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 Lady Gaga, Harto Falión & Evilgiane, Tokimonsta, Star 99, Hamilton Leithauser, the Tubs, Sasami, and Tobacco City. 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.)
Lady Gaga: Mayhem [Interscope]
Lady Gaga teased LG7 for so long that, when “Disease” arrived with news of the album release, it could easily have been underwhelming. But that would not be the Lady Gaga way. Instead came a juggernaut so abundant in hooks, harmonic pivots, and gleefully indulgent production flourishes that it sounds like the result of a sinister plan to option every unclaimed hit on the marketplace and Frankenstein it into one maximalist pop symphony. Mayhem also features the EDM/Eurodisco hybrid “Abracadabra,” along with—why not?—her rock’n’soul ballad with Bruno Mars, “Die With a Smile.” Anything goes, in other words, as Gaga finds herself “returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved,” as she put it in press materials.
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Harto Falión & Evilgiane: The Hurtless [Surf Gang]
Surf Gang main brain Evilgiane reunites with Virginia’s Harto Falión to follow up 2024’s .Bloody-Geeker* and 2023’s Im_My_#Best_Friend. The Hurtless collages the New York producer’s antic, keys-forward beats with Falión’s bittersweet rap soliloquies, creating an introspective dreamscape that valorizes and wallows in despair in equal measure.
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Tokimonsta: Eternal Reverie [Young Art]
Tokimonsta continues to morph between dance-pop maven and R&B path-breaker on Eternal Reverie, her first album since Oasis Nocturno. Anderson. Paak, Gavin Turek, and Cakes da Killa are on the guest list to a party where the chillout lounge and dancefloor are equally hot tickets.
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Star 99: Gaman [Lauren]
Since forming in the Bay Area during the pandemic, Star 99 have been sprinkling songs of existential dread and math-rock intricacy with spangly indie-pop glitter—and plenty of Thin Lizzy widdling for good measure. Gaman, the follow-up to their 2023 debut, Bitch Unlimited, hurtles through another suite of feel-good tunes and feel-bad lyrics, burrowing further into a niche that feels increasingly their own.
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Hamilton Leithauser: This Side of the Island [Glassnote]
Hamilton Leithauser led This Side of the Island with “Knockin’ Heart,” a single sung from the perspective of “an estranged, stoned lover on their way home, who is dying to get a message through to someone who is probably not listening,” he said in press materials. The Walkmen frontman continues to amble through the indie-rock backstreets on his fifth solo album, bringing along co-producer Aaron Dessner (as well as Anna Stumpf, Leithauser’s wife) for an uncharacteristically groovy sojourn into such modern themes as listening to a Joe Rogan podcast and learning “he has absolutely no idea what he is talking about and I don’t care about his nonsense.”
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The Tubs: Cotton Crown [Trouble in Mind]
The Tubs rattle through a suite of anarchic jangle-pop in a brisk half hour on second album Cotton Crown. The Welsh quartet’s Dead Meat follow-up takes DNA from the Smiths’ melancholy exuberance, the Go-Betweens’ windswept gusto, and gung-ho London punk fervor to formulate a disempowered power-pop that spins insecurity and grief into bundles of melodic joy.
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Sasami: Blood on the Silver Screen [Domino]
Sasami is the conservatory-trained singer, songwriter, composer, and producer who came to prominence with a shoegaze-indebted, synth-and-guitar powerhouse of a debut in 2019. Her third album, by contrast, is an avowed pop turn, taking cues from Britney Spears’ Femme Fatale and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way; the single “In Love With a Memory,” featuring Clairo, integrates the chart chops of latter-day Muse and the Strokes. “I was always a weirdo outsider and I didn’t feel like pop music spoke to me,” she said in press materials. “Being a woman of color, I’ve always felt this pressure or need to make something that’s mysterious or innovative, and always shied away from lightheartedness.” Blood on the Silver Screen corrects the record.
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Tobacco City: Horses [Scissor Tail]
On their second album, Horses, Chicago cosmic-country band Tobacco City dash wit and levity into the swamp of small-town life. Vocalists Chris Coleslaw and Lexi Goddard duet across an album depicting a version of America that, writes Linnie Greene in Pitchfork’s review, “smells like diner grease and cheap weed, and it sounds like hope on minimum wage.”
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