8 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Stereolab, Smerz, and More
Stereolab, photo by Joe Dilworth
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 Stereolab, Smerz, Sparks, Sophia Kennedy, MSPaint, These New Puritans, Home Is Where, and Lindstrøm. 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.)
In the 15 years since their last proper album, Stereolab have kept busy with ongoing reunion tours and a reissue program to rival that of the Beatles. Now, the maestros of kosmische indie-pop have come to reclaim their crown, returning to the studio with 13 originals that whirr and whizz with the same analog-chanson joy that has made them a perennial inspiration to alternative pop tinkerers for decades. Read Ben Cardew's review of Instant Holograms on Metal Film.
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Four years after debuting with the minimalist mission statement Believer, Norwegian duo Smerz return with a new batch of retrofuturist warehouse pop on second album Big City Life. Set to stark beats, the grayscale record laces daydreamy monologues with wisps of satiny R&B and occasional, eerie piano lines that seem to have wandered in from a Shostakovich recital. The result is an exercise in controlled chaos, full of moments of plainspoken wonder.
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Sparks are still flying high on Mad!, the latest album of hare-brained confections from the duo celebrated in Edgar Wright's Sparks Brothers documentary. Maverick siblings Ron and Russel Mael sharpen their knives for a playful evisceration of topics including banter and the rise of influencers on the follow-up to The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte, in a series of pop operettas that remind us of all the silliest ways one can put melodic genius to use.
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Squeeze Me is the latest from Baltimore-born artist Sophia Kennedy, who splits her time between Berlin and Hamburg. The 10-song LP follows her 2021 release, Monsters, and her collaborations with DJ Koze; first on 2023's 'Wespennest' and again on this year's 'Der Fall' and 'Die Gondel.' Kennedy has shared a handful of singles from her new, more stripped-back record, including 'Rodeo,' 'Hot Match,' and 'Imaginary Friend.'
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MSPaint's new five-track EP, No Separation, follows the Hattiesburg, Mississippi, synth-punk group's 2023 debut, Post-American. No Separation was produced by Julian Cashwan Pratt and Harlan Steel of New York hardcore band Show Me the Body. MSPaint announced the new record with their single 'Angel,' which arrived with a dystopian music video starring director Alex Thiel.
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These New Puritans became an overnight cult phenomenon with their 2010 album Hidden, an album that paired Jack Barnett's murmured mantras and medieval compositions with his brother George's militant beats. Their albums since have taken that premise along wildly divergent paths, taking Talk Talk and Depeche Mode textures to their logical end point in Crooked Wing. The culminating album, led by the Caroline Polachek–assisted 'Industrial Love Song,' is by turns epic, quiet, gorgeous, and ungodly. Or, as George Barnett put it more simply in press materials, 'Jack on a piano, me smashing the living daylights out of some drums.'
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Home Is Where broke out making athletic, anthemic hardcore, and have only limbered up with time. Hunting Season, the emo-rock outfit's third album and the follow-up to 2023's The Whaler, is looser and shaggier than its predecessors, written in a period when frontwoman Bea MacDonald 'was homesick and Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers' first record specifically sounded like home.' Fear not: The songs still find their moments to thrash, resulting in an album that feels like embarking on a freewheeling road trip while your companion waves a machete out the window.
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For the follow-up to 2023's Everyone Else Is a Stranger, Lindstrøm relaunched the Feedelity label that the Norwegian producer founded back in 2003. He marks the occasion with a reset to the bubbly euphoria explored during his ascent. Lead single 'Cirkl,' he said in press materials, 'taps into the same energy I explored with those early releases, while also pushing into new sounds and ideas. It's minimal in structure, with a warm and uplifting energy.'
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