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 Alchemical Sisters, Fine, Shabazz Palaces, and more. 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.)
Alchemical Sisters: Alchemical Sisters [Interdimensional Transitions]
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Octo Octa and Eris Drew’s B2B sets are the stuff of legend, but the married DJs had never collaborated on a record until they teamed up to remix Special Interest’s “Disco III” in 2021. For a joint moniker they chose “Alchemical Sisters,” a play, of course, on the Chemical Brothers. Nominative determinism at work: ’90s big beat—from Orb to Orbit—makes up the core DNA of their first full-length album as a duo. Pieced together in their New Hampshire log cabin, Alchemical Sisters is, writes Andrew Ryce in Pitchfork’s new review, “a four-dimensional record where the past endlessly loops back on itself,” where “originality and reference become one and the same.”
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Fine: Jazz Dreams [Escho]
So insular is Fine Glindvad Jensen’s musical realm that one ends up reaching for increasingly tortured anachronisms just to map its periphery: Lana if she fronted the Warm Inventions, Hope Sandoval if she made Honeymoon, a Bond girl who’s also Julee Cruise. That’s not to say Jazz Dreams is unwelcoming; the second solo album from the Copenhagen artist known mononymously as Fine is plush, cozy even, steeped in paisley folk and jangle pop. But spend enough time in this incense-scented, velvet-upholstered lounge, and you may begin to see strange shadows crawling up the walls.
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Ryan Hemsworth: Numbskull [Topshelf]
Longtime producer for the indie rock stars Ryan Hemsworth returns with his first solo album in nearly a decade to remind us what his own songwriting sounds like free from others’ ideas. Turns out, it’s caustic electropop, filtered through grainy fuzz, pop vocal hooks that could scale a mountain, and the type of slamming bass notes that could work just as well in EDM or synthpunk. Hemsworth doesn’t have anything to prove, though, which allows him to tap a few guest features—Tegan and Sara, Illuminati Hotties, MSPAINT, Allie—that showcase just how far a singer-songwriter’s ideas can extend in their own voice and beyond. It’s a mature choice, showcasing not just his own skills, but how strongly they lift friends around him, too.
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Shabazz Palaces: It’s a Style Sport [Sub Pop]
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On It’s a Style Sport, his first full-length in six years as Shabazz Palaces, Ishmael Butler slips back into the many guises of his multifarious rap project. Lead single “Ahh World (I Won The Alpha Bet)” sets lucid social commentary to ominous beats that sound like the very dystopian future he rallies listeners to prevent; “Jheri Curl Jump,” meanwhile, is a loquacious love story murmured over jittery electro-funk. Butler’s latest for Sub Pop follows the sibling mini-albums Exotic Birds of Prey and Robed in Rareness. The LP features, among others, Thaddillac, Evan Flory-Barnes, and Kassa Overall, pairing Butler’s own production with that of sometime Shabazz collaborator Erik Blood.
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Josh Johnson: Animative [International Anthem/Nonesuch]
To say Josh Johnson has a lot going on would be an understatement. The Los Angeles composer and multi-instrumentalist—sax, keys, synth, and effects, if you're wondering—has released killer albums with his trio SML and Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, plus produced for Flea and Meshell Ndegeocello. Now he’s making his solo debut on International Anthem with a set of tracks that canonizes his pivotal role in the West Coast’s burgeoning experimental jazz revival. Per press materials, Johnson drew inspiration from his former teacher Wayne Shorter, the West African philosopher Malidoma Somé’s writings, and “non-Western ways of thinking about time and being.”
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Caroline Rose: Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall [Suck]
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Caroline Rose loves a good character. The New York singer-songwriter’s taste for writing people “who are a little strange, who are outsiders, who seem to fuck up a lot,” per a recent statement, fits nicely with their taste for genre-hopping. (To their credit, Rose hopped on the “concept album about fame” train years before it got cool again.) Their new album Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall, got them in the studio with the Paper Chase’s John Congleton, leaning into the breezy hooks and angsty energy of surf rock to translate personal encounters with the uglier corners of the Americana dream.
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Brakence: Marrow [Columbia]
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Brakence knew what he was doing when he titled his comeback single after four years of radio silence “Ready or Not.” Despite his extended absence (or maybe, in fact, because of it), the singer-songwriter-producer has held on to a fervent fanbase happy to keep running back Hypochondriac and supplementing with Quadeca and/or Jane Remover shows until he resurfaces. But he still has his own long shadow to stand up to, a challenge he meets with a hefty 18 new tracks that return to his glitch-crooner roots.
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Sour Widows: Sigil [Julia’s War]
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Bay Area duo Sour Widows drew inspiration for their latest from a pretty bleak source: an apocalyptic dream cofounder Maia Sinaiko had wherein “all traces of human civilization would soon be obliterated, our collective efforts lost forever; no one would ever know.” Sinaiko and bandmate Susanna Thomson lay out this premise in appropriately bleak tones of grunge, emo, and alt-rock. But working with Jay Som and Boygenius producer Melina Duterte, they also manage to infuse these heavy compositions with a sense of urgency, fleet-footedness, and, perhaps most importantly, hope.
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Loidis: From the Toolkit of Lovers [Incienso]
After a 15-year career heavy with touring, it’s understandable that Loidis wants some peace. Lucky for us, that means continuing to make his special blend of minimal techno, ambient, and dub, as exemplified on the stellar 2024 album One Day. His next LP, From The Toolkit Of Lovers, was recorded in the summer 2025 and centers on drawn-out tracks with plenty of room for stretched-out builds and spacious transitions. In his own words, it’s ”a 110-minute meditation on life, love and dub.”
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William Basinski: Passing the Cup of Sorrows [Temporary Residence Ltd.]
In the niche field of past-life regression therapy, “passing the cup of sorrows” describes a concept wherein two souls in the spirit world exchange energy, allowing one spirit to understand and forgive one who hurt them in a past life. These moments of spectral interplay inspired the avant-garde composer William Basinski’s first album in six years, a 40-minute suite of single-note piano and whispering electronics. He composed the piece almost entirely while watching testimonials of the therapy, using their relationship to fragmented and painful memories to guide his hand, mind, and heart.
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