10 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: This Is Lorelei, Alex G, and More

If you're most familiar with This is Lorelei and Water from Your Eyes ’ Nate Amos as a producer, no worries, for many years, so was he. “I kind of landed on this songwriter thing in the most ass-backwards way,” he told the Fader recently. Regardless of how he ended up here, The Singer in My Band establishes the historically puckish Amos as a skillful bard with a knack for twang and earnest evaluation; his dad even has a banjo solo. Populated with picaresque and peripatetic characters who dip in and out of frame, The Singer in My Band takes a keen eye to the literal and spiritual bric-a-brac you accumulate after enough trips around the sun. But the most interesting figure on display here is Amos himself, stepping sure-footedly into the unknown.

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The myriad methods humanity has developed for pain management can make it easy to forget that hurting isn’t always a bad thing. “If you're going to keep participating in the world, and in your life, you have to commit to being hurt,” Sylvan Esso ’s Amelia Meath explains. “And if you aren't putting yourself in the way of potential hurt, you miss out on a lot of potential opportunities.” On her and Nick Sanborn’s new self-produced album Ow ∞, they’re drawn to the kind of rich experiences that leave you a little scratched up: young heartbreak and dramatic nights out, personal failures and professional struggles. Working largely in improvisation with a cadre of talented collaborators, including six different drummers, Sylvan Esso have landed on some of their most refined alt-pop to date.

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Haruomi Hosono , the last living member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, feels ”a growing curiosity toward the unknown music that my new self will create, while also embracing the music of my former self, as if I now carry two musical worlds within me,” he says in press materials for his new album. On Yours Sincerely , he considers how to translate omoiyari into sound, pondering maternal compassion and unconditional love through a batch of wholesome songs. As Hosono fits a children’s choir, delicate melodies, and idyllic lyrics into the LP, the balance of craft mastery and childlike wonder is enough to make you well up

Jhené Aiko has spent the six years since Chilombo navigating setbacks and false starts. “It’s like every time I tried to lock in, life knocked me on my ass,” she said ahead of Westside Whimsy , a suite of mellifluous odes to her Los Angeles hometown. To mark the occasion, the R&B singer enlisted a slate of trusted pals and L.A. royals, plus Tyga, to join her in an itinerary of languid ballads, jazz-bar jaunts, and pensive, acrobatic monologues that flow like waterfalls but roil beneath with whitewater intensity. Longtime collaborator Kendrick Lamar returns with a verse on “ So Good ,” and Larry June and Ab-Soul are among the other guests.

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Alex G has a knack for conjuring the strange, dreamy, and frightening worlds director Jane Schoenbrun has become known for. His soundtrack to her new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma , in which a young director rebooting a famed horror franchise connects with its aging former star, is another testament to the the pair’s like minds. Tapping the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan for a new original song and sprinkling in tracks from R.E.M., Donna Lewis, Counting Crows, and more, Alex G invites you to stay a while at a place you're not likely to soon forget.

Michigan rapper Rio da Yung OG has wasted no time getting back in the game since returning from federal prison in 2024 (refer to his outlandish and hungry first-day-out cut “Rio Free” for proof). But his new album also reaffirms how many friends he still has in the industry, recruiting Tierra Whack, Veeze, Lil Yachty, Monaleo, and more to drop verses on the 22-track LP. Rio has become somewhat of a folk hero in his local scene, earning the admiration of old heads and newer blood alike. The World is Yours lives up to its title, offering a reminder that his influence, and Detroit rap’s writ large, extends far beyond the borders of Motor City.

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For a band that describes their sound as “cuck rock,” London-based jangle rockers the Tubs aren’t exactly the sorry-for-themselves types. “I’m interested in the way sympathy and patience for someone suffering always runs out eventually,” frontman Owen Williams says of their new album Hard Life . “How this can be a good and liberating thing as well as a sad and brutal thing.” Perhaps this very disinterest in wallowing is what turns such bummer subject matter into sharp and engaging pop songs, the type of rousing cuts you might play for a friend whose bed-rotting privileges have just been revoked. Working with frequent collaborators Chris Haigh, Lan McArdle, George Nicholls, and Rachel Kenedy, the quartet manages to find sympathy for the loser without leaving him to mope.

Devendra Banhart, Gyan Riley, and Noah Georgeson spent much of their lives in Californian hippie towns, where it wasn’t uncommon for your family to have a guru or cradle crystals. Another thing they have in common is they’re all great friends. On their self-titled debut album as Hug, they come together as a guitar trio, taking turns leading against a pastoral landscape teeming with water gurgles, frog croaks, and ambient chords. Some songs, like “Petrichor” drift gently away, while tracks like “Bathypelagic” allow you to intensely focus on the group’s intricate riffs. It’s an excellent display of both musicianship and friendship.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Angela Autumn grew up in the Appalachian region of western Pennsylvania. The singer-songwriter warbles her voice like a songbird nestled in the thick branches of a coniferous tree, cawing out in a tone that’s part woody and weightless. On Believer , her second full-length album, she alternates between banjo and guitar while looping her way through naturally melodic riffs. From opener “Heavy Tobacco” through the rolling lap steel on “Electric Lizard,” Autumn crafts an album that sounds like a weekend-long hike and drifting off to sleep beneath constellations in the shape of Kurt Vile and Bonny Light Horseman.

Bad Bunch , the first Black Bananas album in 12 years, wastes no time digging through the shredded rock that Jennifer Herrema made her name on with Royal Trux and RTX . This time, she and her bandmates plunge their hands deep into pop and techno to mold it all together into something more stylish. Alongside Brian McKinley and Kurt Midness, Herrema makes quick work of intentionally messy songs, stringing together frayed guitar parts, thumping beats, squelching electronics, and flitting funk until it drapes over a song structure like the chic destroyed fabrics of a couture fit moving in real time on the runway. You can trace its roots back to 2014’s Electric Brick Wall , yet it sounds modern in all the right ways.