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 Idles, Caroline Polachek, Serpentwithfeet, Friko, Molly Lewis, Bear1Boss, Heems & Lapgan, Laryssa Kim, and Mari Montana. 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.)
Idles: Tangk [Partisan]
Bristol punks Idles introduced Tangk in typically bolshy fashion with the festival-ready anthem “Dancer,” bringing LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Nancy Whang for the ride. The playfulness behind the brawn shone through in the music video for third single “Grace,” an AI recreation of Coldplay’s “Yellow” in which Chris Martin—who volunteered to help train the AI—appears to sing the altogether more menacing track on his famous beach stroll. The band enlisted Nigel Godrich to produce the new LP, alongside longtime collaborator Kenny Beats.
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Caroline Polachek: Desire, I Want to Turn Into You: Everasking Edition [Perpetual Novice]
Caroline Polachek bulks out her star-making Desire, I Want to Turn Into You on this “Everasking Edition,” adding a Weyes Blood collaboration and more. Among the extras are fan-favorite “Dang,” a longtime staple of her DJ sets that formally premiered last year on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and covers of Operating Theatre’s “Spring Is Coming With a Strawberry in the Mouth” and Default Genders’ “Pharmacoma (For Ben Deitz),” reworked here as “Coma.” Revisit Pitchfork’s interview “Caroline Polachek on Divas, an Acid Trip, and Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.”
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Serpentwithfeet: Grip [Secretly Canadian]
Three years after Deacon, and on the heels of his theater production Heart of Brick, Serpentwithfeet returns with Grip. The album pairs the R&B maestro’s sweetly slithering vocals with lustrous guitars and synthesizers in songs that “celebrate and foster the spirit and magic of Black queer nightlife,” according to press materials. Ty Dolla $ign and Mick Jenkins feature.
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Friko: Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here [ATO]
Friko submerge chamber-pop tapestries in oily post-punk on their debut album, Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here. The Chicago band’s members said the record’s waves of roiling choral parts “just happened naturally because we all kept singing along,” hitting a quietly anthemic sweet spot between the humble and grandiose. Citing Chopin’s nocturnes as an influence on their dynamic style, drummer Bailey Minzenberger spoke in press materials of how “listening to solo piano music and playing really heavy rock songs can create the same very palpable feeling,” one that “I don’t want to understand.”
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Molly Lewis: On the Lips [Jagjaguwar]
Molly Lewis, a whistler, has applied her talents to everything from Weyes Blood support slots to high-fashion shows and the Barbie soundtrack. Her debut album, On the Lips, evokes film-noir interludes and barroom blues, inviting guests like Nick Hakim and BadBadNotGood’s Chester Hansen into its smoky underworld. Of the single “Crushed Velvet,” Lewis painted the picture thus: “You’re playing a high stakes game of dice, it’s your last role and a lot is on the line. You need all threes to win. Sweat drips down your brow. Lady Luck grabs your arm at the last moment. The dice spin… and then… this song comes on, distracting everyone just in time for you to grab the moolah and run.”
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Bear1Boss: Super Boss! [Popstar FM]
Bear1Boss kicks off the tirelessly playful Super Boss! mixtape as he means to continue: a bass-heavy collage of Mario noises, trap beats, and whirling synths, conjuring the hyper-saturated fantasyland that is the record’s domain. The underground Atlanta rapper enlists SoFaygo and Jeleel! for the tape, his first since signing a co-publising deal with Pulse and Rick Rubin’s American Records, plotting coordinates for mainstream insurgency.
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Heems & Lapgan: Lafandar [Veena Sounds]
Heems enlisted the Indian American producer Lapgan for his latest album, along with guests including Open Mike Eagle, Quelle Chris, Kool Keith, Saul Williams, Blu, and Your Old Droog. It is the Das Racist and Swet Shop Boys veteran’s first full-length in about a decade; it is out on his new magazine, brand, and label Veena; and it includes a full-song tribute to the England and Arsenal striker Bukayo Saka. Of the new projects, Heems said in press materials, “My world was one of graffiti and golgappas, skateboards and saris, music and Mughals, and so on. This is what my music sounds like.”
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Laryssa Kim: Contezza [City Tracks]
On Contezza, the Brussels-based Italian Congolese singer and composer Laryssa Kim sleepwalks into an electronic netherworld. Her skin-prickling compositions are an unsettling frame for vocals that, when they come, startle with their operatic grace. Chthonic instrumentals give way to eerie ballads incorporating chamber-pop and R&B, her voice rising from the ether like a spirit from a cursed cave.
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Mari Montana: Sincerely, Montana [Real Lifer]
West Palm Beach rapper Mari Montana led into Sincerely, Montana with the horny devotional “My Lil Shit (Pt.2)” on February 14. As Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre summarized, “Suddenly, on Valentine’s Day, rappers who’ve never said a romantic word in their lives are longing like Carl Thomas on the cover of Emotional. They’re taking a day off from hyper-masculine theatrics and dropping R&B-sampling mixtapes full of freaky sex fantasies. Mari Montana got the memo.”
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Source : Pitchfork
