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 drops available on streaming services. This week’s batch includes new albums from This Is Lorelei, Alex G, Haruomi Hosono, 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.) This Is Lorelei: The Singer in My Band [Matador] If you're most familiar with This is Lorelei and Water from Your Eyes’ Nate Amos as a producer, no worries—for many years, so was he. Regardless of how he ended up here, The Singer in My Band establishes the historically puckish Amos as a skillful bard with a knack for twang and earnest evaluation; his dad even has a banjo solo.
Populated with picaresque and peripatetic characters who dip in and out of frame, The Singer in My Band takes a keen eye to the literal and spiritual bric-a-brac you accumulate after enough trips around the sun. But the most interesting figure on display here is Amos himself, stepping sure-footedly into the unknown. Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade Sylvan Esso: Ow ∞ [Psychic Hotline] The myriad methods humanity has developed for pain management can make it easy to forget that hurting isn’t always a bad thing.
Working largely in improvisation with a cadre of talented collaborators— including six different drummers—Sylvan Esso have landed on some of their most refined alt-pop to date. Listen on Apple Music Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade Haruomi Hosono: Yours Sincerely [Ghostly International] Haruomi Hosono, the last living member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, feels ”a growing curiosity toward the unknown music that my new self will create, while also embracing the music of my former self—as if I now carry two musical worlds within me,” he says in press materials for his new album. On Yours Sincerely, he considers how to translate omoiyari into sound, pondering maternal compassion and unconditional love through a batch of wholesome songs.
As Hosono fits a children’s choir, delicate melodies, and idyllic lyrics into the LP, the balance of craft mastery and childlike wonder is enough to make you well up Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade Jhene Aiko: Westside Whimsy [Def Jam] Jhené Aiko has spent the six years since Chilombo navigating setbacks and false starts. To mark the occasion, the R&B singer enlisted a slate of trusted pals and L.A. royals—plus Tyga—to join her in an itinerary of languid ballads, jazz-bar jaunts, and pensive, acrobatic monologues that flow like waterfalls but roil beneath with whitewater intensity. Longtime collaborator Kendrick Lamar returns with a verse on “So Good,” and Larry June and Ab-Soul are among the other guests.
His soundtrack to her new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, in which a young director rebooting a famed horror franchise connects with its aging former star, is another testament to the the pair’s like minds. Tapping the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan for a new original song and sprinkling in tracks from R.E.M., Donna Lewis, Counting Crows, and more, Alex G invites you to stay a while at a place you're not likely to soon forget. Ent. / Empire] Michigan rapper Rio da Yung OG has wasted no time getting back in the game since returning from federal prison in 2024 (refer to his outlandish and hungry first-day-out cut “Rio Free” for proof).
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