Welcome to another installment of Today's Release Highlights, where the TND writers room gathers up some brand new projects they want to draw your eyes and ears to.

This week, we have five new releases we'd like to key you into as you head into the weekend. Check them all out below.

Ba bam!

Charli XCX – Music, Fashion, Film [Atlantic]

Charlotte Aitchison – aka Charli xcx – began as a hit-or-miss critics’ darling at a time when underdog pop stars were the only kind to get good reviews (though Beyoncé upended this months later). Then she linked up with the insurgent PC Music collective a few years later and the sorely missed Sophie; not only was she suddenly on the cutting edge of where pop was going but she was bringing everyone from Carly Rae Jepsen to Lizzo along with her. She scored bangers — “I Love It,” “Take My Hand,” “Paradise,” “Breakin’ Up,” “Boys” — but only 2017’s Pop2 really transcended the hit-or-miss rate, and 2022’s underrated Crash led to a moment bigger and more iconic than anything she or her fans could’ve imagined: the great Brat and its attendant summer, the lime-green, Arial Narrow meme-omenon that took over everything in 2024, from Kamala Harris’ candidacy to year-end lists to the Grammys where it won a few. (And 2024 was not a year lacking in competing pop giants.) She was so nervous about following up such an unprecedented monocultural degree of success that she made a movie about it (The Moment; well-acted, tad hokey), soundtracked another blockbuster (Wuthering Heights) to take some of the heat off her own, and designed this proper follow-up as the anti-Brat, going as far as declaring “the dancefloor is dead” and turning off a lot of new fans with guitar-rock prospects. 

Don’t be surprised if it flops, but Music, Fashion, Film is just as listenable as Brat and often as catchy. It’s not even really the anti-Brat; they share similar foundations built from spry miniature hookmobiles, brisk lengths, and wry, self-deprecating lyrics that grapple with one’s own personhood versus the expectations of a mass audience. But the real attraction is the smattering of intentionally ultra-processed guitar sonics, subverting the instrument into a fanciful electronic effect with spectacular results, especially on the My Bloody Valentine bends of “Persona,” the blown-out clipping of “No One Lasts Forever,” (which gives David Cronenberg the last word) and the cut-up stuttering of “Camera.” The metronomic crunch of “Card Declined” sounds like it could’ve been on El-P’s Fantastic Damage. In a bizarre but attractive inversion, drums are deemphasized to make more room for her new favorite sound, so the dynamics of Music, Fashion, Film feel alien and unfamiliar. That’s just another reason to keep acquainting oneself with this half hour on repeat, where the expert songwriting does indeed emerge given a chance; “I’m Afraid” is a straight-up Blink-182 topline. And her “Rock Music” is only three seconds longer than the Pixies’. — Daniel Aaron

Josaleigh Pollett – If I Let It Quiet [Audio Antihero]

“I burned the map / Now the north is a sound” is just one of many wonderfully written lines on this fourth album from Salt Lake City-based Josaleigh Pollett, but I appreciate it most because I like to think that’s how I move through the world, by instinct rather than instruction. It’s also an idea that Pollett and their longtime musical partner Jordan Watko return to several times across these dozen songs, asking why we need or even want maps in the first place if we can get to “truer places” on our own. “Rip it up and go,” they declare on closer “Tacit,” and clearly they’ve taken their own advice to heart across the record, roving self-directedly through a broader range of electronic sounds and samples that give If I Let It Quiet a choose-your-own-adventure feel, rooted not only its DIY foundations but in letting go of noisy ways of thinking and feeling that had to be outgrown. Pollett sounds more purposeful than ever. – Alan Pedder

No Pressure – NP Style [No Pressure Punx]

If the '90s and early 2000s really are back in style, then the MTV-era pop punk that laid the foundation for the past 25 years is due for a revival. We're talking Blink-182, Sum 41, and Good Charlotte, but before the breakout hits. Think Dude Ranch, not Enema of the State. That's exactly what you get with No Pressure's long-awaited debut album, NP Style, arriving after 2023's excellent No Pressure (EP). Sonically, it's all the hallmarks of classic pop punk: chuggy palm-muted guitars, pogo poppin' drumming, instantly memorable hooks, and choruses practically begging to be shouted from the backseat of your BFFs 2011 Toyota Corolla. Ten back-to-back summer bangers packed into less than 22 minutes. No gimmicks, no gloss, just raw, high-energy pop punk. So hop in, loser. We're going crowd surfing. – Ricky Adams

Sofie Birch – Bivabippabualukka [Stroom]

If, like me, you fell hard for Danish composer and sound artist Sofie Birch’s 2025 album Hiraeth, a collaboration with Warsaw-born Antonina Nowacka, the brightness at large on Bivabippabualukka might take you by surprise. On this album, created over several years with her brother Alfred Bundgard, Birch’s unfailingly pretty compositions are kissed with color, movement, and queer little wonders that scratch a wholly different itch from Hiraeth’s vast and meditative retreat. Busier and buzzier than anything she's done before, it has the sweet, fizzing energy of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as reimagined by a surrealist chamber ensemble or a forest-floor bossa nova band, made all the more fantastical through tape effects and radical whimsy. “It reflects the playfulness and authenticity that comes out of releasing deep traumas and healing wounds,” says Birch in her album notes on Bandcamp. “It’s a pocket of joy, a cup with a fish. It is a step on the journey, like everything else.” – Alan Pedder

The Strokes - Reality Awaits [RCA]

In the way its title suggests, Reality Awaits by The Strokes lives somewhere between myth and reality. Rumors of the band’s sixth studio record began half a decade ago alongside their Grammy-winning comeback The New Abnormal, where the band admitted in interviews they had recorded a second with their producer, Rick Rubin, out in Costa Rica. Front man Julian Casablancas kept batting away the project as years passed, mostly to prepare for side project The Voidz’s resurrection in Like All Before You (2024) and MęĞż øF rÅm (2025). Internal disputes, an onslaught of out-of-nowhere festival headliner spots, and a sudden delay in release piled on, and many bought into the fantasy that the New York City band — desperately begging to quit for the past decade, yet still finding themselves sulking back to the studio together as their now multi-generational fanbase grows stronger — treated this album as a means to pay off their AI warlord producer, put the Costa Rica trip on RCA's credit card, and make one last lap around the world again.

But, to be more fair and realistic about The Strokes, Reality Awaits is no passive, "cash grab" record. (Admittedly, The New Abnormal retread old ground much more, sparking Is This It? nostalgic love in the old fans and reminding new ones about their legacy in indie rock.) It's the band's darkest album yet; the classic snaps of Fabrizio Moretti's early aughts rock drum coast over Albert Hammond Jr.'s and Nick Valensi's increasingly sharper and more vicious electric guitars. Nikolai Fraiture's bass sinks beneath the lightness of some of the poppier tracks ("Going Shopping", "Lonely In The Future", "Dine N'Dash") to imply the ground could shake away at any moment. Then there is Casablancas, who contorts his voice in the ugliest ways as as he spirals into depravity and callousness. ("The Fruits Of Conquest") Or, at his most sensitive and introspective moments — talks of failure, intimacy, age, insecurity, legacy — he succumbs to his own impulses to conceal, warping his image into something plasticky, guarded, robotic and unfeeling ("Falling Out Of Love", "Liar's Remorse"). Reality Awaits is the theatrical, darker side of the great American virtue of self-determination: since you can choose your future, you can bend it to your own will...even if it's deluded, fraught, gross, heartless. Anything to avoid feeling bad about yourself. – Victoria Borlando