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 Ravyn Lenae, Mavi, Latto, Oso Oso, Beabadoobee, Polo G, Asake, Osees, Peter Cat Recording Co., Google Earth, and Belong. 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.)
Ravyn Lenae: Bird’s Eye [Atlantic]
Ravyn Levae follows her debut, Hypnos, with another tour of her opulent R&B dreamworld. “Bird’s Eye signifies returning to a place of self-trust and unbending intuition while acknowledging the paths and turns I’ve taken to get here,” Lenae said in press materials. Guests include Childish Gambino, on “One Wish,” and Ty Dolla $ign, on “Dream Girl.”
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Mavi: Shadowbox [Mavi 4 Mayor Music]
Mavi returns after a short break with Shadowbox, an album partly inspired by the design book The Black Experience in Design. The rapper’s follow-up to Laughing So Hard, It Hurts addresses alcoholism and grief over spangly productions from the likes of Lil Chick and Beach Noise. In the two years since that last album, Mavi said in press materials, “I didn’t really know how to get back into making stuff into the way I like. I felt really hopeless about it, started getting really drunk, dealt with love and heartbreak, having to be there for my family. I had to come back and really learn how to make art all over again.”
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Latto: Sugar Honey Iced Tea [RCA]
Latto has embarked on a victory lap since her breakout with 2022 debut 777, touring late-night television and awards shows, collaborating with BTS star Jung Kook (among many others), and finding time to rebuke the overturning of Roe v. Wade on “Pussy.” The Atlanta rapper stepped into 2024—and her Sugar Honey Iced Tea era—with “Sunday Service,” soon remixed with Megan Thee Stallion and Flo Milli, before subsequent single “Big Mama.” Ciara, Teezo Touchdown, and Hunxho also guest on the album, as well as Atlanta royalty Young Nudy and Mariah the Scientist.
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Oso Oso: Life Till Bones [Yunahon Entertainment LLC]
With just enough time left in the summer for their songs to match the sun’s warming powers, Oso Oso are returning with a 10-track collection of power-pop emo to boost your spirits even if—or, rather, especially when—you’re feeling down. The band’s fifth full-length, Life Till Bones, pushes Jade Lilitri’s songwriting skills to the forefront; “All of My Love” picks up where 2022’s Sore Thumb left off, but it’s the subtly unexpected “That’s What Time Does,” which sounds more like a softened Phoenix track, that showcases a newer side of his band.
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Beabadoobee: This Is How Tomorrow Moves [Dirty Hit]
On This Is How Tomorrow Moves, Beabadoobee goes from lo-fi bedroom pop to crisper, airy indie-rock. With Rick Rubin at the production helm, Beabadoobee retains her charming sound while trying out new ideas, like the subtle, Avett Brothers twang of “Ever Seem” or the Beirut-esque waltz in “Coming Home.” Those who loved 2022’s Beatopia will still find that alt-rock pop that helped her break out on her third album, with single “Take a Bite” leading the charge.
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Polo G: Hood Poet [Columbia]
Polo G reunites with producer Southside for new album Hood Poet—an acronym, the Chicago rapper notes, for He Overcame Obstacles During Pain or Emotional Trauma. The record continues his flirtation with pop and R&B tones and sentiments, notably on the singles “Barely Holdin’ On” and “Angels in the Sky,” sung and rapped like distraught pleas over beats as rousing as they are melancholy.
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Asake: Lungu Boy [YBNL Nation/Empire]
Asake is pulling out all the stops as he unleashes his third album—in as many years—Lungu Boy. The Nigerian superstar further broadens his trademark fusion of amapiano and Afrobeats, establishing a new outpost in the styles’ insurgence into rap and pop. Guests include Travis Scott, on “Active,” and Central Cee, on “Wave.” A tour of arenas in Europe and North America will follow this month.
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Osees: Sorcs 80 [Castle Face]
Osees pivot from their recent run of guitar- and keyboard-centric releases on Sorcs 80, instead concocting a sound palette driven by synths, percussion, and a horn section. In press materials, John Dwyer described the record as “sort of vacuous and maybe a bit sci-fi in sound,” and, more specifically, “sort of a Dexy’s Midnight Runners meets Von LMO meets the Flesh Eaters meets the Screamers kinda punk junk.”
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Peter Cat Recording Co.: Beta [Muddy Water]
Peter Cat Recording Co. unveiled their first record in five years with footage of a herd of elephants feasting on an edible arrangement of the album announcement. The multifarious New Delhi collective devours genres with similar aplomb, taking nibbles from psychedelia, indie-rock, pop, jazz, and more on Beta. The album, the band said in press materials, is “a collection of stories about the future told 50 years in the past, to make sense of the present, on our only home, planet Earth.”
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Google Earth, James Riotto & John Vanderslice: Street View [Tiny Telephone]
John Vanderslice and James Riotto are Google Earth, an electronic duo whose synth fantasias are otherworldly yet murkily tactile, like a crystalline dream of a 1980s warehouse party. In press materials, Riotto said of their debut album, Street View, “John and I have been friends and collaborators for a long time now, but this record feels really different because it’s sort of a culmination of years of pushing each other into more abstract electronic palettes.” The results put jazz chops in service of winding, synth-driven compositions with lyrics attuned to mortality and melancholy.
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Belong: Realistic IX [Kranky]
Michael Jones and Turk Dietrich murmur back to life for their third album as Belong, Realistic IX. The Kranky duo merges shoegaze and noise-rock in a gauze of smoggy distortion on their follow-up to 2011’s Common Era, letting subterranean earworms wriggle up through your subconscious.
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Source : Pitchfork
