4 albums you need to hear this week

In the age of streaming, it’s never been easier to listen to new music — but with over 60,000 new songs added to Spotify every day, it’s also never been harder to know what to put on. Every week, the team at Rolling Stone UK will run down some of the best new releases that have been added to streaming services.

This week, we’ve highlighted records by Olivia Rodrigo, YHWH Nailgun, Kelsey Lu and ANOTR.

Olivia Rodrigo – you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love

After making her name with two albums most impactful when they were giving scornful kiss-offs to exes and relishing her own rage, Olivia Rodrigo entered the process for her third album blissfully in love. Its title, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, suggested more complexity to her emotions though, and the album is a wise and mature look at a new phase of her life. “I’m not kissing any boy that is passive / Their indecision is painfully unattractive,” she sings on ‘expectations’, setting the table for the next stage of her personal life and taking her music to the next level at the same time.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music

YHWH Nailgun – Magazine

After exploding first with incendiary, hype-building live shows and then superb debut album 45 Pounds, YHWH Nailgun make their 4AD debut with Magazine, a 10-track album that is here and then gone in 11 fantastic, dizzying minutes. Opening track ‘Ghost of Love’ fades in and immediately bursts into chaos; 11 minutes later, ‘To the Devil’ fades out, giving a tiny window into what is surely a larger and fruitful period to come next.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music

Kelsey Lu – So Help Me God

It’s been seven years since Kelsey Lu’s last album, debut record Blood. Alongside producers Jack Antonoff and Yves Rothman, she made So Help Me God, a record where she says “devotion, desire, grief and transcendence collapse into one another”. The record is as emotionally involved and layered as that quote suggests, but as a listen it is gorgeous and graceful. “This isn’t really a healing album,” the singer says. “It’s more of a reckoning. It’s about facing the parts of myself I tried to move past, and realising they were still shaping everything. This album is me standing in that truth instead of trying to transcend it.”

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music

ANOTR – Withness

“Creativity makes you like a kid again,” ANOTR’s Jesse van der Heijden told Rolling Stone UK last year when we met the Amsterdam duo at a psychedelics-fuelled retreat. “It keeps you young, brings joy, takes you back to the present moment. It’s important to mess around with no clear goal of what it’s gonna be like.” This childlike sense of wonder and experimentation is front and centre on the pair’s new album Withness, which cycles through house, disco and pop with wonder and abandon.

Listen on: Spotify | ‎Apple Music | TIDAL | Amazon Music