New Music Friday: 7 albums to hear this week

Look, we know what you’ve been asking. “I’m a big fan of PC Music, but why won’t the label’s founder, A. G. Cook, release an album that’s 49 tracks long and split across seven discs, with each disc focusing on a different instrument?” Well, now your prayers have been answered. Cook’s debut album, 7G – its title is presumably a reference to those seven discs and his own ‘AG’ initials, rather than another coronavirus conspiracy – is huge in its ambition. Besides featuring a wealth of new material, it also includes covers of Blur, Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, the Strokes, and the Smashing Pumpkins, as well as additional vocal contributions from Caroline Polachek, Tommy Cash, Cecile Believe, and Hannah Diamond. The album is bursting with ideas, with Cook getting as much variation and leverage out of each of the seven instrument disciplines (drums, guitar, supersaw, piano, Nord, spoken word, extreme vocals) as possible. It’s a showcase of the producer’s unique sound: shiny and hi-fi sonically in places, roughly sketched and lo-fi in others; sometimes intimate, sometimes alienating; euphoric in parts and bittersweet in others; experimental yet poptastic, all at once.

Elsewhere this week, Burna Boy follows up last year’s mega African Giant with Twice as Tall, Orville Peck returns with a new EP featuring the icon Shania Twain, and 03 Greedo releases a new record while he serves an unjust prison sentence. Take a listen below.