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 Primal Scream, SahBabii, Claire Rousay, Perila, El Cousteau, BabyTron, Loe Shimmy, Ab-Soul, and more. 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.)
Primal Scream: Come Ahead [BMG]
Come Ahead marks Primal Scream’s first album in eight years. The longstanding Scottish rock group’s 12th album and follow-up to 2016’s Chaosmosis is an album about “conflict, whether inner or outer,” according to singer Bobby Gillespie. “The title is a Glaswegian term. If someone threatens to fight you, you say, ‘come ahead!’ It’s redolent of the indomitable spirit of the Glaswegian, and the album itself shares that aggressive attitude and confidence.” Come Ahead, produced by David Holmes, is also the band’s first record since the death, in 2022, of Martin Duffy, who had played on all of the group’s records since 1991’s Screamadelica.
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SahBabii: Saaheem [StreamCut]
SahBabii’s new album arrives after a bit of a quiet period for the Atlanta rapper. He shared the vault compilation LeakOut in 2022, but Saaheem serves as a more proper follow-up to 2021’s Do It for Demon. The new, 18-track release includes the 2023 single “Lost All My Feelings.”
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Claire Rousay: The Bloody Lady [Thrill Jockey]
Texan experimental artist Claire Rousay has released her second album of the year, following Sentiment. The Bloody Lady is her reimagined score for Slovak animator Viktor Kubal’s folk-horror animation Krvavá pani. The new score, adapted in the studio from a live premiere at a Belgian film festival last year, employs synthesizers, piano, violin, and field recordings.
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Perila: Intrinsic Rhythm [Smalltown Supersound]
Intrinsic Rhythm is Perila’s second album for the Norwegian label Smalltown Supersound, following 2021’s How Much Time It Is Between You and Me? For the new album, the Russian ambient artist incorporated field recordings and vocal manipulation across 21 expansive, hallucinatory tracks. “In the process of working on this album I found that my own intrinsic rhythm—the one which centers and grounds me—is slow, way slower than life today wants us to be,” Perila explained in press materials. “When you slow down you can notice all the mesmerizing beauty and capture the sound world differently.”
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El Cousteau: Merci, Non Merci [Super Cousteau]
El Cousteau had one of the best hip-hop songs of 2023 in “10 Carat,” and he’s recently gone viral with the Earl Sweatshirt collaboration “Words2LiveBy.” Now, the Washington, D.C., rapper unleashes Merci, Non Merci, a 17-song collection of nimble, tilted bars and off-kilter, addictive beats. New York rapper MIKE features on the project’s last track, “Brown Paper Bag.”
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BabyTron: Tronicles [The Hip Hop Lab]
BabyTron gives fans no shortage of songs on Tronicles. The 28-track, Halloween-themed album includes titles like “Nightmare on Yo Street” and “Haunted House,” and it follows last year’s seasonal entry MegaTron 2. Guests on the new release include Lazer Dim 700, Project Money, and Dave Blunts.
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Loe Shimmy: Nardy World [Open Shift Distribution]
In the five years since releasing his first song, on SoundCloud, Loe Shimmy has built out a sound of melancholy beats and yearning vocals that skirt rap and R&B. The Florida artist has dedicated Nardy World to his late brother, Nardy, whose death preceded a two-year retreat from music. The project opens with a posthumous appearance from Shimmy’s brother, and includes further contributions from Cash Cobain (on the single “Confession”) and Brent Faiyaz (on a new version of the Zombieland 2 standout “For Me”).
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Ab-Soul: Soul Burger [Top Dawg Entertainment]
Top Dawg Entertainment rapper Ab-Soul’s Soul Burger is the mixtape follow-up to his December 2022 studio album Herbert. A nostalgia-infused homage to the artist’s late childhood friend DoeBurger, who died in December 2021, Soul Burger features contributions from Vince Staples, JID, Doechii, Blxst, Lupe Fiasco, and more.
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Fimiguerrero, Len & Lancey Foux: Conglomerate [Lizzy]
Three rising stars of UK rap unite on Conglomerate. Teasers of songs involving the trio of Fimiguerrero, Len, and Lancey Foux have been circulating online for a while, most recently Fimiguerrero and Len’s “Excuse My French” and its Grand Theft Auto–referencing video—the latest in a line of video-game references from Fimiguerrero that includes an NBA Street V3 homage so accurate that it was “a little creepy,” Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre wrote in a September article.
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