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 projects from Beyoncé, Roc Marciano, Saya Gray, Kelly Moran, Reyna Tropical, NTS, Arushi Jain, Omar Souleyman, and Vial. 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.)
Beyoncé: Cowboy Carter [Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia]
Beyoncé is back with act two of her promised Renaissance trilogy. Cowboy Carter melds country, folk, blues, and gospel to cast a contemporary eye on pop and R&B’s roots. Outlaw country original Willie Nelson features, and covers of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and the Beatles’ “Blackbird” support the album’s inquiry into her, and our culture’s, musical ancestry; additional guest spots from Miley Cyrus, Post Malone, and “Buckle Bunny” singer Tanner Adell, meanwhile, help bring the album into the present day.
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Roc Marciano: Marciology [Pimpire/Marci Enterprises]
Roc Marciano returns with another collection of hard-nosed hip-hop. The new album, Marciology, has production from the Alchemist and Animoss, as well as guest spots from underground favorites Knowledge the Pirate, Crimeapple, Flee Lord, Larry June, Jay Worthy, and more. The new album is Marciano’s first solo full-length since November 2020’s Mt. Marci.
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Saya Gray: Qwerty II EP [Dirty Hit]
Qwerty II concludes Saya Gray’s dual-EP follow-up to her 2022 album, 19 Masters, swirling that record’s puckish R&B into hyperactive alt-pop. Usually a bit of an agoraphobe, the singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist wrote last year’s Qwerty and its sequel during a year of chaotic social integration, to give her a window into what she described in Pitchfork’s recent Rising feature as a “basic bitch” lifestyle. The result is a riveting suite of pop operettas mixing R&B melodies with alt-rock riffs, voice-note recordings, phone-notification pings, and anxious ad libs, all stitched together in Gray’s sprawling self-productions.
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Kelly Moran: Moves in the Field [Warp]
On her latest album of sweeping piano compositions, Kelly Moran taps into a strand of modern classical that mesmerizes and haunts, with occasional, breathtaking lurches to disturb the air of sanctuary. The sometime collaborator of Oneohtrix Point Never and FKA twigs switches from prepared to acoustic piano on Moves in the Field, using a modern player piano, the Yamaha Disklavier, to write melodies too intricate for human hands. Dan Bora, Philip Glass’ sound engineer, mixed the LP, and it was mastered by Telefon Tel Aviv’s Joshua Eustis.
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Reyna Tropical: Malegría [Psychic Hotline]
Reyna Tropical’s debut album takes its title—Malegría, a portmanteau of the Spanish words for “bad” and “happiness”—from a Manu Chao song. Like the genre-traversing French Spanish singer, Reyna draws from transcontinental sounds to wed Congolese, Peruvian, and Colombian beats to an internationalist melodic sensibility, its breezy tones carrying lyrics of queer love, feminine sensuality, and politics.
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V/A: Funk.BR – São Paulo (NTS) [NTS]
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Funk.BR – São Paulo, a new compilation from the label wing of London radio station NTS, brings together Brazilian funk stars and newcomers like DJ Dayeh and DJ Bonekinha Iraquiana. The 22 tracks, all previously unreleased, chart the rise of the mandelão sound, which has bounced between the demonic and hypnotic since its inception in São Paulo favelas.
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Arushi Jain: Delight [Leaving]
Delight is the follow-up to Arushi Jain’s 2021 release Under the Lilac Sky. Jain wrote and recorded the nucleus of the new album in a seaside home on Long Island, where she worked in isolation tracking vocal passages. She then collaborated with instrumentalists, sampling cello, marimba, classical guitar, flute, and saxophone on her synthesizer. The result is a starry, spacious plane of acoustic instruments warped and polished with digital processing.
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Omar Souleyman: Erbil [Mad Decent]
Syrian singer Omar Souleyman named his new album after his adopted hometown, Erbil, Iraq. He worked on Erbil with keyboardist Hasan Jamo Alo, and he previewed his Shlon follow-up with the single “Rahat al Chant Ymme.”
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Vial: Burnout [Get Better]
Bassist Taylor Kraemer, guitarist KT Branscom, and drummer Katie Fischer are Vial, and Burnout is the Minneapolis-based pop-punk group’s second album, following 2021’s Loudmouth. With track titles like “Therapy III,” “Just Fine,” and “Broth Song,” Vial’s album deals with the mundane travails of daily life. A touch more polished than their debut, the new album is still bursting at the seams with angst, anxiety, and humor. The best example? The snotty “Ur Dad,” sung from the perspective of your worst friend—the one who’s always trying to seduce your father.
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