With so much new music released each and every day, it can be daunting to try to sift through the stream for hidden gems. That’s why, every few months, Pitchfork’s writers and editors round up a list of generally overlooked recent releases deserving of your attention. None of these were named Best New Music and, in some cases, they weren’t even reviewed on Pitchfork at all. But they’re all worth a listen. From the heavy doom of Divide and Dissolve to the spare, textured jazz of cktrl, to VanJess’ funky R&B, and much more, there’s something for everyone here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
Celeste: Not Your Muse
Any internet commenter within earshot of British vocalist Celeste has noted hints of Amy Winehouse in her voice, especially when it cracks over the slow-dance strings of “Beloved” or her horn-filled single “Love Is Back.” On her debut album Not Your Muse, she defines herself in terms of who she isn’t: neither someone’s object (“Decorate me, adore me, baby/But I can’t be owned,” she sings on the title track) nor an abstract fantasy. As she describes the familiar, disturbing motions of intimacy, faint strings and macabre melodies produce a quiet melancholy. It’s a fairly warm, though uneven introduction to an artist whose voice is already ubiquitous in Brit circles and growing. –Clover Hope
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
cktrl: Robyn EP
Bradley Miller, aka cktrl, is a stalwart of the London jazz scene, and his latest EP, Robyn, carries forth his focus on spare, yet textured work that takes its influence from R&B and grime. While 2018’s Songs4girls and 2019’s Colour reflected his commitment to broken beats, Robyn is fixated on elongated passages of clarinet and saxophone. For most of the EP, Miller is accompanied by Duval Timothy on keys. The two gently whirl around each other; Timothy’s looping piano melodies provide a centering presence, while Miller turns out phrases of exacting resonance. His saxophone technique brings to mind the airy experimentations of Jan Garbarek, yet the focus and direction of Miller’s playing seem to emanate from his unique obsessions with spaced-out grooves. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
D-Town Brass: Demiurge
The fanfare of D-Town Brass’s Demiurge belies the ensemble’s rollout of the album, which the horn-heavy North Carolina jazz band quietly slipped on Bandcamp in December. From the opening squeals of “Horse Fucker,” the ensemble’s squad of saxophones lead the charge, joined by trombones, clarinets, and multiple percussionists. Heat swells out of “Human Resources,” and the band remembers that the revolution can be groovy on “Cobbler’s Dream.” The record’s vocal sections outline a dystopic, hypercapitalist future, and monologues aren’t so much spoken as shouted. With one time Sun Ra Arkestra associate Ken Moshesh in the rhythm section, D-Town Brass charge forward into their terrifying tech-addled future; Demiurge is loud and ferocious, well-suited to scorching away seasonal apathy. –Allison Hussey
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
Divide and Dissolve: Gas Lit
Melbourne doom duo Divide and Dissolve fight for Black and Indigenous liberation using torrential noise “to undermine and destroy the white supremacist colonial framework.” Across the incendiary instrumental tracks of their third album, Gas Lit, guitarist Takiaya Reed and drummer Sylvie Nehill use sirening saxophones and blown-out drone metal to set systemic injustices ablaze. A spoken-word poem by Minori Sanchiz-Fung describes the violence of capitalism, and the colossal force of the music joins with the poet’s words to push back against it. “Don’t forget, this too, this too, is our time/Our spirit is not weaker/It is waiting on us to decide,” Sanchiz-Fung intones, “What it is, that we will honor while we are alive.” –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Editrix: Tell Me I’m Bad
On the title track from Editrix’s Tell Me I’m Bad, Wendy Eisenberg’s impish questions veer from “what’s that song you like?” to “who’s the one you like?” in the space of a few cacophonous drum fills. The Massachusetts guitar guru has a knack for hairpin turns, pivoting effortlessly from the solo intensity of last year’s Auto to the chaotic energy of this trio’s debut album. Tell Me I’m Bad is as silly and as serious as a dive bar jukebox containing cod reggae basslines, dry social commentary, and plenty of cowbell. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Elori Saxl: The Blue of Distance
The Brooklyn composer Elori Saxl wrote the expansive and soft-edged compositions on The Blue of Distance while thinking about the changing of seasons. Yet what matters more than their conception is their dreamlike drift, and how Saxl sets them like floating lanterns across rich bands of analog synthesizers. The seven pieces mingle chamber orchestration with those synths so naturally that the sounds produced seem to be melting into, or arising out of, one another. More serene than Steve Reich, more textured than Philip Glass, the minimalism that arises has a distinct fingerprint: Ingram Marshall, maybe, or a less-busy Elodie Lauten. It feels like a hovering human consciousness, passing briefly overhead. –Jayson Greene
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
Florian T M Zeisig: You Look So Serious
For You Look So Serious, the Berlin sound artist Florian T M Zeisig took a cassette of Enya’s 1988 album Watermark and spliced it into 426 four-second tape loops. Led by the instantly recognizable “Orinoco Flow,” Watermark propelled the Irish singer to worldwide fame, but she was treated as a joke—a woozy, indulgent woman traipsing around castles and dilly-dallying with spirituality. In line with a larger Enya reappraisal among contemporary artists, You Look So Serious is intended to “introduce a discourse on institutional elitism.” Zeisig makes it sound as if Enya is repeatedly being submerged under water, pushed under just as she’s about to surface. Watermark becomes something ghostlier and tenser than the original, a droning memory that never confronts the light. –Cat Zhang
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
glaive: cypress grove EP
At the beginning of the pandemic, 15-year-old Ash Gutierrez was an ordinary kid living in suburban North Carolina and hanging out on Discord. Within a few months, he’d become the face of Spotify’s hottest playlist, representing a genre that he doesn’t even believe is real: “hyperpop.” Those repelled by 100 gecs’ hyperactivity and willful brain-deadness might be more receptive to Gutierrez’s music as glaive: His cypress grove EP is less “hyper” and more “pop” (as he’s sometimes characterized his work), preserving the emotional directness of classic Top 40 radio while incorporating Midwestern emo guitar melodies and pop-punk angst. He sings about being irritated or sad in a pouty, un-enunciated style, leaving room for occasional cleverness: “Yeah, you look so pretty in that dress, but I’d look better,” goes the slightly provocative opening of “astrid.” cypress grove is an easy pleasure, and no quarantine hobbyist has had a trajectory quite like glaive. –Cat Zhang
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Goat Girl: On All Fours
Goat Girl reminds me of the brief and ecstatic moment in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when post-punk was still colorful and vibrant, before it soured into a slate-gray procession of epithet-barking dour frontmen. The crisp, studio-session quality playing on On All Fours gives Goat Girl’s music the sheen of the CD era but the spirit—dry, antic, subversive—cuts against their glassy precision at every turn. There are songs about drowning in your own brain chemicals (“Closing In”), songs about having scabies (“They Bite On You”), and songs about the destruction and pillaging of the Earth (“Pest" and "Badibaba”); they all have the cool tingle of the supermarket aisle—bright, cheerful, vaguely sinister. A sense of giddy possibility lurks beneath these songs, a secret the band won't share but will hint at with every turn. –Jayson Greene
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Groupie: Ephemeral
Groupie began when Ashley Kossakowski put out a call for bandmates on Craigslist, which was answered by guitarist Johanna Healy. Now a quartet, the Brooklyn band recently released a full-length debut, Ephemeral, an invigorating collection of post-punk leaning tracks about identity, nostalgia, and female empowerment. On the dreamy centerpiece, “Thick As Glue,” they interrogate the myth of the male artistic genius: “Young woman idolizing heroic men singing about heroin/Tried to keep it cool, now it’s my turn too. Who you think you’re looking up to?” –Quinn Moreland
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
G.S. Schray: The Changing Account
The Changing Account, the latest from Akron, Ohio artist G.S. Schray, finds a sweet spot between astral jazz and new age. Schray produces lush instrumentals that feel otherworldly. Recognizable materials are altered—snares sound dusted and guitars are liquified—while others creep in from the cosmos, like the metallic pangs on “Dome That Was Nothing.” The song’s creeping beat and spare melody sound fit for a slow-burner sci-fi flick full of neon lights and fog-choked back alleys. It’s just one of the cinematic scenes Schray conjures throughout this mesmerizing record. –Madison Bloom
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Jonnine: Blue Hills
When lockdown hit Melbourne, Australia last year, Jonnine Standish at first found herself powerless in the face of her fear: “And then [I] surrendered to death,” she says. “And then I was able to create some music.” Standish’s work in the duo HTRK has always been shadowy, but on her debut solo LP, commissioned by Boomkat’s Documenting Sound series and recorded last fall in a small town in the hills, she revels in the gloom. With just electric bass, synth, electronic winds, and garden chimes, she summons goth affect and post-punk muscle; string pads shimmer like a heat mirage above a charcoal smear of low end. Drenched in echo, she sounds almost subliminal, as though she were voicing the thoughts in your own head. The mood is claustrophobic, sometimes topsy-turvy: In the title track, she channels the desperation of a ’60s girl group (“I hate summer/I hate spring/I want only what you bring”) before landing on a rapturous note: “We’re drunk on the light.” –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
J.U.S: GOD GOKU JAY-Z
GOD GOKU JAY-Z is a quick, dusty, and sturdy rap record. The album, released via Danny Brown’s revitalized Bruiser Brigade Records, marks the debut of J.U.S, a producer, rapper, and engineer who recorded most of Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition. The beats already sound classic, and J.U.S raps firmly with intent, boasting while also being vulnerable. At just under 20 minutes, there’s not a wasted second. –Matthew Strauss
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
Jusell, Prymek, Sage, Shiroishi: Setsubun (節分)
Setsubun (節分) is the sequel to last fall’s Fuubutsushi (風物詩), a loose and gentle jazz record from Chris Jusell, Chaz Prymek, Matthew Sage, and Patrick Shiroishi. Like its predecessor, Setsubun draws on seasonal cues for its wintry textures: icy, splashing cymbals, glimmering chimes, curling violins, breathy drifts of sax. Its soft edges offer comfort without tranquilizing, and its crackles of static and rich instrumental passages make for a detailed landscape that’s easy to dip in and out of. The album has stunning moments in its melodic swells, as on “White Out” and “Fuyu No Taiyō,” escalating Setsubun from serene to sublime. –Allison Hussey
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
Katy Kirby: Cool Dry Place
Cool Dry Place, the debut album from Texas-born, Nashville-based Katy Kirby, uses songwriting to grapple with departing from evangelical Christianity. Crafted in various living rooms and home studios over what Kirby refers to as an “embarrassingly long period of time,” it sounds breezy and effortless, packed with bright melodies, undeniable hooks, and soaring vocals. Kirby’s shrewd manipulation of rhythm and eclectic compositional style sets the album apart. Her confessional lyrics shine bright in quiet, tender moments, balanced against dark, percussive rage. –Katie Philo
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Los & Nutty: Panagnl4e, Vol. 3
When Los & Nutty aren’t busy shooting short films disguised as music videos, you’ll probably find them cranking out mixtapes. They rang in the new year with Panagnl4e, Vol. 3, 37 minutes of no filler, No Limit-influenced head-spinning raps. Top$ide and Carlo Anthony’s production bounces off the walls; their funky basslines and trunk-rattling production are like supercharged batteries in Los and Nutty’s backs. “Where Would I Be” and “6 N Da Morning” are Los and Nutty at their finest, talking the most shit while counting their money up. –Brandon Callender
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Maassai: With the Shifts
New York rapper Maassai wanted her debut, With the Shifts, to be a motivational—the type of album that makes the listener face pain and work through it. Over 17 minutes packed with heady lyricism and jazzy, avant-garde production, she unpacks childhood trauma while also looking to heroes like Grace Jones and India.Arie for guidance. By prioritizing healing and personal growth, Maassai looks ahead to a beautiful future. –Vrinda Jagota
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
Mal Devisa: Wisdom Teeth
Mal Devisa’s sprawling Wisdom Teeth beautifully displays her range: Her honeyed alto shines on a jazz standard, her compositional skills enliven the closing experimental instrumental loops, and she effortlessly flows between rap and neo-soul. The music also addresses lovesickness, police brutality, and self-love, offering a unique mesh of sound and emotion tied together by Mal Devisa’s singular vision. “I wake up in the morning with the intention of feeling glorious,” she sings on “Dangerous.” With Wisdom Teeth, her intentions are realized. –Vrinda Jagota
Listen: Bandcamp
Maria BC: Devil’s Rain EP
Nearly all the songs on New York-based artist Maria BC’s home-recorded debut EP, Devil’s Rain, pair a melancholy chord progression played on electric guitar with their classically trained mezzo-soprano, delivering precise yet open-ended melodies that reverberate through empty space. With these simple tools, the Ohio-born musician creates graceful ambient pop, and the subtle escalation of their songs—from the layered refrains in the title track to the heartbroken slow burn of “Adelaide”—is where the magic lies: Like a bonfire, they crackle and smoulder until the sound glows and full and bright. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
QOQEQA: Axuxa
On his solo debut Axuxa, Peruvian producer QOQEQA collages polyrhythms, field recordings, and pan flutes from the Andean highlands and the Amazon jungle, honoring his home’s Indigenous and Afro-diasporic sounds. Axuxa cherishes legacies of remembered rhythm, urging us to recall generations of movement. As reverent as he is prescient, QOQEQA layers ancestral elements with hissing acoustics, breakbeats, and spectral crescendo pads. Rather than extracting samples from old records or recording Indigenous musicians without compensation, QOQEQA plays his own instruments and transforms them into loops and rhythmic phrases. On “Kshanti,” he records himself playing the Batá drums, then disassembles the pattern into a forlorn and sinister melody. Axuxa is a testament to the potential that lies beyond surface-level fusion and homage; it yearns for the possibilities of a different musical present. –Isabelia Herrera
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
Ryan Sambol: Gestalt
Texas artist Ryan Sambol writes small songs—intimate, introspective glimpses into our daily efforts as human beings. On Gestalt, he masters this vantage point, peeking into a comments-section romance, the warm reception of a home-cooked meal, and a friend’s comfortable apartment. Sambol’s style is as personal as his subject matter; Gestalt is spun from lean guitar picking and soft piano phrases, while Sambol’s voice keeps to a creaky and sweet hush. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want to disturb the stillness with too much force. –Madison Bloom
SaliYah: Sanctification EP
On SaliYah’s debut EP, the Texas artist blends art-pop and electronica with a keen sense of vulnerability. Sanctification was recorded during quarantine, when SaliYah began taking testosterone as part of hormone replacement therapy, and the resulting EP focuses on a profound “devotion to self.” That awareness manifests in the EP’s ever-changing electronic backdrops: From the droning ambient of ballads like “Sleep” and “Moon in Cancer” to the euphoric electro of “Connected,” Sanctification overflows with singular confidence. On the mesmerizing centerpiece “Crush,” SaliYah’s spoken-word delivery drifts like fog on a window, turning the song’s looped synths and percussion into an unforgettable requiem. –Eric Torres
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Silicone Prairie: My Life on the Silicone Prairie
Within a prolific handful of years, Kansas City’s Ian Teeple has piled up credits on excellent underground punk albums by Warm Bodies and the Natural Man Band. His new band Silicone Prairie opens their debut album with drum machines and synthesizers, fully entrenched in retro new wave gloominess. Gradually, the album offers much more than an affectation of digital remove—the open-air psychedelic folk song “Lay in the Flowers” is a particular highlight. Teeple and the band tease out tensions between analog and digital, alternating between antique electronics and acoustic guitars, Patrick Cowley-indebted dance music and flashy rock’n’roll guitar solos, silicone and prairie. –Evan Minsker
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
Steve Baczkowski / Bill Nace: Success
Pure noise is easy enough to tune out once you get acclimated to it. On Success, a thrilling recording of a live performance from 2019, free-improvising saxophonist Steve Baczkowski and guitarist Bill Nace keep you on the knife’s edge of your attention. Never merely bludgeoning, each responds sensitively to the other’s extremity, as well as to the audience and the room itself. Moreso than your average lo-fi live recording, Success is heavy on extraneous sounds, which actually enhance the music. Background clatter—clinking beer glasses?—drifts into the mix like a percussionist with a particularly light touch. Even the occasional snippet of crowd conversation adds to the almost unbearable intensity. In quiet moments, I judge them for talking over the music, but also feel for them the way I feel for unsuspecting victims in a horror film, chattering away, oblivious to whatever’s coming next. –Andy Cush
Listen: Bandcamp
Tygapaw: Get Free
Get Free opens with rousing words from the poet Mandy Harris Williams: “Some of us had to get free, and some of us might.” Inspired by Harris Williams’ poetry and the bright Detroit public access program The New Dance Show, Tygapaw’s pulse-racing debut is a bid for freedom that delivers a percussive jolt to the system. The Brooklyn-based producer and DJ draws on Detroit techno, ballroom, and other strains of rhythmic electronic music as conduits for bold expressions of liberation—whether from oppressive systems or our own inner demons. Get Free is a head-spinning missive from a brighter and better future; it’s jubilant and defiant in equal measure. –Eric Torres
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
upsammy: Bend EP
With misty chimes, bouncing rhythms, and eerie creaks, upsammy’s electronic instrumentals achieve a serene radiance. Dutch producer Thessa Torsing’s debut, last year’s Zoom, combined off-kilter beats and gleaming synth melodies for a wistful, fastidious update of late-’90s IDM. Follow-up EP Bend returns to similar territory for four crystalline tracks that use technology to evoke nature. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
VanJess: Homegrown
The Nigerian-American sister duo VanJess make their grand return on Homegrown, their first full project of original material in three years. Their 2018 debut, Silk Canvas, leaned heavily on dreamy Soulection watercolors, but Homegrown introduces a splash of funk to their ’90s R&B palette. The velvety and sensual “Slow Down” is a guide to romance that doesn’t beat around the bush: They want your intentions to be loud and clear from the very start. Homegrown adds another weapon to their arsenal with bouncy production from KAYTRANADA and M-Phazes; hardly anyone else is making R&B this danceable right now. –Brandon Callender
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Various Artists: All Nighter Vol. 6
FORM is an eclectic online community of artists and music producers from around the world. Since 2018, this ever-growing legion has released the All Nighter series: A charity compilation of tracks composed, produced, and completed within the span of 24 hours. What began as a showcase for modern electronica has since grown to include an all-encompassing range of styles. Listen to all 45 tracks on All Nighter Vol. 6, and you’ll feel like you’re on a rollercoaster ride through pop’s future. This is the timeline where bass music, emo, chiptune, and Elliott Smith-style guitar strumming don’t just co-exist but feed into each other. All Nighter Vol. 6 outlines how daring, earnest, and unabashedly fun a post-genre world could be. –Noah Yoo
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify
Various Artists: Test Pressing III
Currently headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, Muscut (Ukrainian sound artist Dmytro Nikolaienko’s label) has drawn a wobbly line through lo-fi synth studies, lysergic dub, and the occasional ambient techno masterpiece. The third release in their occasional compilation series doubles as a solid primer of the Eastern European electronic underground: St. Petersburg’s Mårble unspools dissonant jazz samples over a hazy reggae backing; Moscow’s S A D conjure a woozy vision of neo-noir, part BBC Radiophonic Workshop and part Blade Runner. Like-minded offerings from Berlin-based Andrew Pekler and Hanno Leichtmann both prove that true musical kinship knows no borders, but the best of the bunch comes from Moscow’s Koyil, who reimagines dub techno as the soundtrack for a humid rainforest. In a year when clubbing remains purely imaginary, it’s a fine opportunity to practice astral projection instead. –Philip Sherburne
YL: Jesus Is My Homeboy
Usually, YL’s mixtapes feel like they’re supposed to soundtrack the brunt of New York winter, but his latest album Jesus Is My Homeboy sounds made for warmer days. The smoky loops produced by a who’s who of sample-flipping contemporaries—Roper Williams, Argov, Navy Blue, and many more—are brighter than they’ve ever been. On the first 60 degree day of this year, I must have listened to YL lay down his personal chronicles over Roper’s soothing loops half a dozen times as I watched the city come alive. Despite his mellow demeanor, YL has become a dynamic emcee, and his verses are always densely packed with pop culture references (“And I’m still clutch like Chauncey Billups”), fashion choices (“ACGs for the fall”), and slick wordplay (“My city left for dead, I got it locked like a dread/Cop a mixtape from my dread in Harlem”). It’s bound to sound even more lively as we move onto the next season. –Alphonse Pierre
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Yu Su: Yellow River Blue
Yu Su’s Yellow River Blue oscillates between synthetic new wave and distorted dancefloor jams. The dubbed-out rhythms of the former meet with the rollicking sounds of the latter to create a series of rumbling reverberations. It’s the type of electronic music that makes you reach for nature metaphors, and it’s hard not to detect something elemental in a song like “Futuro,” which seems to consist solely of flowing tabla and creaking synths. Never tiring of the possibilities within each note, Yu Su continually alters a pattern of repeated sounds throughout, forming a backdrop that shifts as you listen to it. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
