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 the Armed, Reneé Rapp, Ali Sethi, Demahjiae, Debby Friday, Haru Nemuri, AraabMuzik, and Wolfacejoeyy. 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.)
The Armed: The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed [Sargent House]
The Armed may have transformed from hardcore insurgents into insurgent rock stars, but, on the evidence of The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed, they did so primarily to create a bigger platform from which to yell. Raw fury emanates from the album’s opening moments, spiraling out in blazes of haywire punk maximalism until, concepts be damned, the album sounds like one long, Munchian Scream about the state of America. Says vocalist Tony Wolski, “It’s music for a statistically wealthy population that somehow can’t afford food or medicine—endlessly scrolling past vacation photos, gym selfies, and images of child amputees in the same feed. It reflects the dissociation required just to exist in that reality.”
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Reneé Rapp: Bite Me [Interscope]
Reneé Rapp reunited with Snow Angel producer Alexander 23 for her second album, Bite Me. She also brought in some new faces, like SZA collaborator Carter Lang and “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” co-writer and co-producer Omer Fedi. The result is an album that Rapp has said was inspired by Alanis Morissette (specifically Jagged Little Pill), Joan Jett, and Kate Moss. The pre-release singles from Bite Me were “Leave Me Alone,” “Mad,” and “Why Is She Still Here?”
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Ali Sethi: Love Language [Zubberdust Media]
On Love Language, Ali Sethi fuses hyperpop, reggaeton, Sufi chant, and Hindustani classical music into what he calls “a variety show for the end-times.” Three years after his breakout single, “Pasoori,” Sethi’s solo debut—and follow-up to his 2023 Intiha album with Nicolás Jaar—stages a flamboyant, cross-genre, cross-cultural opera that serves as a flamboyant kiss-off to those who have tried to silence the Pakistani American singer and songwriter. Guest producers include Brockhampton’s Romil Hemnani and Coke Studio’s Abdullah Siddiqui.
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Demahjiae: What Do You Hear When You Pray? [Empire]
After popping up on albums by the likes of MIKE and Navy Blue, Demahjiae debuts on Empire with an album of Oakland rap that is by turns cosy and breathless, as if monologued into the phone while intensely hunched forward on the couch. MusicMeetsHer and 1100 Himself make brief guest turns, but the ever-versatile Demahjiae is happy to sprawl right across the 12-track record with a masterclass in the conversationally offbeat.
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Debby Friday: The Starrr of the Queen of Life [Sub Pop]
Since her 2019 debut EP, Debby Friday has pinballed between punishing noise and weightless club music that resolves, in a sort of reconstruction of those parts, on her dancefloor-oriented new album, The Starrr of the Queen of Life. Songs like “In the Club” and “Lipsync” translate the confrontational flair of her live show to songs full of warehouse beats and murmured monologues, while “Higher” illuminates a more elliptical sideline in industrial, folktronic R&B.
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Haru Nemuri: Ekkolaptómenos [Ekkolaptómenos]
Ekkolaptómenos is the latest opus from Tokyo-based poet, punk, rapper, producer, and composer Haru Nemuri. If that sounds like a lot, it is. But Ekkolaptómenos, by virtue of its conviction, curiosity, and inescapable hugeness, coheres into a singular vision of experimental pop, albeit a discombobulating one. Like 2022’s Shunka Ryougen—her previous fusion of J-pop, J-rock, and American hardcore and rap—the album seems set at the perpetual climax of a great cinematic battle, even as Nemuri alternates her war cries with bursts of chatty intimacy.
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AraabMuzik: Electronic Dream 2 [Genre Defying Entertainment/D Productions]
AraabMuzik has been teasing the sequel to his standout 2011 album, Electronic Dream, for so long that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was already out. That seemed to be the case when a collection called Electronic Dream 2 appeared in 2012, but that turned out to be an unsanctioned leak. Instead, the songs featured on MVP of the MPC, Vol. 1 in 2018, and only now—on the back of his soundtrack album for Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft—has the influential producer delivered the long-awaited goods.
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Wolfacejoeyy: Summersongs [self-released]
Wolfacejoeyy’s second project of 2025, Summersongs, is so bubbly and endorphin-rich that it could have arrived in midwinter and still airdropped in some late-summer vibes. As it is, the 12-song set is just in time for the park hangs and pool parties it seems destined to soundtrack. Slinky R&B cadences weave through sprint-relay beats as the Staten Island singer and rapper spins odes to good times and girls, with help from Jaasu, Reuben Aziz, Dracodontjam, and Kelz2busy.
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