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 Niontay, Maria Somerville, Djrum, William Tyler, Jensen McRae, Fly Anakin, Samia, Nazar, Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas, Satomimagae, Emma-Jean Thackray, and Eliana Glass. 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.)
Niontay: Fada<3of> [10k]3of>
Two years after breaking out with debut album Dontay’s Inferno and the mesmeric rap earworm “Thank Allah,” Niontay returns with another showcase of the ever-versatile rapper’s geographically sprawling sound. The Milwaukee-born, Florida-raised rapper—now embedded in the 10k cadre spearheaded by label founder MIKE—dedicates Fada<3of>3of> to a friend who died in 2009. “Death sucks but we gotta learn to celebrate it and send our loved ones off properly with love,” he said in press materials. “That’s all I’m doing with this music, still tryna have fun and carry my Ole boy’s name and legacy on to the furthest extent despite the ‘reality’ of the situation.” Mavi, El Cousteau, Sideshow, and Jadasea feature, along with production from Tony Seltzer, Surf Gang, and more.
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Maria Somerville: Luster [4AD]
Maria Somerville meanders through a montage of daydreamy slowcore on Luster, expanding her palate of drone-anchored folk to alight upon a stirring, occasionally epic sound that is right at home at her new label home, 4AD. After self-releasing her 2019 album, All My People, Somerville returned to her native Connemara, Ireland, to montage together a series of demoes with collaborators including co-producer Suzanne Kraft and, on uilleann pipe drones, Lankum’s Ian Lynch.
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Djrum: Under Tangled Silence [Houndstooth]
With Under Tangled Silence, Djrum completes his return to recording after a hard drive meltdown that destroyed the fruits of his lockdown labor. The UK producer’s follow-up to the November EP Meaning’s Edge is a celestial mix of antic beats with cascading piano and harp that evokes jazz and jungle hallmarks on its journey to the dancefloor.
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William Tyler: Time Indefinite [Psychic Hotline]
One of Nashville’s most skilled yet humble guitarists, William Tyler finds grace and stillness within his finger-plucked songs. On Time Indefinite, however, he stands more firmly as a composer than anything else. Across his first solo LP since 2019’s Goes West, Tyler uncorks ambient interludes and dreamy passages that serve as the focal point onto which his guitars add texture to emphasize a greater mood, almost taking the focus off his hands and putting it onto the overall direction of the music. With the nearly overwhelming aura cast by the opening three-song suite “Cabin Six,” “Concern,” and “Star of Hope,” Time Indefinite is bold in scope, but later tracks like the acoustic “Anima Hotel” ground Tyler back in his roots.
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Jensen McRae: I Don’t Know How but They Found Me! [Dead Oceans]
Four years after her breakout with a viral single satirizing Phoebe Bridgers, Jensen McRae claims her own inheritance of indie-folk real estate with her second album for Dead Oceans. Recorded with Waxahatchee and Bon Iver collaborator Brad Cook, I Don’t Know How but They Found Me! collects a scrapbook of wistful tales of romantic resilience including her latest viral single, “Massachusetts.”
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Fly Anakin: (The) Forever Dream [Lex]
Fly Anakin’s solo follow-up to 2022 debut Frank is billed as a creative rebirth for the maverick Virginia rapper, executive-produced by Quelle Chris with contributions from Pink Siifu, Bbymutha, the Alchemist, $ilkmoney, and more. Lead single “My N*gga” showcased the tripped-out jazz and soul grooves that coexist with a dizzying assortment of lush psychedelic textures across the LP.
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Samia: Bloodless [Grand Jury Music]
Samia opens Bloodless—the follow-up to her 2023 breakout album, Honey—with “Bovine Excision,” an anthem about the socially ordained trappings of femininity. Its setting of spare, incisive lyrics to folk-flecked indie-pop is typical of an album held taut between the introspective and the spectacular, a record of self-discovery that takes audible pleasure in discovering new frontiers for her sound, too. Christian Lee Hutson and Raffaela contribute songwriting to the LP, which is co-produced by Caleb Wright and Jake Luppen.
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Nazar: Demilitarize [Hyperdub]
In 2020, Nazar debuted with Guerilla, an album that put the kuduro rhythms of Angola in service of a dance-music memoir based on his family’s struggle in the country’s civil war. Demilitarize swaps the debut’s evocative field recordings for kaleidoscopic melodic swirls and daydreamy vocals that cushion his hurtling beats. “I wanted to make it almost metaphysical like creating sci-fi, with classic cyberpunk anime Ghost in the Shell being a core inspiration,” he said in press materials.
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Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas: Totality [Drag City]
Nearly a decade since their first collaborative LP, Automaginary, the astral jazz space force of Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas have reconvened for Totality, a mystic expedition recorded in one day, with Greg Norman, at Chicago’s Electrical Audio. As captured in lead single and album closer “Clock No Clock,” their new collaborative work is continuous and hypnotic, pushing their improvisational instincts until fluttering synth and cymbal crashes are as expected as the song’s steady, mellow beat. A swirl of guimbri, flutes, organs, and more, Totality is a guided meditation with no words, just vibes.
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Satomimagae: Taba [Rvng Intl.]
Taba is Japanese producer and songwriter Satomimagae’s second album for Rvng Intl. since her demoes landed on the New York label’s desk during the pandemic. The album weaves short stories of social minutiae into compositions mixing psychedelic folk and spectral bedroom pop, channelling what she’s called, in press materials, “the awareness that we are just one element in the collective (taba) and yet each individual’s invisible experiences and memories remain somewhere, influencing us, or society, without realizing it. We are small dots within a mass.”
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Emma-Jean Thackray: Weirdo [Brownswood]
Long established as a key engine of south London’s ascendant jazz scene, Emma-Jean Thackray continues to trespass genre borders on her expansive second album, Weirdo. The Yorkshire-born composer and multi-instrumentalist splashes funk, soul, and streaks of anarchic grunge into the record, balancing “confessional poetry” with “lush jazz harmony, sweeping synths, and a pop punk silliness,” as she put it in press materials. “When you centre in on the silliness it’s easier to speak on your pain, and easier for others to hear it.”
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Eliana Glass: E [Shelter Press]
New York–based singer and pianist Eliana Glass inhabits a netherworld between smoky, basement jazz clubs and the melting vistas of surrealist art on her debut album, E. Among its 12 bewitching tracks, steeped in what she calls the “condensation of everyday life,” are covers of Carla Bley and Annette Peacock, as well as a tribute to Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou and her 2006 Éthiopiques entry.
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