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 Taylor Swift, ANOHNI and the Johnsons, PJ Harvey, Julie Byrne, Rauw Alejandro, Lauren Bousfield, Little Dragon, and K-Lone. 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.)
Taylor Swift: Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) [Republic]
Taylor Swift’s starry-eyed coming-of-age album, Speak Now, gets the Taylor’s Version treatment in the latest installment of her full-length re-recording series. Thirteen years after the original album’s release, the redux finds Swift grappling anew with fame, celebrity, and imminent superstardom, themes reflected in the uneasy balance between her country and pop modes. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) features vault tracks newly recorded with Fall Out Boy and Paramore’s Hayley Williams. “Since Speak Now was all about my songwriting, I decided to go to the artists who I feel influenced me most powerfully as a lyricist at that time and ask them to sing on the album,” Swift said on social media.
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ANOHNI and the Johnsons: My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross [Secretly Canadian]
My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, ANOHNI’s first album since 2016’s operatic Hopelessness, takes a more languid tack without sacrificing her animating urgency. To make the album, she brought lyrics addressing grief, inequality, Future Feminism, and the ecological crisis to sessions with soul producer Jimmy Hogarth, before fixing up a band including Brian Eno collaborator Leo Abrahams and star string arranger Rob Moose. “It Must Change,” “Sliver of Ice,” and “Why Am I Alive Now?” preceded the record.
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PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying [Partisan]
Ten albums in, PJ Harvey still finds novel ways to combine the spectral and pastoral, twisting earthy poetry into tough but tender compositions on I Inside the Old Year Dying. Recorded with longtime collaborators Flood and John Parish, her first album in seven years situates 12 poems from her 2022 collection Orlam in a “sonic netherworld,” as she put it. It combines fingerpicked folk and field recordings—rustling winds, tolling bells—into a rustic tapestry, with the alluringly desolate single “A Child’s Question, August” at its heart.
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Julie Byrne: The Greater Wings [Ghostly International]
Julie Byrne returns six years after the crystalline Not Even Happiness with a meditative opus that reflects on an unspecified loss. The title track’s choral folk “tilts the well-worn language of grief” before culminating “in wordless beauty and affirmation,” as Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene wrote in his track review. In her own statement, Byrne said, “Being reshaped by grief also has me more aware of what death does not take from me,” adding that the music captures “what it felt like to me, when we were simultaneous, alive, occurring all at once.”
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Rauw Alejandro: Playa Saturno [Duars Entertainment/Sony Music Latin]
Rauw Alejandro teed up the short-notice LP Playa Saturno last month with “Baby Hello,” a collaboration with Argentine superproducer Bizarrap, which came with a video depicting a multispecies pool party on the moon. The new full-length accompanies the urbano phenom’s 2022 album, Saturno, of which it is a “spinoff,” as he said. In the meantime, Alejandro released a lovestruck joint EP with his fiancée, Rosalía.
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Lauren Bousfield: Salesforce [Orange Milk]
Lauren Bousfield sneezes out an alternate universe of pop on Salesforce. The Los Angeles–based composer, whose breakcore project Nero’s Day at Disneyland helped midwife hyperpop, said the album’s maximalism reflects our delirious times. “I write a lot of songs about hypercapitalism from an oblique or sideways place, going back and forth between absurdity and extremely heartfelt points of view,” she said in press materials. “I like the whiplash that it gives the listener.”
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Little Dragon: Slugs of Love [Ninja Tune]
Little Dragon returned to their Gothenburg studio for the follow-up to 2020’s New Me, Same Us. Damon Albarn and JID feature on the LP, which sparkles with the Swedish quartet’s typical glassy electronics and perky R&B. The band, in a playful statement, described Slugs of Love as a “masterpiece” and its “finest work yet.”
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K-Lone: Swells [Wisdom Teeth]
K-Lone follows up his soothingly bubbly, early-pandemic debut, Cape Cira, with Swells, a sprawling synthesis of deep house, synthpop, and R&B. The British producer applies a gloss to vintage sounds across the LP, setting loose a joyous electro-pop bassline on “Love Me a Little” and indulging his pop impulses alongside Eliza Rose on the single “With U.”
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