Pitchfork Selects Stitches Together Pop, Folk, and the Uncanny

The new edition of Pitchfork Selects arrived Monday, the weekly staff-chosen playlist that runs on a single rule: these are the tracks the site’s writers and editors would send to a friend. The list is a grab-bag, often revealing far more about the internal listening habits of a music publication than any curated column can. This week, that means Ruth Garbus, Sophia Stel, and Kim Petras all share the same tracklisting.

Garbus appears with her askew, quietly devastating songcraft, the kind of thing that rewards repeated listens in a quiet room. Stel, a newer name, arrives with a voice that suggests a particular line of indie-pop lineage but plenty of room to move. Next to them sits Petras, a pop figure whose work lives on a completely different scale of production and audience. The playlist doesn’t bother to smooth the transition, and that’s the point. It’s a record of a week spent bouncing between worlds.

That mix of scale is exactly what makes the Selects series worth checking. Where streaming algorithms flatten differences into seamless autoplay, a human-made list like this lets the seams show. You hear the staff member switching from one thing to another, following a thread they’d have trouble naming. This edition reads like a reminder that even the most professional listeners stay restless. The full playlist is streaming on Apple Music and Spotify.