This week's best new albums to stream
The new albums from Lande Hekt, By Storm, and Joyce Manor should be at the top of your queue today. Tap in and find a new obsession.
Photo of Lande Hekt by Robin Christian
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.
Blackwater Holylight: Not Here Not Gone
Sunny Faris says the Not Here Not Gone title is about “how you can lose people in your life but still have their presence and energy around you.” Presence and energy make for a compelling motif on Blackwater Holylight’s new record, the band’s first since relocating from Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles. These songs sound like a blank slate, dirtied then by sludgy, psychedelic guitar riffs and shoegaze sprawls. TV On The Radio and Run the Jewels producer Dave Sitek shows up with some beats on “Giraffe,” while drones pinch at the atom-splitting fuzz and doom engulfing “Heavy, Why?” I dig the metallic, distorted sustain threaded into “Bodies.” Not Here Not Gone is a compelling listen from a band reflecting on its own transience. —Matt Mitchell [Suicide Squeeze Records]
By Storm: My Ghosts Go Ghost
For My Ghosts Go Ghost, the first record made completely in Groggs’ absence, RiTchie and Parker Corey have left “Injury Reserve” behind them, proceeding instead under a moniker named after the closing song on their last album: By Storm. They look and sound much older now. Corey, once the kind of soft-faced kid who gets ID’d at 35, now resembles an Icelandic noise artist. Where Injury Reserve once made songs about overcoming insurmountable challenges, By Storm have created an album about living with the failure to do so. That’s a far more difficult emotion to articulate, and this is far more difficult music. It would be a lie to say there aren’t vestiges of the old sound here. RiTchie does, after all, still rap. The gentle strings and blue reminiscence which open the album reminds immediately of their weeping 2017 single “North Star,” one of the most devastating rap songs produced this century. As opposed to grins induced by underdog energy though, the joys of My Ghosts Go Ghost arrive through a kind of dumb astonishment instead. —Liam Inscoe-Jones [DeadAir]
Geologist: Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?
Animal Collective’s resident sound-shaper finally claims center stage on Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?, a debut that turns the hurdy-gurdy into a portal rather than a gimmick. Across ten instrumentals, Brian Weitz leans into drone, distortion, and repetition, chasing trance states instead of pop hooks and letting texture carry the emotional weight. The results move between scorched-desert psychedelia and woozy folktronica: “Tonic” and “RV Envy” push the instrument to a feverish, almost rock-like snarl, while long-form pieces like “Compact Mirror/Last Names” sprawl toward ambient jazz and soundtrack territory. Guests—Avey Tare on bass, a rotating cast of drummers, and Weitz’s own son on the loping “Government Job”—slip in and out of the mix, reinforcing how personal this experiment feels even at its most abstract. It’s a quietly audacious record, albeit one that certainly won’t make the charts anytime soon; it is, after all, an artist best known for electronics using a centuries-old drone box to stitch together krautrock, spiritual jazz, and desert hallucinations into something singularly his own. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Drag City]
Taking pop-punk seriously in 2026 isn’t always easy, but Joyce Manor does a valiant job throughout I Used To Go To This Bar, even if they end up stuck in an awkward middle ground. Their trademarks are present: Barry Johnson’s stable whine, nervous love songs, winding licks. Johnson has always been more interested in pop music than punk or hardcore, something he underlined in a recent interview with The Line of Best Fit. I Used To Go To This Bar satisfies that pop instinct as much as possible. With the new wave synths on the tremendous “Falling Into It,” they pick up where 2022’s excellent 40 oz. to Fresno’s left off. “After All You Put Me Through” finds Johnson and co. locating a weirdly funky, bummed-out groove with hints of bongos and movie-ready strings. And with “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives,” Johnson sings about getting high with the former Summer Vacation frontperson, but the song really takes flight with that incisive hook of “Freight train coming down the track / And it almost gave me a heart attack” before diving into a bouncy, power-chord-heavy verse. I Used To Go To This Bar splits the difference between the grown-up Joyce Manor and the sharp punk they’re known for, with an extra dose of existential panic. —Ethan Beck [Epitaph]
Who am I to say no to an English pop-rock record produced by Wire’s Matthew Simms? Lucky Now, Lande Hekt’s latest, has a lot of twee, a lot of jangle, and a lot of vibe. The ex-Muncie Girls leader said Lucky Now is the result of wanting “to try and push for something slightly more positive, which I’m trying to do more of generally—just to not fall apart.” I gotta say, Lucky Now sounds nowhere close to splitting at the seams. This is punchy, catchy rock and roll music. The title track sedates while”Favourite Pair of Shoes” could have gone kablooey in mid-2010s indie. “Coming Home” and “My Imaginary Friend” are tone museums. Take my biases here to heart: this record is 1,000% my shit and I’m obsessed with it. If you like guitar magic done up in chromatic fuzztones and syrupy storytelling, Lucky Now will take good care of you. Music like this could make me smile in a traffic jam. —Matt Mitchell [Tapete]
Drew Daniel’s foray into the symphony was inspired by the forces of gradual change that feel so fundamental to the human experience, particularly how those slow shifts often go unnoticed amid the hectic day-to-day tasks of modern life. In press materials for this new album, Daniel says that he “wanted music for that overlay” of a “longer, slower process playing itself out, cell by cell, structure by structure: birth, growth, life, aging, death.” Yet even with an overarching concept befitting of his day job as an English professor at Johns Hopkins University, Can Such Delightful Times Go on Forever? never feels academic. Thanks to its orchestral setting, it just sounds exceedingly pretty. Daniel’s take on the conservatory successfully charts the non-linear path of temporality, how time itself takes twists and turns that can’t be charted by conventional means. What once started as a project to fulfill a tossed-off dare has since bloomed into a full-fledged artistic endeavor that reckons with human existence. —Grant Sharples [Thrill Jockey]
One of the most polarizing rappers of 2025 was xaviersobased, if only because he’s got a truly perplexing, ad-libbed, party-rap sound. The combination of black metal and rage on “uncomfy” was too much for some, but that didn’t stop the single from drumming up a good amount of hype for xaviersobased’s debut album, which is here now. It’s cool to see one of NYC’s buzziest underground stars take a break from loosies and tapes, and there’s promise in this project, especially when he detours from the jerky, stoner rap style that he and Nettspend often operate under. “I Don’t Gotta Say It” is sedated, woozy. “Packs Gone” sounds like Thank Me Later-era Drake sent through a taffy puller. “Harajuku” is brightly abrasive but not totally. Sure, xaviersobased spends a lot of Xavier recycling ideas, but he’s clearly got shooters—a lot of them even cop a feature here: OsamaSon, Zaytoven, Yung Sherman, Rio Da Yung OG, ksuuvi. I liked xaviersobased’s appearance on Che’s “Mannequin” last year and wish he was doing more of that on Xavier. But this is the same dude that made “vibrator” two years ago. The sky’s still the limit. —Matt Mitchell [1-chance / Surf Gang Records]
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