It’s impossible to hear all the music that comes out every day, but with this list we hope to direct your attention to generally overlooked albums our writers and editors have been returning to over the last few months. None of these releases were named Best New Music and, in some cases, they weren’t reviewed on Pitchfork, but they’re all worth a listen.
(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.)
Ben Seretan: Youth Pastoral
The title of Ben Seretan’s album is more than just a play on words: On it, the New York singer-songwriter comes to terms with a loss of faith. At times, he taps into the raw, earnest delivery of contemporaries like Pinegrove, cooing over lush arrangements that take cues from the uplifting atmospheres of contemporary Christian music. These allusions might be off-putting to some—particularly those burned by the church—but the strength of Seretan’s songwriting lies in his ability to humanize the lofty concept of a relationship with God without clichés or superficialities. –Noah Yoo
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
BlueBucksClan: Clan Way 2
On Clan Way 2, the Los Angeles duo’s first mixtape of 2020, DJ and Jeeezy take us through their daily routine. They shop at Dior, walk into the club without getting patted down, break through some tables, steal the girlfriend of the 10th-best player on the Lakers, and take a trip to the studio. It’s pure shit-talk delivered over bouncy West Coast beats, rap with the purpose of letting you know that their lives are better than yours. By the end, your pockets will feel emptier than they ever have before. –Alphonse Pierre
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Califone: Echo Mine
On Califone’s first album in seven years, the Chicago rock experimentalists still feel like they’re pleasantly close to falling to shambles. Bandleader Tim Rutili guides an eccentric, prickly mix of elements—swaggering funk bass, writhing house synths, dusty blues-rock guitars—into a folksy, lo-fi song cycle that feels cohesive even as it moves mercurially. Motion is particularly important here; Echo Mine was written to score a dance performance (by Robyn Mineko Williams), and it simmers with kinetic energy. –Stacey Anderson
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Desire Marea: Desire
Desire Marea’s solo debut is a meditation on the human need for need itself. Marea—one half of the South African music and performance duo FAKA—doles out icy club cuts, jackhammering industrial beats, and low-lit ballads inspired by lonely nights in Johannesburg. Their voice is sometimes guttural and pained, other times operatic and swooning, as they invoke the most profound human wants: intimacy, community, spiritual meaning. The album flows fluidly through powerful contrasts, a club mix for the last lounge on earth. –Anna Gaca
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Draag Me: I Am Gambling With My Life
Draag Me is the solo alias of Zack Schwartz, the guitarist and bandleader of the Philadelphia indie-rock innovators Spirit of the Beehive. On this project’s first album, Schwartz applies his polyglot sensibilities to a record that jumps from hardcore punk to house. Schwartz’s strong sense of melancholy links these dabblings, giving a dreamy unity to even the harshest moments. It’s a promising indicator of things to come. –Quinn Moreland
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Drown: Subaqueous
Markov Soroka loves a grand gesture. The wildly ambitious Ukranian metal artist operates under an array of pseudonyms and projects—including the dissonant hellscapes of Tchornobog and the spacey ambience of Aureole—and his releases tend to arrive with their own heady mythological backstories. The second album from his one-man funeral doom project is among his most uncompromising: a 42-minute, two-song suite in which the action takes place underwater, with stretches of aquatic effects pulling you down with him. Along the way, the music swells and crashes with gothy riffs and complex, eerily recurring melodic passages. A highlight in Soroka’s vast discography, Subaqueous adds new depth to one of the most thrilling, unpredictable figures in modern metal. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Duwap Kaine: Bad Kid From the 4
Listening to Duwap Kaine’s Bad Kid From the 4 is like stepping into the Georgia teenager’s mind, where all thoughts are unfinished and brief. Highlights like “Da Feeling” and “Earl Sweatshirt” feel like being in a cartoon where nothing is really happening. I’m not sure if Kaine does anything other than smoke weed and rap, but he comes to life as he calmly spits punchlines and croons over dreamlike beats. –Alphonse Pierre
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Eladio Carrión: Sauce Boyz
Last summer, the Puerto Rican rapper Eladio Carrión cracked the urbano mainstream with “Kemba Walker,” a joint track with Bad Bunny. It highlighted Carrión’s formidable gift for piercing, clever rhymes; he and El Conejo Malo compared their come-ups to the Boston Celtics’ point guard and dropped laugh-out-loud references to Goo Gone, Jimmy Neutron, and even the Frozen soundtrack. Sauce Boyz, Carrión’s debut, serves as a more complete presentation of his versatility; the Boricua rapper shows he’s capable of producing polished pop and reggaetón as well as sadboi piano trap baladas. At a time when urbano seems to be overrun with plinking, dancehall-lite beats and cookie-cutter flows, Carrión proves the movement has ample room for whimsy. –Isabelia Herrera
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
G Herbo: PTSD
Chicago drill is known for its old souls. Chief Keef sounded a thousand years old when he was 16; Lil Durk moaned like a bluesman when he still had his baby fat. Even in this prematurely wizened crowd, G Herbo stands out. On his bluesy, downbeat album PTSD, he resembles a survivor of a previous rap generation more than the leader of the current one, especially when he raps for three escalating minutes over JAY-Z’s intro to The Dynasty. If G Herbo has an analog to peak-’00s Roc-A-Fella, it would be to JAY-Z’s former sergeant-in-arms, Beanie Sigel: Like Sigel, he deals exclusively in tough truths, hard-hitting cadences, and scathing self-assessments. Across 14 tracks, he doesn’t mince words, which isn’t to say there are few of them. There are thousands, all of them barreling forward with an intensity that suggests the unbearable pressure of racing thoughts, or the threat of a clock running out. –Jayson Greene
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Gallery S / MoMa Ready: Gallery S
Wyatt D. Stevens (aka MoMa Ready, aka Gallery S) dismantles club music and lets you see each part, then reassembles it right in front of you. A New Dawn, his recent collaboration with AceMo, sped through an assortment of styles in record time, pulling from house, rave, and techno. The solo album he released two weeks before that, Gallery S, is a more methodical and focused work of dance music, powered on high BPMs, harmonious keys, reggae vocal samples, and heavy drum ‘n’ bass snares. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
Hailey Whitters: The Dream
Halfway through The Dream—the second album from the Iowa-born, Nashville-based country singer Hailey Whitters—the 80-year-old woman drinking next to Whitters takes the mic. A gentle ballad with a sweeping chorus, “Janice at the Hotel Bar” is filled with advice, jokes, and subtle characterizations that make you feel like you’re sipping alongside them. Singing in the voice of the titular character, Whitters directs the narrative while she stars in it, choosing which angles to portray and when to pull back and illustrate her characters’ larger philosophies. It’s been five years since Whitters’ last album, and you get the sense that she’s spent that time studying quiet scenes like this. The Dream is the work of a songwriter who’s learned that becoming a great storyteller means being a good listener first. —Sam Sodomsky
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Kassa Overall: I Think I’m Good
Jazz and hip-hop fusion has been waiting for an album as good as this, something that doesn’t just copy-and-paste the two forms over another and proclaim, “Check it: jazz-hop.” The Brooklyn drummer/rapper/producer Kassa Overall is a fastidious composer and magnetic storyteller, blending themes of mental health, black oppression, and unjust incarceration into a singular watercolor blur. The hefty themes feel as important as the ride cymbal, and the French pop-inspired odyssey “Darkness in Mind” is already one of the best songs of the year. –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Kiko Dinucci: Rastilho
Struggling to play traditional Brazilian choro music, the São Paulo guitarist Kiko Dinucci looked instead to the country’s rich history of genre fusions. On Rastilho, he explores folk music textures with a chunky, percussive playing style and a taut energy that recalls his experience in the city’s punk scene. Metá Metá bandmate Juçara Marçal and São Paulo rapper Rodrigo Ogi drop in, but vocals aren’t the main attraction: That’s Dinucci’s vivid playing, with its rhythmic, resonant thrums. Recorded on analog tape with an ear to the production techniques of Brazilian records from the ’60s and ’70s, Rastilho is well-traveled yet close to home. –Anna Gaca
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Lucy Gooch: Rushing EP
Lucy Gooch makes music with the immersive depths of ambient and the melodic focus of pop. “Rushing,” the title track of the Bristol artist’s debut EP, constructs a cathedral of synths and layered voices on a single looped fragment, which starts as a kind of melodic hook and becomes more and more hypnotic as it repeats. The production drapes everything in a cloak of soft reverb, adding to the music’s near-religious sense of serenity. As brief as Rushing is—five tracks, 19 minutes—and as early as it arrives in Gooch’s career, it presents a remarkably whole and compelling vision. And if it occasionally reminds you of Enya, is that such a bad thing? –Andy Cush
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Medhane: Full Circle
Medhane’s Full Circle is a bare-bones 15-minute project that feels like it may vanish just as it reaches its apex. The Brooklyn rapper-producer assembles beats from sampled voices that fade into mist and crunched percussion, and he raps urgently in dense, compact rhyme schemes. Full Circle is a collection of Medhane’s troubles and mantras, a central point where confidence meets hope meets pain. –Matthew Strauss
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Nappy Nina: Dumb Doubt
Nappy Nina cut her teeth in the Bay Area rap and poetry scenes before uprooting to Brooklyn, a move neatly mapped out by her first three head-spinning, spoken word-laced LPs. Her fourth, last December’s Dumb Doubt, is her breeziest and most effortless work, even as she confronts her own self-doubt and fear in the lyrics. Eclectic production from Nina herself and her collaborator Dane, heavy on G-funk synths and smooth jazz keys, complements her wordy, rapid flow. She trades buttery verses with Quelle Chris, Nick Hakim, and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire on the pensive “What You Want” and slinks her way around a bouncy dance beat with the rising Brooklyn rapper Maassai on “Intrigued.” Nappy Nina displays versatility and acuity throughout Dumb Doubt and has her own feature coming soon on Yaeji’s highly anticipated first mixtape. Now is a good time to start paying attention. –Eric Torres
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Patricia Taxxon: Beauty
Patricia Taxxon is an extremely online 20-year-old producer and songwriter who has self-released 45 albums and EPs since 2015. Her music flits from style to style—ambient, dubstep, noise, electro-pop, chiptune, glitch—in a way that makes the term “post-genre” seem quaint. Taxxon’s staggering productivity, not to mention her constantly updating Twitter feed, can feel daunting, but it’s worth pausing a moment to dwell on her recent EP, Beauty. The six-track release alternates between dance-pop whooshes and soothing ambient calm, and listening to it feels like riding the world’s tallest roller coaster. The bangers are largely powered by vocal samples snatched from generic internet sync-pop from the past few years, but Taxxon speeds and dices them up, extracting a heightened level of emotion in the process. The EP’s peak, “Brightest Sunrise,” takes a theoretically inspirational track about God’s greatness by the Christian pop singer Danny Gokey and transforms it into a Robyn-caliber, dancing-through-the-tears stunner that achieves its own kind of exaltation. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: Bandcamp
Portable: The Transit of Mercury
Despite its celebratory connotations, house music can also express deep pain. The South African producer Alan Abrahams taps into a wellspring of hurt on his sixth album under his Portable alias. Over his signature intricate hand percussion, he layers moody, minor chords and downcast vocals imbued with the dolor of mid-’80s Depeche Mode. In the album’s most intense moments, distorted synthesizers turn thick and dissonant, throbbing like a knot in the stomach. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
R.A.P. Ferreira: Purple Moonlight Pages
With his new handle R.A.P. Ferreira, the rapper born Rory Allen Phillip Ferreira retains the defiant spirit he flashed in his last project, milo. On Purple Moonlight Pages, Ferreira twists wordy musings on everyday life with philosophizing on power imbalances and art. “Fuck wealth and the hype machine, rather have health and an icy spring, or electrician training,” he glowers on one song, “OMENS & TOTEMS.” The L.A. production trio the Jefferson Park Boys provide Ferreira with exquisite, jazz-influenced backdrops throughout the record, further lifting his highly technical, poetic raps above the pack. –Noah Yoo
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Rubio: La Pérdida EP
On La Pérdida (“The Loss”), the experimental Chilean artist Rubio revels in decomposition and renewal, combining decayed electronic whispers, orchestral arrangements, controlled vocal spasms, and bright synth stabs. Closer “Tormenta del SXXI” (“21st Century Storm”) is simultaneously radiant and mournful, lamenting the disconnectedness of contemporary life. Though Rubio recorded La Pérdida over a year ago, before the massive protests that rocked Chile and the current global pandemic, the EP serves as an apt soundtrack for this moment. Rubio offers us a sense of wholeness in the face of what feels like collapse, fashioning a mode of being that recognizes fear, sorrow, and joy as part of being fully alive. –Isabelia Herrera
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Soakie: Soakie
On Soakie’s 13-minute debut, the Australian/New York hardcore group confront privilege, power, and complacency with unrestrained energy and incensed ideology. Soakie play furiously, as if their instruments are on fire, and vocalist Summer matches that rage, directing her gravelly pipes toward outdated social conventions. On the standout “Boys on Stage,” she castigates unworthy peers with an electrifying snarl: “There’s too many fucking boys onstage!” –Quinn Moreland
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Sofia Kourtesis: Sarita Colonia EP
Weaving together offbeat samples and candy-colored electronics, Sofia Kourtesis makes dance music you can wrap yourself in. The Peruvian-born, Berlin-based producer’s self-titled EP, released via Studio Barnhus last spring, embodied the openhearted sound of the venerable Stockholm label. Kourtesis’ follow-up EP, Sarita Colonia, is even dreamier: fluffy, cheerfully warped house with spoken snippets about Hollywood and lingerie, as well as soulful, winking vocals. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Terrace Martin: Sounds of Crenshaw and Jammcard Present: Terrace Martin’s Gray Area Live at the JammJamm
Multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin has no shortage of high-profile production credits to his name, having worked with Snoop Dogg in the mid-’00s and contributed to each of Kendrick Lamar’s show-stopping LPs. Gray Area Live, recorded in-the-round in Los Angeles, is an effort to reexamine the highlights of Martin’s past while also conjuring up new classics. Martin recasts the alto saxophone, piano, guitar, and choir he added to Kendrick’s “For Free?” into an elaborate, eight-minute suite, and recruits Kamasi Washington for the transcendent “Juno.” “It was a beautiful exchange of energy to have people that close to you in the midst of the music,” Martin said of the cozy performance. “We’re trying to help heal souls, and heal ourselves.” –Eric Torres
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Ulla: Tumbling Towards a Wall
Ulla Straus snuck this album out in mid-January with little fanfare, and the music itself also feels determined to pass by unnoticed. A profound hush holds sway over her delicate ambient constructions; soft synthesizer tones glint like frozen mist in weak sun. Her rhythms are rarely more forceful than the crinkling of cellophane. But where predecessors like Oval could sound coldly digital or antiseptic, Ulla’s music is warm and sentimental, shot through with traces of voice, guitar, and rapturous piano. Beneath the barely-there form of the music lies deep emotional substance. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
