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 Justin Bieber, Clipse, Wet Leg, Burna Boy, Gina Birch, Open Mike Eagle, Fuubutsushi, and Tony Njoku. 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.)
Justin Bieber: Swag [Def Jam]
Some of you may have more in common with Justin Bieber than you think. He’s a married thirtysomething father of one who likes to listen to hip-hop and indie music, play golf, and root for a hockey team that’s bound to let him down (i.e., be “a slut for these boys”). The difference, of course, is that Justin Bieber can get some of his favorite rappers (such as Sexyy Red and Lil B) and indie darlings (namely Dijon and Mk.gee) to feature on his new album, which is called what you likely also would want to call your album, Swag. The 21-song effort follows 2021’s Justice.
Learn more in “5 Takeaways From Justin Bieber’s New Album Swag.”
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Clipse: Let God Sort Em Out [Roc Nation Distribution]
In the 16 years since their last album, Til the Casket Drops, Clipse have become acknowledged titans of rap history without losing the underdog spirit of a cherished, cult sensation. No doubts about their superstar status linger on Let God Sort Em Out: Guests including Kendrick Lamar, Nas, John Legend, and Tyler, the Creator join Pusha T and Malice for a deliriously anticipated comeback that reunites them with Pharrell Williams, who produced the album in full.
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Wet Leg: Moisturizer [Domino]
On their second album, Moisturizer, Wet Leg transform from masters of Instagrammable indie-pop to roof-raising alt-rockers. Having expanded from a duo to a quintet with their live band, Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers rattle through guns-blazing festival anthems, inflammatory half-spoken monologues, and hooks in the Pixies-Breeders tradition on an album that mixes their usual biting wit with a newfound air of scrappy celebration.
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Burna Boy: No Sign of Weakness [Spaceship/Bad Habit/Atlantic]
Burna Boy’s quest for world domination continues on No Sign of Weakness, the Nigerian Afrobeats star’s follow-up to 2023’s I Told Them…. The album reiterates his masterful fusion of international party music and ballads, with Shaboozey, Stromae, Travis Scott, and—why not?—Mick Jagger jumping aboard for the ride.
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Gina Birch: Trouble [Third Man]
Trouble is the second solo album from Gina Birch, the bassist of post-punk all-timers the Raincoats. Refining her old band’s wily assemblage of punk, dub, and experimental sounds, the peppy album draws influence from Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, and Bob Dylan, among others, to string together vignettes blending everyday minutiae, diaristic storytelling, and political radicalism. “It’s a bit out there, a bit off the tracks, and I always like to go there,” Birch said in press materials. “I unofficially subtitled the album ‘Trouble I’ve Caused and Trouble I’m In,’ so the songs are based around that feeling—that dangerous place to be.”
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Open Mike Eagle: Neighborhood Gods Unlimited [Auto Reverse]
Neighborhood Gods Unlimited might have been a TV show—sometime writer and comedian Open Mike Eagle gave it an opening theme, flashbacks, a narrative arc, and even commercials—but the subject matter was so close to home that he decided to devote its confessional, autobiographical concept to an album. “The trauma at the center of Neighborhood Gods Unlimited is mine,” he explained in press materials. “I was shattered as a young person and I spent the majority of my life not knowing it. In my ignorance I would go on to shatter myself even further because it was all I knew. This is a story about how people who are trying to find themselves get confused when they encounter things that remind them of themselves.” He led the album with the Kenny Segal–produced, excellently titled “Contraband (The Plug Has Bags of Me).”
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Fuubutsushi: Columbia Deluxe [American Dreams]
Fuubutsushi—the quartet of Patrick Shiroishi, Chris Jusell, Matthew Sage, and Chaz Prymek—perform expanded compositions from across its catalog on Columbia Deluxe, an album recorded live at the Columbia Experimental Music Festival in 2021. Having founded the group remotely, the four of them performed for the first (and, to date, only) time at the festival, reworking songs that span from their early-pandemic origins through to last year’s Meridians. Woven through their elemental fusion of ambient, jazz, folk, and modern classical are field recordings of Japanese Americans speaking about their time in American internment camps during World War II.
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Tony Njoku: All Our Knives Are Always Sharp [Studio Njoku]
Since his emergence in the late 2010s, British composer and songwriter Tony Njoku has essayed into an otherworldly universe of electronic, classical, and agitprop-fired pop, all of which bubble to a head on All Our Knives Are Always Sharp. Filling out his sprawling compositions are lynchpins of the past and present UK underground: Tricky, Space Afrika, Gaika, Coby Sey, Ghostpoet, and more. The results feel like laments for a time of political, cultural, and environmental tumult; as he said in press materials, “I’m weaponizing my spirituality for the battle.”
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