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 Panda Bear, Marie Davidson, Darkside, Ichiko Aoba, Kilbourne, Boldy James & Chuck Strangers, Deep Sea Diver, Cheekface, and Saffron Bloom. 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.)
Panda Bear: Sinister Grift [Domino]
Noah Lennox brings the sunshine—and, for the first time on a Panda Bear album, nearly all of his Animal Collective bandmates—on Sinister Grift, an album of spongy psychedelic daydreams and melodies that yearn and enchant. Co-produced by Animal Collective’s Josh “Deakin” Dibb, the Buoys and Reset follow-up invites guests including Cindy Lee, Spirit of the Beehive’s Rivka Ravede, and his old bandmates to add splashes of color to his otherwise one-man operation. The result, said admirer Oneohtrix Point Never in a press release, is “classic rock dream that ebbs beautifully into a little bit of a nightmare.”
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Marie Davidson: City of Clowns [Deewee]
Marie Davidson linked up with Soulwax and Pierre Guerineau for City of Clowns, her latest album of deadpan dancefloor soliloquies and her debut for the Belgian duo’s Deewee label. Inspired by Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Davidson grapples with the tendrils of Big Tech in songs that play out as a militant techno march interrupted by bursts of pop abandon. Lead single “Scary Clown” wryly considers the warping effect of social media. “Most people have a clown inside of them,” Davidson said in press materials. “Some are funny, some are shy, some are twisted, some are dark. The clown is the part of us that is dying to be seen, for better or for worse.”
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Darkside: Nothing [Matador]
Darkside are back—with a new album and a new member. Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington enlisted touring drummer Tlacael Esparza for their official lineup and their new LP, Nothing. The musicians started rehearsing the material that became Nothing in the summer of 2022, jamming in a storefront in northeast Los Angeles. The hours-long improvisational sessions birthed the nine-track record, which includes the singles “S.N.C,” “Are You Tired (Keep on Singing),” and “Graucha Max.” Nothing follows Darkside’s 2021 comeback full-length, Spiral.
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Ichiko Aoba: Luminescent Creatures [Hermine/Psychic Hotline]
Even at her most hushed, Ichiko Aoba brings an epic sensibility to her crystalline ambient-pop curios. The Japanese singer, songwriter, and composer splotches ethereal electronics and vaporous keys across Luminescent Creatures, drawing the listener into minimal compositions with a voice attuned to every inch of space in the recording and when to leave it eerily unfilled. The album’s engulfing calm, she’s said, was partly inspired by a series of diving ventures in Japan’s Ryukyu Archipelago. “I feel unable to resist the pull of the ocean,” Aoba said in press materials, “and know how easy it would be for my small body to be swallowed by the sea.”
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Kilbourne: If Not to Give a Fantasy [Hammerhead]
New York-based hardcore producer Kilbourne applies a playful sensibility to an onslaught of pugilistic beats on If Not to Give a Fantasy, released on her own Hammerhead label. Opener “Loon Call” evokes birdsong amid a tumult of industrial bass slaps, while her puckish tendencies are in evidence on “Bald Boys,” which samples comedian Patti Harrison exclaiming, “I hate bald boys! I can’t stand bald boys!”
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Boldy James & Chuck Strangers: Token of Appreciation [1301 LLC]
We’d already featured him in our weekly roundup for three consecutive months, and, well, turns out it’s Boldy James season all year round. The follow-up to his collaborative projects with Harry Fraud, RichGains, and WhoTheHellIsCarlo unites the prolific Detroit rapper with Pro Era alumnus Chuck Strangers, building on the Sunday-afternoon magic of single “Whale Fishing.” The record leaked in 2022; now you can hear the finished product.
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Deep Sea Diver: Billboard Heart [Sub Pop]
Billboard Heart is the fourth album from Deep Sea Diver—the expansionist indie-rock project helmed by Jessica Dobson—in some 13 years. Between her stints as a touring member with Beck and the Shins, Dobson has developed the quartet into a source of reliably rousing anthems that aims for the rafters like never before on Billboard Heart. The album was led by the title track, which Dobson said is a “nod to the simplicity of my favorite Tom Petty songs and to my love for Wim Wenders’ film Paris, Texas. The feeling of standing in the lonesome desert, embracing every particle of yourself, even the ones that are hard to look at, and fighting for your spirit to move through this world without entanglement.”
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Cheekface: Middle Spoon [self-released]
On Middle Spoon, Cheekface slip slinky indie-pop hooks into a scrapbook of comic commentaries on the modern condition. The Martha tourmates’ second album in as many years follows a year of ill fortune for members of the Los Angeles trio, notes of which find their way into the sometimes mournful, always playful lyrics. “This isn’t an aging and dying album,” said frontperson Greg Katz in press materials. “It’s not a breakup album. It’s definitely a Cheekface album, and no one will confuse it for something else. But if it seems like there are some lyrical threads about being at the hospital, sleeping in uncomfortable places, being forced into change by things outside of your control and fruitlessly trying to resist it, that’s not your imagination.”
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Saffron Bloom: Saffron Bloom [Delicate]
Saffron Bloom is the brainchild of New York producer and sound artist Sepehr. The Iranian American musician’s self-titled debut under the moniker applies his expansive palate and immersive sound design to a seasonally themed fever dream—part night-crawling trip-hop, part science-fiction soundscape, with supernova sweeps of ambient sparkle to spare.
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