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 Vince Staples, Diiv, Shenseea, Young Jesus, James Devane, Nathy Peluso, and Mui Zyu. 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.)
Vince Staples: Dark Times [Blacksmith/Def Jam]
Vince Staples returns to the somber, blue palette of his 2021 self-titled effort on Dark Times, his final album for the label that helped launch his career, Def Jam Recordings. Songs like “Black&Blue,” “Children’s Song,” and “Shame on the Devil” pair Staples’ reflective lyrics with moody guitar and mellow production. Tracks including “Étouffée” and “Little Homies,” meanwhile, ratchet up the pace.
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Diiv: Frog in Boiling Water [Fantasy]
Diiv’s Frog in Boiling Water comes half a decade after its predecessor, 2019’s Deceiver, and took most of that interval to compose. Made as the band (now in its second incarnation) fretted over its direction and identity, the album drills into melancholy and vulnerability with irradiated guitars that throw off dream-pop sparks. In the fashion of shoegaze’s more maximal strains, an undercarriage of funk and breakbeats helps transmute the angst of Zachary Cole Smith’s lullaby vocals into the ultimate catharsis.
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Shenseea: Never Gets Late Here [Rich Immigrants/Interscope]
Shenseea released her debut album, Alpha, in March 2022, and the Jamaican singer has since worked with Calvin Harris, the Chainsmokers, Lola Brooke, Sean Paul, and more. She’s back with Never Gets Late Here, a 14-song collection that brings together dancehall, pop, hip-hop, and R&B. London on da Track executive produces.
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Young Jesus: The Fool [Saddle Creek]
The Fool, John Rossiter’s new album under the Young Jesus banner, took root when Shahzad Ismaily, the vaunted multi-instrumentalist, got in touch proposing a collaboration. They started improvising together in New York, in between Rossiter’s time at home in Los Angeles, where he passed days gardening and singing with friends Alex Babbitt and Alex Lappin. Eventually, the two groups came into the same orbit, collaborating on Rossiter’s baroque synthpop symphonies between New York and Los Angeles. The result sounds like a brazen emotional outpouring after 2022’s more indoors Shepherd Head; the zippy “Brenda & Diane” led the LP.
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James Devane: Searching [Umeboshi]
James Devane continues to explore left-field compositional processes through minimal techno on his new album, Searching, for the Swedish label Umeboshi. “The recordings,” Devane said in press materials, “are the result of chance. Using hours of source material, everything was ‘chosen,’ manipulated, and assembled at random via custom software without concern for key, tempo, measures, or rhythm. A search button and a save button.”
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Nathy Peluso: Grasa [5020/Sony Music Spain]
Nathy Peluso won the 2021 Latin Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album for her studio debut, Calambre. (The Argentine Spanish singer was also nominated at the 2022 Grammys for Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album.) She worked on the follow-up, Grasa, with executive producer Manuel Lara, as well as Blood Orange’s Devonté Hynes, C. Tangana, Argentine rapper Duki, and others. She previewed the LP with “Aprender a Amar.”
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Mui Zyu: Nothing or Something to Die For [Father/Daughter]
Nothing or Something to Die For is Hong Kong British artist Mui Zyu’s second album. The follow-up to last year’s Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century expands her eccentric take on electro-pop by way of sparkling synth-pop melodies, Stereolab-lite rock minimalism, pillowy vocals, and a thematic through line that delves into human connection amid a fractured digital age.
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