Written by 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 Jade; Algernon Cadwallader; Jens Lekman; Mark William Lewis; Frost Children; Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer; El Cousteau; King Princess; Maruja; Rian Treanor & Cara Tolmie; the Hidden Cameras; Liquid Mike; and Verses GT. 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.)
Jade: That’s Showbiz Baby! [RCA]
Jade caused a sensation last year with release of her debut solo single, “Angel of My Dreams,” a sprawling prog opus disguised as a daytime radio smash. There is more where that came from—incendiary pop hooks collaged with club beats and theatrical interludes, with a quickness and eclecticism that rivals hyperpop—on debut album That’s Showbiz Baby! The former Little Mix singer co-wrote the album herself, inspired, she’s said, by her youth listening to the Spice Girls and Samantha Mumba while club tracks by Scooter and Cascada leaked through the wall from her brother’s bedroom. Collaborators on the LP include Tove Lo, Raye, and Mike Sabath.
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Algernon Cadwallader: Trying Not to Have a Thought [Saddle Creek]
Algernon Cadwallader made two albums, left their mark on the emo scene, and left. The band, originally from Pennsylvania, is now back with a third album. Trying Not to Have a Thought came together after Algernon Cadwallader’s 2022 reunion. Learn more in Ian Cohen’s interview with the band, “Some Kind of Wonderful: Algernon Cadwallader on Their Reunion and New Album.”
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Jens Lekman: Songs for Other People’s Weddings [Secretly Canadian]
Jens Lekman is back—with a new book! Don’t worry, though: Songs for Other People’s Weddings is also an album, the baroque-pop companion to a novel of the same name by Lekman and David Levithan. Both are about a heartsore wedding singer who writes brilliant songs for happy couples but can’t find the words when he needs them for himself. (At least some of this is drawn from Lekman’s own experience as a wedding singer.) The record unspools chronologically—like Frank Sinatra’s Watertown, Lekman noted in press materials—as the narrator trudges from one wedding to the next, each with a bespoke musical pairing. “Wedding in Leipzig,” a song that rhymes “whistle,” “pistol,” and “incel,” led the album.
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Mark William Lewis: Mark William Lewis [A24 Music]
Mark William Lewis recites haunted pop songs in a deadpan burr, his Dean Blunt–esque deadpan trundling through compositions that shift between journeyman folk, polluted bossa nova, and rustic indie-rock. The London artist’s self-titled, debut full-length follows collaborations with both MIKE and Bar Italia’s Nina Crisante, his songs in conversation not with any particular scene but with DIY alternative music writ large. The spare, poetic “Tomorrow Is Perfect” preceded the record.
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Frost Children: Sister [True Panther/Dirty Hit]
Sister is an ode to EDM and bloghouse rooted in the “twin telepathy” of sibling duo Angel and Lulu Prost. Together, as Frost Children, they employ the services of Kim Petras, Porter Robinson, and Mø to bring their hyper-satured dance-pop dreams to life on a third album that is “so confidently what we love, and what we breathe,” as Lulu Prost put it in press materials.
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Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer: Purity [10k]
Fresh off her collaboration with Loraine James, on the Clandestine EP, singer-producer Anysia Kym joins forces with New York producer Tony Seltzer on Purity. Introduced by the systems-crashing, rave-R&B hybrid “Speedrun” and the hallucinatory ballad “Automatic,” the 12-track record zips by in barely 18 minutes, Kym knotting her chiffon melodies through the jagged edges and crevices in Seltzer’s productions.
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El Cousteau: Dirty Harry 2 [Super Cousteau]
El Cousteau doesn’t need the beat to tell him how, where, or when to rap. The Washington, D.C., rapper’s flow on Dirty Harry 2 spreads wildly in all directions, never mind a pocket or the drums. The follow-up to last year’s Merci, Non Merci opens with the Alchemist collaboration “Menace to Society,” while further instrumentals are supplied by TwelveAM, Coca Cousteau, and Niontay. Niontay also raps on the album, and Earl Sweatshirt and A$AP Rocky feature, too.
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King Princess: Girl Violence [Section1]
After two albums on Mark Ronson’s Columbia imprint, Zelig, King Princess has gone independent with her third album, Girl Violence. The New York musician produced her new album—which is released via the Partisan-backed Section1—with Jacob Portrait and Aire Atlantica, and she previewed it with “RIP KP,” “Cry Cry Cry,” and “Girls,” each showcasing King Princess’ assertive, bratty rock-inflected pop.
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Maruja: Pain to Power [Music for Nations]
If you feel like you’ve had enough of acerbic, Gilla Band–coded post-punks from the United Kingdom and Ireland, the debut album from Manchester fire-starters Maruja is appointment listening. We’re not saying you’ll like it, but if you don’t, you can safely assume that this sort of thing is no longer for you and go back to seeking out singers with vocal ranges wider than a knife blade. Pain to Power, to be fair, is another thing entirely, full of drones, disarming melodic surges, and cosmic jazz interludes that mediate between battering-ram vocalist Harry Wilkinson and the demands of the human ear. Equal parts transcendence and insurrection, it is among the most inventive and brain-melting rock albums of the year.
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Rian Treanor & Cara Tolmie: Body Lapse [Planet Mu]
This collaborative album from puckish Planet Mu producer Rian Treanor and the experimental Swedish vocalist Cara Tolmie is as punishing as it is playful, setting Tolmie’s flaying vocals to a battery of beats, industrial clatter, and melodic mayhem. According to a press release, Body Lapse also occupies “a deliciously disorientating, hypersurreal space of semantic modulations, concrete poetry, cut-up beats, and mimicked samples,” which is another way of saying it’s an absolute riot, but clever, too.
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The Hidden Cameras: Bronto [EvilEvil]
In 2016, after the release of their seventh album, Home on Native Land, the tape stopped rolling on the Hidden Cameras. A reissue of their debut album as a full band came in 2023, and, now, the Toronto indie-pop darlings are back with more of songwriter Joel Gibb’s self-described “gay folk church music.” Bronto enlists the likes of Pet Shop Boys and Erasure’s Vince Clarke for a pivot into celebratory synth-pop pivot, with arrangements by original violinist Owen Pallett.
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Liquid Mike: Hell Is an Airport [self-released]
Vocalist and guitarist Mike Maple began Liquid Mike in 2020, and he’s already onto his fifth album. He’s also got a lot more bandmates, as the Marquette, Michigan, quintet comprises synthesizer player and vocalist Monica Nelson, drummer Cody Maracek, bassist Zack Alworden, and guitarist David Daignault. The group’s new album, Hell Is an Airport, is classic pop-punk, and Maple’s voice is not a far cry from Mark Hoppus’. The 14-song release includes “Groucho Marx,” “Selling Swords,” “AT&T,” and “Claws.”
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Verses GT: Verses GT [LuckyMe]
Verses GT is the duo of Jacques Greene and Nosaj Thing, two producers synonymous with the elegiac 2010s dance music that now informs various strands of pop, as well as descendants like Overmono. Back with their debut collaborative LP, Greene and Jason Chung strip their trademark sounds down to the fundamentals, with strobing synths and ambient atmospheres occasionally jolted by UK garage and 2-step beats. George Riley features on the single “Your Light,” with Kučka and Tyson making appearances elsewhere.
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