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 Japanese Breakfast; YHWH Nailgun; Lonnie Holley; Jefre Cantu-Ledesma; Dutch Interior; More Eaze & Claire Rousay; Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith; PremRock; Kassian; and Lil Bean. 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.)
Japanese Breakfast: For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) [Dead Oceans]
In the four years since Jubilee, Michelle Zauner got tired of a few things: the color yellow, singing about joy nonstop on tour, and shying away from the shadows. With her new Japanese Breakfast album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), she doesn’t hide her ambitions. Zauner prods at the cloudy feeling of anticipatory sadness and what it’s like to be on the cusp of change. Still, the mood never gets too dark, thanks to the chunky strings guiding lead single “Orlando in Love,” storied drummer Jim Keltner sitting in to add shuffling percussion to “Mega Circuit,” or the way Blake Mills prioritizes the textures of each instrument as the album’s producer. This is a new Japanese Breakfast that expands its sound in broad strokes without missing the fine details that have made Zauner and her band so cherished.
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YHWH Nailgun: 45 Pounds [AD 93]
New York noise punks YHWH Nailgun signed to outré London label AD 93 for their debut album, 45 Pounds, signaling their affinity for textural play and structural ingenuity more often associated with underground electronic music. The album clatters, convulses, and disorientates with sudden tempo changes and contrapuntal percussion, pierced by shards of rich melody and warm synth stabs that beckon you further into the maelstrom.
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Lonnie Holley: Tonky [Jagjaguwar]
A Lonnie Holley record can feel like deep, solitary communion with a higher power. On Tonky, the Alabama artist turned song sculptor opens up that experience to a star-spangled slate of collaborators: Isaac Brock, billy woods, Saul Williams, Open Mike Eagle, and Alabaster DePlume are just a few, all tuning in to Holley’s transcendentalist wavelength on songs that soothe and awe in equal measure.
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Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: Gift Songs [Mexican Summer]
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has become a lodestar to ambient artists in the business of music that feels like bathing in the eternal. For Cantu-Ledesma himself, 20 minutes or so will do: The Texas composer introduced Gift Songs with “The Milky Sea,” a single of just that length that begins with a cascading piano flourish before sinking ever deeper into an Atlantis of undulating synths and drums. The rest of the album, partly inspired by his work as a Zen priest and hospice worker, evokes “being amongst running waters, hearing wind through trees, or the rhythm of hiking to a vista with friends at twilight,” he said in press materials.
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Dutch Interior: Moneyball [Fat Possum]
Dutch Interior are all charm on Moneyball, their third studio album and Fat Possum debut, and it’s easy to get caught up in the fun the six-piece indie-rock group whips up. Recorded over a six month period in the band’s Long Beach, California, studio, Moneyball is, at once, bleary and sharp. Produced by the band’s own Conner Reeves and mixed by Modest Mouse go-to Phil Ek, Moneyball reintroduces Dutch Interior as a group with a resting heart rate between Drive-By Truckers and Florry.
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More Eaze & Claire Rousay: No Floor [Thrill Jockey]
More Eaze and Claire Rousay have once again linked up for a collaborative album, and No Floor crosses their respective songwriting styles more seamlessly than before. The Texas-based ambient sound collage artists use their follow-up to 2022’s hyperpop-inspired Never Stop Texting Me to return to their former comfort zones, nestling into the hazy drone and elongated strings with a renewed appreciation for the far-reaching space they provide. As an introspective reflection on the emotional weight of youth and the friendships born from bonding over that shared experience, No Floor sounds like the process of pushing through a melancholic period until you break through to the other side.
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Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith: Defiant Life [ECM]
Back in 2016, Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith made a splash with A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke, the sort of ECM masterpiece that more often ripples slowly into the wider music community. The jazz piano and trumpet maestros have since released A Love Sonnet for Billie Holiday, with Jack DeJohnette, and add to their quietly revered catalog with the similarly lucent Defiant Life. “We work from our individual languages and materials,” Vijay writes in his liner notes, as well as “our methods of aural attunement, and what I would call a shared aesthetic of necessity.”
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PremRock: Did You Enjoy Your Time Here…? [Backwoodz Studioz]
PremRock is one half of Backwoodz Studioz mainstays Shrapknel, the mellow middle-register that grounds the duo’s combustible rap daydreams. Did You Enjoy Your Time Here…?, his solo follow-up to 2021’s Load Bearing Crow’s Feet, features beats from producers including Elucid, Child Actor, and Willie Green and guest spots for Pink Siifu, Cavalier, Shrapknel bandmate Curly Castro, and Backwoodz Studioz head honcho billy woods.
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Kassian: Channels [!K7]
London electronic duo Kassian are stepping back into the sunlight with Channels, their debut on !K7. The album is ripe with mellow techno, earthly deep house, and momentum-building beats that are equally fitting for a lazy beach day or a 2 a.m. comeback at the club. As digital as the album sounds, Joe Danvers-McCabe and Warren Luke Cummings rope in the warmth of original instrumentation for Channels, too, namely the cozy cello of Timothy Kraemer and lively keys by Joe Armon-Jones. The whole album smooths itself out no matter how quickly it whirrs thanks to singles like “Metro” and “Sunset Park.” By ending with “Limoncello,” however Kassian raise a glass with a toast that will give energy to even the most toasted dancers in the room.
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Lil Bean: Ghetto Children [Empire]
San Francisco rapper Lil Bean has released an album—sometimes two—nearly every year since he broke onto the scene in the late 2010s. Naturally, he’s starting off 2025 fresh with Ghetto Children, a collection of 12 tracks that dip into ample reverb (“Ghetto Children”), hi hat–heavy beats (“Wait 4 Me”), and the occasional trip-hop loop (“Harden on the Rockets”). For Lil Bean, Ghetto Children is a clean plate to showcase how his soulful vocals and even smoother flow fit into, and often represent, the tight-knit Bay Area scene today.
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