5 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Madonna, Ken Carson, and More

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Also stream new releases from Mary in the Junkyard, Smirk, and Low Cut Connie

July 3, 2026

With so much good music being released all the time, it can be hard to determine what to listen to first. Every week, Pitchfork offers a run-down of significant new releases available on streaming services. This week’s batch includes new albums from Madonna, Mary in the Junkyard, Ken Carson, and more. Subscribe to Pitchfork’s New Music Friday newsletter to get our recommendations in your inbox every week. (All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our affiliate links, however, Pitchfork earns an affiliate commission.)

Madonna: Confessions II [Warner]

“I don’t want your judgment or your recitations,” Madonna declares on “Bring Your Love,” the Sabrina Carpenter duet the two ambitious blondes debuted at Carpenter’s Coachella set in April. Ironically, Confessions II and its rollout seem like the first time she’s engaged with audience feedback in, well, maybe ever. It’s conventional wisdom that Confessions on a Dance Floor, from 2005, was the last truly great Madonna album, and she has taken pains to follow the family recipe to the letter, reuniting with producer Stuart Price and her old label. After more than two decades, the Queen of Pop is primed to add at least one more jewel to her crown, even if she has to do it one Grindr targeted ad at a time.

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Ken Carson: Xperiment [Opium]

Following 2023’s A Great Chaos and its follow-up, More Chaos, Ken Carson is back to deliver... further chaos on Xperiment. Based on the guest list alone, the Playboi Carti protégé is not messing around: As well as recruiting the sensei himself on two songs, Carson has signed up Young Thug, 2hollis, Destroy Lonely, and an increasingly rare feature from Lil Uzi Vert. The 22-song tracklist leaves room for plenty of solo Carson too: Expect growling vocals, blown-out synths, and bloody imagery that will haunt even the least faint of heart.

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Mary in the Junyard: Role Model Hermit [AMF]

With their debut album, Mary in the Junkyard make a claim to being the most British-sounding British band going. At various points on Role Model Hermit, the London trio evokes so many peers in contemporary post-punk (Dry Cleaning; Black Country, New Road circa 2021) and post-rock (Caroline; Black Country, New Road circa 2025) that its music merits a new classification. Post-post, maybe? If Mary in the Junkyard manage to salvage an identity of their own, credit vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Clari Freeman-Taylor, whose idiosyncratic charm is best captured by this story she tells about the song “Mouse”: “I remembered that I was a fisherman in a former life with a mouse in my pocket, who was lost in a storm. It is about me reconnecting with the mouse when they have taken on a human form in this life.”

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Smirk: Speculative Fiction [Smoking Room]

Smirk, the power-pop-meets-punk-rock brainchild of Portland musician Nick Vicario, has a knack for turning tropes inside out. On his latest effort, Speculative Fiction, he reinvents suburban anhedonia with an unexpectedly meticulous, pop-forward sensibility. With help from friends like Ceremony’s Ross Farrar, Advertisement’s Ryan Mangione-Smith, and members of the Hotline TNT crew (who play in Smirk’s live band), Vicario recasts an archetypal narrator—the disaffected high schooler—as a grown-up trying to veer out of the fast lane and back to the familiarity of their constricting youth. Smirk’s first official album since 2022, Speculative Fiction is one hell of a reintroduction.

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Low Cut Connie: Livin in the USA [Contender]

Low Cut Connie is “disgusted to see our country descend into an authoritarian hell, a moral vacuum, a place where art does not lead the cultural conversation,” he said in a statement announcing his new protest album, Livin in the USA. The Philadelphia rock’n’roller reckons with this desperate state of affairs in timeworn rock’n’roll fashion, with a parade of theatrical, bluesy anthems designed to challenge the nation’s decaying political institutions, if not its musical ones. “Rock’n’roll is a table flipping artform,” he added in the statement. “It’s time to flip the table again.”

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