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 Stormzy, Fievel Is Glauque, Lykotonon, Wisdom Teeth, and Waajeed. 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.)
Stormzy: This Is What I Mean [0207 Def Jam/Interscope]
Grime superstar Stormzy is back with his third album. Continuing the evolution from his acerbic early bars to a more international and mellow sound, the London MC teed up the album with “Mel Made Me Do It” and a video featuring Usain Bolt, José Mourinho, and more. He wrote most of the album during a retreat to Osea Island, a small island in the Blackwater Estuary. “When you hear about music camps, they always sound intense and somber,” he said in press materials. “But this felt beautifully free.” Guests include Sampha, Nao, and Amaarae.
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Fievel Is Glauque: Flaming Swords [Math Interactive]
Flaming Swords is the debut LP from an ensemble that revolves around the Brooklyn-based pianist Zach Phillips and French-Belgian singer Ma Clément. As Fievel Is Glauque, the pair and their rotating bandmates have earned a reputation for sprawling, hyper-melodic jazz shows, including at U.S. dates supporting Stereolab. They recorded Flaming Swords—led by “Save the Phenomenon”—in one evening, joined by five other players.
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Lykotonon: Promethean Pathology [Profound Lore]
Members of Blood Incantation, Wayfarer, Stormkeep, and anonymous other groups comprise Lykotonon, who make industrial metal with lashings of black and death metal. The Denver outfit describes its sound as “a digitized descent into the darker side of the human psyche”—venture down with them on lead single “That Which Shares in Kind.”
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V/A: To Illustrate [Wisdom Teeth]
UK producers Facta and K-Lone assembled international practitioners of low-BPM electronic music for this compilation from their label, Wisdom Teeth. Along with several UK producers working in ambient, dubstep, and drum and bass, they corralled the Latin American–influenced producer Nick León from Miami, Japanese ambient composer Abentis, and several others for a wide-ranging odyssey that never rises far above the 100bpm mark.
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Waajeed: Memoirs of Hi-Tech Jazz [Tresor]
Waajeed rose to prominence as a photographer and visual artist around Detroit, where he worked closely with the late J Dilla. Now long established as a beatmaker melding techno and hip-hop, the producer and instrumentalist is back with Memoirs of Hi-Tech Jazz, his proper follow-up to 2018’s From the Dirt. He launched the record with a “Motor City Madness” video spotlighting Black artists, record shops, and vinyl pressing plants in his local Detroit community.
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