#ariel-rechtshaid

#ariel-rechtshaid

Each Monday, with our Pitchfork Selects playlist, we're sharing what our writers are playing obsessively and highlighting some of the Pitchfork staff's favorite new music.

Zara Larsson could be called a veteran pop star... because there's an undertow of struggle to her glittering party-girl persona. The teen-age version of her... remains lodged in my memory—a closeted power vocalist dulling her instrument to fit catchy and anodyne tracks.

Grande appears to be teasing a new album ahead of her Eternal Sunshine tour this summer. Recent posts show her in the studio, suggesting new music is on the way.

When you get it, you'll see a SongDNA card 'on supported tracks'. If you tap this, you can explore the writers, producers, and collaborators behind a song, see samples and interpolations that shaped its sound, and browse the covers it inspired.

In early 1991, the composer Alan Menken took a keyboard to St Vincent's hospital in New York to visit his friend and creative partner, the lyricist Howard Ashman. Ashman was in the final stages of Aids-related illness, but was determined to finish his work on Disney's Aladdin.

People all saw that there is something new is being attempted here that you've just got to see. I think that is its own reward. In an era where New York's storied Met Opera has faced layoffs, pay cuts, postponed productions, and a controversial financial agreement with Saudi Arabia, forward-thinking artistic direction becomes essential for survival.

K-Pop Demon Hunters fills the gap, unapologetically indulging every kids' movie cliché with little of the jaded postmodern 'lampshading' that many contemporary animated films love.

The initiative aspires to create 'a new blueprint for artist launches moving forward.' This partnership integrates fan interaction, live broadcast distribution, and platform-native amplification.

R&B in the 21st century has been in a constant state of flux, tugged between safe traditionalism and blurry attempts at progression. For the last decade-plus that "progression" has seen R&B music become more indebted to trap records and the moody atmospherics of alternative bands like Radiohead, Coldplay, or My Bloody Valentine.

I still have to go to the studio after this and I have to make a Mardi Gras costume for my son after the studio. Longest day ever. Just after 2:30 a.m., Rihanna can be seen hard at work in the studio, with the session going on well past 5 a.m.

It's purely a creative space. There are no deadlines. There are no have-to's. It's just something I do for me. When you design a recording studio, the first thing you want to do is treat the room to make sure the sound is good, so you're getting an accurate depiction of the music as it was played or recorded.

'Cool Job' pulls from meme culture pastiche and 'Temporary Secretary' trope to skewer the fantasy that the right job will save your life. Written mid-burnout, it's an anti-work anthem about corporate rot, identity collapse, and trying to care about meetings that could have been emails while everything else is falling apart.

Inner Magic is the duo of former Chromatics guitarist Adam Miller and former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist Jeff Schroeder. They met in 2024 and bonded over their love of '80s UK indie legends Felt, krautrock and the Vinnie Vincent Invasion, and then decided they should make music together.

But to anyone tracking the data over the past few years, it was inevitable. In 2022, Bad Bunny's Un Verano Sin Ti redefined the market, driving Latin music's streaming growth to new heights. It later became the first Spanish-language album nominated for Grammy Album of the Year. The takeaway is simple: When you have accurate, real-time data, you don't guess where culture is going, you know.

Bruce Hornsby has unveiled the starry tracklist of new album Indigo Park. Ezra Koenig, Bonnie Raitt, Blake Mills, Pino Palladino, Chris Dave, and the late Grateful Dead legends Bob Weir and Robert Hunter are among the contributors joining the singer-songwriter and his longtime band the Noisemakers. The album is due April 3, via his own Zappo Productions and Thirty Tigers. The following week, Hornsby will take the Noisemakers on the road. Check out their itinerary and watch the video for the Indigo Park title track below.

When director Emerald Fennell needed to hire a musician to score her Wuthering Heights adaptation, only one person came to mind: Charli XCX. Not only did the British pop star accept the offer, but she used her soundtrack to capture love in all of its grandiose, moody, and elusive ways. As she described the soundtrack on her Substack, it's a "dive into persona, into a world that felt undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured and full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar."

As the CEO and co-founder of the generative AI music company Suno, Shulman currently finds himself in the exhilarating if perhaps unenviable position of being simultaneously regarded as the architect of music's future and its executioner. Suno, which was founded just over two years ago, allows users to create entire songs with just a few text prompts. At the moment, you can't prompt it with the name of a specific pop star

Before the holiday, we were talking a lot about A.I. music. And then when I was listening to the new Bruno Mars song, all I could think about was A.I. It's called I Just Might. It is a rich and lustrous homage to the soul pop of the early 1970s. Obviously, you're thinking about the Jackson 5. It's gloss. It's note-perfect.