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 Chat Pile, Melissa Auf der Maur, 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.) Chat Pile: Who Loves the Sun [The Flesner] Now six years into their career, Chat Pile have a better understanding of what their strengths are, and how they define their sloshing mix of noise rock and post-hardcore. On Who Loves the Sun, their third album, the Oklahoma City band assumes position with aplomb to tear apart “their grievances with the modern world”: AI, genocide, the powerful elite, isolating technology, and ever-mounting greed.
And they fight back, with sludge riffs and droning guitars like plates of metal peeling backwards. Even as our planet itself erodes, Chat Pile still strive to keep their humanity despite what surrounds them. Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade Melissa Auf der Maur: Bass Womb Room: My ’90s 4-Track Demos x Field Recordings [Envision] Some 16 years after her last studio album, Melissa Auf der Maur is back with a new collection that spans the decade-plus before and after she stepped back from the public eye.
On Bass Womb Room: My ’90s 4-Track Demos x Field Recordings, the former Hole bassist cobwebs together a trove of living-room demos with eight brand-new compositions, which double as the soundtrack to a new photo exhibition she’s presenting in Ontario. The demos, says Auf der Maur in press materials, were written amid “rising pressure from the major label-driven music industry […] to make glossy hit songs to dominate radio airwaves. These songs are the sound of my internal experimentation and a way of keeping the Montreal art girl alive inside.” The record follows the March release of Auf der Maur’s Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A ’90s Rock Memoir.
Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Beyoncé: B’Day 20th Anniversary Edition [Sony/BMG] I’m going to make a bold claim: B’Day is the best Beyoncé album. The deluxe edition is where we reach all-timer status: “Beautiful Liar,” “Check on It,” the six-minute extended edit of “Get Me Bodied.” Of this I’m certain—if I’m throwing on a Beyoncé album front-to-back at a party, 10 times out of nine it’s B’Day. Any excuse to revisit it (especially with some new goodies in tow) is an excuse to have a good-ass time.
Her hilarious, aloof bars on songs like “Where Yo Daddy?” and “Not Da 2” immediately stood out from the collective’s debut statement, It’s Us Vol. 1. In 2024, the rapper parted ways with the boys, which was sad news for the them, but not for us. Two years later, the Atlanta rapper is free from her previous label deal and has released her debut album, which is exactly as good as you’d expect it to be.
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