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.
Asher White: Jessica Pratt
Asher White and Jessica Pratt? Pardon my French, but sign me the fuck up. The Brooklyn-based artist responsible for last year’s incredible 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living doesn’t just cover Pratt’s self-titled debut here, but fully reimagines it. Where Pratt’s originals move like candlelight—hushed, close-mic’d, slightly unreal—White keeps testing how far those songs can stretch without snapping: “Mountain’r Lower,” for instance, turns into a full-bodied rock song, arrangements bloom into strings, drums, synths, and stray electronics, and melodies that once felt ghostly suddenly arrive in primary colors. You can hear how obsessively she’s lived with this material; the phantom harmonies she used to sing along with the album become actual stacked vocals, the imagined arrangements get chased down part by part, often played by White herself on an almost absurd list of instruments. What could’ve been a gimmick instead feels like a case study in durability: song after song proves just how sturdy Pratt’s writing is, how easily it holds new shapes and still feels unmistakably hers. The result is a strange, affectionate mirror-world version of a modern cult classic—one that underlines the original’s craft even as it quietly becomes its own, very Asher White record. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Joyful Noise]
Beverly Glenn-Copeland: Laughter in Summer
Beverly Glenn-Copeland announced his dementia diagnosis in 2024, a year after sharing his beautiful first album in 19 years, The Ones Ahead. He and his wife Elizabeth responded by wanting to “challenge the mainstream image of this illness, which focuses on loss. We are actively asking the universe to show us where the life is here.” The product of that ask is Laughter in the Summer, named after the lyric “laughter in thes summer, how I remember.” The album is measured by its abundance, by its joy. Done in collaboration between the spouses, the record surrounds Glenn-Copeland’s tenor with dreamy, sometimes childlike orchestrations and improvisational beats. Artifacts from Glenn-Copeland’s career are made new again with live instrumentation (“Let Us Dance (Movement Two)), and his duets with Elizabeth (“Harbour”) are intimate, immediate. I ask where the life is here, and the universe shows me Laughter in Summer. —Matt Mitchell [Transgressive]
Chuquimamani-Condori: Luzmila edits
For Bandcamp Friday, Chuquimamani-Condori shared an EP of country music edits this morning. Their sibling Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s new album is out today too, which means that Los Thuthanaka is having a banner release day. Luzmila edits is a fast but enchanting listen that pairs big melodies with Chuquimamani-Condori’s style of Andean rhythms and clipped blasts of noise. I think “al cautiverio e dj edit” is sublime, scratched by a heaviness of backing drums and drones. “thought of you e dj edit” is my favorite, thanks to Chuquimamani-Condori’s use of David Ball’s “When the Thought of You Catches Up With Me.” Ball’s voice is interrupted by a laughing sample, crackles of static, and jolts of synth but resumes above the mix. His singing grows louder and louder until Chuquimamani-Condori’s touch fully emerges, in warped howls and guitar-string squeaks that become one. On its own, Luzmila edits is an adventurous 15-minute show. As a companion to DJ E and Edits, it’s an excellent next course. I’m not sure the Cramptons ever stop working, nor should we want them to. —Matt Mitchell [Self-Released]
Daphni: Butterfly
As Caribou, Dan Snaith embraces the macro, expansive palette of electronic music, but as Daphni, he sharpens his focus, aimed squarely at the dancefloor. Such is the case with his latest album, Butterfly. Like the preceding singles, “Good Night Baby” is a highlight reel of Snaith’s abilities as a club producer, where even the mellower moments feel suffused with a festive, nocturnal adrenaline. Snaking melodies, thumping kicks, and pillowy bass reign supreme. Even if it’s technically a side project, Daphni sounds nothing like an afterthought. Caribou “features” on “Waiting So Long,” Butterfly floats through dubs and textures—through EDM, jazz, funk, and house. It’s spiritual dance music all the way through. —Grant Sharples & Matt Mitchell [Jialong]
Dirt Buyer: Dirt Buyer III
One of my favorite songs of 2025 was “Get to Choose,” a single so awesome that, while its riff was burrowing into me for the first time, I started to think, “Wait, maybe I do like New York City???” Joe Sutkowski is a madman and so is his well-titled third Dirt Buyer album, Dirt Buyer III. Actually, “Get to Choose” is so catchy that I heard Billboard is retroactively inserting it into the Top 40 of the Alternative Airplay chart for the week of December 16, 1995. Sutkowski says the song is about “being really, really tiny and screaming, but you’re too small and nobody can hear you.” Now I know why Dirt Buyer made the guitar lick on “Get to Choose” a skyscraper. But how does anyone follow that up? Sutkowski has it figured out: “Baseball.” It doesn’t hit the same level of catchiness as “Get to Choose” but it doesn’t need to. Facsimiles are overrated. “Baseball” chugs, crushes, and contorts. The song is immediately pronounced by piles of distortion—guitar pummelings that overwhelm but never suffocate—and blinking piano lights that jut through the blasts. Sutkowski’s voice soothes the gaps with a shade of twang, especially in his enunciation of “holler.” But “Baseball” luxuriates best in a restless, noisy downpour, when the melody growls louder the heavier he strums. But there’s resolution in a sudden snap of quiet, when acoustic strings begin to vibrate. “Baseball is somethin’ I’ll never get, but I sleep on it, wake up, and try again,” Sutkowski lets out, gently. In his stupor of guitar mania on Dirt Buyer III, which covers me with a vast and stormy brilliance, Dirt Buyer squares American’s pastime in overdrive. —Matt Mitchell [Bayonet]
J. Cole: The Fall-Off
We’ve been waiting on J. Cole’s proper seventh album for almost five years, but it’s here now as a 24-song double-disc. The Fall-Off is a misnomer. Cole sounds anything but subterranean on this tape, now that he’s moved past the Kendrick Lamar beef and gone back to rapping like it’s the 2014 Forest Hills Drive days. At 100 minutes, getting through the The Fall-Off is a tall order, but it’s worth doing for the sample game alone, thanks to Cole and his long producer list (which includes The Alchemist, OMEN, T-Minus, Vinylz, and Carter Lang, to name a few). The beats are strong but the instrumentals sound like a museum: Mobb Deep, Future, Usher, Erykah Badu, OutKast, DMX, Common, the Isley Brothers, and Burna Boy all get a spot in Cole World this time around. “SAFETY” might be one of Cole’s best songs yet. He’s certainly in the kitchen with the stove turned all the way up on “39 Intro” and “The Fall-Off is Inevitable” on the record’s backside. “I Love Her Again” and “What If” are highlights too. Rap projects this ambitious rarely land on one, even two feet. But J. Cole is a veteran, and The Fall-Off is a veteran’s record. —Matt Mitchell [Dreamville/Interscope]
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton: Anata
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s first full-length solo endeavor since 2024’s Estrella Por Estrella (a droning, Bolivian guitar tape with hues of Cheer-Accident) is great. Anata is a product of the Great Pakajaqi Nation and dedicated to the Andean ceremony of the same name, “where we celebrate the Pachamama (Mother Earth) before the rainy season, giving thanks for harvest with offerings & the principle of reciprocity (Anyi) between humans/nature,” according to the liner notes. The q’iwa/queer parts of the music are anti-colonial and anti-state, and the loud parts of this record are ceremonial—like noise clattering in the street, or the soundtrack of a passing parade. The ingredients of Crampton’s instrumental work aren’t parodied by the ego of singing. Anata, like Estrella Por Estrella before it, is a deconstruction. It’s spiritual, medicinal—Indigenous ceremonial music spun boundless by human activation. As Crampton said of the Great Pakajaqi Nation last month, “we’re all still connected no matter where we find ourselves in the world.” Crampton opens a portal to his people by rewiring the compositional possibilities of guitar playing, and the elaborate “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” is shredded noise captured in trance-y loops and crushing ascending lines. Surges of metal guitar couple with the acoustic backings of charango and ronroco, climbing into an overwhelming spate of texture. It’s blown apart and obscured, analogous to YouTube clips of Andean liturgies where the audio’s bottomed out. The energy of “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜” takes me to a different place. It’s an explosive, suspended tribute to Aymara music. Crampton layers his guitars and sometimes they sound like only one, and sometimes they sound like a thousand. “Jallu” is anchored by this static, chugging riff while Crampton noodles across piled instruments. “Mallku Diablón” opens with loose strums and glassy tones, before distending into a compressed, avalanching scorcher. —Matt Mitchell [Self-Released]
Read: “Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s Anata is a ceremony of noise”
Mandy, Indiana: URGH
As far as Mandy, Indiana songs go, “Magazine” begins unassumingly: a jittery 6/4 beat heavy on auxiliary percussion, a clubby kick drum, and rumbling synth bass. But roughly a minute in, everything erupts. Alex Macdougall annihilates his crash cymbal, Scott Fair’s guitar caterwauls like a siren, Simon Catling grounds the cacophony with gritty low-end, and Valentine Caulfield excoriates her rapist in a seething warning to flee while he still can: “I’m coming for you / So go run / I won’t miss you,” she bellows in her native French. Even without the translation, the emotional charge runs deep, transcending any language barrier with its frenzied ferocity. That’s one of the recurring throughlines on URGH, the second album from the Mancunian-Parisian noise rockers. The depth of feeling, conveyed through Caulfield’s tangible presence, is one of this band’s defining traits. Here, they dial up the intensity by heightening and embellishing their core sound rather than delivering a simple reiteration. Through this methodology of escalating their industrial grit until it becomes almost unbearable, URGH utterly shatters expectations. —Grant Sharples [Sacred Bones]
Read: “URGH dials up the industrial intensity of Mandy, Indiana”
Mickey Diamond & Big Ghosts Ltd: Black Sheep
A clip of the Angelic Gospel Singers’ “I’ll Be Alright” flips into a sample of Julius’ Ezekiel 25:17, “vengeance is mine” proverb from Pulp Fiction. An Umbrella Collective tag scratches and Detroiter Mickey Diamond’s new one, Black Sheep, kicks up. If you dig Westside Gunn or Conway the Machine, especially that Griselda Ghost tape from a decade ago, you’ll like the formula Big Ghost Ltd and Mickey have figured out on Black Sheep: locking Hector Puente Colon Jr. and the Santiago Men’s Basketball Philharmonic Orchestra’s backing instrumentation into everything. Mickey’s a compelling narrator when he blurs the line between self-interrogation and putting others on blast. On one of his strongest projects yet, he raps about co-signs, prolific guys without “one hot record,” and vocal-tone verse pops over a splash of humming, pick-up-a-bible-and-start-singing gospel grooves. Black Sheep is spiritual, sometimes drumless, and Mickey’s delivery is old-school braggy. He’s got a heavy voice but a heavier pen, and the talk is cozy. —Matt Mitchell [Big Ghost Ltd. Music]
Ratboys: Singin’ to an Empty Chair
While Ratboys have truly never put out a bad album, 2023’s The Window felt like their big leap—the moment the quartet proved they could pull off fuzzed‑out rock songs, tender folk, and long, indulgent jams without losing the thread. In that sense, Singin’ to an Empty Chair feels less like a reinvention and more like a refinement. You still get the whole Ratboys grab bag—sparkling, almost straight-up alt-country on “Penny in the Lake” and “Strange Love”; nervy indie‑rock on “Anywhere” and “What’s Right?”; sprawling storms like “Burn It Down”—but it all feels of a piece in a way it didn’t always before. “Open Up” can sit next to “Know You Then,” a twangy opener next to a chugging alt‑rock single, without any sense of gear‑shifting whiplash. Every extra bar of jamming, every feedback squall, feels in service to the same question Julia Steiner keeps asking: What happens if I open up this time? That’s the quiet breakthrough here—the work, as Steiner writes it, isn’t about floating above anger or grief but learning how to live inside it. You can hear that tension in the way her voice stays measured even when the guitars go scorched‑earth, or in how a lyric often holds two contradictory truths at once: I didn’t know you then and I would’ve helped if I could; I can’t live without saying anything, but saying something might ruin everything. Singin’ to an Empty Chair lives inside that contradiction, refusing to choose between compassion and self‑preservation, between reaching out and walking away. —Casey Epstein-Gross [New West Records]
Read: “In Singin’ to an Empty Chair, Ratboys find more revelation than reinvention”
