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 Vampire Weekend, Mount Kimbie, Glorilla, Sinkane, Phosphorescent, Drahla, Grace Cummings, Bnny, and Adam Wiltzie. 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.)
Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us [Columbia]
Vampire Weekend’s return is a stock-taking of their past themes and glories, as well as a revival of some signature sounds jettisoned on its eclectic predecessor, Father of the Bride. As Matthew Strauss notes in his Best New Music review, Only God Was Above Us is “the most honest album Vampire Weekend have made, an encapsulation of what the band does best, melodic and abstruse in [frontman Ezra] Koenig’s own masterful way.”
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Mount Kimbie: The Sunset Violent [Warp]
Mount Kimbie expanded to a quartet for their first proper album since 2017’s Love What Survives, adding Andrea Balency-Béarn and Marc Pell to the lineup and enlisting longtime collaborator King Krule for a pair of tracks. The UK electronic veterans swirl up an accordingly vibrant palette on The Sunset Violent, filling out the plangent soundscapes of old with explosive micro-melodies, roiling synth-pop hooks, and thick smears of guitar scuzz, in evidence on the singles “Fishbrain,” “Shipwreck,” and, with Krule, “Empty and Silent.”
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Glorilla: Ehhthang Ehhthang [CMG/Interscope]
Just ahead of the Hot Girl Summer Tour with Megan Thee Stallion, Glorilla has shared her new mixtape Ehhthang Ehhthang. The project follows Anyways, Life’s Great… from 2022, and includes her recent hit “Yeah Glo!” The Memphis rapper released the single earlier this year with a Troy Roscoe–directed video that finds Glorilla handing out cash to neighborhood girls, accepting awards, washing her G-Wagon, storming out of a fast food job, and visiting herself in jail.
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Sinkane: We Belong [City Slang]
We Belong, Sinkane’s first album in five years, is a “love letter to Black music,” the Sudanese American artist said in press materials. Gospel, Afrobeats, 1970s funk, and Sudanese soul rub shoulders on songs full of joyful rhythms and diaspora stories. As he said of the single “How Sweet Is Your Love,” “Free your mind and your ass will follow!”
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Phosphorescent: Revelator [Verve]
Revelator is Phosphorescent’s Verve debut and first proper album since 2018’s C’est la Vie. Matthew Houck led the LP with the playfully pastoral title track, which he’s called the “best song I’ve ever written.” Members of the Raconteurs and Dirty Three contribute, as does Houck’s partner, the singer-songwriter and pianist Jo Schornikow.
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Drahla: Angeltape [Captured Tracks]
It’s been five years since Leeds rock band Drahla issued their debut album, Useless Coordinates. Their sophomore effort, Angeltape, is slightly more frenzied, layering sharp saxophone blurts on top of deadpan vocals and hard-edged, post-punk guitars. While writing the album, the quartet mined memories of grief and trauma, searching for catharsis. Drahla shared a string of singles ahead of Angeltape’s release: “Lip Sync,” “Under the Glass,” “Grief in Phantasia,” “Second Rhythm,” and “Default Parody.”
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Grace Cummings: Ramona [ATO]
Ramona is the third full-length from Australian singer-songwriter Grace Cummings, following her 2019 debut, Refuge Cove, and 2022’s Storm Queen. The new 11-track LP was cut in producer Jonathan Wilson’s Topanga Canyon studio. To achieve Ramona’s lush, orchestral sound, Wilson and Cummings enlisted harpist Mary Lattimore, as well as arranger and multi-instrumentalist Drew Erickson, who has played with Weyes Blood, Mitski, and Lana Del Rey. Cummings recorded guitar and piano while Wilson contributed guitar, drums, banjo, and organ.
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Bnny: One Million Love Songs [Fire Talk]
Chicago’s Bnny follow August 2021’s Everything with sophomore album One Million Love Songs. Bandleader (and former Pitchfork art director) Jessica Viscius wrote the new album in the wake of a breakup, a life event that informed the single “Good Stuff.” “It’s a breakup song,” the musician explained, “but it’s hopeful, optimistic even. Or perhaps it’s just the denial, hoping things will be different next time, hoping that love can save you.” Viscius produced One Million Love Songs and recorded it at Asheville’s Drop of Sun with Alex Farrar.
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Adam Wiltzie: Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal [Kranky]
Adam Wiltzie has specialized in music of magnificent beauty and solace since building a cult with his ambient outfit Stars of the Lid. The composer’s latest suite was inspired by something altogether spookier: a recurring dream wherein “if someone listened to the music I created, then they would die.” Loop’s Robert Hampson mixed the record, intensifying its murky allure. (Pitchfork takes no responsibility for fatalities incurred by clicking the links below.)
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Source : Pitchfork
