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 Burna Boy, the Armed, Zach Bryan, Victoria Monét, jaimie branch, Ruth Garbus, Diego Raposo, Open Mike Eagle, and Drab Majesty. 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.)
Burna Boy: I Told Them… [Spaceship/Bad Habit/Atlantic]
Burna Boy ushered in his current era in June with the Barack Obama favorite “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” an R&B earworm with the nostalgic air of a 1990s summer. The Nigerian star’s new album, I Told Them…, also features “If I’m Lying,” which Burna Boy called his “best song ever” during an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1.
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The Armed: Perfect Saviors [Sargent House]
The Armed unveiled their fourth album, Perfect Saviors, with an Iggy Pop–starring video for the Julien Baker collaboration “Sport of Form,” along with an unmasking of the enigmatic Detroit collective’s contributors. Fronted by Tony Wolski, an ad man for McDonald’s and Jeep, the noise-oriented pop group enlisted the likes of Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Matt Sweeney, and Josh Klinghoffer for the LP, which Wolski, in press materials, called, a “completely unironic, sincere effort to create the biggest, greatest rock album of the 21st century.”
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Zach Bryan: Zach Bryan [Warner]
Country singer-songwriter Zach Bryan has released the follow-up to 2022’s American Heartbreak and its hit single “Something in the Orange.” He produced his own self-titled album, which has contributions from Kacey Musgraves, Sierra Ferrell, the Lumineers, and more. Ahead of the LP’s release, Bryan wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, “if u come into this album thinking it will be a chart topper or if you think that was my intent in it at all you’ll be severely disappointed and I am not sorry (respectfully).”
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Victoria Monét: Jaguar II [Lovett Music/RCA]
Bolstered by the laidback grooves of the single “On My Mama,” Victoria Monét’s long-awaited debut studio album, Jaguar II, arrives just in time for the most languid days of summer. The singer-songwriter’s sequel to 2020’s Jaguar also includes the singles “Smoke” and “Party Girls.” Contributors to the new album include Kaytranada, Lucky Daye, Buju Banton, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Monét’s daughter, Hazel.
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jaimie branch: Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War)) [International Anthem]
Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War)) is the late jaimie branch’s final album with her Fly or Die quartet, released here on her longtime label, International Anthem, as much a Chicago institution as branch herself. Alongside her bandmates—cellist Lester St. Louis, bassist Jason Ajemian, and drummer Chad Taylor—the jazz trumpeter recorded most of the album in April 2022, at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska, before her sudden death that August. Her bandmates and sister finalized the recordings with International Anthem.
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Ruth Garbus: Alive People [Orindal]
The experimental folk songwriter Ruth Garbus announced her new album, Alive People, with two singles, “Mono No Aware” and “Healthy Gamer.” The latter is a meditation on gaming culture, searching for meaning in the “digital thunderdome,” a pursuit with which Garbus sympathizes over penetrating keyboard pulses and a metronomic drum machine. (Garbus herself has “only played Ocarina of Time,” she conceded in a press release, but found it a “wonderful experience.”) The rest of the Kleinmeister follow-up combines wry ballads and self-help pearls over playful guitar and synth.
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Diego Raposo: Yo No Era Así Pero de Ahora en Adelante, Sí [Gran Vaina]
After helping to produce Danny Ocean’s 2022 album, @dannocean, Dominican producer Diego Raposo returns with a new record of his own, his first since 2018’s cult hit Caribe Express. Ever the collaborator, Raposo enlists a long list of contemporaries across the album’s 12 tracks, including Mediopicky, Blue Rojo, Kablito, Gian Rojas, MJ Nebreda, and more.
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Open Mike Eagle: Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering [Auto Reverse]
That’s the hand of Open Mike Eagle’s mother on the cover of the rapper’s latest project, Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering. There’s a song called “The Grand Prize Game on the Bozo Show” and another one called “A New Rap Festival Called Falling Loud.” Eagle described the project in a statement: “These songs are all fancy ways of saying ‘fuck you’ to people that ignore us and ‘thank you’ to people that care if we live or die! Pay close attention to the song titles!”
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Drab Majesty: An Object in Motion [Dais]
Drab Majesty’s Deb Demure explores the psychedelic possibilities of a bowl-shaped 12-string electroacoustic guitar on the Los Angeles project’s new mini-album, An Object in Motion. Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell features on opener “Vanity,” and, elsewhere, M83 collaborator Justin Meldal-Johnsen and Uniform’s Ben Greenberg dip in. The songs range from arrestingly grand laments to noir symphonies and gauzy, Stone Roses–style anthems like “The Skin and the Glove.”
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