New albums to listen to now: Aldous Harding, Broken Social Scene, more

Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story_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 drops available on streaming services. This week’s batch includes new albums from Aldous Harding, Broken Social Scene, Loraine James, and Olof Dreijer. 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.)

Aldous Harding: Train on the Island [4AD]

When you let feeling guide you first, you access a point of view that’s unburdened by doubt, logic, and planning. That Aldous Harding makes this impulse look easy without sacrificing any of the cleverness or creativity that makes her music so immediate is striking, to say the least. Train on the Island, her fifth album and follow-up to 2022’s Warm Chris, finds her at the top of her game, spinning instinct-driven singles like “Coats” and “Venus in the Zinnia” into harmonious, gut-driven, billowing passages of indie folk. There’s no doubt each song on Train on the Island was thought out in its arrangements, and yet it plays like a series of magical happenstances and fateful flashes in the pan, all whimsy and natural beauty. As Harding puts it on “One Stop,” one of the album’s best songs: “I'll never do it again, unless you wanna do it again.”

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Broken Social Scene: Remember the Humans [Arts & Crafts]

Remember the Humans opens the way every Broken Social Scene album does: a quiet flutter of instruments that swirl together like a dream, before gently segueing into the bold yet tender indie rock they’re known for. The band’s first new LP in nine years uses that opening number, “Not Around Anymore,” to cushion their comeback, reminding listeners that as much as the Canadian supergroup thrives on grand statements about the enduring power of love and togetherness, they also enjoy laying it down easy for the sake of a good stretch.

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Namasenda: Limbo [Year0001]

Namasenda’s name has long belonged next to the great Swedes of pop music: she was the first Black artist ever signed to semi-erstwhile label PC Music; an early collaborator of Hannah Diamond and Oklou; and tapped for a Boiler Room set when that still really meant something. Her new album, Limbo, sticks with the sound she helped innovate but doesn’t avoid the way hyperpop has warped, changed, and shifted over the years. Soaring through hardstyle ("Miami Crest"), trance ("Bad Love"), and pure pop ("Madonna"), she finds new opportunities for momentum in a sonic space that often feels stalled.

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Loraine James: Detached From the Rest of You [Hyperdub]

Loraine James has been a dance producer, a post-R&B purveyor, and even an ambient artist over the course of her career. Now, per a press release, it's time for her “IDM pop star” album. Her new record, Detached From the Rest of You, is her first under her government name since 2023’s Gentle Confrontation, and places her voice, often shrouded in her club or chill-out soundscapes, at the top of the mix. She’s not going this new territory alone, though. Features on the record come from Low’s Alan Sparhawk, New York luminary Anysia Kim, Tirzah, and Miho Hatori, among others.

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Olof Dreijer: Loud Bloom [DH2]

The Knife’s Olof Dreijer describes his debut solo album Loud Bloom as his way to “just have fun with my own music again,” and boy, are these songs fun. Like his former Hessle Audio compatriot Ben UFO or Russian phenom Vladimir Dubyshkin, Dreijer knows how to weave elements from techno, house, baile funk, electro, synth pop, and so much more to land on one result: euphoric stompers. All of these songs drip with daytime outdoor party energy, but real club rats will delight in seeing “Acuyuye," with Colombian singer and MC Diva Cruz, on the tracklist here.

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Alabaster DePlume: Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue [International Anthem]

London-based instrumentalist and poet Alabaster Deplume’s new album came to fruition last year, after a fervent period of touring with bassist Shahzad Ismaily and drummer Tcheser Holmes in support of A Blade Because a Blade Is Whole. But the roots of the project date back to 2024, when Plume found himself in occupied Palestine working distantly, but in tandem with, the filmmaker Skyler Carrico. The collection of instrumentals incorporates field recordings that capture kids at play in the West Bank, and arrives alongside a 16mm film Carrico created in collaboration with a youth center for refugees. DePlume also uses wheatpaste posters created by a 13-year-old Gazan boy on its cover, inscribed with the phrase: “Dedicated to the mother of the martyr/witness Obaida Ahmed al-Qiram. May you rest in peace. From your student, the artist, Hasan Jawad Abudayyeh.”

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Thaiboy Digital, Swedm: Paradise [Bank of Star Sound System]

Thaiboy Digital lived in Thailand until he was 9, plenty long enough to call it home. But now, at 31, the Drain Gang rapper still maintains a certain cloak of invisibility in the country. As he told Pitchfork in a recent profile, he never gets recognized in Bangkok on the street, unlike in Stockholm, where he spent his adolescence becoming a cult star alongside Yung Lean, Bladee, ecco2k, and White Armor. In step with a move back to the place he spent his childhood in, Thaiboy Digital’s new record Paradise revisits the 2010s EDM of his teenage years with fresh eyes, genuine respect, and a brand new supergroup: Swedm, which links him with frequent Skrillex collaborator Varg2TM, Eurohead, and jamesjamesjames. “Other than all the lessons I learned, it was the music that I took from my dark ages,” he said.

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Fire-Toolz: Lavender Networks [Warp]

What better way to introduce yourself to Warp’s hallowed roster than with a label-debut single called “Balam =^..^= Says IPv09082024 Strawberry Head.”? It’s only fitting for Angel Marcloid’s boisterously maximalist electronic project Fire-Toolz, which has a new album, Lavender Networks, out on the label now. The release is both a family and far-out affair: guests include Zola Jesus, Nailah Hunter, and Lipsticism; Marcloid’s wife and sister, Sling Beam and Liverfire; and, earning the title of most-unexpected, Americana singer-songwriter Jennifer Holm. It's all par for the course for the omnivorous Marcloid, who describes Holm’ presence on the album as,“Imagine a Nashville mom who sings on country albums and in her church band, being asked by an interfaith transfeminine anarchist from Chicago to sing on her screamy, noisy electronic album.”

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JWords: Sound Therapy [Sine Wave]

Self-soothe to this: gentle arpeggios, bedroom raps, and minimal synth patterns. JWords, one-half of the Brooklyn duo H31R, follows up her house-forward solo debut with a meditative album bridging hip-hop, new age, and ambient. Lyrically, Sound Therapy sounds like it was written by the most grounded person in your friend group. Lessons have been learned, boundaries are being drawn, and the beefs of yesterday are all water under the bridge. The album fittingly was inspired by the musician turning 30. “It’s a new era,” she says. “A calmer, chiller, ‘Yeah, I got my shit together’ kind of era.”

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Lykke Li: The Afterparty [Neon Gold]

The world that Lykke Li released her last album, 2022’s EYEYEYE, into doesn't exist anymore. On her new record, which she says is her last, the alt-pop veteran is ready to meet the apocalypse head-on—and with a 17-piece orchestra at her back. Recorded primarily in her hometown of Stockholm, the album brings in elements of Balearic house, disco, and electro-pop to explore some serious existential trauma. “I find that we’re in an era where everyone is talking about, ‘My higher self.’ Fuck that,” Li has said of The Afterparty. “This is an album dealing with your lower self: your need for revenge, your shame, despair, all of it.”

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Muna: Dancing on the Wall [Saddest Factory]

In terms of so-called “sapphic pop," so much has happened in the last seven years it feels like Way Back When that Muna’s 2019 EP Saves the World seemed genuinely novel, left-field even. By 2022, the LA-based trio became bona-fide pop stars, churning out elegant, synth-laden hits and earning the attention of Phoebe Bridgers and Taylor Swift. Their first album in four years, Dancing on the Wall, reflects a group that's been famous long enough to know what a golden goose’s underbelly looks like. These lush new takes on disco and new wave are still engineered for an arms-up release, but introduce thornier emotional themes with a fresh dose of uninhibitedness. According to a press release, the goal was “inviting listeners onto the dancefloor while keeping its inner world deliberately unresolved.”

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Cola: Cost of Living Adjustment [Fire Talk]

Montreal trio Cola’s latest record finds wide open spaces for their historically scrappy post-punk. It’s not exactly bigger, but it’s certainly vaster. Building on the agitated, fleshed-out indie rock of their 2024 album, The Gloss, ex-Ought members Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworthy fiddle with shoegaze, Southern rock, and folk on Cost of Living Adjustment. The title, from which the band also draws its name, describes the pay bump workers are mandated to get in times of economic flux, setting the table for the band’s ever-unsparing critiques of life under capitalism. “And when you get it, it’s never enough/That said, I will take it,” guitarist and vocalist Darcy remarks on “Satre-torial” before realizing, “Oh shit, there’s no one left alive.”

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Little Simz: Sugar Girl EP [AWAL]

The road to Little Simz’s last full-length album, 2025’s Lotus, was fraught with legal woes and interpersonal upheaval. In the same year, she sued her former producer and childhood friend Inflo after he allegedly failed to repay a loan of £1.7 million, largely to fund a live performance by he and his wife Cleo Sol’s collective SAULT. Simz’s new EP, Sugar Girl, arrives with considerably less turmoil and little to no fanfare, as she only began teasing it earlier this week. Across these four tracks, one thing remains consistent, though: Simz is still one of the UK’s strongest lyricists, with a continually interesting eye for the personal and collective baggage that makes human life on earth, well, human.

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