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 drops available on streaming services. This week’s batch includes albums from Kim Gordon, Elucid, Alexis Taylor, 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.)
Kim Gordon: Play Me [Matador]
Kim Gordon has had enough: of AI chatbots, of tech billionaires, and of the ruling class sucking all the marrow from modern life. Her new album Play Me takes the sharp indictment of the Trump administration she delivered on 2024’s “Bye Bye” and expands it into a full-on assault against capitalist plunder and technofascism. She also continues to build on the rage-rap palettes she and producer Justin Raisen dove into on 2024’s excellent The Collective. But Play Me has a more distinct alt-rock tip than Gordon has worked with since No Home Record, especially on lead single “Not Today.” The album’s only feature is Dave Grohl, who drums on “Busy Bee;” in a recent interview with Pitchfork’s Mano Sundaresan, Gordon promised the full project contains some of ”the biggest low end maybe you’ve ever heard.”
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Elucid: I Guess U Had to Be There [Rhymesayers/Secretly]
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There’s a time and place evoked by the title of Elucid’s latest solo album, I Guess U Had to Be There, but it doesn’t specify exactly when or where that is. Thankfully, you only need to get a few songs deep into the tracklist to recognize that the New York City rap stalwart and his producer, Sebb Bush, have placed you directly inside that moment. On his follow-up to 2024’s Revelator, Elucid gently swipes his arms out before him while he walks through a hallway of mirror shards dangling on strings, each one reflecting back the realities of work burnout, environmental degradation, and back-to-basics decisions over futuristic beats and tape grime. Joining him in guest features to pull off that trick are his Armand Hammer partner billy woods, Shabaka Hutchings, Estee Nack, and Breeze Brewin.
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Alexis Taylor: Paris in the Spring [Night Time Stories]
Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor cuts out on his own on his latest album, but that doesn't mean he’s abandoning collaboration altogether. Paris In The Spring, a dreamy collection of left-field synth pop, features contributions from the Avalanches, Étienne de Crécy, Paradis’ Pierre Rousseau, Ewan Pearson, Pale Blue’s Elizabeth White, and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside. In press materials, Taylor emphasized the record is about “freedom—from constraints, from preconceptions, and from genre.”
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Anjimile: You’re Free to Go [4AD]
Anjimile’s whispered falsettos and warm acoustics still warrant comparisons to Sufjan Stevens. But while Stevens spent his early records discovering his identity as it related to God, family, and landscapes, Anjimile spent his albums sharpening his identity between the pillars of gender, faith, and friendship. On You’re Free to Go, the North Carolina-based singer-songwriter sounds more at ease and comfortable than ever before, no matter what troubling tasks or forks in the road splay themselves in these songs. Anjimile puts it best in “Waits for Me” over muted electric guitar: “When I was a little girl, I wanted to be free… When I was a little boy, I wanted to be real.”
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Ora Cogan: Hard Hearted Woman [Sacred Bones]
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Nine albums into her career, Canadian songwriter Ora Cogan has found a new label, Sacred Bones, and a new home for her otherworldly folk music, which can feel gothic and galactic in equal measure. She manages to maintain a spare, intimate throughline on Hard Hearted Woman even as she builds out her band with organs, fiddle, Wurlitzer, Nashville guitar, mandolin, 12-string acoustics, pedal steel, and more. Perhaps it’s a case of shared DNA—Cogan assembled her ensemble from the noise and folk scenes she’s already a familiar face in in Victoria, British Columbia. For anyone with a deep-set love of Grouper or a passion for driving on back roads late at night, Hard Hearted Woman is appointment listening.
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Cut Worms: Transmitter [Jagjaguwar]
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Max Clarke crafted his latest Cut Worms project in step with Jeff Tweedy, who lent Clarke Wilco’s Loft Studio for the process. Together, the duo land on a nuanced blend of power pop and alt-rock that foreground’s Clarke’s knack for troubadour-style performance. It’s not hard to hear Clarke bring a track like “Windows on the World” to the smoky back corner of a Kingston, NY or Asheville, NC bar, pleasing unassuming locals and bewitched groupies alike. Although he primarily works with an acoustic set-up laden with pedal steel and tambourine, spare piano ballad “Dream” reminds even the casual listener of his dexterity across instruments and modes.
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Laurel Halo: Midnight Zone (Original Soundtrack to the Film by Julian Charrière) [Awe]
To accompany the visual artist Julian Charrière’s new film about a lighthouse lens adrift in an abyssal plain of the Pacific Ocean, Laurel Halo composed a soundtrack album that stands alone as an ambient epic. Undulating with monstrous reverberations and spangly refraction, the album plunges into the unknown with a spirit of bewildered curiosity, its tension rising and falling via drones and aquatic echoes that approach the subliminal.
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Noémi Büchi: Exuvie [-OUS]
The influences on Swiss pianist and sound artist Noémi Büchi’s latest album include molting insects, Baroque counterpoint, blood and guts, and the artwork of Irish-British painter Francis Bacon, who she emulates in Exuvie’s crime scene-cum-cocoon cover artwork. It may seem like a big swing, but Büchi has a deft enough hand to pull it off, delivering a magically disjointed suite of electronic meditations, stilted vocals, and post-modern glitch classical. Her childhood taste for improvisation—and, in turn, distaste for strict conservatory life—pays off handsomely.
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James Blake: Trying Times [Republic]
Much like the plates he’s spinning in its cover artwork, James Blake’s first self-released album Trying Times came to fruition when a lot was up in the air. “I was writing an album, I was producing for other artists, I was going independent, and managing myself,” he recalled in a press statement. “I was on the phone 24/7.” Blake’s new album channels that restless, existential energy into a palate of alternative R&B and midtempo dance that reveals just how definitive his sound has been to pop music over the past decade. Blake is entering the next leg of his career with some key points of consistency: smart selection, stylish delivery, and incisive songwriting.
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