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 Harry Styles, Johnny Blue Skies, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Slayr, and more. 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.)
Harry Styles: Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. [Columbia]
Bid adieu to Harry’s House, and say hello to Harry’s very classy club-slash-listening-room-slash-meditation-center. Led by the LCD Soundsystem and Coldplay-inflected “Aperture,” the British star’s first album in four years Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. trades out the honeyed stylings of his prior record for refined slivers of dance pop, funk, and post-punk. (Don’t worry, he finds time for a couple ballads too, namely “Paint by Numbers” and the string-laden “Coming Up Roses”). It was executive produced by Kid Harpoon, and has credits from a bevy of artists including Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell, the Smile’s Tom Skinner, and a full gospel choir.
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Various Artists: Help(2) [War Child Records]
War Child has rallied a characteristically impressive lineup for the latest instalment in its generation-spanning Help compilation series. Recorded at Abbey Road and led by the first Arctic Monkeys single since 2022, Help(2) features new music from Big Thief, Cameron Winter, Olivia Rodrigo, King Krule, Fontaines D.C., Bat for Lashes, Pulp, Wet Leg, Depeche Mode, and Black Country, New Road, as well as a bunch of unlikely collaborations: Arooj Aftab and Beck; Damon Albarn, Grian Chatten, and Kae Tempest; Anna Calvi, Dove Ellis, and Nilüfer Yanya; and many more. It is, in short, one of the most star-studded compilations since the charity’s last one.
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Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds: Mutiny After Midnight [Atlantic]
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Sturgill Simpson got his new name, Johnny Blue Skies, from hanging out in bars. “When I started performing and getting my confidence at open mics and stuff, he’d come to this other bar and see me because it was his night off,” he said in a GQ interview. “He started every time I’d walk into his bar, he’d say, ‘Johnny Blue Skies.’ So I just started using it.” Mutiny After Midnight also sounds like it was born in a bar, one in which whiskey is overflowing in every years-worn glass, collars are loose, and someone’s in the corner shit-faced, ranting about the government. The album threads disco stabs through country rock and political lyrics, a soundtrack for the best party at the end of the world.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy: We Are Together Again [No Quarter]
We Are Together Again, Will Oldham’s third Bonnie “Prince” Billy album in as many years, resists a hostile world by finding joy in a community of friends and like-minded makers. “The human times have come and gone,” he sings on the pastoral “Life Is Scary Horses.” “We must accept our rule is done, though love is sown and will live on.” Swells of sighing, orchestral-folk warmth fill the album, with a few thorns of melodic dissent to play off Oldham’s bottomlessly reassuring tenor. In press materials, he says the album follows a simple ethos: “We start small, continue small, like oak tree seeds or the sperm-and-egg concoctions mixologized by the parents of movers-and-shakers since the dawn of time. Plant these songs into your soul’s brain, into your existence’s heart and the trees will grow and fruit and flourish and nourish.”
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Arima Ederra: A Rush to Nowhere [Arima’s Lab/RCA]
Arima Ederra’s Rush to Nowhere is the follow-up to her 2022 debut, An Orange Colored Day. The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter continues that earlier record’s soulful meditations, cycling through psychedelic funk à la Tame Impala, hazy guitar pop, and R&B with the larger-than-life orchestral swells of Childish Gambino’s later work. Ederra’s gauzy vocals are transfixing, flitting from grief to hope. Whatever life swings at her, this is an artist that knows how to find the softness in it all.
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Slayr: Bloodluxe [self-released]
Anyone skeptical of deluxe albums would be unwise to let their opinion slip in the presence of Slayr. The 18-year-old Philadelphia rapper wrote a defiant, all-caps retort to those naysayers on X this week, promising a whole new mixtape as a follow-up to Half Blood, their mixtape from November. The result is Bloodluxe, 10 songs of trap, rage, and digicore. Plus, Lucy Bedroque hops on a track.
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Shabaka: Of the Earth [Shabaka Records]
In 2024, the British jazz musician Shabaka put down his beloved saxophone and challenged himself to play the shakuhachi, a Japanese end-blown bamboo flute. That practice prompted his first flute-forward album, 2024’s Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace. Two years later, he returns to the saxophone and the flute on Of the Earth. He brings his expansive jazz to life with colorful percussion and electronic production, often switching gears to feathery ambient, dancehall, and blunted hip-hop. There’s another surprise. Were you stunned when the rapper Andre 3000 dropped a Carlos Niño-inspired flute album in 2023? Well, you might be interested in a role reversal: Shabaka taking a stab at rapping.
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Ohyung: Iowa [self-released]
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In composing Iowa, Ohyung went to the land of cornfields so endless they become brushstrokes of green and yellow from a moving vehicle, where hog farms are more prevalent than opportunity. The Bushwick-based composer spent their time in the Midwestern state throwing raves and making music with local producers, one of whom, the late Chris Wiersema, he dedicates this album to. While the synths glisten like porcelain shards, there is a violence to the music that sounds meteorological. Quiet thunder murmurs through songs like “Nevada”; haunting chorals suggest inevitable decay. It’s the high drama of an outsider peering into a new world.
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