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 Phoebe Bridgers, L’Rain, Djrum, 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.) Phoebe Bridgers: Lost Weekend [Dead Oceans] In the six years since her last solo album, Phoebe Bridgers transformed from being indie-rock famous to pop-star famous: She earned 11 Grammy Awards nominations and won four of them, was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live twice (first on her own, and then with Boygenius), and earned a dedicated TMZ page along with the paparazzi hounds who populate it. As her star rose, though, Bridgers evaded the spotlight, and she returns on Lost Weekend willing to divulge the late-night anxieties of new love, the strained relationship with her late father, and the disaffected grief from that reclusive time.
As the strange giddiness punctuating her scream in lead single “Lost Boys” implies, Bridgers is feeling the pressure and learning how to let it out, this time with her quietest songs yet and an unexpected list of collaborators in tow. Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade L’Rain: Fata Morgana [Mexican Summer] On “soulless cycle,” L’Rain sings in a deceptively skippy cadence: “I am so tired of being tired.” The New York musician has never shied away from difficult themes in her work. Her self-titled debut dealt with grief, Fatigue tackled post-pandemic loss and anxiety, and I Killed Your Dog, embraced her shadow self.
Her fourth album, Fata Morgana, attempts to answer a timely question: How do you thrive in a world designed to see you fail? Across the album, L’Rain picks from a vast selection of genres—atmospheric folk, R&B, and swirling, blazing rock—while threading in poetic lyrics that move through mentions of vampires, cracked fruit, shadows, and bitter-tasting glitter. Yet it took the British producer and DJ until now to actually use the title I Wander, and the six-song EP attached to it is worthy of the name and all of the peaks and valleys it proposes we explore.
Djrum cracks open a new batch of heart-racing beats and skittering electronics, this time in self-proclaimed “bite-size chunks.” Listen to songs at random or take in the full EP for different narratives, all of which is perfect for walks long or short. But there’s a clear reason the Project Blowed compatriots have fallen into natural step over the past few years: they’re like yin and yang, Eagle’s grim and incisive bars juxtaposed over Segal’s funk and synth-heavy stylings. On what is somehow their first full-length LP together, the duo get the chance to expand on this chemistry.
They throw their weight behind a larger narrative that’s likely familiar to many: a recently ended relationship, which Open Mike Eagle sketches with humor, pathos, and plenty of unapologetic pain. Mondal runs her voice ragged in the warped post-punk song “Cocoon” and Schnug strums relentlessly on “Shooting Shadows” until you find yourself pogoing on the dance floor. But what really makes You Say I Romanticize stand out on its own is how the anticipated follow-up to 2023’s Good Living Is Coming for You builds off their previous ideas while sounding like an entirely new concept.
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