The main contribution of this paper is a new improved variant of the laser method for designing matrix multiplication algorithms. Building upon the recent techniques of [Duan, Wu, Zhou, FOCS 2023], the new method introduces several new ingredients that not only yield an improved bound on the matrix multiplication exponent $ω$, but also improve the known bounds on rectangular matrix multiplication by [Le Gall and Urrutia, SODA 2018]. In particular, the new bound on $ω$ is $ω\le 2.371552$ (improved from $ω\le 2.371866$). For the dual matrix multiplication exponent $α$ defined as the largest $α$ for which $ω(1,α,1)=2$, we obtain the improvement $α\ge 0.321334$ (improved from $α\ge 0.31389$). Similar improvements are obtained for various other exponents for multiplying rectangular matrices.