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 Jenny Hval; Model/Actriz; Car Seat Headrest; Yung Lean; Anthony Naples; Boldy James & Real Bad Man; Blondshell; Mei Semones; Paco Cathcart; Loscil; and Rainy Miller. 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.)
Jenny Hval: Iris Silver Mist [4AD]
Iris Silver Mist, the latest album from the ever-familiar, ever-surprising singer-songwriter Jenny Hval, emerged from a series of concerts in which she placed rice cookers around the stage to fill the venue with the claggy aroma of home comforts. The album, itself named after a perfume, taps into her trademark skill for turning misty, windswept synths into lush backdrops for heavenly melodies to thunderbolt right into. As ever, she offsets her baroque largesse with casually deep, oddly funny observational lyrics that turn lines like, “You had bled through your jeans,” into springboards for comic monologues and philosophical yarns.
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Model/Actriz: Pirouette [True Panther]
It happened fast for Model/Actriz, the riotous and much-hyped Brooklyn noise-rockers whose vocalist, Cole Haden, is now a noted Miley Cyrus co-writer. Dogsbody follow-up Pirouette coaxes more of those pop impulses from the band’s ribcage-rattling trademark sound, smearing cues from Haden’s childhood heroes Britney Spears and Mariah Carey into a sludgy base mix of industrial goth and techno.
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Car Seat Headrest: The Scholars [Matador]
For their first full-length in five years, Car Seat Headrest have returned with a concept album set at a fictional college campus called Parnassus University. The Scholars follows multiple students at this imagined school, some of whom possess supernatural powers. Take lead single “Gethsemane,” which is about a medical student named Rosa who can revive a deceased patient by absorbing their pain. The band followed that song with “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You),” which chronicles the experiences of a PU student called Beolco who believes himself to be the reincarnated founder of the university. The nine-song LP follows Car Seat Headrest’s 2020 release Making a Door Less Open.
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Yung Lean: Jonatan [World Affairs]
After a string of releases under his own name, the artist born Jonatan Leandoer returns with his first solo album as Yung Lean since 2020’s Starz. Jonatan marks a synthesis of the Swedish sad boy supreme’s dual identities, mixing the introspective laments of his recent output with the haywire rap that brought him to infamy in the 2010s. Led by the wistfully anthemic rave ballad “Forever Yung,” the album features production from Frank Ocean collaborator Rami Dawod, with additional input from Beck and Oneohtrix Point Never.
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Anthony Naples: Scanners [ANS]
Antony Naples taps into a sleek, squirmy strain of New York house on his sixth album, Scanners. Laid down in Queens, the hypnotic LP purrs with mischievous energy while preserving the vapor-light touch of his more ambient recent output. Scanners follows Naples’ 2023 album, Orbs.
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Boldy James & Real Bad Man: Conversational Pieces [Real Bad Man]
The tireless Boldy James has teamed up with Real Bad Man for yet another 2025 album, this one featuring El-P, Conway the Machine, Dreamcastmoe, and more. It’s the third full-length collaboration from James and the Los Angeles producer, following 2022’s Killing Nothing and 2020’s Real Bad Boldy. The new album showcases the Detroit rapper’s unflinching bars and Real Bad Man’s psychedelic, Morricone-influenced beats across 40 minutes.
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Blondshell: If You Asked for a Picture [Partisan]
Blondshell returns with a combustible alloy of pop, folk, and alt-rock on If You Asked for a Picture, expanding upon her self-titled debut with finely tuned pop hooks and lyrics that probe the tensions and contradictions of love and family. “The last record was a lot of, ‘You’re the villain in this situation, you’ve wronged me, and I’m really pissed,’” she said in press materials. “On this record it was more like: ‘How did I get here? Maybe I’m the villain too.’”
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Mei Semones: Animaru [Bayonet]
Since her scintillating Kabutomushi EP, Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Mei Semones has carved out a new frontier in indie-rock, tearing through bossa nova ballads with the infectious urgency of a rafters-rousing guitar hero. Debut album Animaru pairs the featherlight melancholy of MPB with ribbons of jazzy guitar counterpoint and chamber-pop grandeur, balancing technical agility with an unabashed lunge for your heartstrings. Semones is marking her new album’s release, too, with a music video for the title song.
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Paco Cathcart: Down on Them [Wharf Cat]
Paco Cathcart is a mainstay of the New York underground, releasing dozens of albums as the Cradle and producing for the likes of Palberta and Lily Konigsberg. The resolutely DIY singer-songwriter’s Down on Them is a sort of dual unmasking: both their first album under their own name and a sonic reinvention that lifts the lo-fi fog that enshrouded much of their work as the Cradle.
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Loscil: Lake Fire [Kranky]
Lake Fire is a typically pointed and confrontational take on ambient music from Kranky and the Scott Morgan alias Loscil. Conceived during a road trip skirting active wildfire territory, the album applies a scorched-earth approach to the mesmeric loops and boundless drones in which Morgan specializes. Its enveloping layers bely a core that pulses with an urgent, apocalyptic vision.
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Rainy Miller: Joseph, What Have You Done? [Fixed Abode]
Having made his name with a string of experimental pop records rich with ethereal sound design and melodies that swoop into the mist like birds of prey, Rainy Miller took cues from some unlikely sources for Joseph, What Have You Done? Christianity, country music, and the American Southern Gothic—partly via the 2003 documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus—inspired the follow-up to his 2022 breakout album, Desquamation, and 2023 Space Afrika collaboration A Grisaille Wedding. To describe the results he coined “Northern Gothic,” referring to his native Northern England—an aesthetic he realized with help from artists including More Eaze, High Vis’ Graham Sayle, and the Danish composer August Rosenbaum.
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