In a year of conspicuous, big-budget samples and career-spanning concert extravaganzas, pop music kept pulling us back to the past. But we also got some glimpses into a fresher future, whether in the opulent anthems of Amaarae; the revenge classics of SZA; the yearning, mutant electronica of Fever Ray and Ralphie Choo; the cerebral siren songs of Caroline Polachek; and the slinky, chilled-out club-pop of Kelela and Memphis LK. Below, find some of the best pop releases of 2023.
Note: This list includes songs and albums released in December 2022. Anything that came out after we published our Best of 2022 list was eligible.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2023 wrap-up coverage here.
(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.)
100 gecs: 10,000 gecs
In confusing times, you have to live a little—order the Taco Bell, scream at the slasher movie, shed the skin of your former stuffy self. Ergo 100 gecs, who tore down the half-ironic “so bad it’s good” framework and rebuilt it into “so dumb it’s smart” post-irony. The duo’s major label debut lashes together computer-generated grunge riffs, 16-bit bleep-boops, frog sounds (!?), nonsense koans, and walloping percussion, and then stuffs it all into a malfunctioning sound system turned up to 27. 10,000 gecs is exhilarating anti-taste music, produced by two brain cells colliding into each other over and over until sparks fly. If a Victorian child survived listening to “Dumbest Girl Alive” over good headphones, he’d emerge fully conditioned for our dissonant, destructive, and stitched-together 21st century. –Jeremy Gordon
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Amaarae: Fountain Baby
Has getting money and bitches ever sounded as effortless or lush as it does on Fountain Baby? Amaarae’s second album makes a life of Henny-soaked hedonism and thotty trysts feel like a regular Tuesday. The singer alchemizes her Atlanta and Accra upbringing, melding Clipse samples, Japanese kotos, Afropop bliss, and bratty punk, binding it all together with her breathy, helium-high soprano. Fountain Baby obliterates any superficial understanding of what African—or pop—music is supposed to sound like. Queer bad girls of the diaspora will be gloating about sharing “matching titties” with their boos for years to come. –Isabelia Herrera
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Asake: “Amapiano” [ft. Olamide]
Underpinning Asake’s freewheeling cool is an epic striving for greatness. “Amapiano” is a concentrated blast of the Nigerian artist at his most charismatic and braggadocious, both a salute to the titular South African genre and his own swaggering stamp on it. Between trading boasts with rapper Olamide, Asake builds out the track’s skeletal house pulse and snaking log drum bass with sauntering Afrobeat melodies and a rousing chorus. In his attention to detail and sense of purpose, Asake elevates the song’s everyday hedonism into a hard-partying hero’s quest. –Harry Tafoya
Listen: Asake, “Amapiano” [ft. Olamide]
Avalon Emerson: & the Charm
All aboard the Avalon Express for a serene, 40-minute dream-pop voyage that stirs up faint memories against the backdrop of a glowing pink horizon. For her debut album, the techno whiz turns into a dance-pop singer-songwriter, delivering downy reveries that float on as her mind drifts back to California, old friends, and ice baths in Oslo. Her vocals are cool as lake water, the production light like a spring breeze. No matter what direction she takes next, you’ll trust her navigation. –Cat Zhang
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Carly Rae Jepsen: “Psychedelic Switch”
You’d be forgiven if you thought Daft Punk reunited to produce “Psychedelic Switch,” the latest in Carly Rae Jepsen's growing collection of A-side-worthy B-sides. With synths strobing like Rainbow Road (or, you know, “One More Time”), Jepsen rides a euphoric ’70s bassline all the way to French-touch nirvana. As ever, the Canadian pop star is relatively coy about her desires, but it’s still charming to hear her “puttin’ on the ritz,” as she frames it, in 2023. You get the sense that even if her proverbial switch flips back off, this fleeting crush was worth the high. –Peyton Toups
Listen: Carly Rae Jepsen, “Psychedelic Switch”
Caroline Polachek: Desire, I Want to Turn Into You
Released on Valentine’s Day, Caroline Polachek’s second solo album drags a key through the Hallmark holiday polish and imagines a version of love altogether more carnal and consuming: desire as irrepressible as a volcano, improbable as a flower in winter, binding as a new tattoo. This is fertile emotional terrain, yielding music that feels bountiful and ungoverned. Polachek opens the album with an operatic caterwaul and fills it with wordless, intuitive melody and expressionistic images, her appetite for sounds and textures vast enough to metabolize breakbeats, bagpipes, 1960s Italian pop, and a dulcet children’s choir. Desire, I Want to Turn Into You is an album to get comfortably lost in, knowing there will always be some familiar motif that pops up to reorient you. It’s Caroline’s island, and we’re just walking circles around its wild and wonderful perimeter. –Olivia Horn
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Chappell Roan: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
Chappell Roan isn’t interested in playing a flawless pageant queen: On her debut, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, the messy, uproarious pop starlet finds salvation at a strip club, wishes death on a shitty ex, and makes out while “the world collapses.” Like any recovering theater kid, she dials the drama to 11, leaning into spritely cheerleader chants, line dance ad-libs, and vaudeville-inspired visuals. Between the scathing ballads and Robyn-esque bangers, Roan will convince you to relish those bad decisions. –Jaeden Pinder
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Charli XCX: “Speed Drive”
“Speed Drive” flips Toni Basil’s pining cheerleader relic “Hey Mickey” on its head: Charli XCX wouldn’t dream of begging for a boy’s attention—this passenger princess only has eyes for the girl in the driver’s seat. Her bubblegum Barbie cut, which also samples Robyn’s “Cobrastyle,” is as light and fizzy as pink champagne as it celebrates young women’s vanity and intellect. (Charli shouts out both model Devon Lee Carlson and Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire on the song.) It’s the greatest celebration of love and friendship between thrill-seeking female motorists since Thelma & Louise. –Peyton Thomas
Listen: Charli XCX, “Speed Drive”
Christine and the Queens: “To be honest”
On “To be honest,” Christine and the Queens scales a mountain of self-actualization, shedding earthly anxieties—heartbreak, gender dysphoria—as he ascends toward the pearly gates of enlightenment. Uplifted by swirling synths and angelic coos, he heralds a Franglais party in the clouds where vulnerabilities can be belted out and no shadow self goes without a toast. Lofty as it all sounds, “To be honest” is Chris’ easiest-to-love song in years; at its beatific apex, it practically glows from within. –Owen Myers
Listen: Christine and the Queens, “To be honest”
easyFun: ELECTRIC / ACOUSTIC EP
As PC Music prepared to close its books, longtime label affiliate and Charli XCX collaborator easyFun (aka Finn Keane) released this stereo pair of solo EPs showcasing his exuberantly overlapping takes on dance-pop, EDM, and pop-punk. His playfully outsized tracks indulge googly-eyed humor in full knowledge that it’s all been done before: The respective EPs open with electric and acoustic versions of music-production anthem “Audio” (“All I Ever Got”), but only the ACOUSTIC version sounds suspiciously like it’s about to play you “Wonderwall” (lol). –Anna Gaca
ELECTRIC EP: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
ACOUSTIC EP: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Fever Ray: Radical Romantics
Trace the path of Karin Dreijer’s glinting scalpel as they dissect the many mutations of love. On Radical Romantics, the Swedish pop provocateur’s third album as Fever Ray, Dreijer digs around in the viscera of relationships, whether they be sexual, estranged, or familial. The thrust and surrender of Dreijer’s voice on “Shiver” mimics the thrill of desire as a squirming synth phrase boomerangs around them. Their silvery whisper on “New Utensils” gives a primal instruction: “Pull up a skirt/Grind the beasts.” On the menacing “Even It Out,” Dreijer takes a PTA meeting into their own hands, threatening a boy who once tormented their kid in school. Like the muck of emotions, these different strains of devotion are liable to bleed into each other without warning—sharp electronics stab into a trembling vocal, brutal lyrics spur a slick pop hook.
Dreijer—along with a cadre of co-producers including their brother Olof, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and batida beatmaker Nídia—injects Radical Romantics with textures that are as sticky as sex, and as crackly as stockings snagging on dry skin. Their register bounds between ecstatic highs and a subterranean timbre, with their most sumptuous delivery slinking through “Kandy.” The song deals with lust in its slumbering state: “Can you bring me back?” Dreijer sings, their voice coated in a downy, fungal film. Their attention to detail feels both clinical and human, as if Dreijer has discovered the exact vibrational frequency of a forlorn voice, and decided to paint it rather than punch in the formula. –Madison Bloom
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Jessie Ware: That! Feels Good!
The exclamation marks punctuating That! Feels Good! telegraph its spirit with lightning precision: Jessie Ware’s fifth album offers an enthusiastic celebration of pleasure. Deliberately avoiding the glassy surfaces that coated her previous work, Ware and producers James Ford and Stuart Price opt for an unabashed revival of the glory days of disco, eschewing electronic pulses for full-bodied arrangements that skew close to Chic’s classic thump. Although Ware sometimes sings with an obvious smirk—the litany of double entendres on “Shake the Bottle” flirts with camp—That! Feels Good! is the furthest thing from ironic pastiche. Its bright, bustling hedonism lives by the words Ware sings on “Free Yourself”: “If it feels so good, then don’t you stop.” –Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Kali Uchis: Red Moon in Venus
A little over a decade since getting her start with a DIY trip-hop tape, Kali Uchis has blossomed into a consummate Latin torch diva. Red Moon in Venus, the Colombian-American singer’s third album of sultry, bad-bitch anthems and emotive reflections on growth, sees her vamp, whistle-tone, and murmur sour-sweet nothings into a lover’s ear. This bilingual, slow-burning ode to self-empowerment offers a guide to healing a broken heart while staying pretty, perfumed, and a little petty. Uchis isn’t afraid to be cocky about it, either: Musing on her ex’s new boo, she sing-raps, “At the end of the day, she’d eat my pussy if I let her.” –E.R. Pulgar
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Kelela: Raven
Raven is an uneasy sound bath of an album where soothing, ambient club tunes mask bitter realizations that standing in your truth is often lonely and destabilizing. But Kelela doesn’t wallow in despair. It’s an open invitation to everyone who seeks refuge in the bumping bass and kinetic energy of grinding bodies, who are reeling from implosive friendship breakups and dodging calls from parents back home: Take off your shoes, hang up your coat, and vibe. –Heven Haile
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Kylie Minogue: “Padam Padam”
“We don’t need to use our words,” Kylie Minogue reminds us near the end of “Padam Padam.” The Australian pop lifer has long been an expert at the non- or barely-verbal: the la la la of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” the yeah yeah yeah of “All the Lovers.” And she just knew this heartless year called for more hearty onomatopoeia. Pumped up by producer Lostboy’s thumping bass and engorged whooshes, Kylie didn’t just give the gays and girlies a new pop standard, she gave us a secret code. We hear it and we know. Padam. –Jesse Dorris
Listen: Kylie Minogue, “Padam Padam”
Lana Del Rey: Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
Lana Del Rey’s ninth album pulls the listener close, as the 38-year-old singer-songwriter works through what it means to grow old and who’s going to help her get there. These big questions are presented nakedly and dramatically on songs like “A&W,” a winding metaphor about becoming more of a product than a person, both valuable and disposable. Her openness is particularly affecting on “Sweet,” when she stretches her voice high to ponder the mysteries of romance, on “Kintsugi,” which basks in the glow of familial love, and on “Margaret,” when she practically smiles through the microphone as she concocts a fake date for her producer and friend Jack Antonoff’s wedding. At the album’s core is a longing to be remembered—even if there’s no true meaning to who we are or what we do, she suggests, at least we can hope to live on in someone’s heart. –Matthew Strauss
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Liv.e: Girl in the Half Pearl
Liv.e’s second album roils with muscular, avant-garde R&B. There are the drum loops—clipped, frenetic, bouncing from wall to wall like supercharged particles. The synths—bubbling and chromatic, kinetic like ocean waves. The vocals—sometimes screaming, sometimes honeyed, always delivered with maximum urgency. Because this is music about love that hurts. “Ghost” is about staying up all night, alone with your thoughts. “Wild Animals” is a fuck you that places a smoky jazz piano next to a chaise longue. “I never got to tell you just how I feel,” she sings. She’s almost laughing. Bet you can guess what happens next. –Sophie Kemp
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
María José Llergo: ULTRABELLEZA
ULTRABELLEZA, María José Llergo’s debut full-length, is a stunning document of her emergence, gilded with muted palmas, fluttering flamenco melismas, and the soft clacking of castanets. Contrary to dominant assumptions about flamenco in U.S. media, the folk genre bloomed from struggle; the stories the Andalusian artist tells in her songs speak to the hardships that Romani women have historically faced in Spain. On “LUCHA,” she sings of patriarchal oppression; on “SUPERPODER,” it’s childhood poverty. She is an heir to ancestral pain, but never bound to it: The centerpiece “VISIÓN Y REFLEJO” is an avowal of power, an acknowledgement that she contains the history of all the women who “survived wars they never chose to fight.” This is music for transformation, for moments of becoming. –Isabelia Herrera
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Memphis LK: Too Much Fun EP
Australian producer Memphis LK specializes in the type of portable, light-touch club-pop that you can take into any situation, from the afterparty to your bleary-eyed morning commute. Like the music of PinkPantheress, NewJeans, and Yunè Pinku, her Too Much Fun EP is so stylish and effortlessly sweet that you’ll barely notice the current of disaffection running underneath. On highlight “Coffee,” a late-night confession spells the demise of a friendship: “Hate to watch a maybe drift into a no,” LK sings, exposing the too-relatable anxieties of twenty-somethings set adrift. –Cat Zhang
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
ML Buch: Suntub
ML Buch’s curious, ethereal songs envision ordinary humans pressed between nature and technology, sacrificing parts of ourselves to each. They are slippery and mutable as AI art renderings, full of shadow-dappled scenes from private experimental films and lyrics about listening to nature and seeing through skin. “Here we go, with our temporary bodies,” the Copenhagen producer, guitarist, and singer observes in “Flames shards goo,” imagining a world in which the certitude of the classical elements gives way to the ambiguity of emoji, data, and play slime. –Anna Gaca
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Mura Masa: “Whenever I Want”
2023 was a banner year for Mura Masa: Not only was the Guernsey, UK producer behind PinkPantheress and Ice Spice’s blockbuster hit “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2,” he also collaborated on stellar under-the-radar selections like Ralphie Choo’s industrial-tinged cumbia and yeule’s grungy alt-pop. But it was his gleeful, clattering solo single “Whenever I Want” that supplied the most elastic delights. Expanding on a chopped-up vocal sample from Outsidaz’s “Macosa” (“I’m allowed to fuck up whenever I want”) with fizzy ’90s synths, claps, and an eye-dilating Jersey club beat, it casts a funhouse mirror vision of a reckless night out: disorienting and deliriously fun at once. –Eric Torres
Listen: Mura Masa, “Whenever I Want”
NewJeans: “Super Shy”
Zero-to-hero anthem “Super Shy” is the daydream wafting through the mind of an overlooked heroine while she eyes the most popular boy in school. Minji, Hanni, Danielle, Haerin, and Hyein exude quiet confidence as they plot to catch a cutie by surprise. Built around a riff on the Powerpuff Girls theme and a bass drum like a hiccuping heartbeat, the song was co-written by Erika de Casier, who expertly guides the group towards a soft, sensitive take on drum’n’bass. Embedded in its message of demure power is a sliver of meta-commentary on NewJeans’ approach: More sonically understated than many of their K-pop contemporaries, they have quickly become chart titans nonetheless. “You don’t even know my name, do you?” the girls ask impishly on the hook. The “but you will” is implied. –Olivia Horn
Listen: NewJeans, “Super Shy”
Nourished by Time: Erotic Probiotic 2
If it’s true that a musician spends their whole life making their debut album, you might wonder just how many lives Marcus Brown has lived. Written, recorded, and produced alone during the pandemic in his parents’ basement in Baltimore, Erotic Probiotic 2 heats up decades of music and lets it cool into something almost incredulously new. Its anti-heartbreak, pro-labor, loosely spiritual jams are made for the softest, loungiest club or doing the wavy-arm dance on your couch. Quad City DJs, Arthur Russell, and SWV are some touchpoints, but so is Prince, whose fastidious attention to detail and auteurist approach to R&B are Brown’s specialties.
What jumps out first is his yawny baritone, full of phonetic anomalies, as if his words go through a wormhole somewhere between the back and front of his mouth. But his detailed arrangements and songwriting chops soon begin to glow, revealing a DIY pop star who turns every limitation into an asset. Brown is both careful and wild with his words: He’s been a cat, he’s been a dog, he’s the dot-connector, he’s the spot-corrector, he’s prayed to Jesus once or twice but “never heard a word back in plain English.” He’s a leading voice in the Life Sucks But It’s Chill school of philosophy. “I don’t have much money but I, I do what I want with my time,” he sings on “The Fields.” It’s an undercover mission statement, delivered with the casual confidence of someone serenading themselves in the bathroom mirror. –Jeremy D. Larson
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
Olivia Rodrigo: GUTS
Boys suck. Modern society’s expectations of young women suck harder. So what do you do when you’re a 20-year-old girl navigating romantic disappointment and the perilous transition to adulthood while making one of the most anticipated sophomore albums of the decade? Rock the fuck out. On GUTS, Olivia Rodrigo teaches an AP course in Angry Girl Music of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries, consulting a syllabus of foremothers from Courtney Love to Kesha on insouciant hot-mess anthems and somber ballads that explode into musical-theater showstoppers. Everyone from the Zoomers on TikTok to the Boomers at the Rock Hall is eagerly lining up to enroll. –Amy Phillips
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
PinkPantheress / Ice Spice: “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2”
The boy in question was never the point. On this star-making TikTok megahit—a bubbly fusion of Jersey Club and the sounds of Super Nintendo—Gen Z’s most beloved pop/rap princesses don’t actually seem to care that much about some dude’s mendacity: PinkPantheress assesses her situationship in a sing-songy chirp, while Ice Spice raps well-argued rhetoric about a bro’s sad two-timing, making it very clear that she knows he's not worth her time. What "Boy's a liar Pt. 2" is really about is how much fun it is to bitch with your friends. In the video, the sparkling duo and their pink-clad posse own the streets and subways of New York, a vision of baddies in need of nothing but each other, turning a track about a trifling boy into the ultimate declaration of girl friendship. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Listen: PinkPantheress / Ice Spice, “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2”
Ralphie Choo: Supernova
On the cover of Supernova, Ralphie Choo grins mischievously in a fur ushanka, the portrait’s unseriousness at odds with the fact that Madrid’s golden boy did not come to play. His debut is a whirlwind of flamenco, jungle, trap, and dembow with distorted beat changes and delicate humanity. Refining techniques from Frank Ocean and Rosalía, these glitchy, Auto-Tuned songs are suffused with yearning; whether Ralphie pines for love or an ass that won’t quit is beside the point. Supernova is an unclassifiable Spanish pop record from—and for—the future. –E.R. Pulgar
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Sampha: “Spirit 2.0”
The lead single from Sampha’s follow-up to 2017’s Process, “Spirit 2.0” is an airy journey toward enlightenment in which the singer finds transcendence in himself and his community. Starting with piano chords and arpeggiating Moog synths, the song swells into something luxurious but still light on its feet, as Sampha begins to effortlessly float over nimble percussion and sweeping strings. Switching flows and drawing out lines about “drifting into open skies,” he sounds freer than ever before. –Hannah Jocelyn
Listen: Sampha, “Spirit 2.0”
SZA: SOS
SOS is an indulgence of the masochistic instinct to rage and break shit and deal with the consequences later. We all know this person: They’re unbearably funny and hot, with eviscerating comebacks for days; they’re good at trashing their ain’t-shit ex and quick to tell off a jealous opp; they’re amazing at articulating their mistakes but terrible at taking their own advice. They’re at the center of their own three-act-play. SZA embodies this person on SOS, dissecting love with the analytical and theoretical obsession of an astrology fanatic. It’s an approach to heartbreak that is so familiar and exacting that the album stayed at the top of the Billboard 200 album chart for ten weeks.
In the seven years since her debut album, SZA’s ability to wrangle self-destruction in her songwriting has grown to darker, pettier heights—even better, she’s decided to outright reject the idea that maturity is a prerequisite for growth. When the emotions inside you are at war, it’s more satisfying to taunt, kick, and sabotage yourself on the path to healing than to process your feelings under a life coach’s glare. Here she’s unsparing in her approach to self-soothing, and after being pushed by horrible exes, enemies, and public scrutiny, hasn’t she earned the right to exact vengeance? This is her vigilante era, and she’ll nonchalantly draw up a detailed game plan for murder and convince you to be an accomplice. She knows her fans have felt that same madness inside once or twice before.
SZA’s freewheeling spirit shines on SOS because of how easily her vocals flit, dip, and traverse through disparate genres and forms of songwriting. She proves that not only can she do whatever the fuck she wants, but she can do it better than most of her contemporaries. Make a pop punk song? How about a spare indie duet? Okay, sure—go off, we love it. Lyrically, she’s relentless and perfectly chill, treating flexing as a bloodsport and great sex as a necessary distraction from reality: “Stick it in ‘fore the memories get to kickin’ in,” she teases despairingly on “Nobody Gets Me.” SOS matches the range of its dynamic star, the kind of album where the aching reverb of a song about losing herself in a rocky relationship (“Gone Girl”) rolls seamlessly into the steely bars of an armored response to heartbreak (“Smoking on My Ex Pack”), before SZA ultimately resolves that maybe she’s her own worst enemy.
But the other side of heartbreak is the desperation to be loved; the need to chase a high so great, it might ruin you in its pursuit. The real hope is to find a moment of clarity about who you could be with someone else, without them, or in spite of them; the realization that something powerful remains after all the fear, anger, and resentment has been pushed aside. SOS reminds us that the journey of self-acknowledgement is beautiful and devastating at once. –Clover Hope
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Tinashe: “Needs”
Sometimes, you just need dick. Tinashe doesn’t play coy about what she wants from a man on “Needs,” the no-frills, sex-positive standout from this year’s BB/ANG3L EP. Especially when coupled with a dynamic video full of freewheeling grocery-store choreography, the alt-R&B artist’s confidence in collecting simps is infectious. Reinforcing the idea that everyone has a reason to get some, “Needs” is ready to turn any Hinge-prone loner into a gleeful one-night stand. –Peyton Toups
Listen: Tinashe, “Needs”
Troye Sivan: Something to Give Each Other
Inspired by a revelatory period of being single, Troye Sivan re-establishes himself as an unapologetic hedonist and lover boy on his exemplary third album, Something to Give Each Other. He celebrates poppers-fueled nights out with raucous football chants and populist synth grooves; long-distance pining sounds like a nostalgic indie-folk sample. Something stands out for its radio-ready melodies and refreshingly honest embrace of queer eroticism: It’s joyous and melancholy with all the messy, sweaty emotions in between. –Peyton Toups
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Victoria Monét: “On My Mama”
The centerpiece of an album that’s equally plush and splashy, “On My Mama” is a ritzy “feeling myself” moment decked in showy horns and a stalking bass that unfurls like a red carpet. Singing confidently over a retro Chalie Boy rap sample that’s like a cool uncle playing hype man, R&B virtuoso Victoria Monét has fun luxuriating in her own sex appeal, shit-talking and whispering sweet affirmations to herself. All she wants is a good time—and the “permanent ecstasy” she deserves. –Clover Hope
Listen: Victoria Monét, “On My Mama”
Yunè Pinku: Babylon IX EP
South London’s Yunè Pinku is a pop-minded producer who doesn’t blush at mixing a megahit like “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” into the DJ set. Her second EP, Babylon IX, is a suite of luminous, sure-footed synth-pop that alternates club thump with bittersweet rumination. Switch on “Night Light,” a sparkling little tune that dreams of transcending death as easily as a candelabra bulb vanquishes monsters under the bed: “It’s fake to die/We’re all still alive.” –Anna Gaca
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
