Stream Miso Extra’s Earcandy and more projects for New Music Friday

Keep your eye on the emerging U.K.’s Miso Extra because she’s next up. The best pop record out this week might belong to her: Earcandy, a breezy introduction to her 3D-sounding, Japanese-English electronic compositions that live up to the record’s promise. “Pop,” with its bursting bubbles and zippy melody, is like a perfect onomatopoeic interpretation of the genre; while “Playboi” is a sexy and half-lidded serenade in honor of its namesake. Her songs, meticulously fiddled, have a visceral, hyper-real quality to them, like a sonic version of a pop-up book. Alongside contributions from some A-class features like Metronomy and DJ BORING, the record fully has my attention. —Steffanee Wang

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On her second album, Bristol-based Chilean DJ and producer Shanti Celeste puts her vocals to the front. The soft-edged tracks, a blend of house and techno she calls “fast house,” have a lightness that makes the album ideal for bright summer afternoons that melt into late nights. Across nine tracks Celeste sings about love in multiple forms: romantic, platonic, and its more inward looking form. Like her music, Celeste keeps things winningly simple and has described the notion of self-love as “cringe.” “Note To Self” is a highlight of the album, though. Produced alongside Batu the weightless synth track gives her the space to lean into the vulnerability as she sings about finding confidence in herself. Elsewhere the album explores intense crushes (“Unwind”) and the loss of a loved one (“Thinking About You”) while contributors including Austrian-Ethiopian harpist Miriam Adefris, who appears on “Butterflies” and “Medicine,” pushes the album past material for Celeste’s DJ sets and toward a fully-fleshed out artistic statement.

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Who doesn’t love a good cheat code? Unmusique, the new album from 19-year-old digicore artist Lucy Bedroque, aims to be exactly that: “There’s this huge movement happening right now within music, and there’s going to be a big change, not only in the way people create, but also in the way they consume,” he says in a press statement. “Unmusique is me giving my take on that sonically.” Lucy’s 2023 album Sisterhood operated in a similar mode, but with bleached, lo-fi production that made it feel like a treasured demo tape; in contrast, Lucy wants you to hear every careful decision that went into Unmusique. Like his contemporary skaiwater, Bedroque crafts potential futures for pop that are as convincing as they are exciting: you’d much rather hear the Beebs feature on the glittery rage of “2010 Justin Bieber” than a Rob49 track, and “Smackdown” sounds like the brooding, pitched-down luxury that Travis Scott has been trying and failing to capture for years. Even “Ouija,” a song that sounds on first listen like it was written for OsamaSon, eventually reveals itself to be more cyberpunk industrial that straight post-rage. As the project’s title suggests, Unmusique is a wholesale deconstruction; what Bedroque has built contains new dimensions that weren’t present before.

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Pearlty, the last full-length album from Philly’s Knifeplay, dabbled in spatial, beautiful atmospheric dreampop that straddled shoegaze and folk, the orchestral elements launching them into a stratosphere of their own making. Their new live album, recorded on tour with Ride in secret by Andy Bell, positions the band as they prepare to lay the groundwork for their new album, a departure from the ambient shoegaze of “Lonely Sun” and “Nobody” and into a more minimalist, but still existential, headspace within the folk-rock realm. Opener “Agonizing Mountain” offers just a cursory glimpse into a new foray for Knifeplay, but don’t worry, they still fully believe in distortion and blown-out reverb. — Cady Siregar

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The best metal bands attack the genre from a punk standpoint. This approach can lead to either obnoxious militancy — no one but H.R. or Henry Rollins can be H.R. or Henry Rollins — or insufferable fantasy lore. Full of Hell avoids both of these opposing pitfalls — not by striving for purity or complexity but by constantly experimenting on the signature, short-form style they’ve honed across 16 years. Broken Sword, Rotten Shield is not immune to the allure of fantastic, medieval elements: The EP follows a mythic “dog knight” through seven blistering and brief tracks. “From Dog’s Mouth, A Blessing” lasts only 49 seconds, but gets its point across emphatically, Walker’s growled vocals blasting through a marching drum beat and a fiery wall of power chords. “Lament of All Things,” the album’s midpoint and climax, with its epic admixture of shreddy, distorted guitar and obliterating drums, achieves more than most marathon tracks. The project’s relatively lengthy cuts, “Knight’s Oath” and “To Ruin and the World’s Ending,” are bruising but never boring, maintaining full heads of steam until they collapse. Like a legendary punk set, Broken Sword, Rotten Shield leaves you shell-shocked and wanting more. — Raphael Helfand

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp