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 Childish Gambino, Los Campesinos!, Lava La Rue, Denzel Curry, Total Blue, JT, Blk Odyssy, and Gum & Ambrose Kenny-Smith. 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.)
Childish Gambino: Bando Stone and the New World [RCA]
It’s the end of Childish Gambino as we know him. For years, Donald Glover has been saying he’d put the moniker, famously culled from a Wu-Tang Clan name generator, to rest, and now it’s finally happening as the rapper and singer releases the new album Bando Stone and the New World. “It really was just like, ‘Oh, it’s done,’” Glover recently told Reggie Ugwu for The New York Times. “It’s not fulfilling. And I just felt like I didn’t need to build in this way anymore.” Joining Glover on the Gambino finale are Jorja Smith and Amaarae (on the single “In the Night”), Yeat, Chlöe, producers Ludwig Göransson, Michael Uzowuru, and Max Martin, and more.
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Los Campesinos!: All Hell [Heart Swells]
Los Campesinos! are back after a few years out of the studio, following Sick Scenes seven years later with chronicles of “drinking for fun and drinking for misery, adult acne, adult friendship, football, death and dying, love and sex, late-stage capitalism,” and more, per the band’s press release. The Welsh indie-pop darlings led into the self-released All Hell with the pining “Feast of Tongues” and “0898 Heartache,” a “lovelorn, head-down sprint from limbo into oblivion.”
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Lava La Rue: Starface [Dirty Hit]
After testing the waters with a string of exploratory EPs, Lava La Rue makes their big splash with debut album Starface, a sci-fi concept record that crosses genres and galaxies in its quest from funk, R&B, and indie-rock toward the outer limits of pop. (“I was definitely inspired by the idea of making a lesbian version of Ziggy Stardust,” they noted in press materials.) Guests on the interstellar voyage include Yunè Pinku, Cuco, Audrey Nuna, and, on spoken-word track “Change,” none other than Courtney Love.
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Denzel Curry: King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2 [Loma Vista]
Denzel Curry was just 16 years old when he released King of the Mischievious South Vol. 1 (Underground Tape 1996). Twelve and a half years later, the South Florida rapper is sharing its feature-heavy sequel. The new project, King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2, features a slew of fellow Southerners—such as Juicy J, Maxo Kream, That Mexican OT, Ski Mask the Slump God, Project Pat, TiaCorine, and Mike Dimes—as well as spiritual Houstonian A$AP Rocky.
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Total Blue: Total Blue [Music From Memory]
Los Angeles musicians Nicky Benedek, Alex Talan, and Anthony Calonico join the outré Amsterdam label Music From Memory for their formal debut as Total Blue, mixing the tactile chops of a jazz or soft-rock outfit with splurges of ambient color that seem rent from a digital utopia. The trio sends deft synth earworms and fretless bass into otherworldly soundscapes on the nine-track suite, which suggests disintegrating borders between material and spiritual worlds.
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JT: City Cinderella [Quality Control/Motown]
With City Girls on hiatus, JT steps out with her debut solo mixtape. Supporting the Miami rapper on City Cinderella are guests Stunna Girl, Clip, Jeezy, and fellow Floridian DJ Khaled. “This is just something that I’m putting out with my pure instincts,” she’s said of the project. “Immediately, if a beat talks to me, I already know what I’m gonna go in there and rap about.”
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Blk Odyssy: 1-800 Fantasy [Earthchild/Empire]
Blk Odyssy scales up his trademark hybrid R&B on his third album, 1-800 Fantasy, a “musical journey that explores the space between reality and fantasy,” he said in press materials. The Texan-based artist and producer adds that the concept record draws “inspiration from early 2000s pop/rock” and “new wave hip hop, funk, and soul”—charting the journey of a shapeshifting character he embodied by going method in the studio. A Wiz Khalifa collaboration, “XXX,” preceded the LP; Harry Edohoukwa and Joey Bada$$ also feature.
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Gum & Ambrose Kenny-Smith: Ill Times [(P)Doom]
Jay Watson, the sometime Tame Impala and Pond member who records solo as Gum, teams up with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s Ambrose Kenny-Smith for a new collaborative LP, the inaugural release on the latter band’s new label, (P)Doom. Ill Times applies the longtime friends’ psych-rock chops to funk and groove music, resulting in celebratory, guns-blazing anthems destined to electrify festival big-tops.
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Source : Pitchfork
