New releases this week: Experimental/Electronic

Review: New York’s James K returns with her third album and most complete vision to date—a fragile lattice of haunted vocals, ambient shoegaze and dream-state electronics that gently disorient and dissolve. While still rooted in the foggy intimacy of earlier work, these tracks feel more sculpted, like memory filtered through soft-focus reverb and delay. Her voice remains the anchor: breathy, flickering, always on the cusp of vanishing. Tracks like ‘Deeprose’ and ‘Open My Heart’ flicker with trip-hop melancholy, while the ghostly pulse of ‘Stupid’ or the vaporised chamber-pop of ‘I Don’t Know’ suggest a private language unfolding in real time. There’s a deliberate softness to everything here—compositions that move like weather, both enveloping and elusive. Long involved in the DIY scenes that trace between New York and Berlin, K distils years of collaborative texture into something singular and uncanny.

Review: New York's James K refines her ghostly, intimate style with a third full-length that feels like the clearest articulation of her vision to date. Shifting between whispery dream-pop, spectral ambient textures and flickers of trip-hop, the record sketches emotional states in soft, translucent layers. Tracks like 'Open My Heart' and 'Stupid' showcase her fluttering vocal delivery, drifting somewhere between presence and memory. 'Deeprose' works in slow, distorted waves, while 'I Don't Know' melts guitar lines into padded synths and downcast drums. The production is tactile but restrained-every detail placed with intent. Long affiliated with scenes between New York and Berlin, K has always moved obliquely; here she leans into clarity without surrendering subtlety. It's deeply personal music that never demands attention, but earns it slowly and fully.