9 new albums to stream today

Paste is the place to kick off 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.

Alex Cameron: Late to Set

Late to Set is tied together by terrible men doing terrible things and their desperate attempts to assuage guilt, but it’s also Alex Cameron’s loosest album narrative yet. There’s half a framing device here: it’s easy to assume the failing actor on “No Soldier” is flicking through the filmography of his life, the mistakes and films that were made. But unlike Jumping the Shark or even his last album, Oxy Music, Late to Set eschews a larger arc. Eighties pop glooper “Stand-in Man” starts with Cameron acting as a (literal) swaggering cock, the other man for a femme fatale—until he reveals he’s completely exhausted, unable to keep up with her appetite. “Chastity / You’ve got me screaming out for chastity / Please no more your majesty,” he howls in his best Robert Palmer impersonation. Cameron loves to build a strong façade only to tear the whole thing down, unveiling the weaknesses of every man he inhabits. Over a growing, blocky bass on “Testosterone in Blue,” he mixes alpha male mythology with woo-woo cosmology, impeccable harmonies touching the words as he sings, “I’m revving up like a Chevrolet.” It’s the sort of masculine astrology that Pete Hegseth surely loves and Cameron revels in the garish obnoxiousness of. There’s a sense that much of the album could be straight-up hits, considering our never-ending eighties nostalgia, but Cameron purposefully undercuts himself or defaces the veneers he wears. Would it be better if the music was less cheeky? Maybe, but it would certainly be less him. —Nathan Stevens [Self-Released]

Charli XCX: Music, Fashion, Film

Music, Fashion, Film takes us deep into Charli xcx’s ouroboros of self-referentiality, each statement containing its own contradiction. She claims that she was lying when she said she was making a rock record—all as part of the rollout for an album that runs the gamut from Auto-Tuned pop punk to horror movie soundtrack strings that break down into a nu-metal chorus to a track made with a guitar pedal “made specifically to piss off Kurt Cobain” (as A.G. Cook, Charli’s friend, collaborator, and subject of the song “Heavy Metal Montana,” puts it). She’s as in on the joke as possible on “Wink Wink,” a track that recalls The Teenagers’ “Homecoming,” whose recent indie sleaze revival owes something to Charli herself.

The blurry boundaries between truth and artifice that make up Charli’s autofictional world on Music, Fashion, Film make its emotional echoes ring truer than the finer points of the plot. “Is the dance floor really dead?” is probably the least interesting question “Rock Music” brings up. “How does an artist keep the creative fire lit as their work becomes increasingly self-referential?” and “Can art for art’s sake even exist on this high a budget?” are far more compelling. Who knows whether the philosophical conversation with a French girl at a party actually happened? When it makes for a perfectly Lou Reedian lyrical passage, who cares?

Take away the proper nouns and the baggage of celebrity and you have universal emotional experiences: anxieties about sabotaging a good relationship, admiration for a trusted creative collaborator best expressed through shared references, desires that lay dormant only to resurface just when you think you’re no longer the person you used to be, questions about the lengths you’ll go to and the boundaries you’ll bend for the sake of artistic tension, determination to stay inspired even after you’ve reached your own standard of success, and fear of what happens when the fun inevitably ends. —Grace Robins-Somerville [Atlantic]

IAN SWEET: Shiverstruck

Jilian Medford is back in her native LA for the release of Shiverstruck, but it’s not her homecoming record. It’s her New York record, written entirely during her second year in an unfamiliar, hard-to-handle city that engendered odd jobs, bad sex, and pining for California rain. When the record was finished, and before heading back West, she ended her relationship with SNL cast member Martin Herlihy, even though the album leaves them arm in arm. “A good year by your side / Always late at night,” she sings near the album’s end. Centerpiece “Jilian” is poignant, promising, and beautifully constructed: addressing herself, Medford holds Jilian to account for thinking pain makes her more interesting, while at the same time celebrating small wins and moments of self-safety. Alone at a matinee, she tells us, herself, whoever—“Don’t sweat it / I’m good on my own anyway.” There are some weird, evocative little lines here, too—good weird—like how she frames the sunrise as a party she’s throwing because she can’t sleep. The music is accordingly intimate, as though it’s all for her. “Hired Gun” is a fantastic, important song with motorik propulsion, some wicked guitar parts, and smart commentary on how we perfunctorily address others’ trauma and mental health journeys, often with baked-in sexism. “I’d fake my death and leave this city / Just so you won’t look me in the eyes and say / ‘You look well, you look pretty,’” Medford sings as the music solidly chugs forward. “La La Love Me” follows, and is equally brilliant with the album’s biggest, bubbliest chorus, the guitars circling and dive-bombing like giddy vultures. But the title track boasts the most arresting line on the album: “Got the love of a million mothers / Pacing in waiting rooms / Praying on some good news.” Oof—that could have come from Flannery O’Connor. —Hayden Merrick [Polyvinyl]

Josaleigh Pollett: If I Let It Quiet

Josaleigh Pollett is a hidden treasure. The Salt Lake City-based artist’s fourth album, If I Let It Quiet, a collaborative effort with Crowd Shy, is an achy, cathartic meditation on identity. Tender and distinct, it is a record of hazy promises and half-forgotten regrets. Its twelve tracks are unhurried and meticulous: “Cherry,” a minimalist, intimate song, sees Pollett attempt to find a satisfactory version of themself amidst a sea of wavering acoustics and brain-scratching drumbeats. Pollett tussles with their own mind on “The Witness,” their voice lapping and distorting over a bed of building sound as they croon, “Will you tell me that I’m a good person?” Pollett expertly tiptoes between soft indie-folk and bold electronica, combining the two in unexpected and delightful ways. “Like a River” begins as something akin to ambient sound before bursting into a haunting, heart-racing beat, like a mind running away from itself. “Second Guesser” is sparse, acoustic, and piercing, a desperate grasp at a fleeting sense of connection. “Tacit,” the album’s closer, combines the ethos of the two aforementioned tracks into a glitchy, emotive finale. That the three of them exist on the same record, and that it makes sense they do, is an ambitious feat. Pollett, long under-appreciated, hones their craft to its peak on If I Let It Quiet, one of the most exciting indie releases of the year so far. —Miranda Wollen [Audio Antihero]

Nick Hakim: I Can See

You’ve probably heard a Nick Hakim song without knowing it: over the past several years, he’s worked with everyone from Adrianne Lenker to Anderson .Paak to Show Me The Body. I Can See, Hakim’s first LP since 2022, shows that he’s still managed to save some of his best work for himself. The songs on this record are weird and wonderful; they unfurl, languorously, over a full hour of listening that seems to take hold of you and transport you to a brave new world of the artist’s creation. As usual with Hakim, less is more, and even the longest tracks on I Can See are astonishingly simple. He can get mileage out of a single guitar riff, piano part, or vocal line, stretching them out over the plains of his innermost thoughts and fears. Some of the results are familiar: “River Rising,” for instance, is pushed on by a piano and stacked vocals in a way that bears a great similarity to some of Hakim’s early work. But more of it exists in a new and exciting sonic landscape. On “Real Here Now,” the lyrics are more direct and expressive than Hakim has ever been, opening with a typical line you might give your ex (“Haven’t seen you in a minute”) before pivoting into something more vulnerable: “My sister, she’s been learning magic / She claims she talks to grandpa in the attic.” Later, “7 Days” moves with precise, repeated drumbeats that drive the song forward through picked guitars and sparse, spooky synths. It is on tracks like these that we feel most acutely the point of Hakim’s project: it is an adventure, an attempt to map out the uncharted parts of himself and others, a way to make sense of thought and emotion. It’s not that he knows the answers. He knows the questions and how to ask them in ways that sound intimate and interesting, with songs densely packed with unusual, beautiful sounds. Halfway through “7 Days,” he asks someone to take his hand. “I don’t know the way,” he admits. “But take it anyway.” —Mariam Abdel-Razek [Earseed Records]

Punch Brothers: The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers

The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers is as moving and inventive as any of Punch Brothers’ previous six albums—all of which similarly test the limits of traditional acoustic music, using the “righteous ensemble” of mandolin/fiddle/guitar/banjo/upright bass to touch on traditional bluegrass, chamber music, and progressive folk. Tracked during a pair of productive sessions in late 2025, the record feels like a direct extension of a slippery sound they’ve been refining for 20 years—a run highlighted by 2010’s Jon Brion-produced Antifogmatic and 2018’s Grammy-winning All Ashore. Unsung’s all-instrumental framing naturally offers a wider spotlight to his bandmates, from Chris Eldridge’s human-delay chords on “Song of the Water Kelpie (unsung)” to Noam Pikelny’s rubbery prepared-banjo melodies on a “poisoned” reworking of traditional Appalachian tune “June Apple.” The project also marks another notable new chapter: their first album without co-founding fiddler Gabe Witcher, who left in 2023. Losing a crucial member wasn’t easy, of course, but Chris Thile knew they’d move forward if the right adventurer arrived—and they found the perfect fit in the versatile Brittany Haas. Together, the instrumental format clicked on multiple levels: the pure expression, the challenge of it all, and the momentum of their conceptual variety show, The Energy Curfew Music Hour. —Ryan Reed [Nonesuch]

Sam and Louise Sullivan: Love & Devotion

The best part about Love & Devotion is that I can tap in and immediately tell that it was made by two people who give a shit. There’s a real language of care in these songs, on soon-to-be off-kilter hits like “My Guy” and “Since I Left,” and it helps that Sam and Louise Sullivan are surrounded by people who take this vocation as seriously as they do, namely Emily Moales and Rubber Band Gun’s Kevin Basko. Love & Devotion is retro, but never in a dated way. Instead of revamping a relic of the past on the album, Sam and Louise tap into folk music’s party history. I’m reminded of the Beach Boys’ Party! album that came out six months before Pet Sounds, and how it’s just people laughing and stumbling through Beatles covers for thirty minutes. But if comparison really is king, then Love & Devotion is this decade’s Tusk, just without the millions of dollars Lindsey Buckingham spent to sound like Talking Heads. But there is something about Buckingham’s hard, almost psychotic guitar lines balanced out by the rest of Fleetwood Mac’s desire to keep things pretty. Tusk is an album full of shameless songs, and there’s a chaos to Fleetwood Mac that’s exciting. They’re frustrated, angry, in love, coked out. I’m not sure if the Sullivans are any of those things—especially because their new music is inspired by Buju Banton, merengue, and Afrobeat—but I think they’re also, as Sam puts it, “releasing something by making the music” on Love & Devotion. The world can always use two voices playing off each other while a guitar bleeds into thuds of percussion made from coffee cans and exercise-ball drops. —Matt Mitchell [Historic New Jersey]

The Strokes: Reality Awaits

Fifteen years ago I was fifteen years old seeing The Strokes for the first time. They had just released “Under Cover of Darkness,” which would be the first single of their contentious 2011 album Angles. As thrilled as I was to hear Is This Is and Room on Fire songs booming from the big stage, I had a feeling even back then that I was late to their party, that The Strokes would never again match the magic of their early records. I was probably right! And yet since then, the Strokes have deservedly accrued a whole new generation of devotees and level of viral fame. As he tells it on Reality Awaits, Julian Casablancas has complicated feelings about his late-career resurgence. That translates into some pretty polarizing moments on the record—digs at Anthony Fantano and Drake, for example, only really land if you’re fully on board with Casablancas’ snark—but overall, it still makes for a pretty damn fun afterparty. —Abby Jones [Cult/RCA]

zayALLCAPS: My Uncle Told Me Some Real Ass Sh*t on the Phone Yesterday

Last year, zayALLCAPS appeared on our year-end best songs list, thanks to his single “MTV’s Pimp My Ride” being one of the best releases of the year. As Benny Sun wrote then, the track proved “zayALLCAPS to be a master historian on top of his game, like a period-accurate karaoke lyric video or the occasional skipped beat on a scratched CD.” zay is back with a thud on My Uncle Told Me Some Real Ass Sh*t on the Phone Yesterday, dropping his best project to date. At a brisk forty-one minutes, he’s sampling Death Grips, referencing Jodeci, recording vocals on a MacBook built-in, and tinkering with Atlanta bass because he loves “My Boo.” The album is, as zay calls it, “a chaotic blur of romance and self-discovery set to a backdrop of sample glitches and echoing synth chords.” There’s no better way to describe it than that. I’ve been playing it on repeat since zay dropped it in my inbox last week. —Matt Mitchell [Self-released]

Keep scrolling for more great stories.