18 Great Records You May Have Missed: Winter 2024

Image by Chris Panicker

Every quarter our writers and editors round up a list of overlooked recent releases that deserve some more attention. None of these albums were named Best New Music, and some weren’t reviewed on Pitchfork at all, but we think they’re all worth a listen. From punchy, digitized Chicago footwork to vaporous ambient music and slick, Y2K-indebted R&B, here are some albums you’ll want to listen to.

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

Bianca Scout: Pattern Damage

Pattern Damage, a new album from London-based artist Bianca Scout, drops listeners into a slipstream of meditative, minimalist loops and hushed, ritualistic vocals. The multidisciplinary artist and longtime dancer infuses her music with alien sounds that assume more distinct shapes on repeat listens: a nervous chant of spliced vocals grow into a triumphant call on the standout “Chances,” while the atmospheric “When My Heart Is Lonely (Monks Orchard)” recalls Grouper’s hazy washes of ambient sound, leading you deep into a state of hypnotic reflection.

–Eric Torres

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Chatterton: Fields of This

There’s something sneaky lurking beneath Chatterton’s debut studio album, Fields of This. Across the album, the Oxnard, California, duo of guitarist-keyboardist Brock Pierce and multi-instrumentalist Logan Scrivner—with additional bass by Trevor Edwards and saxophone by Jack Brown—slinks between slacker rock and hazy slowcore. It’s album standout “Lakewood,” though, that steals the show, a surly emo number that devolves into saxophone-squealing post-punk. “I voted for you in the last town election/Fucking rat, you owe me something,” Pierce sings in a deadpan threat. Recorded at home and produced by Scrivner, Fields of This maintains an unnerving sheen, a warning sign where you can’t make out the letters, that gives the album its lingering appeal.

–Nina Corcoran

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify

Church Chords: Elvis, He Was Schlager

Big tip if you like Tortoise, Stereolab, disco edits, krautrock, ripping psychedelic guitar solos, and albums that are so collaborative you could hit word count simply by listing everyone who’s on it. Organized and led by Stephen Buono, Elvis, He Was Schlager is a feast of production tricks and performance styles. I’d single out the off-kilter, funky, floor-filler “Apophatic Melismatic,” which features Dirty Projectors vocalist Kristin Slipp melting into the synth line over a boogie bassline. Or “She Lays on a Leaf,” for which Buono asked guitarist Nels Cline to imagine John McLaughlin playing the opening guitar solo on Can’s “Mother Sky.” It’s heads-only, but also incredibly inviting once you’re at the party.

–Jeremy D. Larson

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify

DJ Nigga Fox: Chá Preto

Rogério Brandão has taken great pains over the last decade to avoid being pinned down to any one sound. The Angolan-born, Lisbon-based producer’s coiled, percussive workouts gradually morphed into more convoluted shapes and complex timbral investigations. On Chá Preto, he leaves rhythmic certainties behind, delving into a wild, spongy morass of pitch-bending synths, murmured vocals, and drum patterns hanging together by a thread. At times, it resembles a kind of spiritual jazz; at others, late-night club music caught in the act of molting into a stranger, stealthier creature. In place of the certainty of style, Brandão offers the slipperiness of unrestrained creative vision.

–Philip Sherburne

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Erika de Casier: Still

Erika de Casier is a true Y2K scholar whose third album embodies the soft chill and playfulness of the era’s slickest, most influential R&B. Her vocals are low, breathy, and Cassie-lite, puffing out smooth, teasing tracks that hug the corner of the proverbial club. Jumpy Timbaland-inspired synth flourishes dance throughout, while songs like the shimmering “Home Alone” and “Test It” glide with a shiny digipop sheen. Sharp and sultry collabs with Shygirl (“Ex-Girlfriend”) and Blood Orange ( “Twice”) carry a similar downtempo ease. De Casier is the chick in the middle of a cavernous room, cooing about a frigid partner or the quiet bliss of doing laundry on a day off, dancing to the sweet paranoias in her mind.

–Clover Hope

Erika de Casier: Still

$26.00, Rough Trade

Ghost 53206: FreeBandz Menace

With a name that sounds like it was spit out by a broken calculator, Ghost 53206 has fast become one of the premier life-lesson-givers of Milwaukee slap. Across 14 vivid, foot-on-the-gas-pedal tracks on FreeBandz Menace, he’s handing out enough dope-dealing tips to fill an instruction manual. Bars like, “When you dealin’ with some pape you can’t even trust your friend,” and, “Gotta keep my grass cut low in case I see a snake,” would land on the first page. He’s the wise, seasoned hustler on the block, hovering above the neighborhood chaos.

–Alphonse Pierre

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify

Guerra / de Paiva / Hornsby / Konradsen: Contrahouse

When leftfield house producers Guerra and de Paiva, of São Paulo’s 40% Foda/Maneiríssimo label, felt the sudden urge to infuse Balearic reggae with a tinge of easy-listening jazz, they had a brainstorm great enough to rattle National Weather Service radars: Why not call Bruce Hornsby? And so it transpired that the bluegrass musician, one-time Grateful Dead member, and Grammy-winning performer of the 2Pac-sampled mega-hit “The Way It Is” ended up providing the liquid jazz keyboard riffing for Guerra and de Paiva to finesse into the year’s most unencumbered soundtrack to moonwalking, spelunking, beery backyard BBQs, and other activities where the ground goes spongy beneath your feet. The pitched-down voice of Jenny Marie Sabel, of Norwegian indie-pop duo Konradsen, applies a ghostly echo of Arthur Russell to their woozy funk and late-night boogie, further melting the boundaries between international borders and musical genres.

–Philip Sherburne

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify

Gulfer: Third Wind

On their fourth album, Third Wind, Quebecois emo quartet Gulfer make their scruffier songs louder and fuzzier, and sweeten their hooks with clean production, courtesy of singer-guitarist Joe Therriault, who’s also taken on primary songwriter duties this go-around. Intentional or not, Gulfer join a long tradition of emo bands embracing pop by switching whose hands are on the reins, the way Jimmy Eat World and the Get Up Kids have done before them. Still, they stay true to themselves as flashes of math rock from previous records reappear. Further, songs like “Prove”—with its zippy guitar tapping and stacked vocal harmonies—suggest the difference between polish and fuzz is just relaxed confidence.

–Nina Corcoran

Gulfer: Third Wind

$27.00, Rough Trade

Heavee: Unleash

Plenty of great footwork production operates in single-minded, Xerox-sharp contrast. Not Chicago producer Heavee, who’s just as interested in weightless R&B melodies and high-def sound effects—an enterprising streamer could probably coordinate an entire playthrough video to the laser-gun zaps and triple-point trills of “Unlock!” Unleash ducks and dives between more traditional but still adventurous footwork tracks (“Bounce Dat,” “Make It Work”), a vaporwavey synth sketch (“Heart Fragments”), and reverb’d-out final-boss voice-overs (like on “Whiplash,” where the bass is so concussive it sounds like it actually hurts). Hyperdub fans should pay attention.

–Anna Gaca

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Heems / Lapgan: Lafandar

Heems stuck with one producer, Chicago’s Lapgan, for his comeback solo album, Lafandar. The result is a crisp, half-hour record that marries the grit of New York rap with sounds and samples that embrace the pair’s shared Indian heritage. Above all, highlights like “Going for 6” and “Yellow Chakra” show the former Das Racist rapper hasn’t lost a step behind the mic, delivering his best bars in years.

–Matthew Strauss

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Lao: Chapultepec

Lao, co-founder of influential Mexico City–based label N.A.A.F.I, is on contemporary Latin American electronic music’s shortlist. His new full-length album is named for CDMX’s grand park and museum complex, a site of spiritual and historical significance since pre-colonial times, as well as a personal landmark: Label headquarters are nearby. As diverse and expansive as its namesake, Chapultepec roves through desiccated after-hours dembow, bottom-heavy jungle, and vaporous techno, occasionally pausing for a breather before tossing us back into the polyrhythmic current. Clubby and crepuscular, it pulses with the ungovernable organic energy of the wild space within the city.

–Anna Gaca

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Little Simz: Drop 7 EP

Little Simz’s seventh Drop EP installment is a globetrotting sprint through a day in the life of the UK rap star. Her vocals spill onto spry, elusive rhythms as if the beat itself is parkouring through the streets of London. Watch as she speeds through Rio de Janeiro test-driving cars for a quick jaunt. Feral drums and steady synth bursts set the pace on opener “Mood Swings” (“I just wanna dance on CP Time,” she raps, daydreaming out loud). The equally stunting “Fever” and “Torch” offer barely any time for Simz to catch her breath. This is an EP where fast and furious is the appropriate mode for Simz’s quick-witted reflections on the highs of living carefree.

–Clover Hope

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Liv.e: Past Futur.e

One of the highlights of following Liv.e, the Los Angeles–based artist who dropped one of the best experimental R&B albums of 2023, is the constant element of surprise. She shapeshifts once more on Past Futur.e, a seven-song mixtape that grinds synth-punk down to a pulp: digitized beats, decayed vocals, and brain-embedding melodies inform this spontaneous implosion. It’s like listening to an 8-bit version of Suicide’s cacophonous, gasping post-punk led by Liv.e’s gnawing vocal delivery instead. Here, she expresses the kind of rage everyone can get behind. “I’m tired of working overtime,” she declares on the closer, “$$$$ $,” voice serrating against a motorik synth pulse and distorted drum machines. “Pay me what you owe me!”

–Eric Torres

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Stormy: Iceberg

Moroccan rapper Stormy pairs modern trap beats with the traditional sounds of chaabi, Gnawa, and Andalusi classical music across his debut album, Titanic. While celebrating his North African upbringing, he also throws in some English amid his Darija verses and experiments with genres like Brazilian funk, in “Popo,” and Afrobeats, in “Maradona.” With track titles like “Elvis,” “Frenemy,” and “Don Corleone,” it’s clear that Stormy aims to be as grand and menacing as something that could sink a ship.

–Boutayna Chokrane

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Tapir!: The Pilgrim, Their God and the King of My Decrepit Mountain

The debut album by Tapir!, an indie-folk six-piece from London that wears papier-mâché heads onstage, bursts with delicate details and big references—Erik Satie, Walt Whitman poems, Bible passages—wrapped up in folklore of its own making. Split into three acts, The Pilgrim, Their God and the King of My Decrepit Mountain builds a tranquil, inspiring landscape of plucked acoustic guitar, lush humming strings, whirring percussion, and quietly thumping electronic drums, like Mutual Benefit covering Nana Grizol or Black Country, New Road. Meant to be heard in full, The Pilgrim is a rich listen that, with a little help from Little Wings, earns its simplistic but true descriptor: beautiful.

–Nina Corcoran

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

TDF: Blueprint

The blown-out, apocalyptic plugg beats all over SoundCloud right now have become heavily associated with Minneapolis producer TDF but his December compilation, Blueprint, is more Pi’erre Bourne than Lazer Dim 700-type beats. Threaded together by hate-fueled sound bites of friends talking shit about his beats—including one saying, “He wanna be Pi’erre,” on the intro—he laces a bunch of nasally, melodic newcomers with airy, swagged-out rhythms. The mixtape never takes itself too seriously, always willing to throw an Opium-style electric guitar over an Adele sample, crack a joke about Sean Kingston, or unleash 808s that sound like a bomb has been detonated whenever the fuck TDF feels like it.

–Alphonse Pierre

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify

Ulla & Ultrafrog: it means a lot

Ulla Straus and the Tokyo-based Kouhei Fukuzumi team up for a set of amorphous, amphibious music that floats between glitch and dream-pop, but with far more empty space. Imagine defragging a Cocteau Twins and reconstituting only about 15% of it, playing it a Grouper album, adding some sub-bass jumpscares, and pushing it out to sea. Ulla’s lightly played guitar is the highlight here—every time it shows up, there’s a new sense of place and time, recalling projects released on the Music From Memory label and the final two Talk Talk albums. But, then again, It Means a Lot is more about getting lost than finding your way back.

–Jeremy D. Larson

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Young Miko: Att.

On her sugary debut, Att., Young Miko and her longtime producer and childhood friend Mauro blend dembow rhythms, glitchy pop, and bedroom trap with Eurodance, ’90s R&B, and candy-crunk. The result sounds like two besties kiki-ing at a sleepover. From talking shit on the TLC-influenced “Fuck TMZ,” to overthinking a situationship in the synth-pop “Princess Peach,” Miko brings you into her late-night MSN chats from a neon-lit internet cafe.

–Boutayna Chokrane

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork