Pay attention: Asake, “Amapiano” [ft. Olamide]

Avalon Emerson: & the Allure

All aboard the Avalon Specific for a serene, 40-minute dream-pop voyage that stirs up faint recollections in opposition to the backdrop of a glowing pink horizon. For her debut album, the techno whiz turns right into a dance-pop singer-songwriter, delivering downy reveries that float on as her thoughts drifts again to California, previous associates, and ice baths in Oslo. Her vocals are cool as lake water, the manufacturing mild like a spring breeze. It doesn’t matter what route she takes subsequent, you’ll belief her navigation. –Cat Zhang

Pay attention/Purchase: Tough Commerce | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Carly Rae Jepsen: “Psychedelic Swap”

You’d be forgiven in the event you thought Daft Punk reunited to provide “Psychedelic Swap,” the most recent in Carly Rae Jepsen’s rising assortment of A-side-worthy B-sides. With synths strobing like Rainbow Street (or, you already know, “One Extra Time”), Jepsen rides a euphoric ’70s bassline all the best way to French-touch nirvana. As ever, the Canadian pop star is comparatively coy about her needs, nevertheless it’s nonetheless charming to listen to her “puttin’ on the ritz,” as she frames it, in 2023. You get the sense that even when her proverbial swap flips again off, this fleeting crush was well worth the excessive. –Peyton Toups

Pay attention: Carly Rae Jepsen, “Psychedelic Swap”

Caroline Polachek: Need, I Need to Flip Into You

Launched on Valentine’s Day, Caroline Polachek’s second solo album drags a key by way of the Hallmark vacation polish and imagines a model of affection altogether extra carnal and consuming: want as irrepressible as a volcano, inconceivable as a flower in winter, binding as a brand new tattoo. That is fertile emotional terrain, yielding music that feels bountiful and ungoverned. Polachek opens the album with an operatic caterwaul and fills it with wordless, intuitive melody and expressionistic photographs, her urge for food for sounds and textures huge sufficient to metabolize breakbeats, bagpipes, Sixties Italian pop, and a dulcet youngsters’s choir. Need, I Need to Flip Into You is an album to get comfortably misplaced in, figuring out there’ll at all times be some acquainted motif that pops as much as reorient you. It’s Caroline’s island, and we’re simply strolling circles round its wild and fantastic perimeter. –Olivia Horn

Pay attention/Purchase: Tough Commerce | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Chappell Roan: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess

Chappell Roan isn’t keen on enjoying a flawless pageant queen: On her debut, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, the messy, uproarious pop starlet finds salvation at a strip membership, needs loss of life on a shitty ex, and makes out whereas “the world collapses.” Like every recovering theater child, she dials the drama to 11, leaning into spritely cheerleader chants, line dance ad-libs, and vaudeville-inspired visuals. Between the scathing ballads and Robyn-esque bangers, Roan will persuade you to relish these dangerous selections. –Jaeden Pinder

Pay attention/Purchase: Tough Commerce | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Charli XCX: “Pace Drive”

“Pace Drive” flips Toni Basil’s pining cheerleader relic “Hey Mickey” on its head: Charli XCX wouldn’t dream of begging for a boy’s consideration—this passenger princess solely has eyes for the woman within the driver’s seat. Her bubblegum Barbie minimize, which additionally samples Robyn’s “Cobrastyle,” is as mild and fizzy as pink champagne because it celebrates younger girls’s vainness and mind. (Charli shouts out each mannequin Devon Lee Carlson and Enlightenment thinker Voltaire on the track.) It’s the best celebration of affection and friendship between thrill-seeking feminine motorists since Thelma & Louise. –Peyton Thomas