Stream Yung Lean’s Jonatan and more projects for New Music Friday

Over the past decade Yung Lean generally split his music into roughly two lanes with a moniker for each: Lean for the cloudy sad boy raps and then lo-fi art rock released under the name Jonatan Leandoer96. In recent years, though, these lanes have converged in appealing ways. His latest album, titled simply Jonatan, follows his 2024 Bladee collaboration Psykos in imagining what a rapper with a rockstar aesthetic can achieve. To achieve this balancing act, he calls on producers including Frank Ocean collaborator Rami Dawod and Oneohtrix Point Never, whose sci-fi keys and cloud of dissipated noise can be heard across tracks including “Paranoid Paparazzi” and “Terminator Symphony.” Lean skulks and pouts throughout the album, like a crooner serenading a club long after the lights have gone out. “Babyface Maniacs” is a fugitive ballad surrounded by death and the acrid smell of burning plastic. “Forever Yung,” meanwhile, is reminiscent of Suicide with its spiky no-wave party energy. “Swan Song,” which has Beck on piano, finds Lean raking over a relationship that proved too tempestuous to be worthwhile. “Might Not B” digs deeper into Lean’s strife and finds him painting an image as a lost cause, romantically at least. “I like when the world moves in slow motion/ I’m awake when everyone’s asleep,” he sings over a buzzing synth and heavy kick drum. It’s a line designed to set a partner free. It also encapsulates the appeal of this cadre of nocturnal ballads that buzz with the energy of late nights and bad decisions. — David Renshaw

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Mei Semones’ debut album Animaru is an album about learning to live instinctively after a quarter-lifetime mired in self-consciousness. “Everyone goes through phases of not knowing how to be a person, and there have been periods where I didn’t love myself in the way I do now,” Semones tells The FADER. The album’s best songs are its most dynamic. “Animaru,” the record’s thesis statement, is a quiet/loud declaration of independence from the pressure — factors internal and external — to label oneself. “I am not a cardboard box / Not to be lived in,” Semones sings as the track’s tension builds. When the hook hits its climax, she delivers the album’s most primal lyrics: “I am an animal / I live and I eat.” — Raphael Helfand. Read our full GEN F profile here.

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“A rose is a rose is a rose is a cigarette,” Norwegian singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist sings on Iris Silver Mist’s second track, “To Be a Rose,” going on to describe a stage “decorated with cigarette smoke from a hundred, no from thousand mouths in synchrony.” The smells of roses and cigarettes, and all the associations they bring with them, commingle above steady drums, guitar, and synth string swells. Elsewhere, Hval dreams of other scents: a burger, birthday candles, breath, burnt resin, spilt beer, a perfumed wrist, and, of course, ghosts. But flowers and cigarette smoke are never far away. “Do you remember all the pandemic birthdays?” she asks on early standout “All Night Long.” “A friend received so many flowers it looked like she had died. She found herself absent, absent from her own house. Happy! Birthday!” — RH

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Dogsbody, the first album from Model/Actriz, was one of 2023’s rawest, implacable rock records, a brutalist dance-punk disco hosted during a dark night of the soul. Pirouette takes all those feelings and makes them grander, more magisterial, but never any less jarring – if Hieronymus Bosch got to produce an LP for DFA Records circa 2004, you might end up with something like the band’s wonderful second effort. A sulphur smell is everywhere on Pirouette: on “Diva,” where Cole Haden, a vocalist who would be equally at home on a Broadway stage as a basement show, launches a devilishly wry exploration of his nomadic, libertine lifestyle; on “Headlights,” a spoken word piece with droning organs about a tragic first love with far-reaching consequences; and on “Poppy,” a perfect encapsulation of the band’s reverent, potentially groundbreaking approach to pop. Haden sings: “As flesh is made in marble / As marble captures softness / As softness holds a violence / Within a pure expression.” It could be a mission statement for the band. — Jordan Darville

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“I’ll come back if you put me down two times,” sings Los Angeles-based singer Sabrina Tetalbaum on “Two Times,” showing just how much nothing has changed with her love life in the two years since she put out her self-titled debut. That record, with searing guitar songs like “Sepsis,” catapulted her into a songwriter who was also an expert at toxic relationships, just as guilty for her own misery as her deadbeat situationships. That line of thinking still girds If You Asked For A Picture, her sophomore record of 12 new songs for hating your love life. But what sets this record apart are the small glimmers of contentment that are now present: accepting she can now sleep soundly at night on “He Wants Me,” and embracing her faults on “Change.” The music has also grown softer, more forgiving, her vocals not so urgent but searching. The coldness of her debut was what made it so excellent but this new warmth has given it a heartbeat. —Steffanee Wang

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp