Best New Albums: This Week’s Records 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.

Aunt Katrina: This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me

Aunt Katrina’s debut full-length, This Heat is Slowly Killing Me, is an ode to the “collaborative energy of the D.C punk scene.” While the title of the record is a tribute to This Heat, the band took sonic inspiration from the mid-aughts noise-pop group The Radio Dept. This Heat is Slowly Killing Me’s yearning lyrics shroud in blurry guitars—it’s textured but neat, and that fusion of guitar-driven rock and electronic embellishments create a sound Ryan Walchonski creatively dubs “laptop gaze.” These songs achieve a delicate balance—or,​​ “a spoonful of sugar.” The stories might be personal to Walchonski, but they’re all imbued with universal ideas that every human has experienced, and he hopes he can use Aunt Katrina’s formal introduction to help fans have an easier time digesting more difficult emotions. —Camryn Teder [Crafted Sounds]

Read: “This Heat Is Slowly Killing Aunt Katrina”

Brutus VIII: Do It For the Money EP

Current Joys drummer Jackson Katz put out a fantastic LP last year, Pure Gluttony, under his experimental darkwave solo project Brutus VIII. It was criminally underrated, but thankfully, people are starting to catch up with his follow-up EP, Do It For The Money. Combining EBM with post-punk and baile funk, Katz creates some of his boldest work yet. Katz has described his music as “Randy Newman on amphetamines,” which is an apt descriptor; his lyrics are sardonic and dark, yet brutally honest. Do It For the Money is intoxicating and abrasive. Even when singing about the darkest topics, from his struggles with an eating disorder (“My Eating Disorder”) to the rise of neo Nazis (“Eichmann On Trial Again),” the instrumentals paired with his booming voice are hypnotizing and make you want to dance in a seedy nightclub. —Tatiana Tenreyro [American Death]

Read: “Brutus VIII Opens Up in ‘My Eating Disorder’”

Clipse: Let God Sort Em Out

16 years after their last album, Clipse has returned with Let God Sort Em Out, perhaps the one final resume piece needed to cement them as one of the three greatest duos in rap history, joining Mobb Deep and OutKast at the top. “Ace Trumpets” makes 99% of rap tracks look like child’s play. It’s a return to the form they put on ice for a decade. Siblings Pusha T and Malice can rap circles around each other. Coke rap hasn’t sounded this good since Pusha’s last LP, thanks to a rimshot snare ‘n’ bass beat supplied by Pharrell Williams. Pusha’s chorus here is dependable (the transition from “ballerinas doin’ pirouettes inside of my snowglobe” to “you had to see it, strippers shakin’ ass and watchin’ the dough blow” is particularly slick), but his brother serves up the stickiest bars, spitting about being “dressed in House of Gucci made from selling Lady Gaga” and “never leavin’ home without my piece like I’m Mahatma.” Malice’s flow sounds either godly or familiar. I mean, he says it himself: “I done disappeared and reappeared without a ‘voilà.” —Matt Mitchell [Roc Nation]

Goon: Dream 3

The latest effort from Goon, an LA-based psych-pop band signed to Born Losers, is what I wish Real Estate sounded like in 2025—and what I hope might come from the next Tame Impala release, whenever it comes. The Claire Morison-produced Dream 3 crunches, swirls, and sprawls—an effort to merge the clean-cut tangents of Green Evening with “more of the haphazard, intuitive, 4-track cassette, homemade style that defined Goon when it was just Kenny Becker doing bedroom recordings in the 2010s. He wrote these songs while transitioning out of a relationship, seeking something holistic and healing not only from his bandmates, but from the world around him. Cue songs about cicadas, cutting grass, rabbits being born, and apples. Dream 3 is polished but echoed, gauzy, and jangly. “Begin Here,” “Closer to,” and “Patsy’s Twin” is one of the year’s strongest three-track runs to open an album. —Matt Mitchell [Born Losers Records]

Open Mike Eagle: Neighborhood Gods Unlimited

It’s always a good day when Open Mike Eagle drops new music—meaning today is a great day, considering it’s the release date of his latest LP, Neighborhood Gods Unlimited. OME has been one of the most consistent rappers in the game for some time now, his laidback flow filled to the brim with wordplay, pop culture references, and quick wit—and his final single prior to the record’s release, “my co-worker clark kent’s secret black box,” features all that and more in spades. As if to preempt the fact that James Gunn’s Superman movie comes out the same day as his album, OME takes shots at none other than Clark Kent himself, albeit from the perspective of a long-suffering Daily Planet employee frustrated that Clark seems to think no one realizes he is obviously Superman, which is honestly a bit insulting to the speaker’s intelligence: “He must think we all some bozos / Jus gossiping and driving Volvos / […] / This is some bullshit / I don’t know why y’all be trying to act like y’all don’t know who that is?! / This is fucked up.” But the song goes beyond that obvious humor, with Mike tweeting that it’s “about open secrets and folks being mad at you because they gave up on their dreams and you didn’t.” And, fittingly, over some lush production from K-Nite, OME spends the second verse in the mind of a protagonist bemoaning precisely that (“I played guitar in a metal band / I still got a pair of leather pants”). Open Mike Eagle remains firmly in a class of his own—I mean, who else would name-drop Pearl Jam and Goku in the same verse? —Casey Epstein-Gross [Auto Reverse]

Sister.: Two Birds

For those who love the intentional sound of singer-songwriters like Adrianne Lenker and Lucy Dacus, you’ll love Sister. We’ve been highlighting them for a minute now, but there’s no better time than now to ease into their discography (if you haven’t already) than now. Last year’s “Colorado,” was a quietly revelatory, achingly beautiful alt-folk masterpiece. “Blood in the Vines,” lovely as ever, finds Hannah Pruzinsky and Ceci Sturman’s harmonies effortlessly swirl into waves of synthesizers, hovering like a diaphanous mist above the jumpy arpeggio zig-zagging throughout. This is, perhaps, the first Sister. song with math-rock in its DNA. It’s an unexpected gene to throw into the band’s sonic pool, but it allows them to build an exquisite tension that beautifully parallels Pruzinsky’s musings on a torturously ambiguous relationship. “You grabbed the wrong hand, we were just friends. I overthought it, I dropped your wrist,” they softly drawl on the first verse, their turmoil bleeding into the viscerally evocative chorus: “Suffocating, suffocating, blood in the vines.” The song’s musical and lyrical complexities are stunning and inexhaustible, and it’s all the more impressive considering that it’s a product of the band challenging themselves to write something new within just 30 minutes. If “Blood in the Vines” proves anything, it’s that Sister. is absolutely limitless. They corroborate that notion on the Two Birds title track, an effort that reaches straight into the heart. An ode to grief amidst changing circumstances, the song explores the evolving relationship between Pruzinsky and Sturman. Having lived together for over a decade, the musicians stand on the precipice of a move that will see them live separately for the first time. These two pour their bleeding hearts into this song, the result a piece shaded in a dreamy tenderness that perfectly encapsulates the feelings of vulnerability and fear that follow life-altering change. Released in advance of the band’s upcoming album of the same name, “Two Birds” leaves me yearning for all the Sister. tracks to come today and beyond. —Anna Pichler & Camryn Teder [Mtn. Laurel]

The Swell Season: Forward

The Swell Season have been around since 2005, back when the Frames’ Glen Hansard and Czech singer/pianist Markéta Irglová grabbedaname from a Josef Škvoreckỳ novel. Two years later, they won a Best Original Song Oscar and have been going steady since returning from hiatus in 2022. Their new album, and first in 16 years, is unsurprisingly good. The duo pick up exactly where they left off on Strict Joy in 2009. It’s grown-up music dealing in the magic and tragedy of friendship and romance—folk songs packed with orchestral elements and sentimental writing that continues to blur the line between real-life and fiction. “I Leave Everything To You” and “Factory Street Bells” will leave you warmed by their baked-in drama. —Matt Mitchell [Plateau]

Wet Leg: moisturizer

A sense of self-effacement—sometimes playful, sometimes purely masochistic—permeates moisturizer’s lovergirl aura, as when Rhian Teasdale cries, “Is it love, or suicide?” on the album’s cheeky, scritchy opener, “CPR.” An ambulance siren plays in the background as the track crescendos, the emergency of being enamored literalized into a 999 call. Hester Chambers and Joshua Mobaraki smash their electric guitars together as the ambulance rips through the streets. “I’m in love, and you’re to blame,” Teasdale scolds an interlocutor one imagines sitting sheepishly beside her as she lies on the gurney. This won’t, then, be a love album we’re used to hearing. At moments when the band’s tried-and-true instrumentation can seem rote, its lyrical ingenuity maintains moisturizer’s novel feel. Take “mangetout,” a buzzing, bitchy anthem written for every woman who’s ever been dragged down by some guy who views her as a sexy alt-rock ornament, the band goes back to its roots. “You think I’m pretty / You think I’m pretty cool / You wanna fuck me? / I know most people do,” Teasdale hisses. An incessant guitar riff and Ellis Durand’s thrumming bass pulse behind the singer’s gleeful purr. “Get lost forever!” Teasdale crows gleefully as the refrain’s “cool” turns to “cruel.” If there’s one hill Wet Leg dies on, it’s the joys of being just a little mean. If you don’t trust me, turn to “catch these fists,” the album’s lead single: The song is a wall of angry, drunken, sadistic sound: “I just threw up in my mouth / When he tried to ask me out!” Teasdale playfully recounts, as Henry Holmes’s drums pummel the poor sucker who tried to talk to her into a hole invented from his own skeeviness. —Miranda Wollen [Domino]

Read: “Love Has Fangs On Wet Leg’s moisturizer”

Other Notable New Album Releases This Week: Allo Darlin: Bright Nights; Backstreet Boys: Millennium 2.0; Gina Birch: Trouble; Guided By Voices: Goodnight El Dorado; Mal Blum: The Villain; Midwife & Matt Jencik: Never Die; Mike Polizze: Around Sound; Noah Cyrus: I WANT MY LOVED ONES TO GO WITH ME; Nuvolascura: How This All Ends; Petey USA: The Yips