Best New Albums: This Week’s Records to Stream
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Paste is the place to kick off each and every New Music Friday. We follow our regular roundups of the best new songs by highlighting the most compelling new records you need to hear. Find the best new albums of the week below, from priority picks to honorable mentions.
Alex G: Headlights
While his other projects have had a heavy ambiguous lean, Headlights is full of personal anecdotes and meshes the idyllic, old country twang of Rocket with the solemn warmth of Beach Music. Alex G has stepped into another caliber of rock, and he’s taking his transition seriously. Take, for example, the battle of opposing dispositions in the wistful opener “June Guitar”: A cymbal twinkles gently at the start, ushering in ethereal synths and a cohort of acoustic guitars. Bass, keyboard, and bongos wash over Giannascoli’s warm vocals, as he yearns after happier days with the “red head” no longer living life beside him. “Love ain’t for the young anyhow / Something that you learn from fallin’ down / Don’t make me,” he sings, the accordion soon carrying away his fears of ever having to love again. If the accordion wasn’t enough of a happy surprise, a mandolin introduces the upbeat “Afterlife,” a welcome switch from the bittersweetness of the first two songs. The narrative here is empowering at heart—an ode to the life you start living after realizing you’ve only got one—and the instrumentals add a sparkly sheen on top. “When the light came / big and bright / I began another life,” Giannascoli sings, the childlike imagery framed by organelle. He’s “not an angel,” but he’s freer than he once was, now living “In between / Heaven and the TV screen.” With his instinctual approach to music, Alex G’s songs never end up sounding quite the same. Some are marked by a wistful sentimentality, like forgotten scriptures framed by solemn guitars; in others, he’s euphorically screeching atop a fuzzed-out soundscape, the vibrant haze swallowing his ambiguous lyrics. Alex G freely creates the kind of stuff his gut tells him, making for albums that feel simultaneously heartfelt, wacky, silly, and luminous. Headlights makes the argument that his confidence has never been greater. These songs sound like they were created with love for every version of Alex G: past, present, and future. —Camryn Teder [RCA]
Read: “Alex G Points the Mirror at Himself On Headlights”
Billie Marten: Dog Eared
If folk once felt like a gilded cage, Dog Eared is Billie Marten slipping quietly out of it. The UK musician’s fifth record is her boldest yet—a warm, collaborative jazz-folk daydream that gently shrugs off the “singer-songwriter” tag she’s carried since her teens, the polished restraint that once characterized her work traded out for something looser, stranger, more alive. Recorded live in a Brooklyn summer with producer Phil Weinrobe and a circle of indie and jazz heavyweights (Sam Evian, Núria Graham, Shahzad Ismaily), Dog Eared is a record of quiet risks and open spaces, where songs breathe as much as they ache. Songs like the gorgeous, elliptical opener “Feeling” and the quietly thrilling “Clover” float on dissonance, rhythmic play, and subtle sonic risks, Marten’s softly luminous vocals threading through like a ribbon. There’s an untetheredness here, but one Marten sounds at home in, and that self-assurance bleeds through every note: in the soft fray of “Crown,” in the wistful ache of “Leap Year,” in the fiddles and swaying defiance of closer “Swing.” It’s still deeply Billie—still introspective, still tender, still deeply human—but with the corners folded down, the margins scribbled in, and the pages shared with new hands, each adding their own impression. Dog Eared is less about holding the line and more about seeing where it might bend, and it’s all the better for it. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Fiction]
Coral Grief: Air Between Us
Air Between Us, the debut album from Seattle dream-pop trio Coral Grief, lobbies that question, both in bassist Lena Farr-Morrissey’s cryptic lyrics and in the aqueous sound that she, guitarist Sam Fason, and drummer Cam Hancock conjure. It’s a sound informed by UK bands like Stereolab, Broadcast, and Seefeel—they who hail from similar dreary shorelines and salt-kissed mists—but with pure PNW in its DNA. That’s partly because of where it was recorded: The Unknown, a small studio in rural Anacortes, helped facilitate the recording experiments of Mount Eerie, one of the area’s definitive acts. But it’s also in how the crisp formants and steely cool of Farr-Morrissey’s voice are softened by the eulogizing they outline: the lived-in for the lifeless, a displacement of a memory. “Avenue, it’s all changed but the name,” sings Farr-Morrissey in the pensive chug of “Avenue You.” It’s not a coincidence that Air Between Us is full of sly references to Seattle’s vanished places: the title of “Mutual Wish” a play on seafood sellers Mutual Fish, unceremoniously shuttered after over 75 years; closer “Almost Everyday” a tribute to Everyday Music, the iconic record store where Farr-Morrissey once worked. “It felt like a metaphor for the city,” she professed to The Stranger. “I’m still processing it.” It’s personal for the band, but it’s also allegorical. Isn’t every city like this now? So Air Between Us broadens its title into a double entendre, not just by examining the progressing breakdown of humanity’s connective tissue but in finding gratitude in natural beauty, something much more difficult to erase. That’s where the sound comes into play. Coral Grief, from their self-titled EP onward, had a particular strain of dream-pop on lock: subterranean streams of sound where Fason’s guitar and Farr-Morrissey’s voice merged. At first it was exemplified in sketches like “Crumble,” all heady textures and delicate emotion augmented by its home-recorded charm. Later, with the addition of a real drummer, they upgraded to “Wow Signal,” a track galvanized by Hancock’s fleet ghost notes and cymbal rushes. —Rob Moura [Suicide Squeeze]
Read: “The Oceanic Dream Pop of Coral Grief’s Air Between Us Eulogizes Places Gone”
DJ Haram: Beside Myself
The debut solo album from DJ Haram, Beside Myself is a haunting palette of electronica packed with big beats, club stamina, and Middle Eastern percussion. Zubeyda Muzeyyen has been putting out music under the DJ Haram moniker since 2016, finding fans in the ranks of billy woods and YHWH Nailgun. On her proper introduction, she calls upon Armand Hammer, Palestinian rapper Dakn, and finds a reunion in her 700 Bliss partner Moor Mother, along with Carmen Nebula, Kayy Drizz, and Bbymutha. But a song like “Voyeur” is all DJ Haram. With darbuka drum blended into electronic drums and kamancheh, she creates an intense beat rooted in her Middle Eastern roots but combined with her love of punk and dance music, which she describes as “the voices in my head screaming wordlessly while I’m at the center of a mosh pit on research chemicals. —Tatiana Tenreyro [Hyperdub]
Graves: Gary Owens Jr.: Super Hits Volume 3
Graves is the project of Greg Olin, a California singer-songwriter who’s quietly put together a tremendous 20-year career. His last LP, Gary Owens: I Have Some Thoughts, was a rich, 16-track project rife with sweet, digestible country zingers caked in West Coast haze and Pacific Highway joy. His next installment in the Gary-verse is Super Hits Volume 3, a palette of 14 songs about forget-me-nots, dads, RVs, and pigs wearing lipstick—well, sort of. Nothing is ever always as it seems on an Owens record. “Can’t Put Wine Back in the Bottle” might be cheekily titled, but its reckoning with unkindness sneaks up on you.” “Death By Astrological Design” is a gorgeous finale, with Olin lamenting a love lost to a wonky chart: “If I’d only fudged what my time of birth was, I bet we’d be doing just fine.” Once again, the Gary Owens Jr. lifestyle is a humorous, country-fried waltz—bite-sized gems, like “Perfect Guy,” “How Can You Miss Me When I’m Home,” and “River Of Tears,” that will tug at your heart one minute but blow it to smithereens by the next. —Matt Mitchell [Perpetual Doom]
Jim Legxacy: black british music (2025)
Braggadocio abounds throughout, but black british music mostly concerns itself with tales of economic strife, upward mobility, houselessness, romantic yearning, and familial melancholy. “issues of trust” finds Legxacy in ballad mode with orchestral string flourishes, finger-picked acoustic guitars, and introspective lyrics about his strained relationship with his father: “I still can’t talk about it,” he admits in his swooning timbre. Meanwhile, the emo-tinged dembow bop “sos” wrestles with the difficulty of watching the one you love chase after someone else. “He won’t take you out / I know you’ve asked a thousand times,” he sings, his emotive voice perched evenly between desperation and determination. At the same time, these new songs demonstrate Jim Legxacy’s refusal to repeat himself. While black british music largely adheres to the Afrobeats-emo fusion he cemented on hnpm, he adapts that blend in fresh ways, whether it’s through acoustic balladry (“issues of trust”), lush alt-pop (“‘06 wayne rooney”), or anthemic Britpop (“dexters phone call”). It also helps that Legxacy understands the power of brevity; most songs hover around the two-minute mark, and the whole project blazes by in less than 35 minutes. Coupled with the sheer amount of ideas he manages to pack into a single track, black british music encourages endless re-listens with plenty of minute details you maybe didn’t notice on the previous go-around. There’s the gliding, cushiony synth bass on “d.b.a.b”; the pitch-shifted vocal samples in the background of “big time forward”; the soft, fuzzy coating of the guitars on the dexter in the newsagent-featuring “dexters phone call.” There’s a lot to take in, but never is it overwhelming. It ensures a longevity that makes the replay button all the more enticing. —Grant Sharples [XL]
Lord Huron: The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1
The new Lord Huron album plays like a vision quest—a spiritual trek into a stark, open landscape under vast skies, where finding yourself means getting lost. Ben Schneider’s lyrics make reference to skies full of stars on “Bag of Bones” and painted deserts on “Who Laughs Last,” an urgent, eerie song that features staticky spoken-word narration from actor Kristen Stewart. Yet the musical arrangements are what set the scene here. None of these songs are sparse, but they have an arid feel that calls to mind heat and scrubland, like a California desert of the soul. “Bag of Bones” has moments of big, glimmering electric guitars drenched in reverb, but the core of the track is hard-strummed acoustic guitar, a bouncing bassline and dusty drums. When a burst of harmonica arrives three-quarters of the way through, it’s like hearing an echo of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” wafting out of the ether. Elsewhere, steel guitar on “Nothing That I Need” shoots off like sparks rising from a campfire into the endless night, even as a mix of plucky banjo and acoustic guitars keep the song rooted to the ground. It’s a regretful number where Schneider’s narrator sifts through the past and wishes he hadn’t made some of the decisions he did. “I threw away her love on the goddamn road / But I see her face everywhere I go,” Schneider sings, with anguish in his voice. There are no U-turns on this particular road, though, and that tension between past and present is at the heart of The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1. It’s an album about fate—not in the sense of destiny, but in how we choose the paths we follow and whether we are ever fully attuned to the choices we’re making. On “Nothing That I Need,” the consequences are evident in retrospect, but that’s not always true. “Is There Anybody Out There” finds Schneider’s narrator in murkier territory as he longs to find a connection, his voice drifting through hypnotic swirls of keyboards and guitars as if he’s catching glimpses of an alluring stranger he can never quite see head-on. —Eric R. Danton [Mercury]
Read: “Lord Huron Embark on a Vision Quest With The Cosmic Selector Vol. 1”
Natalie Bergman: My Home Is Not In This World
Mercy, Natalie Bergman’s last album and her first as a solo artist, was a mournful, religious thing—written in response to the deaths of her father and stepmother. This new album represents the next stage in coping with that terrible loss. While grief never truly leaves a person, there is a sense, on My Home Is Not In This World, of a woman beginning to step out of its earliest, darkest moments. The sadness remains, as it always will, but it is no longer total or crippling. Bergman gave birth to a child last year, which seems to have returned to her a sense of enchantment with life that was lost through grief. The song “Give Me A Reason” describes this experience, speaking of a painful period in which she was confined to bed “for three long years,” unable even to write a note of music. It was a too-long stretch in the wilderness, but the birth of her child eventually gave her “sweet love again” and carried her back into the world. The album, in many ways, can be understood as a celebration of that fact. My Home Is Not In This World is at its finest when it roots itself in the beauty of now, but it also spends a great deal of time looking backwards. Its musical influences, while melded together in a decidedly contemporary way, owe a lot to the ’60s, and lyrically, too, there are moments where the songs feel like they have been dragged forth from a past era. —Tiernan Cannon [Third Man Records]
Other Notable New Album Releases This Week: Bush: I Beat Loneliness; Che: Rest in Bass; Dream, Ivory: When You Come Back I Have So Much to Tell You; FLETCHER: Would You Still Love Me If You Really Knew Me?; Forth Wanderers: The Longer This Goes On; Jade Bird: Who Wants to Talk About Love; Laura Jane Grace in the Trauma Tropes: Adventure Club; Raekwon: The Emperor’s New Clothes; Two Shell: Ilcons; Zac Farro: Operator