7 albums you need to hear this week

In the age of streaming, it’s never been easier to listen to new music — but with over 60,000 new songs added to Spotify every day, it’s also never been harder to know what to put on. Every week, the team at Rolling Stone UK will run down some of the best new releases that have been added to streaming services.

This week, we’ve highlighted records by Jessy Lanza, Post Malone, Bethany Cosentino, Aphex Twin, Dexys, Georgia and Travis Scott.

Jessy Lanza – Love Hallucination

The fourth record from this unflinchingly bold Canadian electropop producer is every bit as idiosyncratic as we’ve come to expect, although this time is characterised by a new confidence, almost a swagger, as she documents her move from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in typically sunny fashion. Her sound is one defined by its contrasts, floaty synths set against juddering bass, and those extremes are deepened on Love Hallucination, which explores sensuality and desire though the prisms of irresistible melody, beguiling instrumental choices and, frequentlly, knowingly witty lyrics, not least on the disarming ‘I Hate Myself’. Having established a singular sound on records one to three, Love Hallucination confirms that nobody is making off-kilter pop quite like Lanza.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | Amazon Music

Post Malone – Austin

On his fifth album, one that takes its title from his birth name, Post Malone finally turns his attention to something he’d continually deferred over the course of his meteoritic rise to hip hop supremacy; a record that explores his guitar-led rock influences. Austin Richard Post’s open reverence of the likes of Nirvana and Bob Dylan, combined with his penchant for emotions honesty, made an album like Austin feel like an inevitability, and while this is not a wholesale step into rock territory, it’s a first foray that throws up some of his most interesting work in a while, particularly on opener ‘Don’t Understand’, which feels like a ground-up reinvention of the sonic and emotions tenor that made him famous.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music

Bethany Cosentino – Natural Disaster

Ever since she first came to prominence, over a decade ago now, with Best Coast’s debut album, Crazy for You, Bethany Cosentino has been trying to escape her own long shadow, with varying degrees of success. The blissed-out pop of that record made her indie famous but also trapped her in amber as a caricature of herself, a stoner girl singing of boys, beaches and her cat, Snacks. Only now, as she ventures out under her own name for the first time, is she finally putting that image to bed, with a deeply authentic record that channels her biggest musical heroes – Christine McVie, Linda Ronstadt, Sheryl Crow – with wit, poise and verve.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | Amazon Music

Aphex Twin – Blackbox Life Recorder 21f/In a Room7 F760

Over three decades into a career that has made him one of the most influential electronic musicians of all time, Richard James remains inscrutable, something reflected in both the unwieldy titling of this first release in five years as well as how far it is musically from what we’ve come to expect from him in recent years, especially after the relentless sonic assault of his festival appearances so far this summer. The three new tracks here, which are accompanied by an alternative mix of ‘Blackbox Life Recorder 21f’, are typically complex in their construction but unusually laid-back, even ruminative, in their feel, as James pairs softly-employed breakbeats with woozy synth lines that perhaps signal a new direction entirely for Aphex Twin.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music

Dexys – The Feminine Divine

As he put together their first album of new material in over a decade, Dexys frontman Kevin Rowland found himself reflecting on the loss of his mother, and making frequent trips to Thailand, where he sought to find emotional balance and ultimately found himself fascinated by ancient notions of feminine power. He delves into them on this, what is only the fifth Dexys studio album in a career that’s spanned several decades, updating the group’s inventive cross between new wave and blue-eyed soul for the 21st century on tracks that explore sex, love and gender dynamics with equal parts sincerity and playfulness.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music

Georgia – Euphoric

A strict adherence to working alone, and to writing most of her music in her bedroom, culminated for Georgia in 2020’s Seeking Thrills, which was nominated for the Mercury Prize and marked the singer-songwriter out as one the UK’s premier purveyors of lovelorn, club-ready alternative dance. Since, she appears to have torn up her own rulebook, collaborating widely with everybody from Gorillaz to Shania Twain and, now, bringing in a producer for the first time – Rostam Batmanglij, previously of Vampire Weekend. The Londoner flew to Los Angeles to put clear blue water between herself and her own methods, and the results are kaleidoscopic, the sound of an artist relishing a new-found lack of boundaries.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music

Travis Scott – Utopia

The first album in five years from one of modern hip hop’s biggest names arrives after a tumultuous period that has seen Scott remain a crucial rap voice through tragedy and shifting industry tides. His ambitious plan to launch this fourth record with a concert in front of the pyramids of Giza may have been nixed, but you can understand what it was about this undulating, sonically restless record that inspired him to attempt such a big statement in the release of it; he has channeled influences from psychedelic rock to K-pop on the singles so far, while the album will arrive with a conceptual film, Circus Maximus, to accompany it.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music