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 Overmono, RP Boo, Madison McFerrin, Oval, Midwife & Vyva Melinkolya, Lucy Liyou, Seán Barna, and Memotone. 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.)
Overmono: Good Lies [XL]
Since breaking out of the UK dance underground in the late 2010s, the Russell brothers’ Overmono project has released a steady stream of endorphin-pumped singles that aim for the sweet spot between alluring murk and end-of-night ecstasy. The Welsh duo’s debut album, Good Lies, which follows the drum’n’bass-fueled Cash Romantic EP, slaloms between the group’s trademark effervescent vocal hooks and exploratory beats that suggest concrete and shadow.
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RP Boo: Legacy Volume 2 [Planet Mu]
RP Boo achieved international acclaim with his 2013 archival album, Legacy, but the footwork pioneer’s vault remains deep. Legacy Volume 2 collects tracks the Chicago producer made between 2002 and 2007, many of them unknown. He made the single “Pop Machine” while working at a Chicago gas station where a faulty vending machine, having swallowed a customer’s money, started barking “Work!” whenever he pressed a button. “What inspires me to keep going is seeing the people having an awesome time moving on the dancefloor, as well as playing music that is a recognizable part of my life,” RP Boo said in press materials. “I’m one with it.”
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Madison McFerrin: I Hope You Can Forgive Me [MadMcFerrin Music]
Madison McFerrin explores traumas and triumphs on I Hope You Can Forgive Me, her first full-length studio album. The singer and producer announced the LP with “(Please Don’t) Leave Me Now,” a song that she wrote about surviving a severe car wreck unharmed. McFerrin called the single “God Herself” a “self-empowerment bop,” and her father, the celebrated singer Bobby McFerrin, appears on the album, too. I Hope You Can Forgive Me also includes “Stay Away (From Me),” which McFerrin released as a single last year.
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Oval: Romantiq [Thrill Jockey]
Markus Popp has been innovating an intricate strain of laptop composition—including the mythic high-watermark 94diskont—since the 1990s. Born out of a collaboration with the digital artist Robert Seidel for the opening of a 19th Century Romantic art museum, his latest as Oval mixes flutes, pianos, trombones, and other period instruments with digital manipulations and, on opener “Zauberwort,” a sampled opera singer. The arresting results find common ground between chamber music and ornate ambient sounds.
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Midwife & Vyva Melinkolya: Orbweaving [The Flenser]
Orbweaving is the product of a friendship between Madeline Johnston (aka Midwife) and Angel Diaz (aka Vyva Melinkolya). In 2021, the artists wrote and recorded the album in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico, where they went looking for orb-weaver spiders. The album, per its announcement, focuses on hopelessness and “the sublime horror of the natural world.”
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Lucy Liyou: Dog Dreams (개꿈) [American Dreams]
Lucy Liyou’s second album is based on their recurring dreams. Made in collaboration with Nick Zanca (fka Mister Lies), it features three songs in total: “Dog Dreams (개꿈),” “April in Paris (봄),” and “Fold the Horse (종이접기).” The 14-minute title track is about a dream where Liyou is rescued from drowning by someone they thought was their mother, but turns out to be a close friend. The album, in full, is a collection of ambient music with elements of jazz and poetry.
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Seán Barna: An Evening at Macri Park [Kill Rock Stars]
The singer-songwriter Seán Barna’s new album, An Evening at Macri Park, features a song called “Benjamin Whishaw Smiled.” It takes place in Greenwich Village, where Barna once saw the actor Whishaw at a bistro. “In my song ‘Benjamin Whishaw Smiled,’ he is my lover,” Barna said. The musician’s new album on Kill Rock Stars also features musings on Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” and the grief sometimes inherent to life as a young queer person.
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Memotone: How Was Your Life? [Impatience]
Bristol multi-instrumentalist and producer Will Yates made his new Memotone album, How Was Your Life?, after purchasing a vintage Roland GR-33 guitar synthesizer. The new electronic and ambient album arrives after a recent self-titled EP and last year’s Clever Dog.
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