Discover the latest releases from Baby Keem, Hen Ogledd, Liz Cooper, The Messthetics & James Brandon Lewis. Explore the best new albums of the week, including Baby Keem's highly anticipated work and Hen Ogledd's genre-bending sonic adventure.
The new albums from Hen Ogledd , Liz Cooper, and The Messthetics & James Brandon Lewis should be at the top of your queue today. Tap in and find a new obsession.Paste is the place to kick off each and every New Music Friday.
We follow our regular roundups of theby highlighting the most compelling new records you need to hear. Find the best new albums of the week below.At 25, Baby Keem is already a major player amongst his peers, in large part due to his fantastic 2021 LPsuggests that Keem can take as long as he needs between releases. Talent like his doesn’t expire or get stale. There’s a nice palette at work on. Ecstatic, exciting West Coast funk powers “Sex Appeal,” while the “I Am Not a Lyricist” title is a huge misnomer, because Keem raps about poverty, drug abuse, and systemic racism under the compelling vertical of a fading family. I feel confident in saying it’s the best song he’s ever released, showing up light-years ahead of “The Hillbillies,” which he made with his cousin Kendrick Lamar. Speaking of, Kendrick shows up on, filling in with verses on “Good Flirts” and giving us a sneaky Young Thug diss while he’s on the mic. The year is still very young, butI appreciate it when bands title their albums correctly, because “Discombobulated” is a good way to describe the latest Hen Ogledd tape. Richard Dawson, his bandmates Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, and Sally Pilkington, and guest contributors deliver us a synth-pop adventure buttoned up with spoken-word, post-punk wigouts, folktales, ambient sprawls, and jazz crescendos. It really is everything but the kitchen sink this time around. The electric guitar streaking across “Scales will fall” has been on my mind since I first heard it; the 19-minute “Clear pools” is seven or eight songs folded into one , giving us the greatest-ever companion track to Sufjan Stevens’ “Impossible Soul.”is a fantastic project full of experiments. Improv may give the record its shape, but Hen Ogledd’s strange, furious, and itinerant impulses are the driving force. —, though the 38-year-old pop star has kept busy over the years: she married songwriter and producer Matthew Koma, starred on, and became a mother to four. Needless to say, Duff has grown up quite a bit in the past decade and change., then, is the inevitable comeback album arriving to broadcast its pop star’s newfound maturity… or something. The album, primarily co-produced by Duff and Koma —A switch-up in sound has plagued quite a few bands I’ve liked, to be honest. Liz Cooper’s OG style—Nashville-driven, good-hearted, cosmic-flavored rock and roll—grabbed me as soon as I heard it in 2016 and again in 2018, when she and her old band the Stampede released, ditching the Music Row singer-songwriter gig for something more experimental. Maybe this is how she was supposed to sound the whole time. Cooper has always been a great guitarist—and her instrument soundsbring a level of excitement to Cooper’s ideas that weren’t there before. She taught herself how to play piano, chased after big hooks, and came back with a smart, empowering record inspired by Beck, Lou Reed, and her pop-singer friend Caroline Kingsbury and full of queer catharsis. Working with producer Dan Molad was a good choice; “Baby Steps” and “Sorry ” are two of her best songs to date. Liz Cooper has never sounded so alive, and her new record’s title lives up to itself. —In 2022, Megan Moroney introduced herself to the world with “Tennessee Orange,” a tender love song that detailed her romance with a blue-eyed Knoxville boy while nodding to her Georgia upbringing. Her three albums alternate between those picture-perfect romances and the relationships that are anything but. Moroney’s emo cowgirl persona—paired with her charred, charming voice—has always scanned as candid and sincere. But while she’s solidified herself as one of the leading women in country music, her songwriting has grown less specific. “I tell the stories,” she oncebut it seems little has changed in Moroney’s world in the interim. The assorted losers and nameless heartbreakers she writes about here rarely have defining characteristics, while the sound is steadfast country pop basics. With the assistance of her regular producer, Kristian Bush of Sugarland, Moroney provides a tasteful blend of swaying acoustic guitars, sanded-down pedal steel, and the occasional electric melody. This isn’t crossover country with glossy stadium ambitions or the recent spate of neo-traditionalists. Instead, the subtle melodies and stately tempos are designed to redirect you back to considering Moroney’s whirlwind feelings. —It’s been a minute since we’ve seen Mirah in action. Seven years, a death, a birth, a pandemic, a near-silent stretch of motherhood—and on, the singer-songwriter doesn’t so much “return” as pick up the thread mid-sentence. Older and earthier and more weathered now, yes, but with that same razor-sharp focus and keening vulnerability. Backed by a small murderer’s row , she leans into warm folk-rock, letting pedal steel sigh and harmonies stack around stories that are almost disarmingly direct: crying on the New Jersey Turnpike en route to bury her father, trying to keep a marriage from buckling, singing a gushy love song to her kid. The younger Mirah hid barbs and kinks inside tape-hiss pop; here, the surprises come from how blunt she’s willing to be about middle-aged stakes—“Life is already hard enough / And I don’t want to throw away all of the good stuff we have”—and how gently the arrangements hold that earnestness without sanding it down.isn’t about reinvention so much as staying, choosing, recommitting: to family, to art, to the messy, unglamorous work of loving people while the world tilts, and to the stubborn belief that all of it, even the worst of it, is worth singing about. —This MX LONELY record snuck up on me. It was in my email for weeks and, after finally getting around to it a few days ago, I can safely say: this band hasis just that good. Vocalist/synthesist Rae Haas and their band don’t just chase hooks; they obliterate them. You can hear touches of Show Me the Body, Pixies, and even, yes,-era Weezer in these eight songs. Big Hips” reaches a freakout climax but doesn’t bottom out, while “Shape of an Angel” doesn’t sacrifice any distortion in the name of cathartic sustain. “Blue Ridge Mtns” hits like a sedative with lucid, loping guitar sprawls. The noise swarming the “Return to Sender” melody suffocates, but “All Monsters Go to Heaven” plummets into this post-hardcore tsunami of riffs. From the first second of “Kill the Candle,”is building into its finale, the seven-minute, blistering rupture of “Whispers in the Fog.” What a righteous, visceral, howling conclusion to reach on your debut record. MX LONELY makes sludge sound like a prayer. —Most people mellow out with age. Peaches—god love her—has spent the last decade sharpening her dildo into a spear. Onher first album in over a decade, she’s still rhyming like a sex‑obsessed shock jock, but the target has shifted: post‑Roe politics, transphobes, ageism, all the miserable little forces trying to shame bodies back into compliance. “Hanging Titties” kicks things off like a demented victory lap, turning post‑menopausal boobs into blunt‑force weapons over sugar‑rush electro while “Fuck How You Wanna Fuck” and “Not In Your Mouth None of Your Business” weld bratty slogans to pile‑driver beats like riot chants you can grind to. Recorded in Berlin with aptly-named producer The Squirt Deluxe, the record keeps mutating its filth: the title track and “Fuck Your Face” stomp around the EDM festival sandbox, “Panna Cotta Delight” slow‑grinds through a sticky, video‑game funk while she drags anyone who thinks “old” equals invisible, and closer “Be Love” sneaks in a genuinely earnest synth-pop ballad under all the lube gags. It’s not subtle and it’s not meant to be; if anything, the one‑note excess becomes the point, an overclocked defense of pleasure and bodily autonomy in a moment when both are being legislated away. There are sleeker, more nuanced records about sex and gender this year, but none that sound quite so thrilled to still be disgusting and sexy as hell in public—and in 2026, that feels like its own kind of protest. —a “mesmerizing exchange between two singular voices in experimental music,” as the liner notes succinctly summarize. The album isn’t a set of ideas so much as it is dialogues in German and English and intuitive interplay shared between the Berlin-based Picciotto and the Osaka hero Phew. The songs are electronic works that, even in their minimalism, find ways to be unpredictable. “Paper Memories” employs a spoken-word performance from de Picciotto that collapses into a glitch; “Pixelwissen” utilizes Auto-Tune aboard a buzzing organ drone; the bleeps and bloops in “The Cat” siren louder than de Picciotto’s voice but never overwhelm her harmonies; “Sugar Sprinkles” puts a sinister lacquer atop a collage of found sounds and vocal clips.is a dystopian yet tranquilizing noise. Language evolves as the record carries forward, as Phew and de Picciotto are woven into each other. I don’t know what to make of this music yet, but I think that’s the point. —sounds like punk’s anxious itch got poured straight into a jazz record and left to ferment. Across seven tracks, the Messthetics—Fugazi’s rhythm section plus guitarist Anthony Pirog—and tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis take the punk‑jazz handshake of their 2024 debut and rough it up: the tempos lurch harder, the noise gets gnarlier, the quiet bits feel newly haunted. You can hear all those 150‑odd shows in the way they move as a single animal—“Deface the Currency” and “Universal Security” keep collapsing from locked‑in groove into total mayhem and back again, like they’re stress‑testing how much chaos the rhythm section can hold before everything splits open. Elsewhere, “Gestations” slinks along on noir funk before blooming into full Sonny Sharrock freakout, “30 Years of Knowing” briefly remembers how to be pretty, and “Serpent Tongue ” takes an old Messthetics bruiser and blows it out into a free‑jazz pileup, skronk ping‑ponging between guitar and sax until there’s nothing left to burn. It’s the rare “crossover” record that never feels like homework: the reference points are there if you want them—Impulse! lineage, DC punk, hard‑bop fire—but mostly it just plays like a band joyriding through all their shared obsessions, daring you to keep up. —
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