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 and EPs from Taylor Swift, Arctic Monkeys, Dry Cleaning, Armani Caesar, Dawn Richard & Spencer Zahn, Frankie Cosmos, Hagop Tchaparian, and Loshh. 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.)
Taylor Swift: Midnights [Republic]
After a pair of woodsy albums with Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff, Taylor Swift’s latest LP tells “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout [her] life.” Antonoff returns to co-produce and co-write the Evermore follow-up, which also features contributions from Lana Del Rey, Zoë Kravitz, Swift’s boyfriend Joe Alwyn (under his pseudonym William Bowery), Sam Dew, and Sounwave. No singles preceded the album.
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Arctic Monkeys: The Car [Domino]
Four years after their sharp left-turn with Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, Arctic Monkeys have regrouped for another confounding and divisive LP. Led by the arthouse-cinematic ballad “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball,” the band’s seventh album pivots between orchestral pop, raucous funk (“I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am”), studio-rat sophistipop, and rousing rock singalongs (“Body Paint”), all with intoxicatingly witty and cryptic lyrics. “The Car is an album of love, longing, and doubt,” writes Pitchfork’s Matthew Strauss in his review. “The obfuscation serves to bolster its core belief that the simplest truths are the hardest ones to discover.”
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Dry Cleaning: Stumpwork [4AD]
Dry Cleaning are back with more deadpan chronicles of the everyday, cramming existential ennui and social commentary into songs where barely anything seems to happen at all. Their New Long Leg follow-up includes the single “No Decent Shoes for Rain,” which is full of idiosyncratic, scrapbooky Florence Shaw–isms like, “Oh/You drink wine and go on holiday now?/OK! Well/OK, well/OK well,” as Pitchfork’s Laura Snapes observes in a track review. John Parish, known for his work with PJ Harvey, produced the album.
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Armani Caesar: The Liz 2 [Griselda]
Dubbed “Griselda’s first lady,” Armani Caesar has appeared across the Buffalo label’s output since releasing her debut project, The Liz, in 2020. Its sequel features Benny the Butcher and Stove God Cooks on lead track “Hunnit Dolla Hiccup,” while Westside Gunn provides a verse on “Paula Deen.” Elsewhere on the tape, Caesar consorted with Kodak Black for a song called “Diana.”
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Dawn Richard & Spencer Zahn: Pigments [Merge]
R&B innovator Dawn Richard sidesteps into contemporary classical on her first album with the New York bassist Spencer Zahn. In this ECM– and Talk Talk–inspired collaborative album, the through-line from Richard’s catalog is her vanguard approach to composition and singing, borne out in these pieces’ grounding in “dance, self-expression, and community, through the lens of New Orleans’ contemporary arts scene,” according to press materials.
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Frankie Cosmos: Inner World Peace [Sub Pop]
Frankie Cosmos’ new album “is about wishing for inner peace, and conversely: spiraling,” frontperson Greta Kline said in press materials. The indie pop group’s latest was co-produced by Market’s Nate Mendelsohn, Katie Von Schleicher, and Frankie Cosmos themselves in their native New York. The album was led by “One Year Stand,” which Kline described as “an encapsulation of the record, in that it’s strange and vast while also being contained and interior.”
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Hagop Tchaparian: Bolts [Text]
In a former life, Hagop Tchaparian played in a post-grunge-era punk band, Symposium, but, these days, he is best known as a techno producer. His latest record, released on Kieran Hebden’s Text Records, is partly drawn from samples gathered over the last 15 years, including clips from Armenian wedding videos and recordings gathered from his visits to the Lebanese village where his father’s family sought refuge in 1939. Caribou guitarist Ryan Smith helped with production and mixing. Read the Best New Track review of “Right to Riot.”
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Loshh: Akọle EP [Don’t Sleep]
Nigerian-born, London-based musician Loshh is back with his Akọle EP. The new six-song record follows Loshh’s 2021 Ífaradá EP and incorporates elements of jazz fusion, funk, and Afrobeat. Ahead of the EP, Loshh shared “K,” his single with Obongjayar, as well as “Ọ.” In a press release, Loshh said his creative process entailed “blocking the noise of the world, of society, almost like another way of being tunnel vision towards your dreams, goals and aspirations. Knowing that where you’re headed is better than where you once [were].”
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