11 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Steve Lacy, Syd, 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 Steve Lacy, Syd, 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.)

Steve Lacy has the ability to channel melancholy, longing, and the first flush of young love through his guitar. His first album since 2022’s Gemini Rights—and one of three records out today from the Internet alums—can sweep you up in nostalgia or transport you to forbidden memories of torrid love affairs. The lyrics of Oh Yeah? mine relationships with the vulnerability of a diarist, inviting in trusted co-conspirators in Erykah Badu, SZA, and Cecile Believe.

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The last time we heard from Syd, she was heartbroken. On Beard, her ego is still a bit bruised, and there are a smattering of red flags (“I know you got my messages because they ain’t turning green”), but at least the singer fully embraces her identity as a lover-in-progress. On “Do Better” she acknowledges that self-growth can only start with herself; on “Walls,” she floats over dewy chimes as she promises she’s trying her best to heal. While much of the album settles into the moody R&B Syd does so well, Beard also plays with Afropop, bossa nova, and ’80s synth-pop. Growth sounds good on her.

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Helado Negro and Reyna Tropical launched their joint project with a delightful video of the duo—Roberto Carlos Lange and She Shreds founder Fabi Reyna—embarking on a soft-focus jaunt around a grocery store. The cheery aesthetic, as ever with these musical shapeshifters, concealed a more complex picture: Helado Tropical unfurls across a nervous tropical sunset, humid with vibe-heavy production that invites melancholy into paradise. Said Reyna in a statement, “This particular album really was able to ground me in what movement means to me and just different characters that the range of movement, travel, environment—sun, wind, and water—has the potential to bring out.”

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When Charli said “We’re doing rock now” because the “dancefloor is dead” (for her, anyway), she might not have considered that some artists do both. On Nia Archives’ second album, Emotional Junglist, jungle’s pop princess folds surf, pop-rock, and grunge into high-octane breaks. Nia Archives has always been a candid songwriter, but the emo tilt to Junglist puts the album in direct conversation with the ’20s rock revival. She addresses heartbreak, romantic desperation, and her own flaws with a lightness that would still entice a DJ to drop it at the club.

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Across their past two albums, Yard Act injected funk bass back into post-punk to make listeners dance. You’re Gonna Need a Little Music, on the other hand, sounds as dark as its subject matter: individualism, multiple realities, and deep questions about the ever-spiraling state of humanity. It’s dark and loud, starting with the ominous beat propelling “Redeemer” over rattling pots and pans, and is amplified by the band recording live in the same room for the first time.

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On Heavenly Body: If I’m the Bottle You’re the Message, Eartheater adds to a canon of postpartum pop albums, including Björk’s Medulla, Madonna’s Ray of Light, and Oklou’s Choke Enough. She sings with immediacy about the unpredictable changes involved with pregnancy: releasing bloody pee in a cup at the doctor, dealing with pregnancy pain, watching her baby girl sleep. The album spans hardstyle, new age pop, and operatic folk at a sometimes startling pace, capturing the chaos and ecstasy of one of the most transformative experiences the human body can endure.

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The genre interceptions on deBasement’s Hardbody feel limitless. The lyrics take cues from electroclash’s nocturnal storytelling, while the production mixes screeching brostep, hyperpop, hard techno, and UKG. In other words, there’s not a lick of subtlety on this album. As the Los Angeles-based duo’s frontperson Alli Logout raps about fat lines of ketamine and diamonds on the dancefloor, car alarms blare and redlining basslines stampede through the mix. Every drop hits like a quake, and each muscular beat compels you to shake your ass. You’ll be recovering from this comedown for days.

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Just a few months after dropping a collab tape with Curren$y and the Alchemist, Larry June is ready to add another solo LP to his trophy case. But Who Coppin, his first solo release since 2024’s Doing It For Me, is still a collaborative effort. Across 16 tracks, June taps producers including Swizz Beatz, DJ Fresh, Cardo, and Jay Versace to set the bedrock for his jazzy, grown-man flows, building out a landscape around singles “The Machinist” and “Organic Motion.” Jhené Aiko, Musiq Soulchild, B-Legit, and Wallo also feature.

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While Lido Pimienta was preparing her new album, only one voice was more prominent than her own: Enya’s. Pimienta listened to the new age icon constantly, searching for the heightened focus that she embodies. (“She’s not associated with evil in any way, shape, or form,” Pimienta elaborated in a statement. “She’s just a nice Irish Catholic lady, living in her castle with her cats and her dogs and her piano.”) But although Enya’s name makes up half of Caribenya’s portmanteau title, this is far from a tribute record: it’s a synthesis of the many elements—from dembow to cumbia to classical composition—that the Toronto-based singer and multi-instrumentalist has incorporated into her practice over the years. Recorded in collaboration with Mexican cumbia collective Turbo Sonidero and Grupo Jejeje’s Arrabalero, this is an LP that, much like Enya herself, is as ambitious as it is grounded.

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Tricky may not have released an album in six years, but he has kept busy; Theis Thaws and Lonely Guest are just two aliases the trip-hop innovator has used to record new music. But, as press-release legend has it, when Tricky’s manager, Alan McGee, heard the bones of the tracks that would become Different When It’s Silent, he saw a rose by any other name. “In my mind it was another side project,” Tricky said. McGee countered: “Mate, this is a Tricky album.” His 15th studio effort reconfigures blues, hip-hop, punk, and electro into a stark, collagist sound that emphasizes those genre’s similarities while highlighting their contrasts. This is the Tricky sound, canonized.

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You’re never too old to start fresh—just ask Patti Smith Group’s Lenny Kaye who, at 79, is releasing his debut solo album. Goin’ Local arrives a few years after the release of Kaye’s memoir, Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll, and includes contributions from jazz pianist Matthew Shipp, Railroad Earth’s Tim Carbone, the Jayhawks’ John Jackson, and David Mansfield. “I’ve always loved the local, its intimacy and camaraderie,” Kaye said in a press release. “I feel that the truest ‘Goin’ Local’ is the privilege to go inside my own head and hear how I sound to me.” Still, old friends are gold friends, and Smith does have a co-write here, on the song “Solstice.”

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