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 releases available on streaming services. This week’s batch includes new albums from SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, Damon Locks and Black Monument Ensemble, BROCKHAMPTON, Matthew E. White and Lonnie Holley, Yaya Bey, Yshinori Hayashi, and the Vijay Iyer Trio. 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.)
Spirit of the Beehive: Entertainment, Death [Saddle Creek]
Spirit of the Beehive’s Entertainment, Death is their fourth LP and their first for Saddle Creek. It’s also the first record that the band recorded and produced themselves. “Spirit of the Beehive’s surreal lyrics reflect the kind of malaise that’s superabundant in the writing of Kmart realists: visceral, hallucinatory vignettes that evoke an entire landscape of feeling in very few words,” Pitchfork’s Sophie Kemp writes. Read the rest of the Best New Music review here.
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Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
Damon Locks – Black Monument Ensemble: NOW [International Anthem]
NOW is the second album from interdisciplinary artist Damon Locks and his Chicago-based Black Monument Ensemble, a lineup that here includes clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid and multi-instrumentalist Ben LaMar Gay. Like its 2019 predecessor, Where Future Unfolds, NOW addresses Black liberation as explored through samples from archival multimedia recordings and improvisation-guided jazz channels. Locks said in a statement, “It was about expressing possibility. It was about asking the question, ‘Since the future has unfolded and taken a new and dangerous shape… what happens NOW?’”
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify
Listen on TIDAL
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen/Buy at Bandcamp
Buy at Rough Trade
