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 the late Mac Miller, the Weather Station, Ela Minus, Blue Lake, Yola, Benjamin Lackner, Jasmine.4.T, and Kele. 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.)
Mac Miller: Balloonerism [Warner]
To Mac Miller fans, Balloonerism is a holy grail posthumous album—a comprehensive LP recorded and compiled in 2014, around the release of Faces, under Miller’s own direction. The long sought-after project, a statement from his family notes, “was of great importance to Malcolm,” who went as far as to commission artwork and plot the release plan before Faces follow-up GO:OD AM took precedence. An animated short film accompanies the release.
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The Weather Station: Humanhood [Fat Possum]
Humanhood is the first Weather Station LP since Tamara Lindeman issued How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars in 2022. Lindeman shared the lead single, “Neon Signs,” last autumn, explaining, in press materials, that she wrote the song during “a moment of feeling confused.… the confusion of being bombarded with advertising at a moment of climate emergency, the confusion of relationships where coercion is wrapped in the language of love.” The sprawling, Joni Mitchell–esque ballad preceded equally intricate, jazz-inflected singles “Mirror,” “Window,” and “Body Moves.”
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Ela Minus: Día [Domino]
Colombian electronic musician Ela Minus returns with her sophomore album, Día. The follow-up to her 2020 record Acts of Rebellion cranks up the volume, dishing out buoyant dance tracks like “Broken,” “QQQQ,” and “Upwards,” and then fades things down to breathy, ambient cuts like “Combat.” Día was mixed by Marta Salogni and mastered by Heba Kadry, both of whom expand Minus’ sound beyond the occasionally hushed timbre of her prior album. Revisit Pitchfork’s 2020 Rising interview “Ela Minus Makes Techno-Pop for Everyday Rebellion.”
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Blue Lake: Weft [Tonal Union]
Jason Dungan composes ornate, instrumental folk compositions as Blue Lake. The Texas-born, Copenhagen-based musician follows his revelatory 2023 LP, Sun Arcs, with this mini-album of zither-led lattices, taking its style—and name—from the weaving practice of his visual artist partner. “There’s a not so subtle visual relation between the masses of strings on the instrument and the masses of thread on a loom,” Dungan said in press materials. “Weaving allows you to have an intimate relationship between the many individual parts of a piece, as well as the finished whole.”
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Yola: My Way EP [S-Curve]
In the four years since Yola released her second album, 2021’s Stand for Myself, the Bristol-born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter went on one of the biggest headlining tours of her career, opened for Chris Stapleton, starred in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, and made her Broadway debut in Hadestown. Now the Grammy-nominated country-soul artist is finally releasing a new record: the five-song My Way EP. As the singles “Symphony” and “Future Enemies” set up, expect a groovy cut of tracks to belt along to and boost your sense of self-worth.
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Benjamin Lackner: Spindrift [ECM]
Pianist and composer Benjamin Lackner is back with a romantic collection of jazz songs recorded in the south of France. Lackner departs from his go-to trio lineup for Spindrift, the follow-up to 2022’s Last Decade, and turns to saxophonist Mark Turner and trumpeter Mathias Eick for prominently featured—but still delicate—horns, along with nonpareil bassist Linda May Han Oh and French drummer Matthieu Chazarenc. The four of them melt seamlessly into the German pianist’s songs, especially on singles “More Mesa” and “See You Again My Friend.”
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Jasmine.4.T: You Are the Morning [Saddest Factory]
You Are the Morning is the debut album from Manchester, England, artist Jasmine.4.T, who is signed to Phoebe Bridgers’ label, Saddest Factory Records. Bridgers sings on the single “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation,” alongside her Boygenius bandmates, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, the latter of whom will bring along Jasmine.4.T to open her spring tour. You Are the Morning borrows from both gentle acoustic emo and blaring arena rock—a dichotomy that can be heard on tracks like “Skin on Skin” and “Elephant.” The title track strips things back to twinkling folk—with the occasional ray of strings bursting through.
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Kele: The Singing Winds Pt. 3 [Kola]
The Singing Winds Pt. 3 is the latest entry in Kele Okereke’s series of solo albums, collectively dubbed The Elements. As the Bloc Party singer continues to tour with his other band, his solo records are increasingly insular, composed of his guitar, voice, and some light production elements. Lead single “It Wasn’t Meant to Be” is accordingly intimate, a meditation on love and heartbreak that relocates his trademark bombast in music that whispers and haunts.
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Source : Pitchfork
