Stream Zayn, Young Thug And The Week's New Albums

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It’s finally every Directioner’s favorite day of the week — yes friends, it’s Zayn day. The solo debut from the former boy bander has arrived today, but it’s got some competition in an incredibly strong week. Young Thug is back with the conclusion of his Slime Season trilogy, The Joy Formidable have another record of alt-arena rock shredders, and we’ve also got new stuff from RJD2 SBTRKT, K. Michelle, The Thermals, Father, Anthony Hamilton and many more. Here are the albums you need to hear this week.

Zayn – Mind of Mine

So — we’ve finally arrived. Now that he’s liberated from what everyone perceived to be a cookie-cutter music cabal, what is the music that the 23-year-old Brit wants to make? The answer to that may sound equally pre-fab — the bad boy moves on from his group to make moody, sultry R&B — but you hear a lot of who Zayn actually is here. Tracks like “BeFoUr” and “PILLOWTALK” are smoky, Saturday afternoon sex jams which present a young man who has an entire new world to explore. Is this the “end all, be all” statement from Zayn? Probably not, he has a lot of room to grow. But that’s the biggest takeaway — he’s young, gifted, and it’s all wide open from here.

Young Thug – Slime Season 3

Hip-hop can feel a lot like an arms race these days. Gone are the times of months and months of promo for an album and then chewing on that for a couple of years. Now you’re lucky if you get a few months of burn. Thankfully, at least in Young Thug’s case, every album he’s flooded the market with has ignited each soul it’s touched, and Slime Season 3 may be his hottest effort yet. Featuring heavy collaboration with maybe his most fruitful producer in London On Da Track, Thugger is maybe at his most lucid here while still at his most out of his mind. If a stranger wanted to understand why Young Thug is the hottest in the game right now, this is probably the tape you would pass along.

The Joy Formidable – Hitch

Ritzy Bryan and The Joy Formidable have consistently put out some of the strongest alt rock records of the past half-decade. Following the massive and bombastic effort of 2013’s Wolf’s Law, the Welsh indie band are back with a much more reduced and stripped down effort on Hitch. Lead single “The Last Thing On My Mind” shows that you can still pack a major punch without all the trimmings of major studio recording (the group made the record in the small, rural Welsh town of Mold.) But the album isn’t all ass-kickers; there are notes of adrift dream pop, world ending shoegaze, and so much more. If anything, with the barest of elements, Hitch shows how much the Joy Formidable can do with so little.

You can listen to The Joy Formidable Hitch on Apple Music, TIDAL, Google Play, and more.