemingly conceived as a lost epistle of Meet Me in the Bathroom. Throwback thrills and generally infectious silliness await those who can stomach it.
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Dummy: Free Energy [Trouble in Mind]
The TikTok-fueled shoegaze revival continues apace, but who will return it to the dancefloor? Dummy, a genre-traversing Los Angeles four-piece, make their case on Free Energy, a reverb-smeared indie-pop powerhouse with designs on the My Bloody Valentine lane of foot-moving psychedelia. With guest spots for woodwind whiz Cole Pulice and Powers/Rolin Duo’s Jen Powers, the album is fit to burst with ambient-infused dreamscapes jolted to life by a refreshingly lively rhythm section.
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Hinds: Viva Hinds [Lucky Number]
From the alt-rock fireworks of opener “Hi, How Are You,” Hinds barrel into Viva Hinds with an attitude of arms-in-the-air celebration. The Spanish band’s follow-up to The Prettiest Curse is a defiant kiss-off to the four years since its release, in which they said goodbye to their bassist and drummer, but not their irrepressible gusto. Beck and Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten feature, adding to the feel of a joyfully scrappy basement party where everyone’s on the guest list.
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Isik Kural: Moon in Gemini [Rvng Intl.]
Isik Kural follows the luminous, ambient-folk collage In February with Moon in Gemini, another quietly arresting sonic scrapbook. The composer recorded the LP between his home country, Turkey, and new base in the Scottish city of Glasgow, pushing his daydreamy vocals to the fore in songs that draw sideways inspiration from Nina Simone, Aldous Harding, and Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste. One song, “Behind the Flowerpots,” includes misheard lyrics from Elliott Smith’s “Stickman,” a moment of happenstance that reflects the album’s sense of wonder, curiosity, and serendipitous beauty.
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Chow Lee: Sex Drive [TC Music LLC]
Sexy drill mainstay Cash Cobain primed audiences for sex-crazed rap with his recent album Play Cash Cobain, and, now, his 2 Slizzy 2 Sexy collaborator, Chow Lee, goes a step further with an album that’s billed as something even hornier. Sex Drive includes songs with Cobain and “Fisherrr” artist Bay Swag, fellow New Yorker Sleepy Hallow, Atlanta’s Anycia, Flo Milli, Drake collaborator Roy Woods, and British rapper AJ Tracey. Revisit Alphonse Pierre’s “Cash Cobain and Chow Lee Are the Horniest Rappers Out” on the Pitch
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Masayoshi Fujita: Migratory [Erased Tapes]
Migratory is Masayoshi Fujita’s second album since leaving his adopted home of Berlin for a mountain range outside Kyoto, where the composer, vibraphonist, and marimba player built a studio in an old kindergarten. Childlike play converges with quiet virtuosity on the Bird Ambience follow-up, which employs Moor Mother and Hatis Noit as guest narrators of its kaleidoscopic, symphonic miniatures. Of the single “Tower of Cloud,” Fujita said in press materials, “The synth riff gives me a late summer feel and reminds me of cumulonimbus clouds, and I can see a swallow drawing a circle in the sky to the marimba melody.”
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Molchat Doma: Belaya Polosa [Sacred Bones]
On Belaya Polosa, Molchat Doma exit the crypt of gothic post-punk, emerging in a synth-pop wilderness where dark undercurrents pulse beneath an icy veneer of stricken guitars and keyboard laser pings. The TikTok-beloved Belarusian trio conjures Depeche Mode and Simple Minds at their most ominous and anthemic, with vocalist Egor Shkutko rendering songwriter and producer Raman Kamahortsau’s lyrics as dislocated pleas from their new home of Los Angeles. “The entire album is a prism through which we tried to reflect what has happened to us,” the band said in press materials.
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