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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 Tinashe, Gilla Band, Julia Jacklin, M83, Godflesh, 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.) Tinashe: Popstar [Nice Life/Atlantic] For any other artist, titling your eighth studio album Popstar would be laying it on a little thick. But Tinashe’s allowed: In addition to practically setting the blueprint for contemporary K-pop, her new record exudes star quality.
Popstar is half-recreation, half-reimagining of the last decade’s biggest pop blockbusters, and it nails all the details: the acoustic closing number (“Heavy Weight”); the rock&b ballad (“I’d Rather Be Alone,” just in case you forgot Tinashe almost had a song on Anti); even the dalliance with stadium country (“Nobody Want to Dance Anymore”). Armed with an arsenal of beats that channel Metro Boomin, Missy-Timbaland, and Mike Will Made-It, ‘Nashe can’t help but make it all sound, well, “Too Easy.” Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Buy at Rough Trade Gilla Band: Pugnello [Rough Trade] With Holding Hands With Jamie, their 2015 debut album, Gilla Band reimagined noise-rock as a queasy, overblown, manic breakdown. Over a decade later, the Irish band’s fourth full-length deepens their place as a north star for the genre and the entire crop of UK bands they’ve inspired.
Pugnello is twisted and unpredictable, a ship battering waves on the high sea with no say in which direction it heads, despite its obstinate persistence. That should make you nauseous, but in Gilla Band’s hands, it’s a rave mandating you to dance. Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade Julia Jacklin: The Gem [4AD] The best records feel like places you can go to; Julia Jacklin’s The Gem actually is one.
The Australian songwriter’s 4AD debut takes its name from a real pub in Melbourne that served as a space of solace when Jacklin moved to the city in 2017, knowing no one. Everything changes, but nearly a decade later, she sought out the same haunt to craft her first proper hometown album. Jacklin recorded in a room above the bar, tested out the songs downstairs, and entrusted co-production to old friend Robert Muinos’ Rat Pack Studios.
For an album made in a period of transition between labels, managers, and stylistic approaches, The Gem moves remarkably like a turtle, carrying home comfortably on its back. His 2023 LP Fantasy was pitched as a sequel to 2005’s Before the Dawn Heals Us, so based on that calculus—and all but confirmed by the piano refrain that closes “Blister Sunrise”—I Wrote You a Letter is the spiritual successor to 2008’s Saturdays=Youth. It’s also relatively subdued for an M83 record.
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