This week’s best new albums to stream

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.

Auratus: Fever Dream

It pays to drop a consistently good rock album, and Auratus did that today. Fever Dream is great fun courtesy of the Red Hook-based duo of Liz Louie and Jesse Rolfe (with contributions from Cooper Ferris, Miles Taylour, and Jesse Lessner). I wasn’t familiar with them before this week, but now I’m locked in on where they go next. Fever Dream surrounds the listener with great, unpretentious dream-pop music. If you dig anything by Blonde Redhead or Pretty Sick, I think you might dig what Auratus has to offer on their debut album, which was written, recorded, and produced by the band at Red Hook’s Community Music Space. “Graham’s Dream” is as hazy and loping as its title suggests, while “Kiss Me Now (Or Don’t)” is a sweet acoustic ditty I’m still humming. Lead single “Gold Dust” summons the ghosts of early 2000s alternative, while “Forgive/Forget” builds and builds into this discombobulated and distorted slow jam. Spanky guitars color the mood of “Oh (And Also Kay),” and the 6-minute “Nothing” crawls through fingerpicked coziness before falling into a belting, swelling, swirling catharsis. What I’m getting at here is: Fever Dream is an impressive and exciting first step from Louie and Rolfe’s brand new band. —Matt Mitchell [Self-Released]

DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ: Fantasy

Released just hours after last week’s edition of this column dropped, I can’t go another day without praising the new DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ album Fantasy—a 4-hour pile of the hottest dance samples you’ll encounter this year. Nobody’s putting out records right now, but luckily Sabrina has come back to save 2025’s final act. A lot of insane songs are in this behemoth of a record, especially “Not There Yet,” “Hideaway,” “Will My Love,” and “Sunset Years,” but let me direct your attention to the 11-minute “Rainfalls,” a track featuring 15-30 samples at any given time—100 or so in total, if Sabrina’s own approximations are correct. Femme and pixelated, “Rainfalls” is emotive. A vocal sample pokes through a Bruce Hornsby’s “Changes”-style piano, declaring that “we’re gonna do our very best to take you on a journey through my personal life. There’s nobody else there, it’s just me” before swelling into a four-on-the-floor heartbeat flushed by spanky synths and discombobulated voices. To describe “Rainfalls,” I go back to this Sabrina quote from my interview with her last year. Talking about the Avalanches song “Since I Left You,” she wrote to me: “[The song] has a very uncanny feeling where it sounds alive and organic, but everything is brought back to life from the dead, like old Victorian corpus photography where they posed the deceased around as if they were still with us.” That’s the crux of “Rainfalls” and the self-referential, skyscraping hypnosis of Fantasy—zigging and zagging through resurrections of techno and splashes of house music in an overwhelming but tenacious pile of pop ideas. The color of Sabrina’s primordial ooze is unmistakable and, hours and hours of music later, still one of a kind. —Matt Mitchell [Self-Released]

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Thoughts On the Future

A few months after sharing the album GUSH, LA producer and composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has shared a new EP, Thoughts On the Future. It’s 22 minutes of ambient instrumentals that any fan of Max Richter will certainly love. Smith calls the album a “contemplative body of work that examines what grief does to the body and the mind—the necessary disembodiment & cocooning—how it suspends us, how it empties us, and how it quietly begins to rebuild us in its own time.” Through three compositions, she utilizes piano, textured synths, and chamber music effects to foster delicate, unhurried musical maps and emotional rooms. “This music is meant to feel private—a private world for you,” Smith continues. “This is not an album about healing. It is an album about truth—about the reconstruction that follows when life has been irrevocably altered.” I think “Dying Is A Normal Part Of Life” is among the most fascinating songs released this month. Do yourself a favor and give Thoughts On the Future a half-hour of your time this weekend. —Matt Mitchell [Nettwerk]

The next Friday albums roundup will come out on January 9. Happy holidays!

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