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 Tortoise; Daniel Caesar; Lily Allen; Rafael Toral; Carrier; Bruiser Wolf & Harry Fraud; Eliza McLamb; Jennifer Walton; Natural Information Society; Joe Westerlund; and Machine Girl. 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.)
Tortoise: Touch [International Anthem/Nonesuch]
In the nine years since The Catastrophist, Tortoise have continued to exert a quiet influence over alternative music, particularly the ever-expanding intersection between rock, ambient, and jazz. After a string of solo records and collaborations, the Chicago-born quintet of Jeff Parker, John Herndon, Douglas McCombs, Dan Bitney, and John McEntire returns with Touch, an album as curious, arresting, and oddly harmonious as any in their diverse catalog. The single “Layered Presence” serves as a gateway to the album’s kosmische universe-building.
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Daniel Caesar: Son of Spergy [Republic]
Daniel Caesar has already had a busy 2025, whether contributing production to Justin Bieber’s Swag or guesting on the latest Blood Orange album. The Canadian singer-songwriter’s new LP ups the ante with a who’s-who of indie, pop, and R&B on the guest list: Bon Iver, Devonté Hynes, Clairo, Mustafa, Sampha, Yebba, and Rex Orange County. Son of Spergy was preceded by “Have a Baby (With Me),” “Moon” (with Bon Iver), and “Call on Me.”
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Lily Allen: West End Girl [BMG]
For the past four years, Lily Allen has carved out a lane as a podcast host and a stage actor, appearing in productions in West End London and netting an Olivier Award nomination. Now, the British pop star has plotted her return to music with the aptly titled West End Girl, her first studio album in seven years. The follow-up to 2018’s No Shame was recorded in December 2024, and is “vulnerable in a way that my music perhaps hasn’t been before,” Allen said in press materials. She continued, “I’ve tried to document my life in a new city and the events that led me to where I am in my life now.” Allen co-wrote the album alongside her musical director, Blue May, and they executive-produced with Seb Chew and Kito.
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Rafael Toral: Traveling Light [Drag City]
Traveling Light is a culmination in the practice of Rafael Toral, a Portuguese electric-guitar composer whose early work with drone and texture led into experiments with self-made electronics and now a fusion of the two approaches: walls of thick tones that move like a slow avalanche along the borders between free jazz, ambient, and ecstatic orchestral music. The Spectral Evolution follow-up’s six, bewitching songs variously feature clarinetist José Bruno Parrinha, tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, flügelhorn player Yaw Tembe, and flautist Clara Saleiro.
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Carrier: Rhythm Immortal [Modern Love]
Rhythm Immortal, the debut album from Carrier, fuses ancient, tactile sounds with synthetic and avant-garde production. A long way from his onetime home in the drum’n’bass duo Commix, the British electronic mainstay born Guy Brewer delves into Arctic bass atmospheres and elaborates on the dubbed-out minimalism he has explored through post-Commix projects like Shifted. “The intention is to create something that feels primal, and physical,” he said in press materials. “I’m interested in what happens when different materials strike each other. The way an object sounds depends a lot on how you excite it.”
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Bruiser Wolf & Harry Fraud: Made by Dope [Srfschl/Bruiser House/Fake Shore Drive]
Made by Dope is the first single-producer project from Bruiser Wolf. Joining the Detroit rapper on the 11-track project is underground veteran Harry Fraud, who produced two tracks on Bruiser Wolf’s May album, Potluck. The new project, Matthew Ritchie writes in his review, “drills deeper into Bruiser Wolf’s conversational writing style with production that’s comfortably attuned to his quirks, even if it doesn't necessarily break new ground.”
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Eliza McLamb: Good Story [Royal Mountain]
Eliza McLamb made her debut album, 2024’s Going Through It, in a period of flux after dropping out of college to work on a farm and eventually ditching North Carolina for Los Angeles. For its follow-up, the indie-rock singer-songwriter found herself relocating again, to New York, with an appetite for reinvention and “on a personal mission to stop being so solipsistic,” as she put it in press materials. The result of that process is Good Story, an album of anthems and ballads that stretches and contracts to fit both wry observation and heavy catharsis, themed around coming-of-age dilemmas and the narrativization of one’s own life. Assists come from Illluminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin, Death Cab for Cutie drummer Jason McGerr, Lucy Dacus guitarist Jacob Blizard, and others.
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Jennifer Walton: Daughters [Local Action]
Daughters is the debut album from Jennifer Walton, the sometime Kero Kero Bonito drummer and close collaborator of maverick producer Aya, who worked on the new record, too. Blending the latter artist’s confrontational maximalism with dizzying polyphony and daydreamy folk, Walton composes music rooted in the chaos of modern life: a bombardment of everyday noise that competes with an internal world of overwhelming emotions, represented by diaristic lyrics and skin-prickling ambience. Members of Caroline and Shovel Dance also contribute.
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Natural Information Society: Perseverance Flow [Eremite]
Joshua Abrams leads the Natural Information Society quartet into battle, or at least toward it, on the joyfully meandering instrumental album Perseverance Flow. Proceeding in a march of trancelike, intoxicating repetition, Abrams and his bandmates embark on a 35-minute pilgrimage to the place where jazz, contemporary classical, and multinational folk convene, achieving singularity in a state of ritual rhythm.
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Joe Westerlund: Curiosities From the Shift [Psychic Hotline]
You may know Joe Westerlund as a onetime member of Justin Vernon’s DeYarmond Edison and the band’s non–Bon Iver folk offshoot Megafaun. But, since his Milford Graves–inspired 2020 solo debut, Reveries in the Rift, the North Carolina musician has specialized a strand of meditative, percussion-driven instrumental music designed to zone in on or zone out to. His new album, Curiosities From the Shift, pursues his muse to a sort of new-age limbo, full of loping melodies, everyday sound, and timbral signifiers that invoke, to quote another noted jazz spiritualist, a universal consciousness. Califone’s Tim Rutili and saxophonist Sam Gendel are among the guests.
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Machine Girl: PsychoWarrior: MG Ultra X [Future Classic]
Machine Girl are back, now as a trio, hurtling through a cyberpunk assault course on their second album in two years. The electronic hardcore maximalists deliver a hyperactive treatise on the collective unconscious on PsychoWarrior: MG Ultra X, inspired by Jungian archetypes, post-internet technophobia, and our “very psychologically damaged culture,” as frontperson Matt Stephenson put it in press materials. Drumcorp-assisted single “Dread Architect” and its hectic video lay out the mission statement, seemingly designed to obliterate brain rot with sheer pulverizing force.
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