Stream billy woods’ GOLLIWOG and more projects for New Music Friday

Stream every standout album released this Friday with The FADER’s weekly roundup.

 

Every Friday, The FADER’s writers dive into the most exciting new projects released that week. Today, read our thoughts on billy woods’ GOLLIWOG, Erika de Casier’s Lifetime, and more.

billy woods: GOLLIWOG

Wander to almost any antique store in your nearest gentrified neighbourhood and you’re guaranteed to see a golliwog somewhere. The Black charicture was the Kermit the Frog of racism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, merchandised into a family-friendly ubiquity that eventually went global. Stateside, it has become taboo, a grinning fetish whose dire presence is still felt far beyond the margins it was banished to. These are the kinds of places where GOLLIWOG, the new album from N.Y.C. rapper billy woods, lives: in declassified CIA files left ignored, in the needle-strewn alleys between luxury department stores, in sweet moments turned sour by his own base urges. From these corners, woods cultivates an 18-track collection of music full of despair, dark humor, and hard-warned wisdom; the joy we feel is not directly transmitted in the sullen beats for cryptids to stalk to, but in woods’ palpable love of language. He’s boosted by his community, too, a venerable assemblage of underground rap heavyweights (E L U C I D, the Alchemist, EL-P, Conductor Williams and more) and beyond spread out across every track. GOLLIWOG is one of 2025’s few truly essential albums because it understands the stakes of our current moment and still feels one step ahead of them: “Right up to the last second, those idiots really thought I was just rhyming,” he sneers on “Pitchforks & Halos.” – Jordan Darville

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Erika de Casier: Lifetime

Listening to Erika de Casier’s first three albums often felt like being let in on a secret. Here was a Danish artist making perfectly weightless pop music in conversation with both nostalgic ’90s R&B and her peers in Copenhagen’s boundary pushing songwriter set. With her fourth album, de Casier initially built the gatekeeping into her release and made the project available solely via cassette. Now widely available on streaming, the entirely self-produced project (a first for de Casier) builds on last year’s Still without straying far from the cool and mournful breeze that her music has always floated on. Described as a “form of communication during the night,” the album adds a sleek sheen to thoughts that skip between sex, desire, flirtation, and dejection. Lifetime frames the highs and lows of romantic adventure as part of a bigger picture, namely the way in which youth is prized and yet ephemeral. Like a match on the dating app she writes about on “Delusional,” it’s here one day and gone the next. The songs on this album have a similarly fleeting feeling, plain spoken vocals and gentle trip-hop beats making for a pillowy listen, but de Casier has a knack for adding weight to the lightest sounds, perfectly encapsulating what it feels like to yearn and dream. — David Renshaw

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

Kali Uchis: Sincerely,

Kali Uchis suffered a huge loss and a blessing before the release of her new album, Sincerely,.: She gave birth to her son and lost her mom. These two compounding events imbued this album cycle with a fraught tension. Two days before the release of Sincerely, she explained on Instagram Stories that it’s been “hard to put a smile on my face & do press stuff right now I dunno if I can do anymore […] I hope the music is enough for you all at this point.” She didn’t need to say this and her latter wish would’ve still been conveyed — the record is a triumph.

Written completely by Uchis alone, it’s a sublime trek through upper-echelon R&B, airlifted by her vocals that billow through phases of love, grief, and insecurity. Most of the songs are plush odes to Toliver and their sacred union, like on “It’s Just Us” where she describes their chemistry as “a love felt infinitely.” Opener “Heaven is a Home,” a tribute to her mother, remarks at how her presence has made the spiritual Nirvana a new source of comfort. “Angels All Around Me…” is one of those neo-soul epics that will certainly be referenced for years to come. Sincerely, earns its acclaim not in the critical sense that there’s profound intellectual layers to dig through; it wins through the sheer excellence of its craft. It deserves your full attention this weekend, and then some. — Steffanee Wang

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music

Deradoorian: Ready For Heaven

Angel Deradoorian has moved through many phases in her career, but her music has always retained an ominous edge, a carving knife’s reflection glinting from behind the black curtains of her bare-bones, industrial production. On Ready For Heaven, she slides between styles — some lush, some minimal — but that familiar menace lurks at the corners of every track. On opener “Storm In My Brain,” skronky, no-wave guitar scratches at Deradoorian’s tightly monotoned vocals over a buoyant beat, but the groove is a few BPMs too fast to ease into comfortably. On “No No Yes Yes,” she repeats “this is the end” over an ESG-emulating instrumental, a faint vocoder in the background reminding us of the incoming AI apocalypse. Things get especially dark on “Digital Gravestone,” where Deradoorian sings emotionlessly of motherless sons and sonless mothers. But “Set Me Free,” the album’s halfway point, is a stately piece of synth-laden chamber pop, full of exultant imagery. Side B of Ready For Heaven pairs the heavenly psychedelia of “Golden Teacher” with the unnervingly dissonant “Purgatory of Consciousness.” By the time the robotic, Kraftwerk-indebted “Reigning Down” segues into the slow, hand-struck drums and atonal sax of “Hell Island” — a closer that deals coolly with climate collapse and genocide — we wake from an aesthetically sleek, emotionally fraught fugue state, Deradoorian’s defiant cries still echoing through the fog. — Raphael Helfand

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

SAILORR: From Florida’s Finest

The narratives in SAILORR’s music follow in the lineage of artists like SZA and Summer Walker but dragged through the swamp muck of Florida. Busted 808s ravage the delicate allure of her latest single “Down Bad,” another track about shameless wallowing produced by Zach Ezzy and Adam Krevlin — two longtime friends whom SAILORR describes as the “Timbaland to [my] Missy” — that pries at complex femininity (“It’s bad bitch energy, but also softness”). The song precedes her debut album, expected to drop this spring and further flesh out the SAILORR universe. The vibe is “sexy as hell,” she teases, and feels “like a hot ass summer in Florida with your homegirls, smoking cigarettes on the side of the road.” — Steffanee Wang, from the Sailorr GEN F profile

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music

Other projects out today that you should listen to

Benny The Butcher: Excelsior
Cole Pulice: Land’s End Eternal
Cuco: Ridin’
Deradoorian: Ready for Heaven
I’m With Her: Wild and Clear and Blue
Kara-Lis Coverdale: From Where You Came
Keegan DeWitt: Friendship (Original Soundtrack)
M83: A Necessary Escape
Men I Trust: Equus Caballus
MIKE & Tony Seltzer: Pinball II
Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke: Tall Tales
Mclusky: The World Is Still Here and So Are We
Moin: Belly Up
PinkPantheress: Fancy That
PradaBagShawty: Home Invasions
Preoccupations: Ill at Ease
Provoker: Mausoleum
rexv2: Abberation
shaio: Linnea (Deluxe)
Sleep Token: Even in Arcadia