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Music

Stream of the Crop: 8 New Albums for Heavy Rotation

New albums from Baths, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, and MoneyBagg Yo and NBA Youngboy top this week's list.
Mario Luna

The end of the week means a glut of new music to dig into and, while that is Extremely Good, it can be difficult to know where to start. So every week, we at Noisey put together a list of our favorite new albums, mixtapes, and EPs from the past seven days. You can listen to them all on this page. It is neither comprehensive nor fair. We hope it helps.

Baths: Romaplasm

Four years after the release of Obsidian, [Will Wiesenfeld] is back with a new Baths record called Romaplasm that he says congealed during that period of comfort, which pretty much stretched through the entire recording of the record. But even if you didn’t know about the “really good state of being” that he’s been living in for the past few years, you can get a sense of it from the record—a bright, moving collection of shimmering electronic instrumentals and lyrics that are often playful, romantic, and yearning. Wiesenfeld notes it’s not 100% positive—mark the half-sung, half-yelped “queer in a way that works for you” refrain on one of the record’s standouts “Human Bog”—but even the dreariest moments hit your ears feeling like you’re waking up in someone’s cottage on a sunny hill in some fantasy world. — Danika Harrod, Baths' New Album Is a Warm Fantasy World

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Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings: Soul of a Woman

Soul music lost one of its foremost icons a year ago after Sharon Jones’s death following a battle with cancer spanning several years. Soul of a Woman, a powerful posthumous send-off, is a fitting final display of the same joy and strength she maintained throughout her entire career, no matter the circumstances. The final track on the album, “Call on God,” is a warm reminder of one of the convictions she held dearest—that she was never alone even in her darkest moments, a fitting closing chapter she’ll remain immortalized through. —Tiffany Wines

MoneyBagg Yo and NBA Youngboy: Fed Baby’s

Memphis and Baton Rouge collide on Fed Baby’s, a joint offering from Youngboy Never Broke Again and MoneyBagg Yo. The two trade bars back and forth, solidifying their statuses as two of the South’s most promising rising stars. The only features on the tape come from rap veterans: Migos’s Quavo and Young Thug. Not that it needs them—it’s hard-hitting all on its own. With tracks titled “Mandatory Drug Test”, “Character Witness,” and “Plea Deal,” Youngboy and Moneybagg set the stage for a more appropriate than ever interrogation of the “justice” of the criminal justice system.

Moth Cock: 0-100 at the Speed of the Present

The Chicago label Hausu Mountain have long established that each batch of their strange digital rot is a must-cop-on-sight sorta deal. But even with that history behind them, their “WTF LOL” batch is something special, featuring new outings by the freak-rock deconstructionists in Form a Log and outerworld explorer Brett Naucke. The unsettled standout though, by my count, is this oozy tape by the Ohioan absurdists Moth Cock. Doug Gent and Pat Modugno have a whole catalog of jittery electro-surrealism behind them at this point—but 0-100 at the Speed of the Present is a new high-sludge mark, a radioactive soup of liquified horns, toothsome drones, shreds of static static, and drum machine chunks. It’s queasy and totally fucked and you’ll definitely want to slurp it down, throw it back up, then enjoy it again and again. — Colin Joyce

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Charlotte Gainsbourg: Rest

Charlotte Gainsbourg's fourth studio album was produced by Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, and features contributions from Paul McCartney, Owen Pallett, and Connan Mockasin. Sung mostly in French, it is melancholy, graceful, and inventive, gliding past and lingering for long enough to creep the listener out. — Alex Robert Ross

Tove Lo: Blue Lips

Swedish pop singer Tove Lo's third album is split into two parts—"Light Beam" and "Pitch Black"—in an attempt to capture the "highs, lows and ultimate demise of a relationship." You can feel it, too, from the bouncy optimism of "disco tits" to the introspective optimism of "shivering gold" to the lonely confusion of "cycles." — ARR

Yamaneko: Spa Commissions

Spa Commissions, [Joe Moynihan's] third longform release for British label Local Action under the Yamaneko alias, is a brilliant, beguiling, and beatless exploration of a specific space: the spa. Describing it over email as, “the result of years of research,” the record—which came about via commission—is a chance for Moynihan to try and present an idea of environment that he’s not intimately familiar with. “I've spent most of my life being pretty into relaxing places, both real and virtual, exercises and the calming music that goes with all that noise,” he says. “Even if I couldn't afford to go to them.” — Josh Baines, Yamaneko's 'Spa Commissions' Offers Some Much Needed Peace

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T-Pain: Oblivion

Though it’s been six years since his last album, 2011’s rEVOLVEr, T-Pain’s Oblivion sounds just as timeless as its predecessor. The signature sound he’s pioneered rings as true as ever on what might be one of his most candid releases to date, featuring highlights like “Textin’ My Ex” and “Second Chance”, remarkably self-aware tracks proving that, in some ways, he’s just like us. — Tiffany Wines

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