New Music Friday: This week’s essential new projects

Noname is back. After five years of indefinite delays, the Chicago rapper has finally delivered Sundial. The ten-track record is filled with Noname flipping between her distinctive rap-singing and spoken-word flow over jazzy beats. It's not too far off from what we already know from Room 25 and Telefone, but her progression as an artist is still apparent all the while still sustaining her raw approach to music. – Arielle Lana LeJarde

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music

Norwegian producer and multi-instrumentalist Morten Martens’s debut as Les Imprimés is out on the Brooklyn-based indie Big Crown, the same people who put out brilliant recent albums from El Michels Affair & Black Thought and Surprise Chef, as well as earlier records from the masterful Lee Fields. Martens’ loose-limbed throwback jams are an easy fit there, his obvious doo-wop, Motown, and ‘60s soul influences complicated charmingly by a voice that is, by his own admission, not built for this music. Smooth, sultry, a little psychedelic — a perfect early-evening late-summer album. — Alex Robert Ross

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music

A catalog like Will Oldham’s can pose a challenge for new listeners trying to find purchase. The depth of a decades-long career is matched by its breadth across multiple solo monikers, plus collaborations with like-minded folk mavericks like Bill Callahan and Matt Sweeney. Luckily Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, his new record as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, makes for an excellent introduction. Across these endearing, plainspoken love songs, Oldham works hard to take the album’s titular mantra to heart, with Dane Waters’ omnipresent voice like a Greek chorus there to keep him honest (she’s the one singing the hook on lead single “Bananas,” one of those goofy-unto-profound country weepers for the ages). Ever since I See A Darkness — still the most well-known and well-regarded Bonnie “Prince” Billy record — Will Oldham has been tentatively letting in some light; Keeping Secrets builds him a beacon. – Walden Green

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music

Some of the early inspiration for Laura Groves's new album Radio Red came from a stint hosting a show on NTS Radio. The London-based artist was able to explore music in an intuitive way and draw links between the music she enjoyed listening to and what she was writing. The result is an album filled with celebrations of spontaneity and community, complete with Groves' (who used to record as Blue Roses) distinct songwriting, which lands somewhere between the intimacy of the Laurel Canyon-era songwriters and the more technologically advanced electronic pop. Album highlight "D 4 N" features a guest vocal from Sampha while Groves falsetto blooms effortlessly across the tender ballad "Sarah." Speaking to The FADER recently, Groves said the album is "a way of reflecting and figuring out what's important to me and also being able to share something of the way I see and feel the world — I hope will help others feel some of that togetherness." – David Renshaw

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music

It’s been a good year for EASYFUN. After co-writing and producing frequent collaborator Charli XCX’s infectious summer hit “Speed Drive” for the Barbie soundtrack, he’s returned with the ELECTRIC EP that’s all sugary maximalism and dizzying, electronic euphoria. There will be fans disappointed that this new EASYFUN project comes in the form of a six-song EP and not the full-length album they’ve been waiting years for –– and that two of its tracks have already been released. But this new EASYFUN release arrives less than two months after PC Music’s announcement that this year will be the last for the label, which just goes to show that while there will be no more PC Music, its influence will endure forever. – Cady Siregar

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music

Move is a responsible band. The Boston group get their namesake from a Black liberation organization that suffered a brutal terrorist attack from Philadelphia police in the '80s, and Black Radical Love album handles the Philly radical org's legacy with the care it deserves. Not since the early days of Code Orange has a genre-skipping band sounded this fierce, with its flesh-rending combination of metal, hardcore, and noise-rock. Only now, it's backed by guttural political screeds flayed with rage and calling out every support beam that undergirds our immoral society. The spirit of revolution runs through the music in a focused and powerful current, the kind that shakes some consciences and worries others – Jordan Darville

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music