11 new albums to stream today

Paste is the place to kick off each and every New Music Friday. We follow our regular roundups of the best new songs by highlighting the most compelling new records you need to hear. Find the best new albums of the week below.

beaming: horseshoe

Derek Ted and Braden Lawrence haven’t been in a band together long, but the music they’re making as beaming sounds like it’s always existed. Their debut album, horseshoe, is so good and catchy. I’ve had the tape in my possession since last year when the duo sold bootlegs of it at their merch table. I got to hear “say goodbye” and “Stuck (here)” early, when they had a life onstage but nowhere else. Seeing beaming early, when they didn’t have enough released music to fill a setlist, is a core memory of my first months in Los Angeles. The beaming EP went mega hard in 2025, but horseshoe is a firecracker. We’re going to be talking about “BUGBITE” for a long time. These songs could have come out in 2016 and dominated curated Spotify playlists even then. Written, recorded, and celebrated right here in SoCal, horseshoe is a community-driven banger. “There’s something special that happens when a room full of people all make something together,” Ted said in a press release. “The right people.” I’m glad Ted and Lawrence keep going into rooms together. We need beaming right now. —Matt Mitchell [Self-Released]

Frog: Frog for Sale

Daniel Bateman has put out three albums in 14 months, which is either the behavior of a genius or a maniac, and Frog for Sale makes a pretty convincing case for both. Frog is Bateman and his brother Steve, and their thing is hard to pin down—lo-fi pop songs delivered in a wobbly falsetto over piano and acoustic guitar, with detours into country and bossa nova and whatever they feel like hopping to next. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but god, is this record just absurdly fun. The synth-led “Best Buy” is catchy enough to hook you immediately; “Max Von Side-Eye” is an eccentric ode to a prostitute with the worst prostitute name of all time (Max Von Side-Eye, obviously); the unexpected pared-down alt-country twang of “Yonder This Way Comes” oddly evokes a bit of Elliott Smith. The bizarre, mundane mantras of “All The Things You Get” ensure it’s going to be a summer staple for me, because honestly I do need this energy in my life right now: “Get drinks outside with co-workers, get Appletinis up / Get hard at the bar, get nailed outside his car / It’s ok it’s not that far and yes I wanna pay with card.” The whole record jaunts around with the ease of a band that writes songs the way other people breathe—compulsively, without much apparent agonizing—and yet the melodies stick like they’ve been workshopped for months. It’s 12 tracks of pure, strange, deeply lovable music that refuses to take itself too seriously, refreshing as a curb-sold push-up popsicle in the dead heat of July. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Audio Antihero]

Jessie Ware: Superbloom

What’s Your Pleasure? was the first instance in which Jessie Ware elevated her retro-tinged sensuality to genuinely inspired heights, migrating her honeyed coo from simmering, steely minimalism to clubby, hedonistic maximalism. That record’s follow-up, 2023’s That! Feels! Good!, went even harder, hitting all the pleasure centers by adding a flair of diva campiness and Studio 54 glamor to Ware’s irresistible grooves and cool effervescence. On Superbloom, Ware’s latest iteration of sleek, sexy disco-pop, the good vibes and vibrant production are still very much present, even though there’s a been-there-done-that aftertaste to the album that makes it slightly less fresh than its predecessors. Superbloom contains the extravagance that its title alludes to, draping itself with breathy backing harmonies, funky basslines, and jewel-encrusted showers of strings and synths. “Ride” cleverly interpolates Ennio Morricone’s iconic theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, flipping the sonic grit of its instantly recognizable whistle into a luxurious, spacey hook. On “Don’t You Know Who I Am,” Ware animates her visceral yearning and howl with a romantic, transportative instrumental that evokes the best of Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor. “16 Summers” is one of Superbloom’s most standout offerings, a bittersweet ballad dedicated to her children that plays like a stirring 11:00 Broadway number. Ware’s deeply felt, fully embodied earnestness sells the emotional urgency of the song, especially considering the personal context surrounding the making of the album, wherein several of her friends and collaborators have become ill and passed away over the past year. Seeking out joy and comfort can be a great antidote to grief and tragedy, but finding gratitude within your own life can also be just as powerful a remedy. —Sam Rosenberg [EMI]

Kathryn Mohr: Sing Me Alive

Carve, Waiting Room’s follow-up, does little to dissuade that initial impression she left for us. Five years in the making, the record first took shape with a visit to the American Southwest—Kathryn Mohr’s first time back in the region since an early childhood road trip. If there’s been any shift in sonic approach, it’s a tangible aridity the desert brings. Recorded in a western-themed Airbnb and mixed by Agriculture’s Richard Chowenhill, Carve’s setting still leans nocturnal, but the road Mohr and her soundscapes swerve on feel bound to a monotonous summer heat. In keeping with previous releases, her lyrics remain opaque—near-surrealist stabs of violent imagery to best describe her isolation. “I’m running around with my head cut off,” she sings on “Commit,” letting the words sit in the back of her throat like she’s positioned to snatch her hand away the second you reach out for it. It places us back in this distinct headspace Mohr has operated in for the last half-decade, establishing the table stakes for this go-around: grief as a condition of intimacy, where the point isn’t so much a specific instance of loss, but the knowledge that such loss is both constant and imminent, like a collar she’s pulled around by as she tries to love and be loved despite it. Again, it’s relentless: in its fear of feeling too alive, that a life which seems too perfect will force her to run. Not much has changed. —Elise Soutar [The Flenser]

Lucy Liyou: MR COBRA

A little over two weeks ago, my friend brought me to Performance Space New York for Lucy Liyou’s “semi-autobiographical solo theater-music performance,” MR COBRA. I went in completely blind, my only information prior to the show’s start being the warning ushers gave to the first two rows: you’re in the fake blood splash zone, watch out. An hour and change later, I was up on my feet for a standing ovation. Since that night, I’ve tried to put the experience into words, only to come up blank every time. It simply defies description—and so too does MR COBRA, the Bandcamp album Liyou created for the performance. The album and show alike function as “a revisionist retelling of a time back in high school when [Liyou] fell in love with a predator,” but not in a conventional sense: the story is told through viscera and sensation, landing somewhere in the bones instead of the mind. Melodies, actual “songs,” are few and far between (see ballad “Romeopathy,” dreamy synth-pop number “Constrictor (Haha),” and the haunting repetition of “Crisis (Identity)”), as is audible dialogue, but the meaning is transmuted anyways—perhaps more purely than language, limiting as it inherently is, would’ve allowed. The record is a musique concrete haunted house, found samples and hushed, pitched whispers lurking around every corner; it’s a work of theatre in its own right, immersive and all-encompassing. Liyou plays the intentionally childlike character “Babygirl” with Jake Muir as the titular predator “Mister Cobra,” his low voice echoing somewhere deep and sick in the gut whenever he cuts in. Throughout the record’s 12 tracks, Liyou dances and crawls and bleeds through pain and sex and trauma and transition and desire and shame and acceptance; fear and pleasure are crushed into a singularity of feeling that lodges in the throat. Selfhood is found in everything and nothing at all. I wish I could find the words to describe the record, but I can’t. You’ll simply have to listen to it—and, if Liyou’s show runs again, see it—for yourself. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Orange Milk]

Nine Inch Nails / Boys Noize: Nine Inch Noize

Nine Inch Noize, the new collab album from Nine Inch Nails and Boys Noize, is awesome. It’s industrial rock-meets-EDM-meets-techno-meets-post-punk-meets-electroclash. Or: a big, long hell yeah. The songs here aren’t “new.” Most of the tracklist consists of Nine Inch Nails songs reworked or re-recorded by the two artists, a cover of Soft Cell’s “Memorabilia,” and a cover of How to Destroy Angels’ “Parasite.” NIN and Boys Noize recorded most of the tape live in studios, planes, wherever they could fit. Their Coachella performance last week brought the collaboration officially to life, and Nine Inch Noize weds Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ recent raver scores with Boys Noize’s dense, trashy electronica. It’s a potent project, one that comes without throwaway. The new “Heresy” mix is especially dangerous. —Matt Mitchell [The Null Corporation]

Sean Solomon: The World Is Not Good Enough

Animator, musician, and onetime Moaning frontman Sean Solomon’s new solo record is a pared-back, contemplative look into the psyche of a gentle, wounded soul. “Life is chaos, love is pain,” he sings in the album’s opening line, a knowing weariness that infects the rest of the tracklist. Soft and slow, the melancholic 28-minute record is caught somewhere between a lullaby and an existential crisis. Despite its title, The World Is Not Good Enough carries with it a sweetness that supersedes the sad. Solomon reaches toward connection for a sense of humanity, even as he licks his perennial wounds. His voice, and his intentional, childlike minimalism, bear some resemblance to Daniel Johnston’s innocent croon; lines like “I still remember both good and bad / I will hold on to the love we had” and “It’s as hard to fail as it is to succeed” demonstrate his piercing honesty and measured murmur. The album is one to savor and fall into, pairing an existential philosophical bent with a quiet, desperate affection for humanity. Plus, the Busy, Busy Town tribute on the front cover is pretty neat. —Miranda Wollen [ANTI-]

Teen Suicide: Nude descending staircase headless

As someone who spent no small portion of high school blinking back tears in bathrooms to a soundtrack of “doing all the things i used to do with people, part 2 (acoustic),” I am always going to have a soft spot for Teen Suicide (which sounds awful out of context, I’m well aware). Nude descending staircase headless—titled after a David Berman poem, naturally—is the married duo’s first go at a full studio recording, and while my own nostalgia ensures that I will likely be partial to their earlier scrappy DIY records, it turns out that giving Sam and Kitty Ray an actual budget and a decent microphone doesn’t dilute their intensity one bit. Instead, it just matches the scale of the sound to the scale of the feeling. The album rips through thirteen tracks of post-rock, noise-pop, and ’90s-indebted fuzz without ever settling into one mode for long: “Anhedonia” opens on ambient quiet before bursting into a searing shoegaze-adjacent wall of sound, “Idiot” has a riff nasty enough to pit to; “Everything in my life is perfect” is all self-deprecation and lines like ““I was getting head outside a Denny’s”; “Spiders” lets Kitty shred on vocals; “Come and see the clown” lands the plane with a stripped-down acoustic. Sam nearly died from a lung condition a few years back; Kitty’s been fighting her own body too. Nude descending staircase headless doesn’t really talk about any of that, and it doesn’t have to. Music that feels this alive is its own answer. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Run For Cover]

Winston Hightower: 100 Acre Wood

I’m missing Columbus, Ohio, today. It’s been three-ish years since I lived there, and Winston Hightower’s 100 Acre Wood tape has me wishing I was at Used Kids picking up a copy (he’s playing a free show there next Friday, if you’re in the central Ohio area). Thank goodness one of my favorite labels, K Records (Sharp Pins, Touch Girl Apple Blossom, Slippers), scooped this guy up. 100 Acre Wood is a tremendous lo-fi release—14 songs that “give carefree camouflage to a wistful heart.” 33 RPMs rarely sound this charming, discordant, and goofy. It’s like Beat Happening covering early Modest Mouse for the Flubber soundtrack; I’m especially addicted to “Selfish Shooter,” “Poppi,” and “Help Is On The Way.” “High School” is so offkilter it gave me vertigo. And, there’s a melodica in “Lay Low,” which I really dig. These songs emphasize one thing: we need to make time for ourselves. But I hope Hightower won’t mind me giving a little bit of my time to 100 Acre Wood this weekend. —Matt Mitchell [K]

Yaya Bey: Fidelity

Billed as a counterpart to last year’s do it afraid, Fidelity confronts a different strain of grief than its predecessors. It’s metatextual in the sense that, rather than mourning any one specific person, Fidelity mourns the act of grief itself: the privilege of allowing yourself a private respite when you’re a musician in the public eye. This is a suite of R&B, jazz, and reggae tunes for Yaya Bey to wax poetic on our relatively short lives and the transient nature of this mortal coil. She frames that idea through love songs that you come to realize aren’t always directed at a particular paramour but at the fleeting moments shared with that person. Her vision comes together at its best on “Blue.” The bass and drums hold on to each other like slow dancers in a tight embrace, and Justine Lee Hopper’s flute, tranquil and trilling, needles its way through the pulse. But Bey’s mesmerizing voice is the element that rises above all else. “Say what you mean, mean what you say / It’s a new day,” she sings in her silky timbre. This is where Fidelity truly shines: when the band sits in the pocket, when the sundry sonic details unite themselves into a billowy blend, and when Bey’s voice emerges like a light in thick fog. Life is far too short, she tells us, to not lay it all out there. —Grant Sharples [drink sum wtr]

Yot Club: Simpleton

The third LP from Mississippi singer-songwriter Ryan Kaiser’s project Yot Club offers up a woozy, lo-fi record reminiscent of early decade bedroom-pop. On Simpleton, a DIY sensibility and sense of deep American malaise carry Kaiser’s dissociative alto forward on a wave of twinkly electric guitars. Thoughtful and focused, Kaiser dismantles the ideals of American society as he floats through an endless stream of modern mental clutter. Disarmingly sparse and deliciously angsty, the album sees Kaiser slump forward with the defeated sepia tone that late-capitalist suburbia imbues. “They told me I might have a few loose cords,” Kaiser sings “Serotonin,” a deceptively peppy lament, “But I just wanted to live in a different world.” Simpleton’s primary mood is one of being stuck, sinking resignedly into a reality that doesn’t suit you as what seemed to be other options fade into the background. “Everything is fake, but I don’t care,” Kaiser sighs on the album’s last track, “Uphill Road,” before a minute and a half of surf-rock guitars glides the LP onward to its finish; you’d rather not believe him, but he’s making some good points. —Miranda Wollen [amuse]