8 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: The Smile, Ty Segall, 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 the Smile, Ty Segall, Evilgiane, Torres, Astrid Sonne, Angry Blackmen, Fabiano do Nascimento & Sam Gendel, and Office Dog. 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.)

The Smile: Wall of Eyes [XL]

Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and Tom Skinner return for their second full-length album as the Smile. Wall of Eyes goes deeper into the band’s subconscious, both lyrically and musically. The trio explores jazz and prog with a light touch, bending these songs into strange places that never feel eerie, just enchanting. As singles “Friend of a Friend” and “Bending Hectic” made clear, Yorke and Greenwood sound as relaxed in their latest project as they do energized, and Skinner is letting curiosity guide his movements. The Smile isn’t a Radiohead side-project as much as it is an outlet for nurtured experimentation and growth, and Wall of Eyes is proof.

The irrepressibly prolific Ty Segall is back with another album. This one’s called Three Bells, and it follows his 2022 acoustic LP, “Hello, Hi”. Three Bells includes the singles “My Room,” “My Best Friend,” “Eggman,” and “Void.” Segall co-produced the 15-song LP with Cooper Crain, who also engineered and mixed the project. The artist also worked with his frequent collaborator and wife, Denée Segall, on five of the album’s cuts, and tracked them with members of his Freedom Band.

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Evilgiane: #Heavensgate (Vol. 1) [Surf Gang]

Producer Evilgiane had a banner year in 2023, producing Baby Keem and Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-nominated “The Hillbillies” and Earl Sweatshirt’s excellent “Making the Band (Danity Kane).” For his new mixtape, #Heavensgate (Vol. 1), Evilgiane worked with names more familiar to the Surf Gang orbit like 454, Rx Papi, Xaviersobased, Harto Falión, and Anycia. Watch the new video for the mixtape’s “Lil Wayne” (not featuring Lil Wayne).

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Torres: What an Enormous Room [Merge]

What an Enormous Room is the sixth Torres album from singer and songwriter Mackenzie Scott. Scott co-produced the record alongside Sarah Jaffe, laying down its 10 tracks at Stadium Heights Sound in Durham, North Carolina. The follow-up to 2021’s Thirstier features lead single “Collect,” which arrived last fall, as well as follow-up cuts “Wake to Flowers” and “I Got the Fear.” All three songs received visuals directed by Dani Okon. Scott plays a range of instruments across What an Enormous Room, including guitar, bass, programmed drums, organ, synthesizer, and piano.

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Astrid Sonne: Great Doubt [Escho]

Great Doubt is the third studio album from the Danish, London-based composer and violist Astrid Sonne. In his review of the album, Philip Sherburne writes, “As on Sonne’s previous albums, the mood is somber and restrained, but what was once a heady remove has turned melancholy.” Sherburne also describes Great Doubt as “a singer-songwriter record, swapping electroacoustic abstraction for plainspoken intimacy.”

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Angry Blackmen: The Legend of ABM [Deathbomb Arc]

Together, Quentin Branch and Brian Warren are Angry Blackmen, and they made their debut with the single “OK!” in 2017. The Chicago hip-hop duo’s new album, The Legend of ABM, is described, in press materials, as “a 30-minute coming of age narrative centered around Black men navigating this wilderness known as North America” that was inspired by the 1954 post-apocalyptic novel I Am Legend. “For us, this album is kinda like our villain origin story, a bedtime story and introduction to those who have and haven’t heard of us yet,” Branch and Warren have said. “Black men have historically been the boogie men of America, so I think it’s fitting that we tell our own legend.”

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Fabiano do Nascimento & Sam Gendel: The Room [Real World]

Prolific saxophonist Sam Gendel teams up with Brazilian guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento for a new 10-track album. While The Room is the musicians’ first collaborative full-length, they’ve apparently known each other for some time. “In 2011 I was in a Latin jazz group called Triorganico,” do Nascimento recalled in a press release. “We had a gig at a restaurant owned by Sam’s cousin, who invited him along. Sam brought his sax and sat in.” The Room was engineered by Tomas Jacobi and mixed and mastered by Jason Hiller.

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Office Dog: Spiel [New West]

On their debut album, Spiel, Office Dog submerge their brand of indie rock under scuzzy noise until the bubbles stop rising to the top. The Auckland, New Zealand, trio began putting together the components that would form its 12-song LP while ping-ponging around the area, taking note of what inspired the group. Recorded with producer De Stevens at Roundhead Studios and mastered by Jonathan Pearce of the Beths, Spiel blows up the band’s deadpan vocals and raw guitar so that the tiny fragments that remain rain down like ash—unnerving and pretty simultaneously—like Truth Club covering Wednesday.

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Source : Pitchfork