New Music Friday: Stream new projects from DIIV, Young Jesus, mui zyu, and more

DIIV’s fourth album is the band’s most outward looking work to date. Where past albums — their 2012 debut Oshin and, more recently, 2019’s Deceiver — were ruminations on addiction and personal struggle, Frog In Boiling Water gazes at the world around us. What the band see is not exactly uplifting (the album title is a clear allegory for the climate crisis) but there is a newfound determination on this record to find a way forward through the brutal decline. Zachary Cole Smith has said he has long wanted to make a “political shoegaze record,” and Frog In Boiling Water nails the brief. It feels like a reward for fans who have stuck by the band through their well-documented troubles, with songs like “Raining On Your Pillow” (sample lyric: “There’s a river out there somewhere I’m the only owner of”) and “Everyone Out” marrying Smith’s newfound lyrical approach with DIIV’s beloved brand of feelings-first indie rock. The album’s high point is “Brown Paper Bag,” a song that takes stock of an imminent societal collapse and asks how does this make us feel. DIIV have always plucked beauty out from the pits of hell. The large-scale scope of their new outlook might overwhelm many, but Frog In Boiling Watersuggests they’re up to the task. — David Renshaw

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

The rollout for the new Young Jesus album has felt more intimate than most. Each single from The Fool came with a B-side, and the strategy never felt like a throwback to a bygone era of the industry as much as John Rossiter’s attempt to savor an unexpected return to his rich, ragged songwriting. Rossiter had given up after 2022’s Shepard Head, swapping out an insular life for one outdoors as a permaculturist. But then Shahzad Ismaily — one of modern music’s most respected esotericists — reached out, and the two began to work on a new chapter in the book Rossiter thought had concluded. Their partnership has led to some of the most profound music Young Jesus has ever produced, and Rossiter seems to feel it: this music is more unmoored than ever from the project’s beginnings, bringing the reinvention heralded on Sherpard Head into full bloom. Triumph emanates from The Fool, even when Rossiter sings of deep tragedy in a voice that ranges from a slightly manic David Byrne yelp to a hushed prayer from ANOHNI’s lips. Throughout these compositions, which can be as spacious as a high plains horizon or as cramped as a coffin, Rossiter is a child of Springsteen and Berman, a chronicler of some deeper color of human experience. — Jordan Darville

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

The new 3XLP from David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke is their final joint release, the exclamation point on their creative partnership as Gastr del Sol after a quarter-century ellipsis. Founded as a four-piece in 1991, the group’s lineup halved to a duo in 1993, and an intensely prolific period followed. For the next five years, Grubbs and O’Rourke’s mind meld produced some of the era’s most interesting music, flitting from the outer edges of post rock to a great beyond where no one had dared to venture before. We Have Dozens of Titles, conceived in 2016 at a vegan Tokyo restaurant where the two icons of experimental music reunited for the first time in 14 years, pulls from a vault of unheard artifacts: an hour of live recordings — some from the duo’s final performance together — sits alongside an hour of lost tracks previously unknown to the listening public. Taken together, the album is like a secret map to Gastr del Sol’s brilliant but fast-burning run, a treasure for those of us too young to have experienced the band in full bloom as much as for the older heads who’ve loved the band for decades. — Raphael Helfand

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Apathy is the easy way out when the end is nigh, but moody dream pop artist mui zyu attempts to make the case for an alternative approach on her minimalist new release, nothing or something to die for. On her observational sophomore record, the Hong Kong British artist explores our complex existence as inherently hopeful humans who live in a perpetual state of overwhelming technocratic chaos. Through distortion and decay, she turns a combination of heavy Auto-Tune, synthetic noise, and uneasy mechanized dissonance into something oddly soft and celestial, giving a surprisingly organic feel to songs like “please be ok” and “the rules of what an earthling can be.” A multifaceted presentation of the past, present, and (probably) future, nothing or something to die for asks us to remain cautiously optimistic as we continue to search for the familiar in the strange. — Sandra Song

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

On Placenta, the 10th Carlos Niño and Friends record in as many years (and 12th overall), the Los Angeles-based spiritual jazz percussionist and prolific collaborator recruits some of the finest musicians from his close-knit L.A. community and beyond: Sam Gendel brings his effected alto sax to “Some Rest for the Midwives…” and “Generous Pelvis”; André 3000 (whose recent album New Blue Sun Niño co-wrote) tears it up on Quetzacoatl flute next to Maia’s concert flute and guttural vocalizations; and Niño’s close collaborator Nate Merceneau plays guitar on seven of the 13 tracks. The project culminates in a 17-minute closer, “Play Kerri Chandler’s RAIN,” that creatively reprises (and significantly extends) its titular house staple. After an hour-long labor of love dedicated to “Mothers, Children, Babies, Aunties, Doulas, Midwives, [and] Birthworkers,” the song’s groovy delivery brings the whole affair to a satisfying close. — Raphael Helfand

Placenta is available for digital and physical (2XLP) purchase now via Bandcamp and is scheduled to arrive on digital streaming platforms on June 12.