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 projects from Flo, Pa Salieu, Young Nudy, Star Bandz, Merely & Malibu, Johnny Coley, Sofie Royer, Cavalier & Child Actor, and Big Sad 1900. 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.)
Flo: Access All Areas [Republic]
After years of honing their throwback R&B and girl-group charisma, Flo have released their debut album, Access All Areas. The three singers go big with belt-out songs (“AAA”) and radio hits (“Walk Like This”) as a way to showcase their self-described “growth and dedication to making girl group history.” The album, which follows last year’s 3 of Us EP, delves deeper into the rich harmonies, pop-teasing production, and soulful vocals that have helped Flo earn praise from genre figureheads like Kelly Rowland and Ariana Grande.
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Pa Salieu: Afrikan Alien [Warner]
Pa Salieu made his long-awaited comeback, in September, when the inventive British Gambian rapper released “Belly,” swiftly followed by a pair of freestyles. His new mixtape, Afrikan Alien, was conceived during his 21-month prison term for wielding a tree branch as a weapon against a man who fatally stabbed his friend outside a nightclub. “These bars were born in a cell and completed when I was released, with each collaboration—from Byron Messiah to Odumodublvck to Black Sherif—being organic and true, like home-cooked food from the motherland, filled with love and truth,” Salieu said in press materials.
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Young Nudy: Sli’merre 2 [RCA]
A half-decade after Sli’merre, Young Nudy and Pi’erre Bourne reunite for a sequel that showcases the rapper’s goofball bars and producer’s ethereal beats. Sli’merre 2, led by “Right Now” and “Get Fu*ked Up,” offers just over 45 minutes of zenned-out hip-hop.
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Star Bandz: Estrella [Priority/Capitol]
Estrella is the debut mixtape from Star Bandz, the 16-year-old Chicago rapper who went viral with “Yea Yea.” The mixtape features fellow teenage phenoms Luh Tyler, BabyChiefDoit, and Sugarhill Ddot, with 29-year-old Detroit veteran Veeze serving as Estrella’s elder statesman. The project includes Star Bandz’s recent single “How the Game Go.”
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Merely & Malibu: Essential Mixtape [Year0001]
European ambient artists Malibu and Merely have joined forces for their debut collaborative full-length. Released on Year0001—in the midst of the label’s most prominent artists’ departure—Essential Mixtape collates a series of ethereal, tranquilizing synth sounds like those of the lush lead single, “Arpeggiated Romance.”
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Johnny Coley: Mister Sweet Whisper [Mississippi]
Septuagenarian poet Johnny Coley mumbles into beguiling jazz soundscapes on Mister Sweet Whisper, his third album since making his recording debut, at a ripe old age, in 2021. The Birmingham, Alabama, artist improvised the album’s surrealist spoken word entirely on the spot, in his apartment home studio, according to press materials, conjuring supernatural encounters and European adventures with Southern gothic import. Guitarists, upright bassists, vibraphonists, saxophonists, and organists from the Sweat Wreath label accompany him on his somnambulant travels.
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Sofie Royer: Young-Girl Forever [Stones Throw]
With her third album for Stones Throw, Young-Girl Forever, Sofie Royer composes baroque electro-pop polarized between the rapturous and apocalyptic. The DJ, violinist, painter, and Toro y Moi collaborator borrows the title from Preliminary Materials for the Theory of a Young-Girl, a text about consumerism and the corrosive effects of capitalism that was originally published in a French anarchist journal. She described the themes in press materials as follows: “Instead of clinging tightly to what you perceive as correct—or even real—I think sometimes you just have to turn the lights off and surrender.”
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Cavalier & Child Actor: Cine [Backwoodz Studioz]
Cine brings together rapper Cavalier and producer Child Actor for the first time, via billy woods’ Backwoodz Studioz. It is Cavalier’s third album of the year, after Different Type Time and the Quelle Chris collaboration Death Tape 2 | We Gon’ Need Each Other, furthering his narrative journey into memoir and present surroundings, underscored by Child Actor’s integration of environmental sounds like running engines and passing conversation. “This is a rhythmic biopic—Child Actor didn’t just produce this record, he scored chapters of my life for processing, framed buried thoughts, and illuminated the grittier parts of my journey,” Cavalier said in a press release, which note that—if Different Type Time was the rapper’s Do the Right Thing opus—Cine is his Crooklyn.
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Big Sad 1900: 1937 South Corning St [1900]
It’s been a banner year for Los Angeles hip-hop—look no further than Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” Schoolboy Q’s Blue Lips, and Tyler, the Creator’s Chromakopia—and Big Sad 1900 is looking to stake his claim with 1937 South Corning St. The West Los Angeles rapper previewed his album with “40 & Broke,” “I Eat Lobster,” and “False Narratives.” He also shared the music video for “Put Double on My Kidneys” to go with the project’s release.
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