3 days ago
12 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Miley Cyrus, Ty Segall, and More
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Miley Cyrus, February 2025 (Kevin Mazur/Peacock via Getty Images)
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 Miley Cyrus; Ty Segall; Caroline; Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko; Matt Berninger; Shura; Yeule; Aesop Rock; Obongjayar; Qasim Naqvi; Rome Streetz & Conductor Williams; and Photographic Memory. 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.)
After winning the Record of the Year Grammy for 'Flowers' last year, Miley Cyrus took a logical next step that so often eludes pop stars at the highest level: She leaned into her weirdest, most experimental impulses for an album that panders to nobody but herself. Enter Something Beautiful, a wily pop opus with contributions from a diverse array of indie artists. Executive-produced by Cyrus and Shawn Everett, the sprawling album balances its outré intentions by keeping a handle on the most durable pop influences—'the Beatles and Elvis and David Bowie and Prince like Madonna, these are all pop artists,' Cyrus told Apple Music.
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Possession isn't the usual Ty Segall record as of late. The longtime psych-rock staple co-wrote the album with filmmaker Matt Yoka to be a collection of American stories about hopeless kleptomaniacs, urban explorers, and other people who slip through the cracks. Segall sounds looser and sunnier on these songs, harkening back to his older sound while allowing the vibrancy of Yoka's imagination—which previously took shape solely in the visual world of Segall's albums Goodbye Bread, Manipulator, and Emotional Mugger—to lead toward low-heat grooves ('Fantastic Tomb') and Bowie-style classic rock ('Possession') when it may.
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Caroline's debut album built an outpost at the intersection between post-rock, emo, and campfire folk. Three years later, the follow-up, Caroline 2, expands outward in every direction, pairing scraggy, strummed chorales with heart-on-sleeve mantras and distorted furore. The London octet enlisted Caroline Polachek for lead single 'Tell Me I Never Knew That,' one of many moments that feels like the work of not just a band but a community. 'The first record was a compilation, but this one is a declaration,' as singer-guitarist Jasper Llewellyn put it in press materials.
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Ukrainian composer and avant-garde electronic musician Heinali has spent the past few years contributing to the growing trend of fusing electronic music with medieval folk. On Гільдеґарда, the album recorded from his new show with Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko, he draws from the work of Hildegard von Bingen to explore further the intersection of those genres. The 12th-century abbess, composer, philosopher, and visionary becomes a thrilling subject when backed by modular synths, Ukrainian folk singing, and high medieval music.
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The National's Matt Berninger made his second solo album, Get Sunk, around his move from Los Angeles to Connecticut. After a period of writers' block—and a sense he was 'drowning' in his own voice—he cracked open a new songwriting idiom, before assembling musicians including Booker T. Jones, Hand Habits' Meg Duffy, National touring member Kyle Resnick, and members of the Walkmen, mostly recording with Berninger in a basement. 'Our heart's are like old wells filled with pennies and worms,' he said of the album's themes. 'I can't resist going down to the bottom of mine to see what else is there. But sometimes you can get yourself stuck.'
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Shura glides between rallying and confessional synth-pop on I Got Too Sad for My Friends, the six-years-coming follow-up to Forevher. The British singer-songwriter applies her lithe pop sensibility to topics such as social anxiety, pandemic isolation, and, as ever, the tumult of love on the Luke Smith–produced album, which features guest turns from Cassandra Jenkins, Helado Negro, and Becca Mancari.
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In a shapeshifter career, Evangelic Girl Is a Gun is Yeule's most disarming transformation yet. Having mastered hyperpop heaters and meteoric alt-rock, the singer-producer-songwriter summons trip-hop ooze and industrial sleaze on an album that is both a total reinvention and, on the synth-pop-grunge hybrid of songs like 'Eko,' a consolidation of the adventuring spirit that has made Yeule one of the defining artists of the decade.
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On Black Hole Superette, Aesop Rock presents the late-night convenience store as a symbol of the modern condition. The Long Island veteran—assisted by likeminded rappers Lupe Fiasco, Homeboy Sandman, Open Mike Eagle, billy woods, and Elucid—invites us into surreal lyrical mazes as he stumbles, half-asleep, through a vortex of consumerism and encroaching tech. Watch the hallucinatory 'Checkers' video for a window into the dreamworld.
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Paradise Now is a renewed mission statement from Obongjayar, the Nigerian musician whose hyperactive fusion of Afrobeat, soul, and hip-hop has made him a sensation in his adopted hometown of London. The album adds volleys of synth-punk and summery electropop to his eclectic palate, explored with collaborators including producer Kwes Darko, Fontaines D.C.'s Carlos O'Connell, and, on 'Talk Olympics,' Little Simz.
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Dawn of Midi drummer Qasim Naqvi flexes his skills as a composer on his latest album for Erased Tapes, Endling. Haunted by a phrase from a dream his wife had one night—'God docks at death harbor'—the Pakistani American artist conceived of a 'tone poem' about, he's said, 'the last human on the planet—an endling, traversing a world centuries into the future. A world decayed and mutated into a strange amalgam of the natural and artificial.' Moor Mother features on the undulating ambient refractions of 'Power Down the Heart.'
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New York rapper Rome Streetz and superstar producer Conductor Williams unite for their debut collaborative album in Trainspotting. Williams' freewheeling production snips hooks from jazz and gospel while his collaborator knots together dense verses on industry greed on the Tribe-referencing 'Rule 4080,' expanding the vintage style the pair explored on Rome Streetz's 2022 album, Kiss the Ring.
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Photographic Memory is the solo project of Los Angeles producer, singer, and songwriter Max Epstein. I Look at Her and Light Goes All Through Me, his third album, shares some of the maximalist sensibilities of collaborators like Militarie Gun and Jane Remover, neutralizing lashings of overdriven excess with oases of introspective, melodic emo and shoegaze. Guests include Winter and Wisp.
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