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 and EPs from Slowdive, Speedy Ortiz, Jeff Rosenstock, Smoke DZA & Flying Lotus, Brian Eno, Midwxst, Sprain, and Theee Retail Simps. 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.)
Slowdive: Everything Is Alive [Dead Oceans]
Six years ago, Slowdive reformed for a monumental, self-titled comeback album. Now, the shoegaze legends are back with a fifth album led by singer-guitarists Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead. Halstead had conceived a more minimal record built around modular synths, but, as Everything Is Alive took shape, their trademark abraded guitars and reverb tunnels burrowed back into the picture, along with pop moments like “Kisses.” Halstead said in press materials, “It wouldn’t feel right to make a really dark record right now. The album is quite eclectic emotionally, but it does feel hopeful.”
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Speedy Ortiz: Rabbit Rabbit [Wax Nine]
Speedy Ortiz return with another bundle of wily hooks and witty, pithy lyrics on fourth album Rabbit Rabbit, the follow-up to 2018’s Twerp Verse. Single “You S02” skewers union-busters and sunken ex-punks, reflecting the band’s sidelines working in and alongside activist movements, while “Ranch vs. Ranch” unspools a movie hero’s origin story. “As I was channeling scenes and sentiments from decades past, I wanted to honor the bands I loved when I first learned guitar, ones that taught me to get lost in the possibilities of this instrument,” Sadie Dupuis said in press materials, referring to touchstones including post-hardcore, the Palm Desert scene, and alternative metal.
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Jeff Rosenstock: Hellmode [Polyvinyl]
Jeff Rosenstock has prevailed as a preeminent punk torchbearer of his era, and is now bigger than ever. Equally, “It’s weird feeling success at the worst possible time, while the world falls apart,” he said in press materials. “These things I’ve been unintentionally working towards for the last two decades have come to fruition now, when everything is on fire.” So he made Hellmode, billed as his biggest and most apocalyptic, but also poppiest, album yet. “It’s funny,” he said, “I feel like in 2023, you can write an unabashedly poppy punk song and it’s probably not gonna be on the radio anyway, so it doesn’t feel like a sellout move. We felt free to make something that just kicks as much ass as possible.”
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Smoke DZA & Flying Lotus: Flying Objects EP [The Smoker’s Club]
Smoke DZA said he manifested this collaborative project with his longtime inspiration Flying Lotus before he knew it was possible. The pair’s collaborative history dates back to 2014 track “Just My Thoughts” and the 2016 Bernie Sanders endorsement “Outside My Mind | 4 -19 – 2026 | Petty Murphy.” Flying Objects, their first extended project together, was led by “Drug Trade,” in which the New York rapper spars with the Roots’ Black Thought. It also includes the Estelle-featuring “Harlem World 97.”
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Brian Eno: Top Boy (Score From the Original Series) [Netflix Music]
As the British crime drama prepares to return to Netflix for its final season, Brian Eno is releasing his Top Boy score—the first time his songs for all five seasons have been released (with the exception of two tracks that appear on Eno’s Film Music 1976 – 2020). Eno, who composed the theme tune and original music for each season, praised the filmmakers for their blessing to work as he wished. “If you’d been scoring it in the conventional Hollywood way, the temptation would be to up the excitement factor, up the danger factor, all the time,” he said in press materials. “But Top Boy is really about children in a pretty bad situation. So I explored the internal world of the children.”
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Midwxst: E3 [Geffen]
After cutting his teeth in the hyperpop scene and making forays into rage rap, emo, and pure pop on past EPs, Indiana upstart Midwxst is releasing his debut studio album, E3. He executive produced his album with “Slide Den” collaborator Sophie Gray. The title comes from Midwxst’s childhood nickname. (The 20-year-old was born Edgar Nathaniel Sarratt III.) “I think that E3 is a character that everybody is going to relate to because he fucks up, and every good human who has flaws and makes mistakes and goes through things that they don’t tell their friends or other people will be able to relate to the music,” he recently told Wonderland.
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Sprain: The Lamb as Effigy [The Flenser]
Sprain’s second album for beloved San Francisco label The Flenser is titled, in full, The Lamb as Effigy or Three Hundred and Fifty XOXOXOS for a Spark Union With My Darling Divine. The Los Angeles group has spent the last few years evolving from minimalist slowcore toward this two-hour record’s sprawling, noisy rock compositions, texturized by howls, croons, and occasionally absurdist spoken word.
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Theee Retail Simps: Live on Cool Street [Total Punk]
Last year, Montreal’s lo-fi garage rock party band Retail Simps made a splash with their debut album on Total Punk Records, Reverberant Scratch: 9 Shots in the Dark. For that album, the band’s name was stylized Tha Retail Simps and was largely made by a three-person lineup in a basement studio. As Live on Cool Street’s album art implies, their latest—now credited to Theee Retail Simps—is the work of what’s grown to be a larger live band lineup. The band’s Joe Chamandy said they attempted to “widen the scope” of their sound this time around.
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