Maybe you were too busy barbecuing in the summer and admiring the foliage in the fall to keep up with the new albums coming out. Every few months, our writers and editors round up a list of generally overlooked recent releases that deserve some more attention. None of these albums were named Best New Music, and some weren’t reviewed on Pitchfork at all, but we think they’re all worth a listen. From sun-soaked, aquatic techno to Saharan music shared through WhatsApp, here are some albums you’ll want to listen to.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
454: Fast Trax 3
A candy-pink swirl of fluffy synths and helium vocals, Fast Trax 3 sounds like Saturday night on Animal Crossing’s most turnt-up island. Florida rapper-producer 454 released his latest mixtape as a single 41-minute track on SoundCloud, and it’s best experienced as a continuous wash of ever-morphing psychedelia, a smear of R&B samples and antsy drums. Keep rewinding, though, and moments break through the haze. When the mesmerizing loop of “8TEEN” flips from pitched-up to slowed-down, it’s like a skydiver pulling their ripcord. And on “Tales of the Hood,” 454’s prepubescent vocal effect becomes nostalgic and bittersweet, a nod to the times he won’t, or can’t, forget. –Ryan Dombal
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Spotify
Asake: Mr. Money With the Vibe
Mr. Money With the Vibe is a call to all the pop stars to step up their game, because no one is doing choruses like Asake right now. The album’s hooks are damn near spiritual, often supported by a team of background singers who give them an anthemic heft. The way Asake transitions from easily recitable melodies to light-footed rapping on songs like “Peace Be Unto You” or “Sungba” is hypnotic, as is the saxophone that carries “Dupe” and the slow-burning amapiano rhythms throughout. Yet it all circles back to the hooks, which—like so much great pop—feel made to be sung word for word in a jam-packed room. –Alphonse Pierre
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Baby Tate: Mani/Pedi
Baby Tate can’t help but be loud and selfish on her latest release. The Georgia-bred rapper-singer enters savage mode on Mani/Pedi, trashing defective exes and relishing in the afterglow while encouraging women to be merciless in their pursuits. “Pedi” opens with a familiar viral tweet: “Ask yourself, who’s the pettiest person that you know? It’s a man, ain’t it?” before Tate cackles and cops to being the pettiest of them all. Alongside lewd-and-bouncy standout “Slut Him Out Again,” there’s a touch of crunk&B and a series of low-stakes ballads where the mood never accelerates past fun and flashy. –Clover Hope
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Bbyafricka: The Art of Geekin’
Bbyafricka’s low-voiced raps can go from funny to sinister to seductive, sometimes occupying all three categories at once. Near the end of standout “Freak Bitch,” she raps about squirting breast milk into an unsatisfying hookup’s mouth with unsettling calm. Geekin’ is packed to the brim with moments like these, foregrounding Bbyafricka’s enticing malevolence across 12 breezy and bludgeoning songs that skew toward the darker side of Bay Area hyphy music. –Dylan Green
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billy woods: Church
Cannabis is a frequent collaborator in billy woods’ music. On Church, made in collaboration with Baltimore producer Messiah Musik, the substance informs both his perspective and aesthetic. “Paraquat” touches on the herbicidal poison often found in cannabis flower; “Fever Grass” recounts drug-dealer economics and blunts laced with PCP. An acerbic memoirist, woods often raps through a cloud of sativa smoke, but here he explores its role in the art, business, and daily existence of communities living under a rapidly disintegrating policy of prohibition, uncovering something sinister behind the high. –Matthew Ruiz
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BLACKSTARKIDS: CYBERKISS*
Deiondre, TyFaizon, and TheBabeGabe attended the same high school, but they formed their band Blackstarkids over Instagram. Cyberkiss*, the second record from the Kansas City pop/rap trio, is ’90s and ’00s nostalgia with a Gen-Z twist. You can hear throwbacks to the Neptunes, Timbaland, and Missy Elliott in their bubbly production and singing cadences; they also sound like Brockhampton and the Black Eyed Peas. To top things off, they pepper the project with Disney Channel-inspired interludes and reflections about coming of age as Black kids in the digital era. –Heven Haile
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All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Brittle Brian: Biodiesel
Brittle Brian, the minimalist acoustic project of Philadelphia-via-Boston musician Victoria Rose, offers the same hushed austerity as the Microphones but orients itself toward the outer world. On Biodiesel, her first album in four years, Rose uses fingerpicked guitar and multi-tracked vocals to tell cryptic stories about pockmarks, conversing with crows, and the head-clearing properties of riding your bike. “Do you think you could live alone? Shrinking over time, gently,” she sings on “The Trout Drive,” her voice getting softer with each phrase until it’s replaced by wordless coos, sharp as a gust of wind sneaking through your window sill. –Nina Corcoran
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Coby Sey: Conduit
Coby Sey’s debut album has picked up labels like “trip-hop” and “post-grime,” but those terms fail to do justice to the singularity of the South London producer’s music. Part of a close-knit group of restless creatives that includes Mica Levi and Tirzah, he’s previously recorded stern bass music and ruminative piano instrumentals; on Conduit, he brings his voice to the fore, spotlighting somber, intricately rhymed meditations on his Lewisham heritage and the ills of post-Brexit Britain; his production, meanwhile, flickers between dream-pop boom-bap, industrial-grade noise, and densely collaged epics that are part free-improv jam, part volcano. –Philip Sherburne
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The Comet Is Coming: Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam
Much of Shabaka Hutchings’ work can be viewed through an apocalyptic lens, as if it were posing the question, What should be done if the end of the world is inevitable? The Comet Is Coming, Hutchings’ cosmic jazz trio with his music-school buddies Dan Leavers and Maxwell Hallett, is arguably the most optimistic of his projects. Their latest LP, Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, is both a propulsive exploration of humanity’s limits and a forward-facing attempt to obliterate them. The album is technically instrumental, but Hutching’s saxophone is inarguably the group’s voice, in both rhythm and melody. Standout track “Pyramids” is ample evidence: a pulsing bassline is overtaken by the forceful gales flowing through Hutchings’ reed, sounding the alarm on impending doom in just enough time for something to be done about it. –Matthew Ruiz
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Contour: Onwards!
Across 12 tracks of minimal, jazz-inflected neo-soul and hip-hop, South Carolina-based artist Contour contemplates what a personal and a collective Black future looks like. Reminiscent sonically and thematically of L’Rain’s Fatigue and KeiyaA’s Forever, Ya Girl, his album Onwards! is a boundless expression of self-compassion and resilience. Voices layer into evocative, slightly dissonant harmonies, and Contour puts himself in direct conversation with past Black theorists and artists by sampling audio excerpts from L.A. Rebellion movement films. Standouts “Freedom Facade” and “Nigga Won’t Reach Mars” see him questioning ideas of liberation; on the latter, he issues a light challenge to Sun Ra (“Space is not the place”) and wonders what freedoms lie for Black people on Mars if they’re still not guaranteed here on Earth. It’s a contemplative and gripping listen. –Margeaux Labat
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Dania: Voz
As the founder of label Paralaxe Editions, Dania Shihab finds comfort in the expressive possibilities of raw sound. On her solo debut, Voz, the Baghdad-born, Barcelona-based sound artist approaches the voice as a new kind of electroacoustic instrument, one that’s firmly uncoupled from early polyphonic religious music and placed in dialogue with textural samples and modular synths. The maximalist spirit of tracks like “I Lied” and “An Individual” moves in tandem with the muffled tape loops and piano arrangements at the heart of the release, as Shihab explores new ideas and always seems to land effortlessly amongst the clouds. –Rob Arcand
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Daniela Lalita: Trescerotres EP
The Peruvian artist Daniela Lalita exhibits a masterful command of her voice. Across the five tracks on her Trececerotres EP, she stretches it into a thousand different directions, launching a falsetto into the air, only to harness it into grunts, grasps, and growls when it descends back to Earth. The talent may have emerged from her childhood job of manipulating her voice for TV commercials, but it doesn’t feel cartoonish or jejune. Lalita finds a place between friction and harmony, creating macabre tracks with dark, ritualistic vim. –Isabelia Herrera
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death’s dynamic shroud: Darklife
You get the sense that the electronic trio death’s dynamic shroud wanted to cram everything they find awesome into their double album Darklife: Burial-style vocal cutups, Skrillex-sized drops, glistening Yellow Magic Orchestra synth tones, soap opera soundtrack string sections, massive pop melodies, stretches of bracing abstraction and abrasion. Vocoder? Of course. Fretless bass and muted trumpet? Why not. Is that a church bell tolling in the background? Certainly could be. It seems that all the knobs on all the synths and samplers are turned up to 10 at all times. Is it subtle? Not particularly. Is it awesome? Absolutely. –Andy Cush
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DJ Scriby / DJ Marillo / DJ Skothan: The Gqom Trilogy
A 26-song compilation from electronic label Hakuna Kulala, The Gqom Trilogy celebrates three star producers from South Africa—DJ Scriby, DJ Marillo, and DJ Skothan—who specialize in the robust house music that has been bubbling up from Durban townships for over a decade. Produced largely on bootleg software, their gqom is jagged and visceral, spurred by spitting hi-hats and incessant programmed vocals. Depending on the position of your volume knob, tracks like “Shadow,” “The Night,” and “Ixhaphozi” will either pummel you into a wide-eyed trance, or rattle you out of your chair. –Madison Bloom
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Eli Winter: Eli Winter
Don’t let the name fool you: The self-titled album from Chicago guitarist Eli Winter is something of a communal affair. While his nimble acoustic fingerpicking is almost always the focal point, Winter allows each song to become a conversation, ceding the floor to guest musicians like Yasmin Williams, Ryley Walker, David Grubbs, and in “Dayenu”—a track named after the Jewish prayer—the jazz player jaimie branch, in one of her final recorded performances. The cumulative effect is a warm and multi-dimensional: the work of an artist who understands there’s as much virtuosity in listening as there is in playing. –Sam Sodomsky
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George Riley: Running in Waves
London R&B singer George Riley steps behind the velvet rope on Running in Waves, her second record. Sleek and stylish, her songs are all about tuning in to one’s own emotional wellbeing: “Just ’cause you retain all the hurt and pain doesn’t mean I choose to do the fuckin’ same,” she rasps on “Delusion.” Augmented by strings and knocking beats, producer Vegyn’s tasteful synth sculptures play off Riley’s airy voice yet remain mellow enough to evoke ambient reflection. Alongside more familiar feelings like “Jealousy” and “Desire,” the title track represents Riley’s term for the humbling admission that no one is more responsible for you than yourself. –Anna Gaca
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Infinity Knives / Brian Ennals: King Cobra
Baltimore producer Infinity Knives and rapper Brian Ennals thrive on the chaos of an unforgiving world. On their second collaborative album, King Cobra, Knives’ cacophonous and layered beats provide the backdrop as Ennals deconstructs what he sees as lies and propaganda all around him. “Time, money, love, gender, none of that shit is real,” he raps on “Coke Jaw,” going on to call the Nation of Islam “feds” and imagine himself as Joe Biden’s assassin on “Don’t Let the Smooth Taste Fool You.” King Cobra doesn’t just dance on the knife's edge; it draws blood. –Dylan Green
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James K: Random Girl
Random Girl, the second full-length from New York-based experimental pop musician James K, feels simultaneously heavenly and hellish: K’s angelic, reverb-drenched vocals are submerged by punishing waves of distortion, grungy guitars, and delayed drums. She deconstructs pop with diabolic delight, zagging from the ethereal riffs on “Life of a Fly” to the hammering beats of “Nude Volvo.” Occupying its own terrain between noisy pop, industrial ambient, and shoegaze, Random Girl is a diverse record from a musician who’s always been hard to pin down. –Arjun Srivatsa
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Jenevieve: Rendezvous EP
Los Angeles singer Jenevieve’s latest EP blends lustrous R&B with house and funk, using rubbery synths and laidback beats to backdrop tales of illicit affairs and quiet yearning. The bittersweet “Candy Lies” sounds fit for a hazy club sequence in a movie flush with glitter and sweat, while slow-burning highlights “MDMA” and “Love Quotes” find hard-won self-sufficiency amid heartache. Lifted by Jenevieve’s featherlight voice, Rendezvous balances its danceable highs against low-key moments with ease. –Eric Torres
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Jennifer Loveless: Around the World EP
Around the World is a cheeky title for a dance record, but surely Toronto-born, Melbourne-rooted, and London-based producer Jennifer Loveless has a claim to it if anyone does. Her second EP of originals is a set of disco, house, and techno that’s hard to place except for a unifying sense of sun-drenched euphoria. The title track builds gradually to a kaleidoscopic simmer; “Fall In Love” is misty and pensive; “Club Stomp” is a merciless march that detours into melancholy piano house. Think of Around the World as an imaginary concert cruise: for 36 radiant minutes, it’s difficult to imagine wanting to touch land again. –Marc Hogan
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Julie Odell: Autumn Eve
New Orleans singer-songwriter Julie Odell belts out notes like she’s grateful for every cubic inch of her lungs. While that powerhouse voice is what initially draws you into her debut album, it’s Odell’s songwriting that gives the record lasting impact. Her songs lend overwhelming emotion to small gestures, akin to the way opening a handwritten letter can make its recipient feel seen anew. From the heartfelt chord progressions of “Caterpillar” to the nearly nine-minute closer “Autumn Eve,” Odell’s album is an ideal soundtrack to future moments of revelation and self-growth. –Nina Corcoran
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Lou Turner: Microcosmos
“You said you’d make Hank proud, but all your buckets got holes in ’em,” sings Lou Turner on “Empty Tame and Ugly,” delivering a hard diss in a light, loose tune about country-music masculinity from her third album, Microcosmos. Skeptical of the brightest lights in her home city of Nashville, Turner instead turns her attention to tiny details and tender moments from daily life. Against acoustic guitar-led instrumentals, she makes pillowy bread, curious house cats, and “the land of big heads” seem equally poetic. Delivered with warmth and a winking smile, each song has the satisfaction of flipping a rock in the garden and discovering a busy world beneath its surface. –Allison Hussey
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Lucki: Flawless Like Me
“I wanted people to feel about me how I feel about Future,” Lucki told Pitchfork in 2019. Flawless Like Me marks the Chicago rapper’s first collaboration with his superstar forebear, who features on the decadent and languorous “Kapitol Denim.” But the album, which follows last year’s Wake Up Lucki, is a mesmerizing, unremittingly morose testament to Lucki’s own sneaky, sing-song catchiness. He’s been perfecting his wounded and woozy rap for almost a decade, and the result is so irresistible you might find yourself accidentally groaning, “I mix the love with drugs, can’t get enough, codeine in the artery,” on the way home from school dropoff. –Marc Hogan
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Mala Fama: Jichushka
Jichushka—named after a Kichwa word that means “lonely” or “abandoned”—is filled with moments of terrene melancholy: circular gaita flutes flutter over industrial synth stabs, a vocalist’s raspy lament loops over the sound of a marimba. The full-length debut from sound artist Mala Fama draws on the musical genealogies of the Andes (cumbia, vallenato, and other styles) and asks us to move beyond antiquated visions of Indigenous life and Andean folklore. Part political missive and part cultural reimagining, the album is an invitation toward multiplicity, one that also contains flashes of serene beauty. –Isabelia Herrera
Mamaleek: Diner Coffee
On Diner Coffee, metal experimentalists Mamaleek bring together the bludgeoning force of hardcore and the starry grandeur of post-rock, plus the fractured rap rhythms of J Dilla, the uncanny jazz pastiche of Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks score, and the anguished screams of a man dying a very painful death. You can’t describe their music without indulging in a certain amount of ill-advised genre triangulation. But to belabor the range of influences would risk reducing Diner Coffee to a simple list of reference points. In fact it has a ferocious life of its own: When junkyard blues-punk turns to brittle hip-hop turns to ersatz swing, these left turns are striking not for their shock value but for their surprising intuitiveness, as if they are the only possible paths the music could have taken. –Andy Cush
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Novelty Act: The Doctor Is Sick
For fans of ’90s Drag City stalwarts Gastr del Sol, this collaboration between singer-guitarist John Hoegberg and drummer Jonah Giuliano is the next best thing to a proper reunion of Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs’ late, lamented post-rock duo. The album captures the same spindly guitar figures, the same improvisational sprawl, the same uncanny fusion of American folk, free jazz, and classical minimalism. Hoegberg’s vocal tone even resembles Grubbs’ low-key sing-speaking. But The Doctor Is Sick goes way beyond mere imitation. The Baltimore duo’s five sidewinding tracks feel like snapshots of thought frozen in time and space—every bar a freeze-frame of a single unbroken motion, like one of Eadweard Muybridge’s galloping horses. –Philip Sherburne
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Phobophilic: Enveloping Absurdity
In a year rich with excellent death metal releases, Phobophilic stand out for sheer craftsmanship. With exquisite technicality and visceral energy, the songs on the Fargo, North Dakota quartet’s debut get under your skin. Riffs like the one that opens “Survive in Obscurity” hit like a jolt of adrenaline, and in each song the band finds new ways to maintain momentum while veering in surprising directions. A quote from Albert Camus in the liner notes forecasts their existential malaise—reaffirmed by song titles like “The Illusion of Self” and lyrical quandaries such as “Can there be true altruism/When you’re looking for reward?”—but Phobophilic sound energized and inspired by the search. –Sam Sodomsky
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Qasim Naqvi / Wadada Leo Smith / Andrew Cyrille: Two Centuries
Two Centuries is a dialogue between masters and their pupil. Composer Qasim Naqvi studied under both trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and drummer Andrew Cyrille, at CalArts and the New School respectively. Rather than enlist his teachers as sidemen, he highlights their expertise. Smith’s horn keens, golden and mournful, on opener “For D.F.”—named after Darnella Frazier, the woman who recorded the murder of George Floyd. On “Bypass Decay,” Cyrille’s delicate tiers of percussion sound like wind-rattled chimes. The result is a subtle but profound conversation. –Madison Bloom
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Reace Sosa: Big Zap
Reace Sosa comes from West Palm Beach, Florida, but Big Zap packs so many out-of-state influences that it might be hard to place his roots. On “Bout Whatever,” he reimagines a track of the same name by New Orleans’ Hot Boys; the wonky bassline of “Kay Flock” has serious No Limit vibes, even though the song is named after a Bronx drill rapper. A skeptic might say he’s just bringing everything that’s hot into the fold, but the way he merges these styles with his South Florida drawl and naturalistic melodies makes me think otherwise. –Alphonse Pierre
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Silvana Estrada: Abrazo EP
The Mexican singer Silvana Estrada’s music swirls outward from multiple traditions: classical (her parents were both luthiers), jazz (she studied it in conservatory), and son jarocho, a bright and communal Mexican folk form. But all that history dissolves in the sunlight of her mesmeric singing, which treats simple melodies as launch pads for limber vocal runs, and the delicate sound of her four-stringed Venezuelan cuatro. Abrazo radiates effortlessness, but close listens reveal muscles and sinew bunching beneath the smooth surface. It is the kind of music that requires precious little context or explanation to transfix: Estrada’s music just happens to the room, stopping coffee cups raised mid-sip, breaking off conversations, and enlightening whichever space it enters. –Jayson Greene
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Sofie Birch / Antonia Nowacka: Languoria
Composer Sofie Birch and vocalist Antonina Nowacka are a match made in the cosmos. For their first performance together, the two artists improvised a lush ambient soundscape, an exercise that would eventually evolve into the elysian Languoria. Throughout the record, Birch’s synths breathe and swell with Nowacka’s eerie voice, shifting harmonies and timbres in meditative waves. Each track paints a different scene; standout “Geor Lu” feels like a trail of cloud caught in a jar. With each piece, Languoria invites you away from Earth and into the duo’s celestial world. –Jane Bua
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Suzi Analogue: Infinite Zonez
In addition to producing for rappers like Knxwledge and Quelle Chris, Suzi Analogue has spent over a decade as a DJ merging high-speed footwork, drum’n’bass, and hip-hop into one propulsive fusion. Infinite Zonez is a compilation of three years’ worth of material, compiling Analogue’s best work into a fluorescent mix “assembled within a dazed world,” as she says, “where the axis of systemic oppressions routinely mutes young, not-rich Black femme voices.” Tempos shift like quicksand throughout, making way for standout guest verses from Junglepussy, RP Boo, and more. It’s a sleek vision of a free-form, futuristic club in Analogue’s own image. –Eric Torres
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TAKA: Theory
Taka’s Theory has a certain weight; thick air accumulates into a heavy, cavernous atmosphere, punctured by sharp percussion. The record represents the New York-based artist’s attempt to explore various types of electronic music like IDM and ambient, and while his instruments may be inorganic, they embody characteristics of living creatures: Snares chirp like fluttering beings on “1002” and kicks growl their way from ear to ear on “access granted.” The record feels like an ecosystem. –Arjun Srivatsa
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Various Artists: Music from Saharan WhatsApp
When the Sahel Sounds label compiled 2011’s Music for Saharan Cellphones, its title referred to the favored DIY music network of the West African Sahel desert, where listeners share tunes through Bluetooth, memory cards, or WhatsApp. Over a decade later, Sahel Sounds’ latest comp gathers mesmerizing live performances sent to the label via the titular chat app during an open call in 2020. Among its treasures are contributions from the family collective Etran de L'Aïr, electronic artist Hama, and Les Filles de Illighadad guitarist Amaria Hamadalher, who each bring distinct takes on sky-like desert blues. –Jenn Pelly
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
