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 Big Thief, Titanic, David Byrne, Lucrecia Dalt, James K, Shame, Saint Etienne, Brian Dunne, Suede, La Dispute, and Flur. 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.)
Early this year, Big Thief and a rotating cast of guests gathered in a Manhattan studio to record this long-brewing collection of songs largely familiar from the band’s recent setlists. Double Infinity is an album of love, sex, and pontification on whatever truths might lie beneath the material world, rendered with the usual economy and stirring atmospheres that tilt Big Thief’s music into the sublime. Collaborators include Laraaji, Hannah Cohen, June McDoom, and Alena Spanger.
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Titanic: Hagen [Unheard of Hope]
Hagen is Mabe Fratti and Héctor “I la Católica” Tosta’s second album as Titanic—an arresting and wildly ambitious fusion of pop and the avant-garde that, more closely than any of Fratti’s other albums, captures the obliterating force of the Guatamalan cellist’s live show. Strands of sophistipop, doom-metal, jazz, stadium-rock, baroque classical, and noise collide as Fratti’s divine folk melodies battle through the melée. “Libra” showcases the album’s pop instincts—albeit the freeform pop of Björk, Robert Wyatt, and Tom Zé—while “Pájaro de fuego” is a darkly alluring ballad, complete with synths from Daniel Lopatin.
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David Byrne: Who Is the Sky? [Matador]
“At my age, at least for me, there’s a ‘don’t give a shit about what people think’ attitude that kicks in,” David Byrne said of his new album, Who Is the Sky? Accordingly, his follow-up to 2018’s American Utopia employs the chamber ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra in service of a sort of globe-trotting baroque-pop opera. To that eclectic backdrop, the Talking Heads frontman applies his usual puckish wit to matters of love, connection, and other quandaries of existence, assisted by Paramore’s Hayley Williams, St. Vincent, and the Smile’s Tom Skinner.
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Lucrecia Dalt: A Danger to Ourselves [Rvng Intl.]
Lucrecia Dalt broke out in 2022 with the sci-fi bolero opus ¡Ay! Three years and one horror movie score later, the Colombian singer, composer, and songwriter is back with a beguiling follow-up—but only after “spending enough time in the abyssal realm of erotic delirium” to write it, as she informs us in press materials. A Danger to Ourselves presents 13 transcendent, explosive takes on the experimental pop song, conceived in part with co-producer David Sylvian. “I wanted to create music that flows cinematically and sets a landscape to tell a love story that flirts with improbability, the miraculous and the mysterious,” Dalt summarized.
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James K: Friend [AD 93]
Friend, the latest from experimental New York composer and singer James K, is a pillowy and mollifying album even by dream-pop standards. Volcanic murmurs stir and accumulate, only occasionally—spectacularly—erupting, as on the single “Doom Bikini.” For the most part, she drifts through ashen synths and aquatic guitar strums carefree and half-awake, slowly dissolving your worries in a pinkish melodic mush.
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Shame: Cutthroat [Dead Oceans]
Shame wrote their new album “about the cowards, the cunts, the hypocrites,” vocalist Charlie Steen explained in press materials. But how does he really feel? On Cutthroat, the British post-punks let us know through a spangly bombardment of vitriolic rock anthems, untamed by the silvery tones of producer John Congleton. Forays into Americana and rockabilly break up the walls of noise, but not the feel of a band, four albums in, hurtling through life at top speed.
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Saint Etienne: International [Heavenly]
Saint Etienne insist they’re not breaking up, but they do not plan to release another studio album after International. Fans will just have to take solace in knowing that the British indie-poppers don’t wish to sully their reputation with subpar work. The group made International, a quick follow-up to 2024’s The Night, with contributions from Errol Alkan, Paul Hartnoll, Vince Clarke, Tom Rowlands, and others.
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Brian Dunne: Clams Casino [Missing Piece]
At long last, Clams Casino is bac—no, hang on, that’s not right. It says here that Clams Casino is actually a new album of exuberant pop-rock from Brian Dunne, one-fourth of the New York folk rockers Fantastic Cat. (If it’s a 2010s-style rap record you’re after, try the Justin Bieber album, apparently.) Dunne’s fifth solo LP is a suite of wry character studies in which the characters, as well as the songs, are swept up in high-stakes drama that will always resolve in a satisfactory manner, because this is a crowd-pleasing, everyman rock album—and definitely not a rap album.
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Suede: Antidepressants [BMG]
While Oasis, Blur, and, to some degree, Pulp rake it in with reunions bankrolled by nostalgia, Suede are still plugging away as a working band of Britpop survivors. Antidepressants, their 10th studio album, channels their usual mix of light social commentary and first-person misadventure in songs as full-throatedly anthemic as anything in their catalog.
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La Dispute: No One Was Driving the Car [Epitaph]
There’s regular dissociation, and then there’s the three-tiered saga presented in No One Was Driving the Car, La Dispute’s first new album in six years. The Michigan screamo and post-hardcore musicians immerse themselves in the narrative of a man disconnecting from himself as he shaves his head, follows a sex worker outdoors, and ends an aimless walk at night at the hospital before things spiral further. Taking inspiration from the 2017 Paul Schrader film First Reformed, La Dispute’s follow-up to Panorama is intense and brooding as it grapples with self-control, technological consumption, and the feeling of dread that populates the future.
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Flur: Plunge [Latency]
While studying different courses from one another at the London university Goldsmiths, all three members of Flur—Austrian Ethiopian harpist Miriam Adefris, British saxophonist Isaac Robertson, and percussionist Dillon Harrison—submerged themselves in the school’s explorative music scene where they started gravitating towards one another as musicians. After various stints collaborating with artists like Floating Points and Shabaka Hutchings, the three musicians finally formed a proper trio. On Plunge, their debut album as Flur, they merge written compositions and offhand improvisation to showcase their take on classical, ambient, and free jazz.
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