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10 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Jessica Pratt, Mdou Moctar, Kamasi Washington, and More
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 projects from Jessica Pratt, Mdou Moctar, Kamasi Washington, Jawnino, Ibibio Sound Machine, Evilgiane & Slimesito, Kacy Hill, Hana Vu, Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes, and Jadasea. 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.)
Kacy Hill Teams With Nourished by Time in Video for New Song “My Day Off”: Watch
Kacy Hill has enlisted Nourished by Time for the new song “My Day Off.” Hill and Sadie Wilking directed the pastoral video, in which Hill and some friends dance semi-nude in a field while Nourished by Time peers toward them through a magnifying glass. Check that out below.
Ravyn Lenae Announces Sophomore Album, Shares New Songs: Listen
Ravyn Lenae is returning in the summer with her sophomore studio album. The new album, Bird’s Eye, is out August 9 via Atlantic. Leading the Hypnos follow-up are the singles “Love Me Not” and “Love Is Blind.” The former song arrives with a Lenae-directed video. Check out the new songs below.
Radical Optimism
Dua Lipa is a pop star who stridently resists personal disclosure in her work. This added an irresistible biographical quirk to “Houdini,” the hard-edged, darting lead single of her third album. As she often does, Lipa was challenging a guy to impress her before she gave him the slip. Lipa herself is an elusive presence, which isn’t to say she’s reclusive. Although it’s been four years since her second album Future Nostalgia, the British Albanian-Kosovar 28-year-old has remained omnipresent thanks to various luxury brand campaigns and the contractually attendant magazine covers, roles in Barbie and Argylle, her podcast and book club, and the album’s pandemic-delayed tour. Despite that visibility, she appears glamorous, distant. It’s quite admirable that she refuses to trade on her private life for intrigue, especially when celebrity subtext has never been a more powerful driver of pop success. At the same time, it’s hard to decipher what she stands for as an artist, and harder than ever on the confused Radical Optimism.
Jon McKiel
Jon McKiel’s life and music changed forever when he bought a haunted reel-to-reel. When the equipment arrived at his home in rural New Brunswick, the singer-songwriter discovered a tape still wound into the machine, full of odd song fragments and guitar noodlings recorded by its previous owner. Who was he? When did he make those recordings? What dreams did he have for his music? Nobody could say. McKiel and his co-producer Jay Crocker (better known as JOYFULTALK) dubbed the anonymous artist Bobby Joe Hope, welcomed him as a full collaborator, and even named the subsequent album after him. The songs on 2020’s Bobby Joe Hope sampled snippets of his unfinished songs into unusual sound collages that disrupted McKiel’s solid, if familiar, guitar rock and inspired him to work new sounds and styles into his repertoire.
40
Jawnino is prone to the type of errant observations that stumble across your mind when the drugs and drinks are hitting especially hard, glitchy epiphanies spurred by Red Stripe and ketamine. His raps drape languidly over jungle and grime grooves; no matter the BPM, his bars rarely move faster than a jog, refusing to break a sweat. Across his debut mixtape 40, the south London grime rapper comes off calm, cool, and collected—you just wish he’d loosen up a little.
King Princess Covers Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work”: Listen
King Princess has shared a new cover of Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill classic “Dirty Work.” She and producers Robert Linvill and Slimdan recorded the cover for the new season of the show Hacks. Listen to the song below (via Consequence). Mikaela Strauss released her...
Vampire Weekend to Return as Saturday Night Live Musical Guests
Vampire Weekend will return to Saturday Night Live this month. Maya Rudolph will host the May 11 episode, which will mark the band’s fourth time performing on the show. The following installment of SNL, airing May 18, will be helmed by Jake Gyllenhaal, with musical guest Sabrina Carpenter. Carpenter will make her debut on the show, and will likely perform her recent pop hit “Espresso.”
Illuminati Hotties Announces Tour, Shares Video for New Song “Can’t Be Still”: Watch
Illuminati Hotties has announced a North American tour that’s slated for this autumn. To coincide with the news, she’s also shared a new song titled “Can’t Be Still,” along with a music video directed by Tony Wolski. In the clip, Sarah Tudzin walks across the city, a tropical landscape, and a desert, picking up new friends along the way – one of whom is Camp Cope’s Georgia Maq. Check it out below.
Ian Sweet Releases New Cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year‐Old Girl”: Listen
Ian Sweet is following her 2023 album, Sucker, with a new cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year‐Old Girl.” Listen to the track, and find Ian Sweet’s upcoming tour dates, below. In a lengthy press statement, Ian Sweet mastermind Jilian Medford said:
Duane Eddy, Influential Rock’n’Roll Guitarist, Dies at 86
Duane Eddy, the pioneering guitarist who helped popularize twang—the reverberating electric sound that emits a warped and dusty tone—in rock’n’roll during the 1950s, has died, reports The Associated Press. He died of complications from cancer in the hospital on Tuesday (April 30) in Franklin, Tennessee, according to his wife, Deed Abbate. He was 86 years old.
Washed Out Announces Album, Shares Video for New Song “The Hardest Part”: Watch
Ernest Greene has announced his first Washed Out album since August 2020’s Purple Noon. The new album, Notes From a Quiet Life, is out June 28 via Sub Pop. Leading the LP is the new single “The Hardest Part,” which arrives with a music video directed and edited by Paul Trillo. Find it below.
Universal Music Group Reaches Deal to Return Music to TikTok
Universal Music Group has reached a licensing agreement with TikTok that will return its artists to the platform after a months-long standoff. The deal secures “improved remuneration” for UMG artists, as well as new commercial opportunities and protections against generative AI, according to a joint press release from the companies.
Caroline Polachek Shares New Song “Starburned and Unkissed”: Listen
Caroline Polachek has released her contribution to the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack. She produced the new song, “Starburned and Unkissed,” with A. G. Cook. Hear it below. I Saw the TV Glow (Original Soundtrack) is out May 10 (via A24 Music). The album has tracks from Yeule, Florist, the Weather Station, Jay Som, and more.
Here in the Pitch
There is already so much to admire about Jessica Pratt the folk artist: her elliptical lyrics, her nylon-string guitar and voice to match. But the label of folk singer-songwriter doesn’t quite capture the real essence of the Jessica Pratt song. It is difficult to describe, like a dream that doesn’t go anywhere but still feels like you should talk about it in therapy. In the bottom right-hand corner of the lyric sheet that accompanies the physical release of her fourth album, Here in the Pitch, Pratt includes a quote from Leonard Cohen, pulled from a 1975 Crawdaddy interview about the genesis of songwriting and trusting your own process: “The fact is that you feel like singing, and this is the song that you know.”
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
The significance of the Rivoli to Toronto music lore cannot be overstated. Upon opening in 1982, the Queen Street West venue became an epicenter of local bohemia, with a streetfront restaurant serving up pad thai to art students on first dates, a second-floor pool hall where you could wager away the last of your beer money, and most crucially, an intimate, 200-capacity brick-walled performance room where the city’s freaks had free rein. Through the ’80s, it was the space where queercore pioneers Fifth Column turned their gigs into Super 8 film happenings, the Cowboy Junkies perfected their brand of codeined country, and a pre-TV Kids in the Hall pushed sketch comedy to anarchic extremes. In the late ’90s, it was the place where a young Leslie Feist workshopped songs and tended bar. And a decade after that, you might’ve caught a teenage Aubrey Graham trying his hand at improv. Even now, long after the Queen West neighborhood’s cachet has diminished, the Rivoli is still a place where music history is made: Last November, it hosted arguably the strangest Neil Young and Crazy Horse gig ever.
Affection
The backstory of a Bullion song is never obvious. All that’s legible are stray details—a name, a place, an age—silhouetted in the warm light of emotional afterglow. In “Hula,” my favorite song from 2020’s We Had a Good Time, he hinted at stolen moments on dancefloors in Tokyo, Mexico, and Berlin (no further context; guess you had to be there) and asked, out of nowhere, “Are people in pain where you are?” That a bittersweet synth-pop track so perfectly suited for swaying cheek to cheek coincided with the onset of the novel coronavirus made the question feel uncannily apropos.
Charly Bliss Announce First Album in Five Years, Share Video for New Song: Watch
Charly Bliss have announced their first new album in five years: Forever, the follow-up to 2019’s Young Enough, arrives August 16 via Lucky Number. The power-pop band has shared its lead single, “Nineteen,” along with a Henry Kaplan–directed music video that captures the band participating in a cross-country race in various ways. Watch it below.
Wild Up Announce New Julius Eastman Album, Share Song: Listen
Wild Up, the Los Angeles music collective led by artistic director and conductor Christopher Rountree, have announced a new album of Julius Eastman recordings. The album—Julius Eastman, Vol. 4: The Holy Presence—is out June 21 via New Amsterdam. Listen to Wild Up’s new take on Eastman’s “Our Father” below.
Ra Ra Riot Return With First New Song in Five Years: Listen
Ra Ra Riot are back with their first song in five years. Listen to “The Wish” below. Rostam Batmanglij, whose former Vampire Weekend bandmates are playing a handful of shows with Ra Ra Riot, co-wrote and produced the song. In a press release, Ra Ra Riot’s Wes Miles—who...
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