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 American Football, Tori Amos, Zara Larsson, and Kacey Musgraves. 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.)

American Football: LP4 [Polyvinyl]

Decades into their career, American Football still manage to find new tricks up their sleeves. The veteran Midwest emo group’s fourth record traipses into somewhat novel post-rock, shoegaze, and math-y territory. Yet tracks like lead single “Bad Moons” prove they’re the same old AF from the block, as vocalist Mike Kinsella illustrates in his signature murmur, "I'm just two little boys in a trench coat with plastic knives—I'm scared, and I don’t want to grow up."

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Tori Amos: In Times of Dragons [Universal/Fontana]

Dealing with demons is nothing new for Tori Amos, but on her 18th studio album, there’s little that’s figurative about the struggle between human good and Trumpian evil. Across 17 tracks, Amos positions herself as both conqueror and coward, exploring how the greed and individualism of modern society has allowed tech feudalists and 21st-century robber barons to make out like kings. Not all of Amos’ new ground is so heavy, though; In Times of Dragons boasts her first use of the harpsichord since 1996’s seminal Boys for Pele.

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Hekt: Forever [Numbers]

Forever has been a long time coming: Hekt’s debut album heralds a union between the left-field pop scene of his native Copenhagen and the influential Glasgow label Numbers, whose formidable run of 2010s releases—including several landmark SOPHIE singles—has left a neon imprint on the new Danish vanguard. Hekt’s fellow Copenhagen composer-songwriters Smerz and Fine are among the co-conspirators on this future-pop manifesto, combining, as he puts it in press materials, “the songs you hear when you’re falling in love on the dancefloor, and the songs you hear when you open your eyes and realize it’s just you alone with the DJ, the last one to leave.”

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Ana Roxanne: Poem 1 [Kranky]

On Poem 1, her most lucid and arresting album to date, Ana Roxanne channels her mastery of drone and ambient textures into an idiom of pure, disarming balladry. She suspends her glassy tones over crackly piano figures, reverberations, and slow bass notes that draw simple songs into their fathomless depths, her voice seemingly beamed in from a distant past or future. Her first solo album since 2020’s Because of a Flower, Poem 1 follows her 2023 LP with DJ Python as Natural Wonder Beauty Concept.

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Zara Larsson: Midnight Sun: Girls Trip [Sommer House/Epic]

Since she won the Swedish talent show Talang in 2008 at 10 years old, Zara Larsson has been the kind of artist who carries herself like a star no matter the size of the venue or tone of the press. But last year marked a huge breakout, thanks to the earth-shattering summer anthem “Midnight Sun” and an all-quotables verse on PinkPantheress’ “Stateside” remix that made its the way to the Olympics. The next step to diva domination? A remix album. Following in the footsteps of Pink’s Fancy Some More? and Charli xcx’s Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat, Larsson’s latest reintroduces her 2025 record with new arrangements and a few new faces; the features list includes the been-it (Robyn, Shakira), the of-the-moments (Tyla, JT), and the up-nexts (Eli, Malibu).

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Isaiah Rashad: It’s Been Awful [TDE/Warner]

In some ways, every Isaiah Rashad record feels like an event album: not just because they’re rare, but because each one seems to document momentous internal shifts for the TDE rapper. It’s Been Awful, his first LP in five years, takes new and bigger swings without ignoring his roots. Lead single “Same Sh!t,” which came with an Omar Jones-directed visual where the rapper confronts his shadow self, is the bridge here; as Rashad noted in press materials, “I wanted to ensure there was something that spoke directly to where I’m from, for my older brothers, for that core audience.” Although It's Been Awful is notably lighter on guests than 2021’s The House Is Burning, Rashad still selects a few choice collaborators to come into his world, including Dominic Fike, Julian Sintonia, and his longtime labelmate SZA.

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Kacey Musgraves: Middle of Nowhere [Lost Highway]

Kacey Musgraves’ first album since 2024 takes her out of the depths of Deeper Well and into remote, if familiar, territory. Middle of Nowhere pulls its name from an actual tongue-in-cheek sign Musgraves saw in her hometown of Golden, Texas, and the arch-but-timeless folk and country instrumentation on songs like lead single “Dry Spell” present similarly classic territory for the singer. Willie Nelson, Miranda Lambert, Billy Strings, and Gregory Alan Isakov all feature.

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Hiss Golden Messenger: I’m People [Chrysalis]

M.C. Taylor delves further into the soft-rock heartland of 2023’s Jump for Joy on its studio follow-up, I’m People. The North Carolina-based singer-songwriter led the record with “I’m in the Middle of It,” a freewheeling country anthem inspired by the open road and desert towns, as well as “ghosts and UFOs and vagabonds,” he said in press materials. “The engine sings out over the long lightning fields. In the middle of it: the country, the story, the relationships.”

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Lip Critic: Theft World [Partisan]

Lip Critic’s third album is a true-crime concept record so absurd you’ll suspect the New York synth-punk band might have willed it into existence. This is pointedly not the case: The story revolves around a Lip Critic fan who, believing conspiratorial messages had been breadcrumbed throughout the band’s catalog, stole frontman Bret Kaser’s identity in a bid to complete a supposed hidden puzzle. The album co-opts the narrative with a string of chaotic, sparks-flying earworms, as Kaser’s barked monologues are electrified by digital shrapnel, industrial abrasions, and drums that blast through the mix as if to obliterate evidence the band was ever there.

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Kneecap: Fenian [Heavenly]

If you thought the thrown-out terrorism charge, the ban from multiple different countries, and the ire of dozens of Parliament politicians was enough to tone down Irish rap trio Kneecap’s blistering rebuke of British presence in Ireland and international imperialism at large—well, think again. Fenian, their latest, pairs the group with Fontaines D.C. and Wet Leg producer Dan Carey, who condenses their sound into a pressure-cooker of post-punk, bass music, and MTV-era hooks. The album may boast sharper songcraft and even clearer-eyed revolutionary politics, but Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Próvaí are still the same boys from West Belfast, making good trouble to hold bad actors to account.

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Seefeel: Sol.Hz [Warp]

Warp lodestars Seefeel are most recognizable for their vaporous blend of shoegaze, ambient, and experimental electronic music. But their first album in 15 years, Sol.Hz, has a heart of pure dub. Cloudy, reverberating bass mingles with sonorous, textural guitar loops courtesy of Mark Clifford, while Sarah Peacock’s spellbinding vocals ooze over the mix. For all the ambiguity coursing through their music, their new album’s title (if taken literally) nicely sums up a sonic ethos: sun plus electricity.

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Thurston Moore / Bonner Kramer: They Came Like Swallows - Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza [Silver Current Records]

Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore and Galaxie 500 producer Kramer have been friends and professional confidants for over 40 years, but it took an injustice of global proportions to get them on a collaborative album. The seven tracks on their first LP together are largely instrumental and instinctive, building a pivotal series of Miami recording sessions into a fresco of outsider rock, ambient, and avant-garde arrangement. But its title, They Came Like Swallows - Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza, doesn't mince words. In a press statement, the duo called it “a prayer to the war-torn souls of the families of Palestine continually decimated by the brutality of genocide.”

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Jump Source: Fold [NAFF]

Jump Source, the duo of Canadian producers Francis Latreille (aka Priori) and Patrick Holland (aka Project Pablo), know how to make dance music that's sweaty in all the right places. Their debut album expands on their pop-meets-Panorama Bar ethos, landing on a blissful medium that will please casual heads and die-hard Front Left-ers alike. Twirling through garage, pure house, and even IDM with a consistent four-on-the-floor pulse, Fold translates the energy and pace of a solid peak-time DJ set into a standout tape, with support from vocalists like POiSON GiRL FRiEND, BEA1991, and Montreal’s own Helena Deland.

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Safety Trance: Sacrificio [Romantico/Mad Decent]

Venezuela-born producer Safety Trance is intimately familiar with how a great party can act as a form of protest; his debut album, Sacrificio, shows he’s as well-suited to host as participate. Weaving strains of reggaeton, witch house, trance, hard techno, and even Memphis rap, he always finds his way back to the Latin club futurism that he’s been quietly shaping alongside bigger names like Arca and Sega Bodega (who both feature here). Other features include Kinara, Lolahol, Spanish experimental artists nusar3000 and Argentina’s Six Sex. There’s never been a better time to get on your feet.

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