9 new albums to stream today

Paste is the place to kick off 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.

Diles que no me maten: Escrito en Agua

One of the best acts right now is an experimental, post-post-rock, pre-psych-jazz band in Mexico City. Diles que no me maten just shared their best album yet, the rapturous, affirmative Escrito en Agua. It’s a striking achievement, powered by “Viene el viento” and “La rata modesta,” songs souped up in sax/clarinet duets and bleary reverb. The music never drags, and “Tunuwame”’s droning then eruptive conclusion is a perfect end-cap to Escrito en Agua’s loose song-cycle arrangements. The songs have more pedal steel passages and less prog sequiturs, revealing an inventiveness even in repetition and improvisation. Not to be cliché, but this is music that really makes me think. I exit a Diles que no me maten album better than I entered it, thanks to the band’s, as a press release calls it, “scrappy mutability.” These song structures are tack-sharp, wonderfully unnerving, but never overworked. —Matt Mitchell [Moonlight Archives]

Fruit Bats: The Landfill

The idea behind morning pages is to write without inhibition to unburden the subconscious and unlock creativity. Some practitioners say you shouldn’t even re-read what you’ve written, nevermind edit it, though it seems likely that Eric D. Johnson doesn’t subscribe to that particular idea. Lyrics in the ten songs on The Landfill are polished enough to suggest that the singer has spent at least a little time shaping them—or maybe his thirty years of experience writing as Fruit Bats and, since 2019, as one-third of the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman (as well as stints in the Shins and Califone) means his stream of consciousness is supremely well-honed. Either way, The Landfill is a multi-layered, often melancholy affair as Johnson sorts through the comings and goings of life on the threshold of a milestone: the singer turned fifty this past week, which is a moment that lends itself to reflection. “Time heals all wounds is a thing they say,” he sings at the start of “All Wounds.” “But I haven’t always found it to be that way.” That truism tends to refer to emotional wounds, but Johnson has a broader definition in mind. In fact, the couplet summarizes the worldview of this album, which weighs psychic hurt alongside the tangible physical changes that humans have made on the landscape. —Eric R. Danton [Merge]

Horse Lords: Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!

In the kingdom of Horse Lords, “instrumental egalitarianism” is the rule of law. Their songs are constructed meticulously, each loop and fragment precisely situated and arranged, the whole band playing like a single unified organism. That’s always been the case, though. What’s new on Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! is the first-time inclusion of the human voice: Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor, vocals chopped and smeared until singing becomes just another tuned instrument in the collective, joined by guest bass clarinet and trombone. The album announces this new vocabulary immediately, opening with “Eureka 378-B,” a 56-second rendering of an actual Sacred Harp hymn—music by John P. Rees, 1859, words by Thomas Kelly, 1802—and the choice is a kind of thesis in its own right: shape-note singing is one of the oldest leaderless, communal musical traditions, congregations facing inward and tuning to each other rather than to a standard. From there, the band builds twelve pieces that read like a syllabus for a better world: “Before the Law” (a Kafka nod), “After the Last Sky” (an Edward Said nod), “A City Yet to Come,” two separate “Galactic Utopias,” all stitched together by a series of “Rotation” interludes in the lineage of Interventions‘ palate-cleansers. The eight-minute closing title track grows out of their 2025 collaboration with minimalist composer Arnold Dreyblatt, that project’s raw material refracted through FM synthesis into something hymn-like in its own right, saxophone and voice and a Kuwaiti mirwas drum circling a single shimmering idea. This isn’t patient, wait-your-turn utopianism but heaven as a demand, immediate and non-negotiable. Horse Lords have always made music about how things could be organized otherwise; here, for the first time, you can hear voices in the structure—and the structure sounds like it’s singing back. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Rvng Intl.]

Kelsey Lu: So Help Me God

Still, for all the self-serious stylings of So Help Me God’s experimental chamber folk, there’s an undeniable element of play beneath these songs, which reflects in Lu’s long list of collaborators: producers Jack Antonoff and Yves Rothman, former Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon, jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington, and British singer-songwriter Sampha. Album highlight “Reaper” is a spellbinding, trippy, nearly nine-minute odyssey through life’s mysteries. Lu delivers prophecies like a wandering beatnik musician (“You’re only sinnin’ if Heaven has lost its way / You’re only winnin’ if Heaven is on its way”) yet refuses any easy answers; before long, she drifts off (“Lifted I feel nothin’ now / Take two pills to feel it out”) as a woozy bed of Washington’s sax and Gordon’s guitar lulls us into an uneasy, slippery dreamworld. So Help Me God is eclectic to its core: there’s the way the album jumps around from genre to genre, from the drum‘n’bass breakbeats of “Only the Lonely” to the blazing, triumphant synth-pop ballad of “Cutting Off the Head of a Ghost”. Then there’s the chameleonic force of Lu’s voice, which can sound anywhere from soulful to spidery, husky to wheedling. On “What Can I Do,” gentle acoustic guitars patter in the background as Lu’s voice soars and warbles, tinged with a slight witchiness; you imagine them as a wizened recluse, rocking on their porch and guarding these secrets of the heart. And on “Better Than That,” only Lu can make the Gen Z-addled line “Taking the L on this one” sound so doleful and expansive. —Lydia Wei [Dirty Hit]

Olivia Rodrigo: you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love

As has become Olivia Rodrigo’s signature, her third album offers a series of remarkably intimate revelations, cloaked in orchestral arrangements and confronting, conversational lyrics. She leans into the cinematic on you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, highlighting a weepy violin on “honeybee” and a spectral organ on “purple.” The album leans into ‘80s-inspired sounds, obvious in the synth-heavy “maggots for brains” and her melodramatic duet with Robert Smith on “what’s wrong with me.” The inherent cheesiness of Rodrigo’s pouty subject matter hits with a refreshing sense of self-awareness. While her predilection for diaristic lyrics remains much the same—“I love you more than any stupid song could ever say,” she sighs on the appropriately titled “stupid song”—the instrumentals are more exploratory here, employing spangly guitars and distorted, breathy keyboards on “my way” and pointillistic robotic backings on “expectations.” Her vocals are far more interesting this time around, too; “purple” is layered with dissonance, “drop dead” with blunt song-speak. you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is Rodrigo’s sound all grown up. —Miranda Wollen [Geffen]

Ruth Garbus: Profound

I heard the first verse of Ruth Garbus’ “I Think I’m Ready Now” two months ago but won’t let go of me: “When I penetrated that man, I felt just like a dog / Getting fucked is the season of the world, my life springs forth / Into the jewel of creation, the arched back of the imagination.” That’s one hell of a greeting. The song is musically bare but threaded with perverted silver linings and interstellar chain reactions, as is all of her new LP Profound. “As relaxed as a woman can be when she’s filled with blood, my inner bitch was enterprising,” Garbus hums, in her Nico-meets-Newsom register. “And vain, and vain, and vain.” The guitars and pianos are braided until, in the song’s final corridor, their fanned-out, impish-jazz textures brighten toward a baroque changeover from Nick Bisceglia and Elie McAfee-Hahn, and Garbus’ voice thins out into a soothing falsetto. “I Think I’m Ready Now” is part-feral rebirth, part-midlife unmooring. Profound from beginning to end is haunting, nearly violent in its truth. —Matt Mitchell [Orindal]

Telescreens: Why the Lights Flicker

Easy though it would be to boil Telescreens down to their influences—the brawny, sinewy guitar sounds of The Strokes, the synth-infused punk of LCD Soundsystem—Why the Lights Flicker is the band’s most convincing argument yet in favor of being viewed as artists in their own right. Telescreens is at heart a live band, and the three albums they’ve released since their formation display an obsession with finding a way to extract the energy of their live performances into the recording studio. On Why the Lights Flicker, they succeed; a hum of kinetic, ephemeral energy pulses through this album, never dropping in intensity (impressive, considering the hefty run time).

Lead single “Nothing” is a swaggering, scrappy piece of alt-rock, demonstrating to great effect what Telescreens do best with a thrumming, addictive guitar riff that careers into a cathartic yell of a chorus. “Preacher,” similarly, shows their great skill for keeping things simple: the melody pulses and bops through your head without being basic, a synth line offering texture as it slips in and out. These are known quantities, though, and what makes Why the Lights Flicker good is when Telescreens start to get a little weird with it. Stand-out track “The Hill” is a 6.5-minute upward climb; opening with a piano part that wouldn’t sound out of place on a George Michael record, it chugs forward relentlessly, tugging in layers of instrumentation as it goes; a brief intermission halfway through precedes the next euphoric explosion of sound, a cacophony of harmony. It might have been recorded in a studio, but Why the Lights Flicker gives us the things that all the best live music does: a release, a journey, a chance to escape ourselves and become someone else, if only for a few minutes at a time. —Mariam Abdel-Razek [+1 Records]

Wiki: Ancient History

Everything in New York City feels heightened. After a brutal winter, the city’s finally climbing to its muggy, thunderous summer peak. It’s the first summer under Mayor Mamdani’s regime and we’re anxiously waiting to see if he’ll deliver on the promises that put him into office. The Knicks are in the finals for the first time since 1999 and the whole city’s rallying around them. Ancient History, the latest release from super-collaborator and Upper West Side wunderkind rapper Wiki, is the perfect soundtrack to New York City right now. The album’s first half drifts through metropolitan misadventures with the swagger and chaotic zen that comes with taking the city at its best and its worst. “But the hate gon’ make me take this city, make it mine,” he raps on “IHNY,” a microcosm of Ancient History’s encapsulation of how it feels to mourn this city as it disappears before your eyes—your favorite spots replaced by “bougie coffee shops”—and cling to the vestiges of it that still feel like yours. Rolling with each punch from producers like Lord Unknown and dj blackpower (aka MIKE), Wiki narrates vignettes about gentrification, loneliness, heartbreak, new love, and the idiosyncrasies of his own career trajectory (“You ain’t gotta know my name, still influential”) proving himself as complex and compelling as the city that raised him. —Grace Robins-Somerville [Wikset Enterprise]

YHWH Nailgun: Magazine

If you’ve heard anything about YHWH Nailgun’s sophomore record, you’ve probably heard that it’s eleven minutes long, bringing their entire discography to a whopping 48 minutes. But that’s not a provocation or schtick or troll (although it is at least a little funny); it’s a deliberate attempt to both strip back and hone in on what made their 2025 debut, 45 Pounds, so compelling. Gone are the rototoms, the heavily augmented vocals; in their place, Saguiv Rosenstock’s guitar winds aching and sharp through each song, and vocalist Zack Borzone’s minimalist fire-and-brimstone screeds against war take on a pulse of their own. It’s less an impulse towards concision than compression, not about making the songs shorter but making them denser, forcing the attention ever inwards.

How much weight can a forty-second track hold before it buckles? Enough to require you to sit with it numerous times to try to parse each movement, each glowing synth strike and guttural bark and cymbal clatter. Everything on Magazine feels intentional—there is, quite literally, not a second wasted. To obsess over the length itself is to miss the point: there’s more going on in a single track than some hour-long albums can say for their whole runtime. “Hips on a Wheel” uses groaning synths and hollow percussion to create a sonic equivalent of an abandoned hanger for Borzone’s howled “I’m a hangman, mama, but I love to breathe” to echo around in; “Stillness Blues” is anything but still, creaking to life beneath a danceable, tinny beat and stomach-churning guitar riffs; “Sewer Tree” starts stark and sparse, a tautness held in the breaths between downbeats, before erupting into something vast and unnameable. The album opens on a fade-in and ends on a fade-out, as if the music itself exists beyond the recording of it—we’re simply tuning in to and tuning out of a frequency that’s been there all along. It’s only eleven minutes, sure, but it feels eternal. —Casey Epstein-Gross [4AD]