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Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
Gangrene are here to crack brains like they were blown speakers. So says Oh No near the top of his fourth collaborative album with The Alchemist, Heads I Win, Tails You Lose. The Oh No-produced highlight “Oxnard Water Torture” slides in on a bed of drums, cymbals, and haunted-house organs, a hazy backdrop he runs into the gutter. “This ain’t your Moët, this Olde English,” he says with a Joker-like snarl, his verse all harsh dissonance and razor edges. Alchemist follows up with more nimble flows and surreal writing: He’s the android with a sniper scope, hopping out the reclining Recaro seat at pinball velocity. Back together for the first time since 2015’s You Disgust Me, this dueling-stoner-dragons approach is a perfect distillation of the mud-caked shit talk the duo inaugurated with 2009’s “Acts of Violence.” Heads I Win oozes with menace when it taps into this frequency, but nearly as often, it loses some of that grime, coming off a touch too clean for its own good.
Sabrina Carpenter
I know this came out almost three weeks ago, but it’s going to be 82 degrees in New York today and it’s fair to say that Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” is currently in pole position to be this year’s song of the summer. The luxury nu-disco tune’s got its hooks in me, and if you have a peripheral awareness of the phrases “That’s that me espresso” or “I’m working late/’Cause I’m a singer,” you’ll realize it has also wormed into the brains of thousands of others.
Mabe Fratti Announces New Album Sentir Que No Sabes, Shares Songs: Listen
Mabe Fratti has announced a new album. The follow-up to 2022’s Se Ve Desde Aquí is titled Sentir Que No Sabes; it arrives June 28 via Unheard of Hope. She’s sharing two songs from it in advance, “Kravitz” and “Pantalla azul,” the latter of which comes with a video directed by Emanuel Juárez. Check those out below.
Nilüfer Yanya, Tems, Porter Robinson, Sabrina Carpenter, and More: This Week’s Pitchfork Selects Playlist
The staff of Pitchfork listens to a lot of new music. A lot of it. On any given day our writers, editors, and contributors go through an imposing number of new releases, giving recommendations to each other and discovering new favorites along the way. Each Monday, with our Pitchfork Selects playlist, we’re sharing what our writers are playing obsessively and highlighting some of the Pitchfork staff’s favorite new music. The playlist is a grab-bag of tracks: Its only guiding principle is that these are the songs you’d gladly send to a friend.
Billie Eilish Announces Massive Tour for New Album
Billie Eilish has announced a huge tour in support of her forthcoming new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft. The pop singer-songwriter’s tour begins in begins in North America in September. She’ll continue with shows in the United States and Canada through to the middle of December. Eilish restarts her tour in Australia in February 2025. Eventually, she has shows in Europe and the United Kingdom in spring and summer 2025. See all of Eilish’s tour dates below.
Hovvdy
Countless playlists and anthologies have collected the greatest songs about a first kiss and a last goodbye; mourning a parent and becoming one yourself; best friends and mortal enemies. As for the cultivation of these relationships, there’s a 256-page book trying to reteach people how to hang out, but pop music isn’t going to be much help. Hovvdy isn’t going to tell you how to navigate these things either. On one song, they’re letting loved ones know that their time together mattered, and on the next they’re setting boundaries. They might reach out to a friend in quiet agony or chastise themselves for not doing so earlier. They’re figuring it all out as it comes, just like the rest of us, and the endlessly generous Hovvdy doesn’t attempt to be a manual for living, but a scrapbook of moments of love and loss from a life well-lived.
Time Is Glass
As with all Greek myths, there are several contradictory versions of the story of Hephaestus, but in each one, he was exiled from paradise and forced to toil at his craft on the Earth before he could go home, transformed into an artisan god. I’m sure Ben Chasny wasn’t making such lofty claims when he gave Hephaestus’ name to a song on his new album, but the parallels are plain.
CAROUSEL FROM HELL
LustSickPuppy—who makes a madcap meld of punk, digital hardcore, rave, and rap—typically exerts a hyper-confident lusty indignation. It’s not that Tommy Hayes, the mind behind LustSickPuppy (LSP to the heads), doesn’t ever mention romance or melancholy within the turbulence of their mostly self-produced discography, which now totals 27 songs and a tad over 45 minutes, all counted. But all over their debut album CAROUSEL FROM HELL is the image of peeling back: “Peel ya skin back/Peel back all of my layers.” We get one surprising moment of tenderness with an almost sweetly sung “I love you, I love you/I want you to stay,” but as we move along, this peeling works in reverse, the tenderness revealed to be anger, as though to say the deepest of feeling is passionate rage.
Taylor Swift Scores 14th No. 1 Album With The Tortured Poets Department
Taylor Swift’s new LP, The Tortured Poets Department, has debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, making it her 14th studio album reach the peak. The album achieved enormous first-week sales, debuting with 2.61 million equivalent album units in the United States in the week ending April 25, as Billboard reports. Of that number, 1.914 million units were traditional album sales—with vinyl purchases alone representing a massive 859,000—and on-demand streams clocked in at 891.34 million units. Swift is now tied with Jay-Z for the most No. 1 albums among soloists. (The record for most chart-toppers of all time is still held by the Beatles, who have 19 overall.)
The Blue Mask
The three-minute guitar duet that kicks off 1974’s Rock ’n’ Roll Animal is kind of satanic when you know what’s coming: “Sweet Jane,” one of the most beautiful and important songs of all time, written by Lou Reed for the Velvet Underground, a beautiful and important band that felt like the last piece of the puzzle to teenage rock fans who discovered them during their renaissance in the early nineties. “Sweet Jane” is the song that liberated a generation from classic rock radio. It proved that you could write something durable without resorting to the exhausting riff-mongering of Foreigner or the idiot machismo of AC/DC. To hear this landmark of art rock used as a prog noodle pot by Reed’s touring band is a profoundly disorienting experience, but the whole album is like that. They do “Heroin” as the kind of uptempo funk that would later be used to get guests on and off of late-night TV. It all sounds very not Lou Reed, but by 1973 the question of what Lou Reed was had become unsettled.
Light Verse
How do you measure the time between albums? The calendar says that Iron & Wine’s latest studio effort, Light Verses, arrives exactly six years, eight months, and one day after its previous one, 2017’s Beast Epic. Your record shelf, on the other hand, says it’s been two EPs, one Archive Series release, one collab with Calexico, one reissue of his breakthrough album, two live albums, and a documentary. Maybe it’s more useful to tally up all the mundane moments when you’ve tried to be a good partner or patient father or productive artist or engaged citizen—tasks all complicated by a global pandemic that, for Sam Beam, anyway, proved creatively crippling. These various metrics are all bouncing around his skull on Light Verse, an album very much aware of time passing. Beam’s own abacus can be startlingly gruesome: “Time likes pulling my teeth,” he sings on the wry, spry “Cutting It Close.” “I never knew how many teeth I would need.”
Ice Spice Joins Cash Cobain and Bay Swag in New Video for “Fisherrr (Remix)”: Watch
New York rappers Cash Cobain and Bay Swag have tapped another New York favorite, Ice Spice, for the new remix of their song “Fisherrr.” It comes with a music video that’s directed by Kevin “KZA” Douglas and largely set at a Chinese restaurant. Watch it below.
Mickey Guyton Announces Tour, Shares New Song “Scary Love”: Listen
Mickey Guyton will head out on a North American tour this September. To go with the announcement, the country artist has shared a new song, “Scary Love.” Check that out, along with the dates, below. Guyton wrote “Scary Love” with Emma-Lee, producer Karen Kosowski, and Victoria Banks in...
“Knock Yourself Out XD”
Is anything worse than a self-serious pop song about the unbearable reality of endless public adoration? We can all think of a few—ahem, ahem. I wonder which ones Porter Robinson had in mind while writing “Knock Yourself Out XD,” a gloriously tongue-in-cheek sendup of this precise phenomenon with a winking emoticon built into the title. In character as a hopelessly out-of-touch celebrity, Robinson complains about getting stopped in the airport, declares that his face tattoo makes him uniquely special, and deliriously proclaims, “Bitch I’m Taylor Swift!” The irreverent chiptune’d melody and infectious, sugar-rush harmonies call up equal parts Backstreet Boys and George Clanton as Robinson cannily pins the blame back where it belonged in the first place: on uncritical fans with impossible expectations for their all-too-human idols. “Why should you keep letting yourself be let down?” he teases. Being famous does sound awful—so does being humorless about it.
The Smashing Pumpkins, After Public Casting Call, Announce Kiki Wong as New Touring Guitarist
In January, the Smashing Pumpkins put out a public call for a new touring guitarist. The search is now over, as the Smashing Pumpkins have announced that Kiki Wong is hitting the road with the rock band. See the Smashing Pumpkins’ upcoming tour dates below. “Reviewing the work of...
Drake Takes Down Kendrick Lamar Diss After Legal Threat From 2Pac Estate
After posting “Taylor Made Freestyle” on social media last week, Drake has seemingly taken down the Kendrick Lamar diss track, Billboard notes. The song, which included AI renderings of 2Pac and Snoop Dogg’s voices, was subject to a legal letter from 2Pac’s estate, which cited the “misappropriation and misuse of Tupac Shakur personality rights.” The estate, the letter noted, was “deeply dismayed and disappointed” by the unauthorized usage, adding that it was “a blatant abuse of the legacy of one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time.” A Drake representative declined to comment, and Drake gave no reason for the song’s removal.
9 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: St. Vincent, Thom Yorke, Justice, 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 albums from St. Vincent, Thom Yorke, Justice, Hovvdy, Anycia, LustSickPuppy, Six Organs of Admittance, Bullion, and Sega Bodega. 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.)
Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Release New Challengers (Original Score): Listen
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross recently released Challengers [Mixed], Boys Noize’s nine-song mix of music from the Nine Inch Nails musicians’ score for Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. Reznor and Ross have now released their official score for the film. Listen to the new album, Challengers (Original Score), featuring the Guadagnino co-write “Compress / Repress,” below.
Normani Reveals Debut Album Release Date, Shares Gunna-Featuring New Song “1:59”: Listen
Normani has released the first single from her long-promised debut album. The new song, “1:59,” features Atlanta rapper Gunna. Find the new song, produced by Leathre Jackettt and Tommy Brown, below. Along with “1:59,” Normani has shared the release date for her album Dopamine. The former Fifth Harmony...
Christine and the Queens Shares Video for New Song “Rentrer Chez Moi”: Watch
Christine and the Queens has shared a new song, “Rentrer Chez Moi,” with a Sasha Mongin–directed video with choreography set in the desert. Check it out below. The single follows Chris’ album Paranoïa, Angels, True Love, released last year. “This song makes me cry because...
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