3 new songs and 3 new albums to check out this weekend

Welcome to our weekly music post, where we spotlight our favorite new songs and albums. Hop in the comments and tell us: What new music are you listening to?

Bob Mould, “Here We Go Crazy”

New music from Bob Mould is always good news, but the prospect of his upcoming album, Here We Go Crazy, being Mould’s California record is particularly tantalizing. “I’ve been spending time in the Southern California desert over the past few years, and the video [for the single “Here We Go Crazy”] was shot there,” Mould said in a press release. “Chilly wilderness atop a mountain, expansive vistas below the hills, distant places to escape life’s routines. ‘Going crazy’ can be many different things. The joy of reckless abandon, the uncertainty of the world’s future, the silence of solitude.”

Japanese Breakfast, “Orlando In Love”

Japanese Breakfast dropped a new single along with the release date for their upcoming album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), which comes out on March 21. According to a press release, “The plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends For Melancholy Brunettes its most persistent theme, the perils of desire. Like light dispersed, its spectral parts take the album’s characters through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution.” “Orlando In Love” takes inspiration from Matteo Maria Boiero’s Italian Renaissance poem Orlando Innamorato (literally “Orlando in love” in English), and its lyrics follow a poet tempted by a siren at the edge of the sea. The album’s literary bent is perhaps unsurprising given vocalist and guitarist Michelle Zauner’s massively successful 2021 memoir Crying In H Mart, but we still can’t wait to see Zauner and co. explore those themes in full on the new album.

PUP, “Paranoid”

“Paranoid” is PUP’s first new single in two years, and while it didn’t come with an official album announcement in any of the marketing materials or social promos, there’s an Easter egg in the (irritatingly vertically filmed) music video that might point in that direction. At 1:20, the camera pans over a poster that looks like repurposed promo material from their 2016 album The Dream Is Over, except the cover art has been modified to include a lyric from the new song (“You’ve seen how I live”) and the release date has been changed from May 27, 2016 to May 2, 2025. Maybe we’re just wearing tin foil hats, but it’s hard not to get excited when the new song is this good, a return to form for PUP and their modern punk sound.

Ethel Cain, Perverts

Even though Perverts only debuted two days ago, Ethel Cain’s latest album is already inescapable—and divisive. Our full review publishes tomorrow, but for now we’ll say that Perverts is well worth a listen, as long as you know what you’re getting into. It’s 90 minutes of ambient noise interspersed with sparse lyrics; on “Vacillator,” the new single, it takes nearly two full minutes for the lyrics to start, and the track is over seven minutes long. Perverts is a challenging work of art that doesn’t necessarily follow from Cain’s first album, the Southern Gothic-infused Preacher’s Daughter, but it announces Cain as one of the most interesting young singer-songwriters in the game right now.

Franz Ferdinand, The Human Fear

Franz Ferdinand don’t do anything surprising with their new record, The Human Fear, but they don’t really need to when they’ve found a formula that works so well for them. Singer and guitarist Alex Kapranos said in a press release, “Making this record was one of the most life-affirming experiences I’ve had, but it’s called The Human Fear. Fear reminds you that you’re alive. I think we all are addicted in some way to the buzz it can give us. How we respond to it shows how we are human. So here’s a bunch of songs searching for the thrill of being human via fears. Not that you’d necessarily notice on first listen.” The songs are still poppy, infectious, and supremely danceable in classic Franz fashion, and that’s good enough for us.

Lambrini Girls, Who Let The Dogs Out

Who Let The Dogs Out is the first full-length album from British noise-punk duo Lambrini Girls, who have already been making waves in the punk scene for a few years now. In November 2024, they did a joint interview with Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, and if that kind of endorsement doesn’t automatically perk your ears up, we don’t really know how to help you. The album is a ferocious expression of anger—and it’s also really fun to listen to.