11 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Ravyn Lenae, Karol G, and More

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 Ravyn Lenae, Karol G, Flo, and more. 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.)

More than any project in her catalog, Blue Island expands the idea of what a Ravyn Lenae album can sound like. She abandons dusty disco grooves and homes in on an easy, breezy, early ’00s sound nestled within retro synth-pop à la Dev Hynes. Guitar strums peek through the mix like fresh blades of grass and drums gently sweep the songs forward, while Lenae sounds sweeter than ever, her airy vocals sometimes channeling a young Janet Jackson, others paying homage to Mariah Carey’s acrobatic runs. In other words, it’s a true summer album, with enough ease and warmth to play on long car rides to the beach, and enough sentimentality to sit with on days sleeping in.

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Urbano superstar Karol G formally unveiled her new album, No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto, just this week, as she became the first solo woman to headline Toronto’s Rogers Stadium. The record, whose title translates as I Don’t Regret Feeling So Much, includes features from Drake, Rusowsky, and Bruno Mars, who appears on her first-ever English song, “Still.” Sentir Tanto steps away from the palette of last year’s Tropicoqueta, a joyfully retro tribute to Colombia’s musical lineage, and revisits the clubbier territory of 2023’s Mañana Será Bonita. Don’t worry, though—you’ll still find dembows galore.

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The title of Flo’s sophomore album is pretty self-explanatory, but allow them to explain it anyway: “For us, the club is more than just a night out, it’s like therapy. I mean, where else do you feel more understood than in a girls bathroom on a night out…that’s the vibe!” Stella, Jorja, and Renée may be onto something. The dancefloor is fun and all, but the ladies room is where the real drama goes down. The British trio blew up on an alloy of turn-of-the-milennium girl groups and Darkchild-lite R&B, buffed to a sheen, but this time around, they’re keying the bumper. Therapy at the Club promises a peek under the stall door, a glimpse into the hidden photos folder. Let’s just hope fans don’t take lead single “Leak It” too literally.

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Given that Man/Woman/Chainsaw formed when its members were all of 16 years old, it’s unsurprising that, at first, they just wanted to rock. “We were talking about having a whole record of bangers—having everything be really in your face like a Rage Against the Machine record,” drummer Lola Cherry recalled. “We soon realised we weren’t Rage Against the Machine.” The self-reflective lightbulb moment laid the groundwork for what would become their debut album, Cannonball, a new-wave and post-punk-inflected collection that finds the soft underbelly of some seriously mangy riffs. Working closely with Black Midi collaborator Seth Evans, the band carves a lane for itself amongst a new class of British rock bands unafraid to get a little theatrical.

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Hana Stretton’s ambient folk music captures the quiet of her surroundings. On her 2023 album Soon, this meant the rustlings of a remote farm in rural Australia, where she hung out with cows and witnessed a pastoral landscape vulnerable to brush fires and floods. Her follow-up, Tiarn, takes her to the Japanese seaside, inspired by the home footage her family took when they lived in the country in the ’90s. This archival work is both a documentation of place and a reimagining of it, filled with the woody clunk of piano keys, plaintive guitar, and gentle inhales. There’s a tranquil innocence to the sound collage, an uncanny ability to transport you to a still place, wherever you are.

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Qué les pasó a mis amigos?, the title of the new EP from Ela Minus and Nick León, translates to “What happened to my friends?” The record explores the changes that naturally occur in adult life—new jobs, new relationships, new cities that create more distance between us and our loved ones. After two years of collaborations—Nick on remix duty for Ela’s bright synth-pop album DÍA, Ela across the atmospheric rhythms of Tropical Entropy’s “Ghost Orchid”—their first joint project courses with longing and melancholia.

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Brothers—or as they’re often represented in album art and videos, a pair of stately Dobermans—Tom and Ed Russell have a knack for making smooth, big-room dance music with just enough tweaks to pique your interest: a stray break here, an asynchronous vocal there. On their new effort as Overmono, Pure Devotion, they level up by honing in on their physical process: running tape over magnets or through circa-1930s train announcement speakers. At one point, they even “oven-baked” a cymbal covered in “coffee grounds, crisps, and vinegar,” per press materials—anything to create a new way into the classic synth and bass sounds they’ve always built on. As they put it, “Making music has always been about having fun… forever learning, always trying to get better.”

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Margaret Glaspy refines her increasingly forthright and pared-back songwriting modes on I Am Both, a volley of stirring anthems that wed the circular wisdom of folk to the agitated flair of indie-rock. The Brooklyn singer-songwriter’s follow-up to 2023’s Echo the Diamond was borne out of a desire to “walk the walk in terms of how I envision myself as a songwriter,” she said in press materials. “At first it was really hard to break that addiction to social media, but after a while something shifted. It felt like I’d gotten back to original thought instead of being under the influence of so many outside opinions. It was life-changing.”

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DMV rapper and 2026 XXL Freshman Nino Paid has a complicated relationship with his hometown—he couldn’t be prouder to rep such a longstanding regional hip-hop tradition, but it’s also a place where he experienced serious hardship. His brutally honest bars about suicidal ideation and generational trauma are on full display in Somewhere Over the Rainbow, the follow-up to his 2025 debut Love Me As I Am. Featuring Lazer Dim 700, Benji Blue Bills, VonOff1700, and Shy Glizzy, Rainbow takes a similarly layered approach to his stardom. Nino surveys the peaks of his newfound success alongside the bad valleys, from on-tour depression to struggles with drugs. Never filtered and always off-the-cuff, Somewhere Over the Rainbow is a compelling portrait of one of the East Coast’s most promising new upstarts.

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For a long time, Roy Montgomery seemed unlikely to earn his dues, as if his music of steely strums and gauzy sound design had been stuffed in the vault of some medieval castle. But the New Zealand guitar composer has recently experienced an uptick in interest, exemplified by his ongoing work with the British singer-songwriter Martha Skye Murphy. After collaborating at London’s Cafe Oto, the duo has sporadically composed together in a partnership made manifest in this debut collaborative LP: a symphony of ambient spangle, luminous drones, and murmured conversation that seems to take place on either side of an otherworldly veil.

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Of course the Mountain Goats are going to have an unforgettable title or two when it comes to an album tracklist, but few have been as comical as Days’ lead single: “Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds.” (Second place for best track names on Days goes to “Hidden Majesty of Later Venom Albums.”) What began as a sequel to their 2017 album Goths, tentatively titled Grunges, soon turned into a reflection of how “the accumulation of days” in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s blurred together while also becoming clearer, says John Darnielle. Joining the verbose frontman in the lineup are guitarist Matt Douglas and drummer Jon Wurster, as expected, but not Peter Hughes, who left the band in 2024 after 30 years. Playing bass in his place is Rob Jost, while harpist Mikaela Davis hops on a few tracks for levity, too.