Also stream new releases from DJ Plead and Maxo Kream
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Photo by Kasia Wozniak
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 Chanel Beads, DJ Plead, Maxo Kream, 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.)
Beth Orton: The Ground Above [Partisan]
In a brief message accompanying the announcement of her new album, Beth Orton wrote, “Linear time has no place in music.” That’s undoubtedly true of Orton’s own work, which is better than ever three decades into the English songwriter’s career. The Ground Above, her follow-up to 2022’s Weather Alive, resists the tacit assumption that an artist’s catalogue should walk a straight line. A better word to describe the relationship between the two records might be… expansion? Diffusion? Fragmentation? Joined by collaborators old—Portishead’s Adrian Utley, Shahzad Ismaily—and new—Nick Hakim, the Smile drummer Tom Skinner—Orton knits an infinity scarf of wicker-weir folk, jazzy ambiance, and blue-eyed soul.
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Chanel Beads: Your Day Will Come [Jagjaguwar]
Chanel Beads might as well be the poster children for “all in good time.” The project of songwriter Shane Lavers has been one to watch in New York’s perpetually reshuffling rock underground since 2024 debut Your Day Will Come. Their second effort manages to be both a significant step forward and a statement of real consistency. Also titled Your Day Will Come (hey, maybe it’s still coming), the LP boasts lusher arrangements—courtesy of guests More Eaze, Anastasia Coope, and Tchad Cousins of Urika’s Bedroom—and sneakier hooks.
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DJ Plead: Please [Smalltown Supersound]
As DJ Plead, Lebanese-Australian producer Jarred Beeler has always made music that invites Western dance sensibilities into conversation with the Arabic party music that has otherwise soundtracked his life. Now, after collaborations with the likes of rRoxymore and DJ Python, Beeler has alighted upon a synthesis of dub and dabke, deep house and mahraganat, that is “loose and spacious, billowing like fabric that flaps at the slightest breeze,” as Andrew Ryce writes in Pitchfork’s review. The results gleam with sentimental melodies that conceal a mournful undertow, “like listening to an old relative’s stories that are tinged with sorrow but still lovely all the same,” as Ryce puts it.
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Gold Panda: Ton Up [Studio Barnhus]
After putting Gold Panda into hibernation for six years before 2022 comeback The Work, Derwin Dicker spent the past four years compressing the project’s aura into the tiniest possible capsules. The 10 tracks of Ton Up are at once his briskest and heaviest yet, miniaturizing his trademark loops of Dillafied psychedelia into speaker-rattling sample snippets that bombard uptempo house beats in dizzying volleys. The puckish spirit of Swedish label Studio Barnhus, here releasing Dicker for the first time, looms large.
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Maxo Kream: O.Y.N. [EMPIRE]
“I'm getting sick of Houston city, feel we’re out-of-towners/Japanese denim, ’bout to do a show in China,” raps Maxo Kream on “Time Out,” the lead single off his new album O.Y.N. That line might give you whiplash—the song mostly deals in lucid tales of addiction and mental-health issues—but it will be familiar to longtime fans of the Houston rapper, who can pivot on a dime no matter the subject matter. New territory awaits, though: O.Y.N. marks Maxo’s first album with a sole producer—Jpegmafia, fresh from his supposedly Experimental Rap album—across the entire project.
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Madeon: Victory [Mom+Pop]
To paraphrase one of my editors, Anna Gaca, listening to Madeon is like eating your dessert before dinner. While Diplo and Skrillex were pioneering the “pop-drop” during the mid-2010s, the French producer’s approach to radio EDM was refreshingly tasteless. So it was only a matter of time before he reached for that most tasteless of dance music fads: electroclash. Now, after seven years, allow Madeon to reintroduce himself. “Hi!,” the opening track of Victory, careens into the passing lane and then right over the guardrails. The rest of the album splits the difference between this newfound scrappiness and the skyscraping edifices Madeon built his name on. It’s a glittery car wreck that not only grabs your attention but demands you crank the stereo even louder.
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Félicia Atkinson: Sans Visage [Shelter Press]
If you saw Georges Franju’s cult horror movie Les Yeux Sans Visage and thought its fantastical portrayal of a skin-grafting surgeon could only be improved by an all-new, bone-ticklingly eerie electronic score, your name is probably Félicia Atkinson. (Hi, Félicia!) For those of us who had never considered this, Sans Visage serves as a striking and unexpected transmission from the other side—a Stockhausen-esque mood piece haunted by glassy piano motifs and musique concrète-style arrangement. “Through the music, I decided to bring back [the characters’] empowerment despite what they endure,” the French composer said in a statement, adding that the record is dedicated to the rape survivor Gisèle Pelicot. “I kept thinking of her strength and her decision to share her trial in order to reverse the shame.”
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SML: Spontaneous Music Live [Int’l Anthem]
Spontaneous Music Live is just that: Two sides of unedited improvisation from the esteemed Los Angeles quintet of Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann. Though SML’s two prior albums drew from performance recordings, the new one rejects studio trappings altogether, bypassing post-production wizardry in favor of a sprawling, pendulous snapshot of a band approaching perfection over the course of an evening. Bryce Gonzales, having performed similarly sacred duties for the Jeff Parker IVtet, recorded and mixed the show live to stereo tape at Los Angeles venue Zebulon.
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Harmony Tividad: Lifetime [KRO/One Riot]
Harmony Tividad is done with the intentional brain-rot pop of Gossip, at least for now. The former Girlpool member picks back up the acoustic guitar and, with it, her natural instincts for indie-pop earworms. Broadly recounting an endless cycle of becoming in the modern world, Lifetime is a detailed and thoughtful reflection that takes note of life’s smallest details and always cradles them with a gentle heart. “Mulholland Drive,” “Lifetime,” and “Your Strange Addiction” land like familiar staples of the past, with easygoing melodies that never sound fussed over, even when Tividad indulges in vocal effects.
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Brutalismus 3000: Harmony [Live From Earth/Columbia]
When producer Theo Zeitner and singer Victoria Vassiliki Daldas linked up in Berlin back in 2020, they didn’t expect their aggressive spin on techno to take off as quickly as it did. Together as Brutalismus 3000, the two bring a punk spirit to the dancefloor, merging the shared energy of both genres with subwoofer-and-guitar breakdowns, screamed lyrics that put you in a trance, and the type of stuttering beats that both genres can agree on. On Harmony, their sophomore album, the duo gleefully throws dubstep, nu-metal, and trap in a blender with the lid off, letting their influences splatter the walls and drawing out their initials.
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Ibeyi: Offering [AWAL]
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On Spell 31, Ibeyi reckoned with the fissures of a divided world, singing of police violence and sampling a Michelle Obama speech condemning “sexually predatory behavior” while charting a path to healing. Grief has always been at the core of the French Cuban twin duo’s work, but joy spills over in the rumbling electronic-R&B production, dramatic strings, and exultant hand percussion of Offering, their first album as independent artists. “I don’t make spells anymore, now I make offerings,” they sing on the title track, and there’s something radiant about this new perspective—one that honors the spirit of connection more than the outcome of manifestation.
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M. Geddes Gengras: Guest List [M. Geddes Gengras]
M. Geddes Gengras, a veteran synth architect and maximalist of the arcane, steps into the role of bandleader on Guest List. Where the multi-instrumentalist and producer would usually be on the receiving end of calls to produce and collaborate, this time, he enlisted an array of players—including drummer Greg Fox, guitarist Ben Seretan, and Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy—to form a full-band counterpart to his trademark modular synth composition. They followed his instruction, which was to follow their intuition; the songs are dense but lively, surging and tugging at their own forms with a chemistry that belies their remote composition.
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