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 Lil Uzi Vert, Joanna Sternberg, Lucinda Williams, Sweeping Promises, Tainy, Veeze, Chester Watson, and Hayden Pedigo. 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.)

Lil Uzi Vert: Pink Tape [Generation Now/Atlantic]

Lil Uzi Vert announced Pink Tape, their official follow-up to 2020’s Eternal Atake, with a samurai-themed trailer that launched them on a quest to a haunted temple, with a soundtrack of cascading vocals woven into antic beats and hyperactive metal riffs. Guests on Pink Tape include Nicki Minaj, Travis Scott, Babymetal, Bring Me the Horizon, and Don Toliver. The 26-track album, preceded by “Just Wanna Rock,” is Lil Uzi Vert’s first since pleading no contest last year to charges of assaulting their ex-girlfriend and threatening her with a firearm.

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Joanna Sternberg: I’ve Got Me [Fat Possum]

For all its scrappy charm, Joanna Sternberg’s new album, I’ve Got Me, plays out with a timeless, classical ease. The New York singer-songwriter—who cut their teeth touring with Conor Oberst and will soon hit the road with Kurt Vile and Angel Olsen—played every instrument themself after writing the songs in the artists-only residence of Manhattan Plaza, where previous occupants include Charles Mingus and Alicia Keys. Matt Sweeney produced the album without burnishing its DIY feel—Sternberg themself illustrated the comic-style “Stockholm Syndrome” video—and captured the optimism beneath the songs’ piercing observations of self and others. “I love people, I love to make people laugh, I love to make them feel better,” Sternberg said in press materials. Read Sam Sodomsky’s Rising profile “The Real World of Joanna Sternberg.”

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Lucinda Williams: Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart [Highway 20/Thirty Tigers]

Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart is the first album from singer-songwriter heavyweight Lucinda Williams since 2020’s Good Souls Better Angels and her first since having a stroke in November of that year. After several months of recovery, she’s since released a memoir and has played shows with Bonnie Raitt, Jason Isbell, and Wilco. Williams announced her new LP in April with “New York Comeback,” featuring Bruce Springsteen and Patty Scialfa.

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Sweeping Promises: Good Living Is Coming for You [Feel It/Sub Pop]

Sweeping Promises moved their art-punk operation from Massachusets to Texas to a nude painting studio in Lawrence, Kansas, while conceiving their new album. Their follow-up to 2020’s Hunger for a Way Out trades in starkly produced but anthemic rallying cries; its title, Good Living Is Coming for You, is either a promise or an eerie, corporate-speak threat. Whatever the cause, their wailed pleas and insistent hooks are bound to win you over.

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Tainy: Data [Neon16]

One of the preeminent producers in reggaeton, Puerto Rico’s Tainy puts his talents front and center on Data, his first official solo album. A slew of his regular collaborators and other big names appear across the record’s 19 tracks, including Bad Bunny, Arca, Four Tet, Daddy Yankee, and several more. Data was preceded by singles including “Lo Siento BB:/” and “Sci-Fi.”

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Veeze: Ganger [Navy Wavy LLC]

On his viral 2020 single “Law N Order,” Detroit rapper Veeze “raps with the energy of someone caught in a phone conversation they want no part of,” as Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre put it in a Michigan rap column at the time. In the three years since—and four since debut mixtape Navy Wavy—Veeze has released a string of singles, but not so many that fans stopped clamoring for leaks, waiting in vain for the next project. Now, Ganger is finally here, with features from the likes of Lil Yachty and Babyface Ray. Read Pierre’s recent profile “There Are Unbothered Rappers, and Then There’s Veeze.”

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Chester Watson: Fish Don’t Climb Trees [POW]

Chester Watson conjures a shadowland of queasy, downbeat rap on Fish Don’t Climb Trees—his first full-length since 2020’s A Japanese Horror Film. Across the new album, which is named for an apocryphal Albert Einstein quote, the Missouri-born artist monologues in his alluring monotone over dub-inspired beats that he largely self-produced. Videos for “Mirrors,” “Eyes Closed,” and “Spirits.” led the record.

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Hayden Pedigo: The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored [Mexican Summer]

Texas-reared guitarist Hayden Pedigo unwinds another set of fluid, fingerpicked guitar compositions on The Happiest Time I Ever Ignored, his second LP for Mexican Summer. Following 2021’s Letting Go, Pedigo continues to synthesize multiple guitar traditions while drawing upon his desert surroundings for further inspiration. “Elsewhere” arrived as the album’s first preview in April, with Pedigo later sharing the title track and the pedal steel-ringed “Signal of Hope.”

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