The New Albums Actually Worth Your Time This Week

There’s a specific kind of Friday morning ritual that nobody talks about but millions of people do: you open Spotify, see forty-seven new releases, and immediately feel paralyzed. Not because there’s nothing good but because the algorithm has already decided what you’re going to hear, and it’s wrong. It’s always wrong. So let me save you the trouble of sifting through the slush pile, because this week’s crop of new albums is seriously stacked in a way that hasn’t happened since maybe early February, and at least three of them are going to end up on year-end lists that people will pretend they called months from now.

Kim Gordon dropped another record and it sounds like she’s trying to unlearn everything Sonic Youth ever taught her, which is exactly what makes it interesting. She’s been on this trajectory since No Home Record back in 2019, leaning harder into abrasive electronic textures and vocals that feel less like singing and more like dispatches from someone who stopped caring about being palatable around the time most of us were born. The new material is confrontational in a way that doesn’t announce itself. It just sits in the room with you and dares you to leave. She’s 72 years old and making music that sounds more dangerous than anything on the rap charts this week. That’s not shade. That’s just true.

Then there’s Elucid, and if you’re sleeping on this one you need to wake up immediately. The Armand Hammer half has been quietly building one of the most compelling solo catalogs in underground hip-hop, and this new project is dense, layered, paranoid in the best possible way. His production choices feel like walking through a building that’s being demolished while someone reads you poetry through a broken intercom. It’s not easy listening. It’s not trying to be. But there’s a clarity of vision here that makes most mainstream rap releases feel like they were assembled by committee, which, let’s be honest, they were. And the thing about Elucid is he rewards repeat listens in a way that almost nobody does anymore. First pass you get the texture. Second pass you get the architecture. Third pass you realize he buried something in there that changes the whole meaning.

Alexis Taylor from Hot Chip released something that caught me completely off guard. You expect a certain kind of wistful synth-pop prettiness from him at this point, and he delivers that, but there’s a rawness underneath it this time that feels surprisingly vulnerable rather than performed. It’s the kind of record you put on at 11pm when the apartment is quiet and you’re not sure if you want company or not. Short songs, most of them. Nothing overstays its welcome. He understands something that a lot of artists forget, which is that leaving space in a song is harder than filling it.

Anjimile is the one I keep coming back to, though. Their folk-adjacent sound has been sharpening record by record, and this latest effort feels like the moment where everything clicks into place. There’s a confidence in the songwriting that wasn’t quite there on Giver Taker in 2020, a willingness to let melodies breathe and then twist them somewhere unexpected. It’s gentle music that isn’t soft, if that distinction makes sense. And it does if you listen to it.

James Blake also has new material out, which at this point is like saying water is wet. He’s reliable. He’s excellent. He will make you feel something in your chest whether you asked for it or not. But the Blake record feels like the least surprising entry this week, and in a lineup this strong, being unsurprising is the worst thing you can be.

Nine albums dropped and at least five of them are worth your actual time. Not background noise time, not playlist-filler time, but sit-down-and-listen time. That almost never happens in a single week anymore. So close the algorithm, open any of these, and press play before the internet tells you what to think about them.