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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 drops available on streaming services. This week’s batch includes new albums from Turnstile, Erykah Badu and the Alchemist, Interpol, 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.) Interpol: This Mirror Weighs a Ton [Partisan] Interpol always carried themselves a little more sharply than their East Village neighbors, dressing in tailored suits and sport coats and slicking back their hair. On This Mirror Weighs a Ton, Paul Banks, Daniel Kessler, and Sam Fogarino age into the (relatively) moneyed New York life, which is to say they sound more like the National than ever.
The album’s cover depicts an artwork from the Whitney Museum, and its producer, Andrew Wyatt, has credits on Charli XCX’s Crash and Rosalía’s Lux. Of course, this is Interpol, so paranoia and discontent lurk around every street corner. The Baltimore experimental hardcore band is adamant that it’s a “reimagined album” of songs from last year’s Grammy-winning full-length Never Enough.
For starters, there’s more collaborators than there are songs on the original tracklist, and the list is as diverse in names as their music sounds: Elton John, Alex G, Slayyyter, Panda Bear, Hayley Williams, Dying Fetus, Oklou, Julien Baker, Blood Orange, Faye Webster, Dan Deacon, Four Tet, A.G. Cook, Mustafa, Chanel Beads, Floating Points, Rod Lee, Porches, Angel Du$t, Kettama, Brandon Woody, Shabaka, and Nourished by Time. The rest will have to be obvious to your ears, as Turnstile otherwise decided to stay tight-lipped about Never Enough: Versions until it came out.
Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Erykah Badu / the Alchemist: Before the World Blows [Young] Before the World Blows, the first full-length Erykah Badu project since the 2015 mixtape But You Caint Use My Phone, evokes a hallucinatory house party that never quite spins out of control, with Earl Sweatshirt, Westside Gunn, and Steve Lacy among the drop-ins. The 16-track LP, produced by the Alchemist, conjures a fever dream of vibe-heavy hip-hop beats and percussive excursions that frame Badu’s timeless riffs on modern times. Kamasi Washington shows up for closer “Black Box,” the latest dispatch from Badu’s chaotic superego, expressing her ambivalence towards phones and their chokehold on our wellbeing.
As Badu tells The Guardian, “It’s the first thing we reach for in the morning—it has become our pseudo-husband and wife—and one thing I do know is that the first thing we do in the morning that gives us dopamine is what we will reach for all day long.” Trust in Erykah by making Before the World Blows the next, if not the first, thing you reach for today. For starters, a shocking amount has changed since 2015, and frontperson Brittany Howard can’t help looking around her and clocking how “the world is so fucking crazy right now” and yet “the world is so incredibly beautiful,” too. Hence the double meaning behind I Must Be Dreaming, the Southern rock band’s comeback record.
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