Best New Music: Tracks, Albums & Reissues (2024)

Verraco

The Colombian producer’s galaxy-sized rave tracks are unsettling and exhilarating. This 21-minute EP is an essential record for the vanguard of dance music.

Charli XCX

With her sixth album, Charli XCX transcends all narratives and delivers a hit. Brat is imperious and cool, nuanced and vulnerable, and one of the best pop albums of the year.

Arooj Aftab

The singer and composer’s wondrous fourth album deepens the sound of her boundless folk-jazz style. Its gestures are bold, romantic, and often unforgettable.

Yaya Bey

With singular grace and flair, Yaya Bey deepens her connection to homespun funk and R&B while transforming grief, insecurities, and depletion into a full embrace of life.

Chief Keef

The long-teased sequel to his cult-classic mixtape is a highlight in the Chicago rapper’s career, bringing the first-wave drill he helped popularize screaming into the future.

Mdou Moctar

In his most directly political album yet, the Tuareg guitarist lets his solos become the sound of his fury when his Tamasheq lyrics aren’t enough.

Jessica Pratt

Jessica Pratt’s fourth album of hypnagogic folk music hones her mysterious song to its finest point.

Bladee

The Swedish rapper’s latest is the most fully realized project of his career. Its blurry, blot-out-the-world vibe glitches between reality and nightmare.

Hovvdy

The Austin duo’s hushed and unassuming double album is a capstone to their career so far, a scrapbook of moments of love and loss from a life well-lived.

Still House Plants

In their seemingly telepathic interplay, the London post-rock trio eschews typical song forms in favor of a kind of collective flickering; their music tracks the process of its creation.

Cindy Lee

The sprawling and spectacular Cindy Lee album is an essential trove of music. Each song is like a foggy transmission from a rock’n’roll netherworld with its own ghostly canon of beloved hits.

Vampire Weekend

On their masterfully knotty fifth album, Vampire Weekend go on a self-mythological journey into old sounds, old haunts, and old cities to find something new within.

Charli XCX

The first single from Brat has its heart in the club and its ass on a Harley.

Jessica Pratt

The lead single from Pratt’s new album, Here in the Pitch, takes the time-obsessed spirit of her music, adds a drummer and a bassist, and welcomes a new era.

Waxahatchee

MJ Lenderman guest stars on the lead single from Katie Crutchfield’s new album, Tigers Blood.

Björk / Rosalía

Rescued from the archives, the musician’s sweeping new song with Rosalía supports the legal fight against foreign commercial farming operations in Iceland.

Sufjan Stevens

Here’s a new Sufjan song that might make you cry even before you listen.

Mannequin puss*

On a blistering new single, the Philadelphia band chooses spitefulness as a form of love.

L’Rain

The new single from I Killed Your Dog hinges on a Strokes-style guitar melody and a sense of deep alienation.

Sufjan Stevens

The lead single to Javelin is an elegant break-up song that sounds like a lullaby.

Olivia Rodrigo

The second single from Guts is hammy, blasé, and brilliant.

MJ Lenderman

On the Asheville songwriter’s re-recorded single, a golf-themed version of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is just one strange detail in a mundane landscape.

Carly Rae Jepsen

The joyous, floor-filling highlight of The Loveliest Time is as transcendent as its subject matter.

Big Thief

The marvelous new single has been a staple of the band’s live sets for a couple of years.

Gastr del Sol

In a new archival collection, Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs have polished and stitched together every scrap and forgotten rarity into one final album, a fitting final chapter for an indescribably great band.

Dettinger

New vinyl reissues spotlight a masterful pair of albums by the elusive German producer whose ambient techno occupies an interzone between the dancefloor and cloud nine.

Broadcast

Thirteen years after Trish Keenan’s death, a collection of her demos, home recordings, and voice notes offers an intimate and at times heartbreaking look at her otherworldly genius.

Alice Coltrane

This newly issued 1971 set helpfully complicates the iconic harpist and pianist’s legacy, revealing her as not just a spiritual-jazz mystic but also the heir to her late husband’s harshly ecstatic fire music.

Joe Henderson

The virtuoso saxophonist’s 1969 album with Herbie Hanco*ck, Ron Carter, and Jack DeJohnette is an essential document of a transitional moment in which everything in jazz seemed up for grabs.

Mixmaster Morris / Jonah Sharp / Haruomi Hosono

The 1998 collaborative album brought together a trio of legends from the worlds of ambient and chillout. It’s a placid but playful collection that is like nothing else in their repertoires.

Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru

A remarkable archival release captures rare vocal performances that the esteemed nun, composer, and pianist recorded in the late 1970s and early ’80s amid political turmoil in Ethiopia.

Microstoria

On two LPs from the mid 1990s, members of Oval and Mouse on Mars ask what lies beyond music’s borders. Their sonic abstractions are as bewitching as the most tightly composed song.

Lou Reed

A new reissue of Lou Reed’s final solo album spotlights a side of the New York icon that few ever got to see: a quiet ambient composer.

Pauline Anna Strom

In the 1980s, the legendary Bay Area composer self-released her first three albums of roving, curious synthesis. Restored and remixed by master engineer Marta Salogni, they’re collected in a new box set.

Dorothy Carter

Self-released in 1978, this gorgeous set of ancient songs and instrumental abstractions predicted the shape of folk to come.

War

The new reissue of a landmark album of 1970s funk restores the Los Angeles group’s reputation as multi-cultural pop savants and unstoppable improvisers.