9 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Peso Pluma, Kehlani, 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 albums from Peso Pluma; Kehlani; Polo Perks, FearDorian & AyooLii; Sumac; Linda Thompson; O.; Tim Koh & Sun An; Yetsuby; and Been Stellar. 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.)


Peso Pluma: Éxodo [Double P]

Génesis earned Peso Pluma his first-ever Grammy Award and several other record-breaking moments, but it also raised eyebrows about some of the lyrical subject matter, which prompted alleged death threats from a cartel. With Éxodo, his double album follow-up, the Mexican corridos tumbados star has crafted “a direct response to the negative press” to explain “why we do what we do, and why we sing what we do,” he told Rolling Stone. To show off his range, Peso Pluma uses the first disc of Éxodo to further explore the regional Mexican music and corridos tumbados for which he’s known, and the second disc to tap into Latin trap and reggaeton with features from Cardi B, Anitta, Quavo, and others.

Kehlani announced the news of their fourth studio album, Crash, after releasing “After Hours,” a breezy single that prominently samples Cordel Burrell’s reggae classic “Coolie Dance Riddim.” That song and the subsequent “Next 2 U” promised an album with a carefree, summertime dance mood. With this backdrop, Crash may have more in common with 2020’s It Was Good Until It Wasn’t than 2022’s Blue Water Road.

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Polo Perks, FearDorian & AyooLii: A Dog’s Chance [3500]

A Dog’s Chance is the debut collaborative full-length from three marquee artists in hip-hop’s new underground, New York’s Polo Perks, Milwaukee’s AyooLii, and Atlanta’s FearDorian. The album, which runs just under 30 minutes, features a song called “Ricky Eats Acid,” named for its sample of another Sam Ray band, Teen Suicide. With its unpredictable beats and bars, A Dog’s Chance is a showcase for some of the best new left-field rap.

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Sumac: The Healer [Thrill Jockey]

The Healer is the latest album of haywire metal from Sumac, following 2020’s May You Be Held and their 2022 album with Keiji Haino, Into This Juvenile Apocalypse Our Golden Blood to Pour Let Us Never. Led by Aaron Turner, formerly of post-metal greats Isis, the trio webs together a four-track, 76-minute odyssey that is by turns funereal, restorative, and totally incendiary.

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Linda Thompson: Proxy Music [StorySound]

Though she got her start in the 1960s, Linda Thompson rose as a musical force in London’s folk-rock scene a decade later when collaborating with her husband, Richard Thompson. After releasing four solo LPs, she returns with her first album in more than a decade. Proxy Music reimagines Thompson’s original tracks with the help of handpicked collaborators and friends, including the Proclaimers, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, John Grant, and Dori Freeman, and others.

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O.: WeirdOs [Speedy Wunderground]

After bubbling up in the scene around London’s Windmill venue (see also: art-rock luminaries Black Midi and Black Country, New Road), O. have arrived with a debut album, which saxophonist Joe Henwood described in press materials as the sound of “total freedom. Two people taking every risk.” He is joined in the duo by Tash Keary, whose drums gird a steely fusion of jazz and rock, embalmed in the dubby microclimate of WeirdOs’ producer, Dan Carey.

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Tim Koh & Sun An: Salt and Sugar Look the Same [Music From Memory]

Fingerpicked guitars, refracted vocals, and pangs of dreamlike sound design lattice together on Salt and Sugar Look the Same, a collaboration between the American multi-instrumentalist Tim Koh and Korean American sound designer Sun An. The album’s 18 short compositions are drawn from reserves of ancestral and cultural memory, but sound so gorgeous on the surface that the undertones of pain and longing feel like a gift.

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Yetsuby: B_B [All My Thoughts]

“Who Swallowed the Chimes at the Random Place” introduces Yetsuby’s new mini-album, B_B, in a haze of rustic folktronica, otherworldly ambient, and hallucinatory sound design. The solo project of South Korean artist Yejin Jang (one half of the electronic duo Salamanda) proceeds in a spirit of collage play, at once mesmeric and puckish. “I want to put comfort into the music and give some message to people who blame themselves,” she said in press materials.

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Been Stellar: Scream From New York, NY [Dirty Hit]

Fresh from support slots with the 1975, Interpol, and Fontaines D.C., New York indie-rockers Been Stellar swap their trademark shoegaze for a suite of cataclysmic anthems inspired by Sonic Youth and Iceage on their debut album. Scream From New York, NY, like O.’s debut listed above, is produced by Dan Carey, though here he favors a thick, sludgy assault that enhances the band’s pet theme of modern alienation.

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Source : Pitchfork