New Music Friday: This week’s essential new albums

London's Pangaea puts everything you want to hear in a club and packages it perfectly into one album. Changing Channels is the producer's latest offering on Hessle Audio, the electronic music scene's cult favorite label that he co-founded with Pearson Sound and Ben UFO, and it's loaded with six tracks that are destined for the dancefloor. Starting with the catchy tech-house "Installation" (a song in the running for 2023's most played tracks at the club) and ends with the bombastic '90s UK rave-inspired "Bad Lines," but everything in between is a trip for the ears. Whether you're a selector or a dancer, Changing Channels is worthy of your catalog. — Arielle Lana LeJarde

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

A beep pulses across the beginning of Slauson Malone 1's "Voyager," a song named after the space probes that revealed the secrets of the universe. It's a lonely mission to contemplate, this gathering of information and sending of messages across infinity without hope of response or return. The exploration of the structures that undergird our lives can be its own reward, and this is the root of the success of EXCELSIOR, Malone 1's third album and first for Warp Records. Resistant to categorization since his days as a member of Standing in the Corner, a N.Y.C. group that pulled from underground hip-hop and experimental jazz, Malone 1 makes his songs feel like solid constructions you can reach out and touch. — Jordan Darville

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Andrew Savage has always been a phenomenal songwriter. Like some of rock’s greatest literary minds — Dylan, Zeven — his turns of phrase can come off as acerbic or pretentious at times, but when he hits, he hits. The second solo album from the Denton, Texas-born Parquet Courts frontman is a farewell letter to New York, the city that embraced him in his 20s the way it did his lyrical ancestors — though, perhaps, to a slightly lesser extent. “I have paid rent to the same lord of land / For ten plus years, and now / I’m tired as hell of living life this way,” he sings on “David’s Dead,” a late-album cut about an unhoused man who lived on his block in Brooklyn for years, witnessing its gentrification in real time from street level. The record is at its best on reflective songs like these, where Savage gives himself room to exercise his keen observational and imaginative powers — “Le Grand Baloon,” “Mountain Time,” and “My New Green Coat” are also excellent. Its only misses come during two mid-album tracks in which he sticks to a single melodic and rhythmic refrain for nearly every four-bar phrase (think Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” or J. Cole’s recent verse on “The Secret Recipe”), rendering both cuts claustrophobically cute. Save for this brief setback, though, Several Songs About Fire is a terrific record that rewards repeat listening and a return trip to Savage’s brilliant 2017 solo debut, Thawing Dawn. — Raphael Helfand

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Ethan P. Flynn is an FKA twigs collaborator and a product of the same scene that bred indie eccentrics Jockstrap. His music is a little less future-facing than those in his orbit but that's not to say the songs on Abandon All Hope play it safe. Flynn knows how to successfully warp a prototype, taking the folk singer aesthetic and blurring the edges a little with unexpected production choices and a maximalist approach to instrumentation. Abandon All Hope, as its title would suggest, is laced with a nihilistic worldview but it's impossible to listen to the rollicking title track or "Clutching Your Pearls" and not feel a little hope for the future. — David Renshaw

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Back in 1992, a then little-known band called Weezer opened for the band Dogstar, featuring the better-known actor Keanu Reeves on bass, in Los Angeles. It’s the most California moment to have ever California’d, and now, nearly three decades later, Dogstar have returned with their latest studio release, Somewhere Between the Power Lines and Palm Trees, which takes their sunny, West Coast mentality and mixes it with grunge and alt-rock. Reeves’s love for bands such as Joy Division and Alvvays has been well-documented, but his work on Dogstar — warm, grooving bass lines — leans less Factory Records or shoegaze and more Pearl Jam mixed in with The National. Throw it on while you’re cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway to get into the mood for your Point Break rewatch. — Cady Siregar

Stream: Spotify | Apple Music