New Music Friday: Stream projects from Feist, Angel Olsen, and more

Multitudes is Leslie Feist's sixth studio album and her first since 2017's Pleasure. Feist wrote the bulk of the record while on tour in the past two years. Her live shows, in which she performed to small crowds in the round, were dubbed Multitudes and were staged with the aim of bringing crowds together as people emerged from a period of lockdowns and quarantine.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music

Last year Black Thought of The Roots teamed up with producer Danger Mouse to release the critically-acclaimed Cheat Codes. Clearly keen to continue this run of excellence, the lyrically dextrous MC returns today with another collaborative album. Glorious Game was made alongside El Michels Affair with the duo starting production during the pandemic. The artists had performed live together in the past but never worked on a full-length project. Leon Michels boasts a varied resume, having previously worked with everyone from Beyonce & Jay-Z to Dan Auerbach’s band The Arcs. Listen to Black Thought discuss the project on this week’s episode of The FADER Interview.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Angel Olsen shares a new EP comprising four previously unreleased songs recorded during the making of her 2022 album Big Time. Forever Means features the single “Nothing Free,” a song written about “that point when self-denial breaks, and you notice how long you’ve been restraining who you are,” according to Olsen. The EP was co-produced by Olsen alongside Jonathan Wilson. The pair also worked together on Big Time.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Kara Jackson, a former National Youth Poet Laureate turned singer-songwriter, drops her debut album today. Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? began when the Chicago-based Jackson began working on demis in her childhood bedroom during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. She then turned to local musicians including Nnamdï, Kaina, and Sen Morimoto to build up her ideas and record them in full.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

A collaboration between Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, and 9th Wonder is the kind of union that the term "supergroup" was made for. The jazz/R&B fusion band announced their sophomore project and follow-up to 2020's self-titled LP with the single "For Granted" featuring Arin Ray.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music

Chicago rapper and producer ICYTWAT shares a surprise-released tape Have Mercy On Us, seven tracks combining the laid-back braggadocio of Playboi Carti with the dusty haze of a ’90s underground Memphis rap cassette. It follows last year’s Siddhi World (the deluxe arrived in January) and “Give Her Soul,” a Song You Need.

Stream: Bandcamp | SoundCloud

This new posthumous collection celebrates the work of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, an Ethiopian nun whose piano compositions — sold to benefit orphanages since the ’60s — found a dedicated audience around the world. The album is titled after the city where she lived in a monastery since 1984. Guèbrou passed away on March 27 at the age of 99.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

A Kenyan artist born and raised in Uganda, MC Yallah enlists the French producer Debmaster and members of the Nyege Nyege collective for her second album, a project that showcases a lightening fast flow and industrial, Yeezus-inflected beats.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Shygirl’s excellent debut Nymph was released in late 2022 and includes “Woe,” one of The FADER’s best songs of 2022. Building on the success of that album, today she releases a deluxe edition of the record. Nymph_o features 11 remixes and reworkings of Shygirl tracks, including appearances Tinashe, Arca, Erika de Casier, Sevdaliza, and Eartheater as well as a remix of “Woe” courtesy of Björk.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

The superproducer and rapper yields to the demands of his fanbase and releases studio versions of songs that have only been shared as teasers and snippets over the years. They include "IG," and "Honeyberry 2."

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music

Philadelphia metalcore quintet Jesus Piece are one of the scene's most reliably chaotic forces. ...So Unknown is the band's second studio album and their first in five years. They have kept busy in-between, most notably when drummer Luis Aponte joined Charli XCX for a performance on SNL. Back together after an extended break and Jesus Piece sound heavier than ever. ...So Unknown might not yield a Turnstile-esque breakthrough but it will lay waste to every mosh pit it comes in contact with.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music

Congolese artist Petite Noir creates music under the self-coined genre of Noirwave, a framework meant to empower the African diaspora to see themselves in any kind of art they enjoy. His new album MotherFather is “a conversation with God” Noir says in a press release. “It’s about going through the darkness. But it’s also about rebirth. Because the dark times are needed for us to grow.”

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

23-year-old Queens rapper Shawny Binladen has become a staple in New York City’s drill scene, and one of its most consistently exciting artists. The so-called “king of samples” is locked in on his latest project, WiCKMAN STICKMAN, on which he pays homage to his idol John Wick with 15 dark tales of murder most foul.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music

The Edinburgh producer teases a rare tenderness out of his cybernetic, glitchy tracks on his new EP, a follow-up to 2021’s Siren Spine Sysex.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

“Poison Ruin have constructed a fantasy world of a better future,” the bio for the Philadelphia band’s new album begins. “They do not flinch in the face of darkness or peddle in empty utopian gestures, but rather harness the energies of revenge and comaradery to stoke the desire for a better world made material.” The result is Härvest, a blistering but oddly hopeful collection of goth-tinged punk songs that transport the listener to a dingy rec center where a revolution is being planned.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Heartland hardcore powerhouses Chat Pile (OKC) and Nerver (KC) have teamed up for a punishing, four-track split EP. Nerver take the fist half, delivering the violent headbangers “Kicks in the Sky” and “The Nerve.” Chat Pile’s Side B opens with the post-grunge anthem “King’ and closes with “">Cut,” the record’s obliterating closer and a certified Song You Need.

Stream: Apple Music | Bandcamp

Natural Information Society are expanding out into the cosmos, one album at a time. Orbiting bandleader Joshua Abram’s earthy guembri, their new album is (appropriately) a voyage across temporal and gravitational fields. Like the universe, it tends endlessly toward entropy, growing bigger and wilder with every passing moment despite our futile attempts to rein it in. The record’s lead single, “Stigmergy,” received our most celestial Song You Need certification of the year thus far.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Preternaturally gifted singer songwriter Kristian Matsson (The Tallest Man On Earth) returns with his first new album of original music in four years. Henry St. finds Matsson picking up where he left off on 2019’s I Love You. It’s a Fever Dream., adding to his vehemently simple sound here with production help from Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn.

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp