9 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Charli XCX, the Strokes, Tyla, 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 Charli XCX, the Strokes, Tyla, 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.)

How do you follow up a cultural phenomenon like BRAT? If you're Charli XCX, by unloading your notes app, voice memos, and thorniest garage-rock demos into an unruly, invigorating collection that serves as a stan purge and a creative state-of-the-union all at once. Music, Fashion, Film laces a series of crunchy, distinctly 2000s guitar lines with first-thought-best-thought lyrics about making art and grappling with artifice. It’s both a love letter to current collaborators like A.G. Cook, who finally gets an ode of his own here, and inspirations across mediums. One of the album’s most profound moments arrives via director David Cronenberg, who muses on change and permanence in his gravelly tenor. Music, Fashion, Film is a definite left-turn from the pop provocateur’s recent work, but its earnest blend of cheek and vulnerability is Charli through and through.

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On first pass, the Strokes’ shimmering lead single, “Going Shopping,” appears lost in Auto-Tune, as if frontman Julian Casablancas is shying away from the imperfections that made his own voice synonymous with New York City’s indie rock boom. Get lost in the song’s breezy guitar riff, though, and it’s apparent just how intentionally that vocal effect scuffs up the song’s vacation vibes—especially live. Perhaps that’s the best descriptor of Reality Awaits, the Strokes’ seventh studio album and first full-length in six years: uncanny pop squiggling against a backdrop of government intervention and cruelty. As Casablancas puts it on “Falling Out of Love”: “Some things are flawed by design/But I’m fine for the first time/Dancin’ in acid rain alone, it’s new/But I don’t wanna do it anymore.”

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Tyla’s sophomore album, A*Pop, feels like a significant reflection on her rise to stardom—namely, how Afrobeats is interpreted on a global scale, and how her allegiance to it has sometimes sidelined her in main pop-girl conversations, despite the genre’s massive (and often uncredited) influence on popular music writ large. No longer. In a world where we might never get another Rihanna album, A*Pop is poised to occupy a space in the genre there’s always more room for: fun, sexy, cool music.

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Since his 2023 debut, zayALLCAPS has proved to be one of the most interesting all-around artists in the underground, never settling neatly into one scene, style, or sound. His latest LP, My Uncle Told Me Some Real Ass Shit on the Phone Yesterday, is another W, bursting with ideas and layers without ever sounding overwrought or tortured. Whether he’s sampling Death Grips or “Throw That Ass In A Circle,” or delivering off-the-cuff reflections over Haruomi Hosono-type beats, he’s never at a loss for inspiration. This is one of the freshest sounds in hip-hop right now.

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Over the past few years, Sofie Birch has amassed a sparkling catalog of bucolic curios on outré labels. Bivabippabualukka slots neatly in this ambient folk family, but it is far and away the Copenhagen composer’s chirpiest addition yet. As Shaad D’Souza puts it in Pitchfork’s review, “It is lighthearted and sprawling—a record full of magical left-turns and strange detours that recalls Stereolab’s cosmopolitan dioramas if they were dropped in some ancient wood and left to be overtaken by the local flora and fauna.”

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The 20-minute runtime might raise some traditionalist eyebrows, but for Rico Nasty, it’s plenty of room to lay down her strongest project in years. Reunited with frequent producer Kenneth Blume (who you probably know best by his former moniker, Kenny Beats), Rico divebombs back into her bag of thrashing, breathless bars over punk-minded beats. She also taps Bauuer and god-tier collaborator Dylan Brady for features. But don't get it twisted: this is, at its core, a one-woman showcase. After all, few rappers right now could as convincingly pull off a bar like “Rockstar pussy and it got a mohawk.”

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If there’s one consistent thread in Willow’s career, it’s a near-insatiable urge to keep people guessing. At just 25, she’s already moved from Radio Disney pop to mournful R&B to pop-punk to gothic-jazz (and spun the block on a few of those sounds). Earlier this year, she returned with a surprise seventh album, the characteristically restless Petal Rock Black; now, just a few months later, she’s back with an eighth LP, The Thread and reuniting with producer Chris Greatti, who worked on 2022’s <CopingMechanism> and 2024’s empathogen.

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Japanese producer Foodman has long been a maestro of the everyday, using abstract percussion and vérité soundbites to explore the odd beauty of the only world we’ve got. His latest, HIKARIGASASHIKOMU, takes its title from a Japanese phrase that roughly translates to “light shines,” and is meant to convey hope. What that sounds like is a rejuvenated sense of play and a new confidence in using his own voice, with which he loops familiar children’s songs and playground ditties from his own youth. In his own words, it pairs “casual everyday humming with my own sonic palette,” which comes through in spades with new flecks of ghetto house, baile funk, and his bread-and-butter, footwork.

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Jilian Medford has always had something secretive and alluring about her singing voice, but she taps into a different strain for Ian Sweet’s latest album, Shiverstruck, that feels particularly noteworthy. Credit it to her time working as a children’s music teacher or the fact that she’s consistently used her songwriting pen over the past decade; either way, Sweet’s fifth LP settles into a new sweet spot strengthened by her vocals. From the breathy panting in the romantic lead single “Criminal Kissing” to her distant calls layered in “Jilian,” Medford finds even more space within the boundaries of pop music to continue expanding Ian Sweet’s sound.

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