11 new albums to stream this week
The new albums from Grace Ives, Gladie, underscores, and Avalon Emerson should be at the top of your queue today. Tap in and find a new obsession.
Photo of Avalon Emerson by Lillie Eiger
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.
Anna Calvi: Is This All There Is? EP
Anna Calvi has been one of rock’s most criminally underloved guitarists and vocalists for going on fifteen years, so the fact that her first release since 2018’s Hunter is a four-song EP rather than the full-length she owes the world might sting—at least until you hear it. Is This All There Is? pairs Calvi with a different collaborator on each track (Iggy Pop, Perfume Genius, Laurie Anderson, Matt Berninger) and treats each duet not as a streaming-era handshake but as a genuine collision of sensibilities, her operatic guitar work and enormous voice reshaping itself around whoever’s in the room. Iggy actually sings on “God’s Lonely Man” rather than delivering his usual late-career spoken-word cameo, and the two of them circle each other over a pounding, gothic groove. Perfume Genius barely holds himself together on a devastating take on Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “I See a Darkness” while Calvi builds something cavernous around him. Laurie Anderson turns Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” into something beamed in from another dimension entirely. And the title track with Berninger—sweeping, cinematic, originally written for a Joanna Hogg film—lets their voices chase each other through an arrangement that gallops like a spaghetti western score until Calvi unleashes a howl that stops the whole thing in its tracks. Fifteen minutes, four songs, zero wasted motion. If this is just the opening salvo of the trilogy she’s promised, brace accordingly. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Domino]
Avalon Emerson & The Charm: Written Into Changes
Written Into Changes is a heady, intoxicating trip. Avalon Emerson came up as a DJ doing globe-trotting gigs, and her second album with The Charm is full of geographical splendor. She conjures everybody from the Stone Roses to the Postal Service, jumping off the deep end into one of the most exciting pop efforts of this young year. Songs like “Eden” and “Jupiter and Mars” and “Happy Birthday” and “Earth Alive” are textural, catchy, and ephemeral. Written Into Changes gives us concrete proof that Emerson’s ability to pull magic out of thin air goes far beyond her turntables. This is a record with panache and polish, as she experiments with reverb, baggy synths, and deep lyrical adventures, proving her worth in the dance-pop space. She writes like hell and can find a groove anyplace. Not many albums from 2026 have this kind of replay value. The songs get better the longer you sit with them. —Matt Mitchell [Dead Oceans]
Girl Scout: Brink
Three EPs, a tour with Alvvays, and years of mounting buzz later, Stockholm’s Girl Scout have finally committed to a full length, and Brink justifies the patience. Scout’s honor, I swear. Emma Jansson, Per Lindberg, and Kevin Hamring met studying jazz at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music but bonded over ’80s and ’90s guitar records, and that clash between conservatory discipline and scruffy rock instinct powers the whole album. “Operator” has a wiry, post-punk bite that recalls Elastica at their sharpest; “Keeper” flips the script entirely with a glossy synth-driven arrangement that could fill an arena; “The Kill” throws in a theremin and a deranged synth solo just because it can.The sonic territory covered across thirteen tracks is impressive for a debut: spiky post-punk sits next to lush synth arrangements, widescreen melodrama neighbors deadpan wit, and Jansson’s voice—which can pivot from whispery and detached to ferocious inside a single chorus—ties all of it into something coherent. She writes about the specific dread of watching your twenties calcify around you: choices that used to feel casual now leaving marks, childhood’s sense of infinite possibility shrinking in the rearview. Both she and Hamring grew up as expats, bouncing between countries before eventually settling in Sweden, and that mutual experience of never quite arriving on time lends the record an emotional texture that goes deeper than standard quarter-life melancholy. They half-jokingly call what they do “bubblegrunge,” and it fits: there’s genuine grit beneath all that sparkle. —Casey Epstein-Gross [AWAL]
I’ve been an Augusta Koch believer since I was 15 years old, screaming along to Cayetana’s Nervous Like Me in my bedroom, so when the band broke up I took it as a personal affront. I lost track of Koch for a few years—until she turned up as the opener at an AJJ show I caught in 2021, fronting a project called Gladie that I didn’t realize was her until I Googled it between sets. The first two Gladie albums were genuinely very good, but they lived in a quieter, more inward-facing register than what Koch had done before, as if she’d made a conscious decision to leave the volume behind with the old band name. No Need to Be Lonely is the record where those two impulses—the punk and the poet—fully meld together into something entirely new. Produced by DIY legend Jeff Rosenstock, who signed on after hearing Koch’s demos and apparently couldn’t help himself, the album reunites Koch with the kind of full-throttle, room-filling energy that made Cayetana irresistible while carrying forward everything Gladie taught her about sitting with a feeling instead of just bulldozing through it. Songs erupt out of nowhere and then, just as suddenly, pull back to a whisper; piano ballads split open into double-time rock songs like a cocoon tearing from the inside; an Americana detour shows up with brushed snare and a twangy guitar and never feels like a gimmick. Koch writes about the exhausting daily work of being a person who gives a shit: watching a friend suffer through illness and raging at the world for having the audacity to look peaceful while it happens, catching yourself complaining about traffic you’re contributing to, learning that loving someone doesn’t mean you can save them. Koch’s voice—raw, slightly unpredictable, cracking at the moments that count—remains one of indie rock’s most underrated instruments, and Rosenstock’s production knows exactly when to let it sit alone and when to bury it in noise. 15-year-old me could not be happier. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Get Better]
Ringtone crashouts, bric-a-brac expanse, and homebody anthems have made Grace Ives a compelling frontrunner in this current phase of indie-pop, positing her as the high-drama, cry-your-eyes-out-singing midpoint between Sky Ferreira and Addison Rae. Girlfriend should be a remedy for all this bro-country, half-baked reggaeton, and TikTok-audio slop-generated chart malaise. After years of worshipping Kesha’s “Die Young,” Ives now has one of her own in “Drink Up.” On Girlfriend, Ives finds great duet partners in Ariel Rechtshaid and John DeBold, two producers with the resumés and sensibilities needed to fill her bedroom pop with a vampy sum of strings and speaker-blowouts, not hollow it out. Her working with greats like Rechtshaid, DeBold, and Justin Raisen, two of whom co-produced Night Time, My Time… Let’s just say the music on Girlfriend is as good as I’d hoped it would be. No pop song since “Everything Is Embarrassing” has hit quite like “Trouble,” and “Dance With Me” is a confident, sincere, and bursting potpourri of synths, piano, pump organ, mellotron, cello, and guitar. Ives’ alto is a cyclone on Girlfriend. “My Mans” is fucking ridiculous, and I mean that as a compliment. She’s truly belting that shit. There’s a lyric on Girlfriend that I love: “I think we could be like the air.” It’s just so good, especially in a period where pop-music lyricism has gotten so apathetic and boring. Ives is a collector who surrounds herself with trinkets and decorations. She once called 2nd a collage, and I always thought that spoke well to the scatteredness of her obsessions. In Janky Star and especially in Girlfriend there is a tactile feeling to the music, as if her songs are ephemera on a shelf. —Matt Mitchell [True Panther]
Luke Combs’ discography is a game of margins. Almost ten years ago, he burst through with a bellowing voice and sturdy guitar licks that recalled the hits of 1990s country. After the bro-country boom, where lame hip-hop production and processed guitars reigned supreme, Combs’ approach felt like a palette cleanser. Since then, he’s reliably put out pleasant albums, chock full of radio hits, where he details old breakups, adventures in drinking, and what it means to be a parent. Combs also knew the right songwriters to pull from, especially with his 2023 cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” which completed his ascent to household name. Across this last decade, there have been small but noticeable additions to his sonic palette, primarily more mandolins and fiddles. Plus, his regular producers Chip Matthews and Jonathan Singleton figured out how to make those snare drums truly thump. Consistency is the name of the game; there are almost no terrible songs by Combs but only a few life-changing ones. Last summer, he teased his unwieldy new album, The Way I Am, by telling People that he’d return to what his fans craved. “It’s not going to be nothing weird,” he said. “We’re not doing no jazz album.” He was going back to booming, anthemic country. The result is an overlong supply of sturdy songs. —Ethan Beck [Seven Ridges/Sony]
God bless mari rubio! Country, pop, ambient—the multi-instrumentalist Texan does it all, and her new more eaze album, sentence structure in the country, sews the three together. You can hear the influence of rubio’s recent collaborators (Grumpy, claire rousay, Lynn Avery) all over “bad friend,” the first taste of sentence structure and a song “about knowing you shouldn’t have romantic feelings for a friend.” But it’s also “about not doing a very good job hanging out with people and generally feeling like an alien,” rubio says. With Auto-Tuned vox, violin vignettes, clear-water synths, wincing pedal steel moves, guitar phrases generated by the great Wendy Eisenberg, and a killer opening line (“With new conditions you walk it back, pervert the air but leave in tack”), “bad friend” is three blurry minutes that embolden the album’s somber, drifting quiet. —Matt Mitchell [Thrill Jockey]
Spencer Thomas spent several years playing with Athens rockers Futurebirds—first as drummer, then as keyboardist—before leaving for Atlanta to focus on his own music. He plays both those instruments and many others on his new album Cynical Vision. Thomas’ latest swings wildly in just the first four tracks, laying out his influences on his suit jacket sleeves: there’s some Lou Reed on opener “This Is Your Life Now,” a bit of Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson on “Hoeny Burne,” a little Townes Van Zandt on “Grab Enlightenment by the Horns,” and even Howard Jones ’80s synth-pop on “The World Is Fucked and I Love You.” But what most of those influences have in common is their sublime and often funny storytelling, and that’s the thread that holds Cynical Vision together. Thomas lays bare the absurdities of modern life while longing for something a little more real. —Josh Jackson [Strolling Bones Records]
16 years and six albums in, and the Tedeschi Trucks Band has never sounded so powerful. How do you follow-up a concept project like I Am the Moon, which interlinked four separate albums and films, all of which are based on a 12th-century Persian poem? I suppose calling up producer Mike Elizondo was a good first step. What he and the band came up with, Future Soul, is a delightful, exploratory set of 11 roots-rock tunes that never overstay their welcome. Susan Tedeschi’s voice is commanding, while guitarists Mike Mattison and Derek Trucks flash funk riffs and vintage tones. Trucks’ picking is sounding especially tight, and his solo on “I Got You” is a highlight in a career full of ‘em. “Under the Knife,” “Devil Be Gone,” and “Shout Out” conjure many eras of soul, Southern rock, and R&B music, all done up in the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s traditional flavor of vibrance. These guys can really wail, overdrive, and scale back, obvious from the first lick of “Crazy Tryin’,” the album’s scene-stealer. The band may be 12 players deep, but not one second of Future Soul sounds overcrowded. —Matt Mitchell [Fantasy]
U, underscores’ third album, is April Harper Grey’s lean and mean bid for pop stardom. Gone are the proggy, conceptual arcs of 2023’s wallsocket. U hits all the beats of a classic pop record—a choreo-primed single, a power ballad, a post-breakup closure anthem—without overstaying its welcome. It’s glossy and stylized, but it never sacrifices the zoomed-up, post-genre, chaos-prone quirks of her earlier work. The goal here is maximum impact in a slimmed-down package. Take the album’s three singles: “Music,” “Do It,” and “Tell Me (U Want It).” On the one hand, these songs are spiritual successors to the wallsocket bonus track “Stupid (Can’t run from the urge).” They’re jittery electro-pop bangers built off 8-bit synths, hardened for impact. Still, underscores’ music has never quite sparkled like this before. Even with their hyperpop tricks—like a techno pivot to close out “Tell Me” or an EDC-ready drop on “Music”—U’s singles feel more Britney Spears’ Blackout than Dylan Brady; more early Rina than Revengeseekerz. The glitching out is not the point; the hooks, the style, and the pop star attitude are. While wallsocket expanded outward, U digs deep into one spot. By the end of it, it’s hard not to find underscores’ bid for pop stardom incredibly convincing. She really can do it all (pun slightly intended): the addictive hooks, the branding, the choreography. —Andy Steiner [Mom+Pop/Corporate Rockmusic]
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