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 Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore. 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.)
Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore: Tragic Magic [InFiné]
Last year, curators at the French museum Musée de la Musique invited Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore to use some of their historically significant artifacts to record an album. The musicians—both of whom make airy, whimsical, near-ambient compositions—took them up on the offer without hesitation. Although they spent nine days testing out pieces and taping compositions, the duo whittled down their recordings into an album’s worth of material. Musically, Tragic Magic is almost exactly what you might expect: songs with ethereal vocal harmonies and gentle harp plucks, complete with titles like “Perpetual Adoration” and “Melted Moon.”
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A$AP Rocky: Don’t Be Dumb [AWGE/RCA]
Between the launch of his surprisingly viable acting career and the birth of three children, A$AP Rocky has found plenty of time since 2018’s Testing to pretend his follow-up, Don’t Be Dumb, was just around the corner. The campaign kicked up a gear last month when he unveiled the record’s visual universe, with Tim Burton behind the album art and the director’s close collaborator Winona Ryder in the “Punk Rocky” video—plus another fellow Burtonite Danny Elfman on string arrangements. “Highjack,” the rapper’s 2024 track with Jessica Pratt, does not make the cut, but a new one called “The End” does. And Rocky helicoptered in a squadron of other guests too, including Doechii, Gorillaz, Thundercat, Westside Gunn, Will.i.am, and Tyler, the Creator.
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Peaer: Doppelgänger [Danger Collective]
What began as a slowcore outlet for Peter Katz a decade ago has since become a slightly poppier and mathier trio over the years, eventually evolving into the present-day iteration of Peaer. Doppelgänger, their first new album in nearly seven years, wastes no time explaining just how happy they are to be back with the jubilant opener “End of the World.” From there, though, Peaer find themselves caught in bristly knots like “Button” and “Bad News,” suggesting they returned to a thornier world that needs some untangling after all.
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evilgiane: Giane 2 [Surf Gang]
In the midst of a tour with his Surf Gang cadre, evilgiane has surprise-released this follow-up to his 2022 instrumental LP Giane. Clams Casino and Rue Jacobs are the only guests, the former co-composing the piano-and-sub-bass elegy “Poker” and the latter riding the vaporwave of “Aerial Passing.” The rest of the record is a showcase for evilgiane’s ambient finesse, full of muffled earworms and lulling tones, with the odd technical beat racing in to wake you from its daydream.
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Xiu Xiu: Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1 [Polyvinyl]
Newcomers to Xiu Xiu could do worse than starting with their hauntingly intense version of Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” one of 12 covers that make Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1 a perfect introduction to the influential art-rockers’ dark allure. About half of the tracklist checks out—takes on direct antecedents like Throbbing Gristle, This Heat, and Coil—leaving a half-dozen curveballs, from a dubbed-out take on Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” to an industrial revamp of GloRilla’s “Lick or Sum” and a disarmingly gorgeous interpretation of Daniel Johnston’s “Some Things Last a Long Time.”
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Sleaford Mods: The Demise Of Planet X [Rough Trade]
Sleaford Mods foretold The Demise of Planet X with an increasingly surprising string of collaborations with British darlings, from Life Without Buildings’ Sue Tompkins (on the joyous single “No Touch”) to Andrea Arnold (director of Fish Tank and, now, the “No Touch” video) to Game of Thrones and Star Wars star Gwendolyn Christie, who blazes through an unlikely rap verse on “The Good Life.” That collaborative spirit extends to the commonwealth on “Elitist G.O.A.T.”—which features New Zealander Aldous Harding—but not to the likes of compatriots Rishi Sunak or the old English fascist Henry Williamson, who get a lyrical kicking in Jason Williamson’s latest batch of reliably caustic bars.
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Courtney Marie Andrews: Valentine [Loose Future]
Once a hired hand for the likes of Jimmy Eat World and Damien Jurado, Courtney Marie Andrews has beaten down a country-folk path of her own in the past decade. The poet and singer-songwriter recorded Valentine, her follow-up to 2022’s Loose Future, in Los Angeles, with Jerry Bernhardt co-producing and Grizzly Bear’s Chris Bear on drums. “Love, it turns out, is a lot more than I gave it credit for,” Andrews says of the source material. “I was in one of the darkest periods of my life, and songs were the only way I could reckon with it.”
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Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly noted the A$AP Rocky and Jessica Pratt song “Hijack” appeared on the rapper’s new album. It has since been updated.
