With so much good music released all the time, it can be difficult to determine what to listen to first. Every week Pitchfork offers a number of important new releases for streaming services. This week it features new albums from SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, Damon Locks and the Black Monument Ensemble, BROCKHAMPTON, Matthew E. White and Lonnie Holley, Yaya Bey, Yshinori Hayashi and the Vijay Iyer Trio. Subscribe to Pitchfork’s New Music Friday newsletter to get our recommendations in your inbox every week. (All of the publications featured here are independently selected by our editors. However, if you buy something through our affiliate links, Pitchfork earns an affiliate commission.)
Spirit of the beehive:: Entertainment, death [Saddle Creek]
Spirit of the Beehive’s Entertainment, Death is their fourth LP and their first for Saddle Creek. It is also the first record the band recorded and produced themselves. “The surreal lyrics of Spirit of the Beehive reflect the kind of discomfort that is abundant in the writing of Kmart realists: visceral, hallucinatory vignettes that evoke an entire emotional landscape in a few words,” writes Sophie Kemp of Pitchfork. Read the rest of the Best New Music review here.
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Damon Locks – – Black Monument Ensemble:: NOW [International Anthem]
NOW is the second album by interdisciplinary artist Damon Locks and his Chicago-based Black Monument Ensemble, which includes clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid and multi-instrumentalist Ben LaMar Gay. Like its 2019 predecessor, Where Future Unfolds, NOW deals with the liberation of blacks as examined using examples from archived multimedia recordings and improvisation-driven jazz channels. Locks said in a statement, “It was about expressing possibility. It was about asking the question, “Since the future has evolved and assumed a new and dangerous form … what is happening NOW?”
Listen to Apple Music
Listen to Spotify
Listen to TIDAL
Listen to Amazon Music
Listen / Buy at Bandcamp
Buy from Rough Trade
