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 Megan Thee Stallion, Mabe Fratti, Omar Apollo, Lucky Daye, Channel Tres, Dirty Three, Eiko Ishibashi, Lupe Fiasco, Sour Widows, and the Folk Implosion. 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.)
Megan Thee Stallion: Megan [Hot Girl Productions]
After introducing Megan with three serpentine singles—“Hiss,” “Boa,” and “Cobra”—Megan Thee Stallion has uncoiled the finished product. For her third album, the Houston rapper invites guests including Glorilla and Victoria Monét to fill out a typically raucous collection of brutal bars, infectious hooks, and venomous one-liners.
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Mabe Fratti: Sentir Que No Sabes [Unheard of Hope]
In the two years since Mabe Fratti released her third solo album, Se Ve Desde Aquí, she has made a crystalline album with Héctor Tosta as Titanic and another with Amor Muere, a collective based in her adopted hometown of Mexico City. The Guatemalan cellist’s return with Sentir Que No Sabes expands on her bracing live show, a fusion of avant-rock shock with swells of perfect harmony. Read Philip Sherburne’s feature “Chasing the Goblin With Mabe Fratti, the Guatemalan Cellist at the Heart of Mexico City’s Avant-Rock Scene.”
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Omar Apollo: God Said No [Warner]
Omar Apollo’s star has risen steadily since his 2022 debut, Ivory: He was recently at the Met Gala and he got nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammy Awards. Now comes Apollo’s second album, God Said No. The full-length has a song with Mustafa (“Plane Trees”) and another with Pedro Pascal. The actor’s contribution comes on “Pedro,” the album’s penultimate track before “Glow,” a song that Apollo said “is about grief, and the complexities of it, and different griefs existing at the same time.”
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Lucky Daye: Algorithm [Keep Cool/RCA]
Algorithm is the third studio album from Lucky Daye. The New Orleans R&B musician previewed his follow-up to Candydrip with “That’s You,” “Hericane,” and “Soft.” Contributors to the new album include Bruno Mars, producer and multi-instrumentalist Dernst “D’Mile” Emile II, Raye, and more.
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Channel Tres: Head Rush [RCA]
Channel Tres’ album is finally here. After a string of EPs, the Compton-raised rapper and producer has enlisted a slate of guests for Head Rush, his official debut—Thundercat, Toro y Moi, Ravyn Lenae, Teezo Touchdown, and Ty Dolla $ign among them. Together, they have created the comprehensive document of Tres’ warped spin on R&B and funk. “I’m older now, and the things that I’ve accomplished tell me I’m ready to do this,” he said in press materials.
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Dirty Three: Love Changes Everything [Drag City]
Warren Ellis and Nick Cave may be gearing up to release the first Bad Seeds album in five years, but Ellis’ reunion with Mick Turner and Jim White may be more feverishly anticipated by a certain stripe of somber rock thrill-seeker. Love Changes Everything, the first Dirty Three record in more than a decade, finds the experimental trio continuing to mine a rustic post-rock offshoot with every bit as much gravitas—albeit wordless—as Ellis’ other band.
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Eiko Ishibashi: Evil Does Not Exist [Drag City]
Evil Does Not Exist is not only the soundtrack to the film of the same name (from Drive My Car director Ryusuke Hamaguchi), but also an impetus for the film itself, which started out as a visual counterpart to Eiko Ishibashi’s live performances of the songs. The record’s doleful orchestral compositions feature contributions from Ishibashi’s longtime musical partner Jim O’Rourke.
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Lupe Fiasco: Samurai [1st & 15th]
The eight-song Samurai is Lupe Fiasco’s first album since 2022’s Drill Music in Zion. And, for the first time since 2007’s Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool, Fiasco and producer Soundtrakk worked on a project with Charles “Chilly” Patton. The Chicago-born rapper shared the singles “Samurai” and “Cake” ahead of the full-length’s release.
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Sour Widows: Revival of a Friend [Exploding in Sound]
Singers and guitarists Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson formed Sour Widows in 2017, and Revival of a Friend is their debut album. With drummer Max Edelman and longtime contributing bassist Timmy Stabler, they recorded the new album last year at Oakland’s Tiny Telephone. The new album follows the group’s 2021 Crossing Over, an EP that found the band “wielding raw vulnerability like a superpower,” as Marc Hogan wrote in his review. More expressive indie-rock follows on Revival of a Friend.
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The Folk Implosion: Walk Thru Me [Joyful Noise]
Lou Barlow and John Davis revived the Folk Implosion last year for the archival collection Music for Kids, but the seeds for new album Walk Thru Me were sewn at the height of the pandemic in 2020. “There was a moment when I was worried one of us might kick it, or never talk to each other again,” Davis said, “so I decided we should pick it back up.” The musicians made their first album together since 1999 with producer Scott Solter.
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Source : Pitchfork
