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 Alchemical Sisters, Fine, Shabazz Palaces, 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.) Alchemical Sisters: Alchemical Sisters [Interdimensional Transitions] Octo Octa and Eris Drew’s B2B sets are the stuff of legend, but the married DJs had never collaborated on a record until they teamed up to remix Special Interest’s “Disco III” in 2021. For a joint moniker they chose “Alchemical Sisters,” a play, of course, on the Chemical Brothers.
Nominative determinism at work: ’90s big beat—from Orb to Orbit—makes up the core DNA of their first full-length album as a duo. Pieced together in their New Hampshire log cabin, Alchemical Sisters is, writes Andrew Ryce in Pitchfork’s new review, “a four-dimensional record where the past endlessly loops back on itself,” where “originality and reference become one and the same.” Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Fine: Jazz Dreams [Escho] So insular is Fine Glindvad Jensen’s musical realm that one ends up reaching for increasingly tortured anachronisms just to map its periphery: Lana if she fronted the Warm Inventions, Hope Sandoval if she made Honeymoon, a Bond girl who’s also Julee Cruise. That’s not to say Jazz Dreams is unwelcoming; the second solo album from the Copenhagen artist known mononymously as Fine is plush, cozy even, steeped in paisley folk and jangle pop.
But spend enough time in this incense-scented, velvet-upholstered lounge, and you may begin to see strange shadows crawling up the walls. Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade Ryan Hemsworth: Numbskull [Topshelf] Longtime producer for the indie rock stars Ryan Hemsworth returns with his first solo album in nearly a decade to remind us what his own songwriting sounds like free from others’ ideas. Turns out, it’s caustic electropop, filtered through grainy fuzz, pop vocal hooks that could scale a mountain, and the type of slamming bass notes that could work just as well in EDM or synthpunk.
Hemsworth doesn’t have anything to prove, though, which allows him to tap a few guest features—Tegan and Sara, Illuminati Hotties, MSPAINT, Allie—that showcase just how far a singer-songwriter’s ideas can extend in their own voice and beyond. It’s a mature choice, showcasing not just his own skills, but how strongly they lift friends around him, too. Lead single “Ahh World (I Won The Alpha Bet)” sets lucid social commentary to ominous beats that sound like the very dystopian future he rallies listeners to prevent; “Jheri Curl Jump,” meanwhile, is a loquacious love story murmured over jittery electro-funk.
Butler’s latest for Sub Pop follows the sibling mini-albums Exotic Birds of Prey and Robed in Rareness. The LP features, among others, Thaddillac, Evan Flory-Barnes, and Kassa Overall, pairing Butler’s own production with that of sometime Shabazz collaborator Erik Blood. The Los Angeles composer and multi-instrumentalist—sax, keys, synth, and effects, if you're wondering—has released killer albums with his trio SML and Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, plus produced for Flea and Meshell Ndegeocello.
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