Every quarter our writers and editors round up a list of overlooked recent releases that deserve some more attention. None of these albums were named Best New Music, and some weren’t reviewed on Pitchfork at all, but we think they’re all worth a listen. From moody Portuguese batida to sunny northern Ghanaian gospel music and sparkly UK garage-pop, here are some albums you’ll want to listen to.
(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.)
Allegra Krieger: I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane
The hushed songs on the New York singer-songwriter’s fourth album, I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane, close the distance between the spiritual and normal, dwelling on the power of a radiant sunset or seeing a loved one get lowered into the grave. Her voice has a habit of sneaking up on you; its lilt casts a solemn shadow over songs like “Carry Me Into Tomorrow” or “Terribly Free,” that delicate moodiness evoking Elliott Smith at his most tender. When a bow gently scratches against the strings of a violin on “Making Sense Of” or the hearty acoustic guitar strums on “I Wanted to Be,” Krieger invites you into the present with her, appreciating one fleeting moment at a time. –Nina Corcoran
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Alogte Oho and his Sounds of Joy: O Yinne!
The northern Ghanaian music that Alogte Oho Jones makes with his Sounds of Joy backup singers is known as Frafra gospel; it sounds less like American gospel than an intoxicatingly sunny confection of reggae and highlife, as seen on 2019’s Mam Yinne Wa, the troupe’s first internationally released album. Their follow-up O Yinne! remains devotional in spirit—“Yinne” means “God”—while honing their tirelessly upbeat blend of polyrhythmic grooves, call-and-response vocals, and punchy horns, adding synth and wah-wah alongside highlife guitar runs. No wonder Alogte Oho and His Sounds of Joy have been busy on the festival circuit. These songs feel like sweet relief, a reminder that music is a higher power too. –Marc Hogan
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Andrew Smiley / Kate Gentile: Flagrances
The Bandcamp genre tags for veteran guitarist Andrew Smiley and drummer Kate Gentile’s new album Flagrances include “experimental,” “free jazz,” and one that fans might not expect: “Midwest emo.” Though no one will mistake Flagrances for a Cap’n Jazz record, there are traces of the style in the melodic tangles of Smiley’s guitar playing, and in the jagged way he and Gentile sometimes ascend to the climax of a given piece. Both players are closely attuned to the timbre and physicality of their instruments and use unconventional techniques. The climaxes, when they arrive, rarely make themselves obvious in the manner of a basement-punk anthem; they may come instead via an exquisitely scraped cymbal, or the way a particular bent note jumps out from its surrounding chord. Flagrances is a free-improv record of uncommon emotional range, veering from breathtaking stillness to ferocious catharsis. –Andy Cush
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
BAMBII: INFINITY CLUB EP
Step into the licentious underworld of Bambii’s Infinity Club and find somersaulting breakbeats, delirious pitched-up vocals, and irresistible commands to keep the good times going. The Toronto producer’s debut EP is a carnival of dancehall, garage, and jungle, an homage to her Caribbean upbringing and years of all-nighters at the rave. “When I get twisted anything goes/Drunk and belligerents is in tow,” guest Lady Lykez asserts on “Wicked Gyal” over bass so wobbly that even those sticking to seltzer for the evening will lose their balance. While your local nightclub charges a door fee of $30, Infinity Club offers thrills that money can’t buy. –Cat Zhang
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Bendik Giske: Bendik Giske
The eponymous third album from the Norwegian experimental saxophonist is a song cycle of alien palpitations. The conservatory-trained musician throws out the book of traditional woodwind technique: Some notes are round and rubbery, creating the insistent rhythm of a paddleball. Others skronk like hungry seagulls. Collaborating with producer Beatrice Dillon, Giske expelled each song in one take, blasting out hypnotic patterns on tracks like “Rise and Fall,” and “Slipping.” Most of the time, the album is like a swelling wave that refuses to break. But on closer “End,” Giske summons metallic thrums that sound as if they are finally washing ashore. –Madison Bloom
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Dave / Central Cee: Split Decision EP
For one, the mischievously witty baller’s anthem “Sprinter” spent the summer as the longest-running rap song to top the UK charts. But Cench and Dave’s chemistry is explosive over four songs mostly produced by Dave himself, as they explore (and fret over) the spoils of their mutual come-up from much bleaker beginnings. They also celebrate, albeit fuckboyily—on “Our 25th Birthday,” the more tenor-voiced Cee raps, “That girl is a hoe, but I won’t judge cause I’m a slag as well.” But there’s a method to the misanthropy, a gloomy, compelling depth to their vivid roadman tales of poverty and unease. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
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DJ Danifox: Ansiedade
On his debut album, DJ Danifox offers a moodier, more reflective take on batida. Where much of the Afro-Portuguese style, as practiced by artists like DJ Marfox and Nídia, is a relentless flurry of strident frequencies and furious syncopations, Ansiedade is slow and contemplative, a spongy field of melancholy keys and soft, rounded drums. Despite the air of unease—the title translates as “anxiety”—it’s never maudlin or mopey; in fact, there’s a strange comfort to be found in his aquarium-bubble rhythms and anti-gravity bleeps. Batida is a relatively young sound, not even two decades old. But with a song like standout “Robert Johnson,” Danifox makes clear that he’s tapping into a mode of expression as old as the blues. –Philip Sherburne
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DJ Sosa RD: island boy with internet
On this EP, DJ Sosa RD enlists dembow’s resident freaks for the teteo of the century. Familiar samples from Haraca Kiko and Tokischa are contorted over twitchy templates of jungle and breakcore, the playful chaos amplified by fever-pitch riddims and jittery breakbeats. The Barcelona-based Dominican producer, who previously appeared on Colombian label TraTraTrax’s stellar 2022 compilation no pare, sigue sigue, thrillingly links these kindred styles, both street sounds born out of Black diasporic rebellion. Island boys with internet can rave too. –Isabelia Herrera
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Dustin Wong: Perpetual Morphosis
The latest LP from guitarist and electronics wiz Dustin Wong dares to ask: What strange worlds lie at the intersection of ECM and PC Music? On one hand, Perpetual Morphosis recalls when instrumentalist-composers like Steve Tibbetts and Jon Hassell began working with both the simplicity of folk music and the possibilities of sampling to suggest borderless, future-primitive utopias. On the other, much of its palette—uncanny ultra-hi-def digital sound design, snatches of Auto-Tuned vocals, software instruments that somehow sound realer and crisper than the real-life counterparts they are ostensibly emulating—brings to mind the 21st century’s preeminent art-pop pranksters. This isn’t a mere assemblage of references or academic exercise: Highlights like the title track and “Memory River - Future Composite” are seriously moving. –Andy Cush
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Fatboi Sharif / Steel Tipped Dove: Decay
True to its name, Decay—the joint album of New Jersey rapper Fatboi Sharif and New York producer Steel Tipped Dove—sounds like a world constantly falling apart. Some songs bubble like magma breaching the Earth’s surface (“Phantasm,” “The Christening”) while others lurch and stumble over jagged samples (“Ash Wednesday”). Sharif is at the center of it all, holding things together with mind-numbing wordplay: “Surround long grass deathbed over Lord Abundance/He lay passion behind the pine trees/Poisonous monsters,” he says, unfazed, on “Phantasm.” The lyrics are abstract, but Sharif delivers them with startling clarity while Dove’s beats press forward. –Dylan Green
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Fust: Genevieve
Fust know how to throw a punch. Led by North Carolina songwriter Aaron Dowdy and accompanied by local guests like Indigo De Souza and MJ Lenderman, the indie rock band gravitates toward slow builds and singalong choruses, chiming pedal steel and driving rhythms. Those qualities help make their second album, Genevieve, one of the most fun rock records of the year, but Dowdy’s lyrics help make it one of the most rewarding, too. As a writer, he is thoughtful and casual, detail-driven and refined, spinning little turns of phrases into fully fleshed-out scenes. To clock the ghostly details that connect the disparate vignettes of “Violent Jubilee,” or how those two words in the title finally conjoin by the time of its climactic closing verse, it might take a couple dozen listens. Fust have the confidence and chops to get you to those play counts—and beyond. –Sam Sodomsky
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Gia Margaret: Romantic Piano
Instrumental albums are often lauded for their ability to function as background music, pretty and soothing enough to pose no real distraction. Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano winks at this typecasting while challenging you to listen closer. Looping acoustic guitar, warm saxophone, muffled drums, and various field recordings come and go like characters encountered on side quests, with Margaret’s piano leading the pack on a spontaneous journey. It gives the effect of memories being unearthed and reminisced on, before fading away again. –Jaeden Pinder
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Gorgeous: Sapsucker
The second album from the Brooklyn duo opens with Judd Anderman’s breakneck drums battling Dana Lippmann’s shrill guitar drone as Lippmann coolly sings throughout: “You’re my sweet tooth.” They pick up where “Sweet” left off on the album’s squalling finale, aptly titled “Tooth.” But in between it’s exquisitely bent noise pop, herky-jerk clatter, and scree in the mold of artists from Deerhoof and No Age to Guerilla Toss and Wendy Eisenberg. One stately exception is slow-mo smolderer “Keep It Steady,” which could be Gorgeous’ “Maps.” Better than a dentist’s X-ray, Sapsucker embodies the sugar and the damage done. –Marc Hogan
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Hardrock: 1Of1
If there were an annual award for Young Thug pupil of the year, Hardrock would be a finalist. On his recent mixtape 1of1, the Atlanta rapper twists and stretches out his nasally melodies in so many different ways it’s hard to keep track. The BNYX® and F1lthy-produced “WA\VE” is like Beautiful Thugger Girls gone rage, with blown-out 808s laid over the acoustic riff and Hardrock damn-near scatting his way through the track. “Kickdoors” is full of extremely hummable flow switches; “Range/Era” pushes his wails to the brink, sounding as though he’s got a hair in his throat. Admittedly, Hardrock is not saying much. He’s all style, lacking some of Thug’s emotionality. But that style is so compelling that it’s hard not to give in. –Alphonse Pierre
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Jonny Nash: Point of Entry
British-born, Amsterdam-based musician Jonny Nash has been making contemplative ambient music for a decade, both on his own and alongside similarly soft-spoken collaborators Suzanne Kraft and Gigi Masin. But his sixth solo album marks a notable shift, swapping out airy synths and elegant piano for silvery strands of guitar, accompanied in places by Joseph Shabason’s saxophone. The influence of Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly looms large over Nash’s gentle plucking and muted singing, and there’s a hint of cosmic pioneer Manuel Göttsching’s psychedelia in the minimalist cycles of a track like “Ditto.” But these songs are not so much referential as reverential: meditative daybreak etudes capable of conveying the feeling that all is right in the world. These days, that’s a rare thing. –Philip Sherburne
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JSPORT: Out of Bounds
On their first release, JSPORT, the co-founder of Atlanta's queer dance party-turned-artist collective Club Morph, sets down their neon subwoofer across the global south, fusing bass pulse with deep syncopation and reverence for the 2 a.m. night sweats. New to producing but visionary from the jump, they craft new perspectives on what is, theoretically, an EP of drum sketches, feteing diasporic rhythms on the soca throb of “Gully Bop,” the laser-house reverie “Zenon,” and the ghostly battle track “Capoeira Drum.” It’s a celebration of underground dancefloors and everything that thrives in the margins. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
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Juan Wauters: Wandering Rebel
The newest entry in songwriter Juan Waters’ singing travelogs of the Americas is a self-consciously offbeat folk album with the homey atmosphere of a dollar-bin treasure. “It took a long, long, long, long, long time/For me to sing to you this freely,” Wauters says, not believing in fourth walls. Wandering Rebel’s songs are freeform journeys—through the ritzy part of Los Angeles, the gray skies of depression, or the successive seasons of a long-term relationship—that converge to weigh the value of art against the sacrifices we make to create it. –Anna Gaca
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Keke Palmer: Big Boss
Keke Palmer’s sweetly demanding Virgo energy is on full display on her visual album, Big Boss, which plays like a curt dating primer for zoomers. The project combines mid-tempo trap production and spunky R&B melodies with pretenseless songwriting about setting boundaries in relationships (“Can’t get sidetracked with broken promises,” etc.). There’s a frivolous, internet-savvy glaze that feels too fleeting on tracks like “FR FR” and “Love Language," but it’s really the Keke of it all that makes it work. At best, this is Palmer adding her two cents to the canon of unbreakable ground rules for how women in R&B want to be treated. –Clover Hope
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Margaret Glaspy: Echo the Diamond
After turning toward synth arrangements on 2020’s Devotion, Margaret Glaspy picked up her guitar again for Echo the Diamond. Assisted by drummer Dave King and bassist Chris Morrissey, Glaspy skates between open-season shredding and tasteful balladeering. “Act Natural” captures all of her charms: illustrative writing, melodies that stick in the brain, and brisk electric guitar. As Glaspy contemplates grief (“Memories”) and rebukes sexist expectations (“Female Brain”), she hits a sweet spot between reflection and restlessness. –Allison Hussey
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Mary Jane Dunphe: Stage of Love
Musician, dancer, and poet Mary Jane Dunphe is a true underground legend. Formerly the vocalist of Vexx—among the most beloved punk bands of the past decade—she also brought an ecstatic physicality to the synth-pop project CCFX, as if longing were not a feeling but an action. The title track of her solo debut explores the Lacanian adage that “Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it,” and the emotional stakes of her vivid, visceral new wave grow more intense from there. That the album is out via Pop Wig, the label run by Turnstile and Angel Du$t, only underscores its allure. –Jenn Pelly
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Neggy Gemmy: CBD Reiki Moonbeam
Shop til you drop at the legal weed mall while you listen to CBD Reiki Moonbeam, a woozy electro-pop beat tape soaked in tunnel-vision reverb and leaking glitter gel pen. Besides sounding like it studied with Grimes after school to pass Pop 2, Neggy Gemmy’s album calls up its own slackerdelic vision of the Los Angeles low life, where we might escape a paparazzi chase (“Take a Picture”) and immediately get stuck in traffic (“Beep Beep”). Call it 5G bubblegum because the waves are gonna go right through you. –Anna Gaca
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Nikki Nair / Hudson Mohawke: Set the Roof EP
Glasgow native Hudson Mohawke tapped Atlanta’s Nikki Nair for the explosive, six-song Set the Roof EP, which mashes breakbeats, sizzling house, and pitched-up hip-hop. The two producers enlisted sole vocalist Tayla Parx for the title track, which thumps along to trap hi-hats and what sounds like a toy xylophone. “Demuro” kicks into a loop of revved-up disco, crammed with auto-tuned chirps that sound squeezed from chipmunks, while “Wait a Minute” pulses to warped keys and a sample of Tek Soldierz’s 2005 banger “Work This.” Play on repeat for an extended flashback. –Madison Bloom
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Taichu: Rawr
On her debut album, Taichu channels the liberating insolence of 2010s party-pop—smeared eyeliner and clear lip gloss in tow, of course. “NOCHE DE SATEO” is the equivalent of a Tilt-A-Whirl, with careening synths pulled directly from the playbook of LMFAO. The album swerves between neoperreo, Jersey club, and EDM, collecting the detritus of the internet’s favorite microgenres over the last 20 years. “PAYDAY,” a collaboration with Spanish producer-singer rusowksy, is punctuated by not one but three breakdowns, practically begging you to grind on the nearest surface available. By the time its chopped-and-screwed outro arrives, you’ll feel immortal. –Isabelia Herrera
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Yunè Pinku: Babylon IX EP
In an interview with NME last year, Yunè Pinku professed a childhood hatred for electronic music. None of that former distaste is present, however, on her latest EP Babylon IX, a taut yet delicate collection of garage-informed electro-pop. The 20-year-old Malaysian-Irish producer creates swirls of electrified air as she channels club-floor intimacy, outfitting your brain with a new lining of flashing LEDs. –Peyton Toups
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
