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 Earl Sweatshirt, Mac DeMarco, Nourished by Time, Deftones, Ghostface Killah, Water From Your Eyes, Wolf Alice, Kathleen Edwards, Ami Taf Ra, Superchunk, Hunx and His Punx, Scree, and Greg Freeman. 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.)
Earl Sweatshirt: Live Laugh Love [Tan Cressida/Warner]
Earl Sweatshirt trickled out Live Love Laugh with cheeky teasers and a Los Angeles listening party. The new album follows the 2023 Alchemist collaboration Voir Dire, and it’s the rapper’s first solo effort since 2022’s Sick!, but it really shares its DNA with 2018 opus Some Rap Songs. The 11-song album is similarly filled with off-kilter, sample-driven beats, and the Californian’s lyrics and deadpan delivery are as potent and affecting as ever. Producers on the album include Theravada, Navy Blue, Black Noi$e, and Child Actor, and Erykah Badu adds vocals to the closing “Exhaust.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Mac DeMarco: Guitar [Mac’s Record Label]
Mac DeMarco returns to songwriting basics on Guitar, a sonic stripping-back that belies his enormification as an indie-rock lodestar. Guitar is the follow-up to both One Wayne G, which was really a compilation of mostly instrumental leftovers, and a proper, albeit entirely instrumental, album called Five Easy Hot Dogs. So you might call Guitar the follow-up to 2019’s Here Comes the Cowboy, DeMarco’s last DeMarco-esque album, as long as you are willing to discount Hear the Music, a record he shelved just before recording Guitar. The only thing Guitar really follows is DeMarco’s meandering muse, the carefree romantic sensibility that makes his melodies simmer and his twinges of melancholy smart like cigarette burns. The Beatlesy “Home” and minimalist ditties “Holy” and “Phantom” preceded the album.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Buy at Rough Trade
Nourished by Time: The Passionate Ones [XL]
Some great artists emerge fully formed, but Nourished by Time’s breathtaking run of early releases suggests a perpetual self-realization. DIY debut Erotic Probiotic 2 and XL-backed stopgap EP Catching Chickens planted a flag at the hitherto unimagined intersection between Prince, the Cure, King Krule, and Anita Baker, North Stars who remain fixed on The Passionate Ones as Marcus Brown develops a world-building, soul-stirring twist on bedroom pop. It all comes to a head on “Baby Baby,” an indie-pop, synth-punk-rap whirlwind that catapults Brown’s social commentary onto another astral plane altogether.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Deftones: Private Music [Reprise]
Deftones’ 10th album and first in five years reaffirms their position as fringe metal greats, heavy-rock tinkerers as adept at brushing pop’s outer-limits as they are at conjuring up a seductive void to subsume their legion fans. As Sadie Sardini Garner puts it in Pitchfork’s review of Private Music, “While [guitarist Stephen] Carpenter has made no secret of his love for Meshuggah, the sparkling detail of private music, the loving way the album lingers on thick, sustained chords for a beat longer than seems natural, like it’s trying to tear itself away from a Rothko, means part of the album’s pleasure comes from his pure devotion to tone, Sunn O))) with certified-platinum pop instincts.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Buy at Rough Trade
Ghostface Killah: Supreme Clientele 2 [Mass Appeal]
Supreme Clientele 2 is one of those albums that seemed like it would never materialize. Remarkably, it’s real, and it finds Ghostface Killah rapping beside Wu-Tang Clan bandmates Raekwon, GZA, Method Man; contemporaries Nas, M.O.P., and Styles P; and disciples like Conway the Machine. While it’s virtually impossible for any rapper to recapture the energy and power of “Saturday Nite” or “Mighty Healthy,” Supreme Clientele 2 singles “Rap Kingpin” and “Metaphysics” show that Ghostface Killah is as hungry as he’s been in a long time.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Amazon Music
Water From Your Eyes: It’s a Beautiful Place [Matador]
As Water From Your Eyes, Rachel Brown and Nate Amos make art-pop that is by turns heady and visceral, intricate and riotous. It’s a Beautiful Place, the follow-up to 2023 breakout Everyone’s Crushed channels the anything-goes maximalism of King Crimson or Built to Spill into quick, dense earworms, Brown’s deliberate melodies mangled by shifting-sands riffs and relay-bursts of global rhythms. “It ended up being about time, dinosaurs, and space,” said Nate Amos of the LP. “We wanted to present a wide range of styles in a way that acknowledges everything’s just a tiny blip.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Wolf Alice: The Clearing [RCA]
Wolf Alice lean ever further in to grandiosity on Greg Kurtsin–produced new album The Clearing, the Blue Weekend follow-up that marks their departure from Dirty Hit and arrival on Sony label RCA. Written in their native North London and recorded in Los Angeles, the album—lead single “Bloom Baby Bloom,” in particular—is a gleefully camp, glam-studded reinvention of their dreamy, folk-flecked rock roots, suggesting visions of a life beyond their longtime status as UK darlings.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Buy at Rough Trade
Kathleen Edwards: Billionaire [Dualtone]
Eight and a half years separated Total Freedom and its predecessor, Voyageur, so the five years between albums for Kathleen Edwards now feels like the blink of an eye. For her new one, Billionaire, the Ottawa musician teamed up with producers Jason Isbell and Gena Johnson for 10 tracks of chugging rock and razor-sharp songwriting.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Ami Taf Ra: The Prophet and the Madman [Brainfeeder]
Ami Taf Ra is a relatively new entrant to the Los Angeles jazz scene, but she fits snuggly, like she’s been singing along the likes of Kamasi Washington, Brandon Coleman, Ronald Bruner Jr., and Taylor Graves for years. The musician’s debut, The Prophet and the Madman, is, accordingly, a bright expression of spiritual jazz and religious music.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Superchunk: Songs in the Key of Yikes [Merge]
Superchunk’s new album, Songs in the Key of Yikes, opens with “Is It Making You Feel Something,” a slice of power-pop that bandleader Mac McCaughan said “is about not second-guessing yourself in the very second-guessable process of writing words and music.” What follows is a suite of reliably punchy hooks and big riffs, as the band follows 2022’s Wild Loneliness.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Hunx and His Punx: Walk Out on This World [Get Better]
Seth Bogart, Shannon Shaw, and Erin Emslie are back together as Hunx and His Punx. Their new album, Walk Out on This World, showcases their jangly garage-punk chops and playful nature, especially on singles “Wild Boys” and “Alone in Hollywood on Acid.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Scree: August [Ruination]
With August, Scree—the Brooklyn, New York, trio of guitarist Ryan El-Solh and bassist Carmen Quill and drummer Jason Burger—deliver another collection of experimental music that blends influences from jazz, classical, and Arabic music. Joining the core group on the follow-up to Jasmine on a Night in July are violinist Zosha Warpeha, cellist David Balatero, clarinetist Ivan Arteaga, woodwinds player Levon Henry, pedal steel player Luke Bergman, and producer Ari Chersky.
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Greg Freeman: Burnover [Transgressive]
Greg Freeman, an alt-country artist based in Burlington, Vermont, made his debut in 2022 with I Looked Out. Discussing the the follow-up, Burnover, in press materials, he explained, “I was trying to make an album about where I live, without specifically writing about myself and my immediate surroundings.” Freeman co-produced his album with Benny Yurco, and he previewed it with the singles “Point and Shoot,” “Curtain,” “Gallic Shrug,” and “Salesman.”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Tidal
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade