New Music Friday: Fatima Al Qadiri’s 3TWI, Dawn Richard’s creole culture & More

Fatima Al Qadiri – 3TWI

Fatima Al Qadiri returns to Hyperdub with 3TWI, a four-track EP out today. The title comes from Kuwaiti Arabic femme slang for a dirty old man, literally a male alley cat, and that bite sets the tone. Improvised vocals from Bobo Secret, Lama3an and Gumar move through club structures that feel ceremonial and socially charged at once. Lead track “7ilween,” pretty young things, arrives with a video directed by Sophia Al-Maria and shot between London and Baghdad. After the queer Arabic dance music of Shaneera and the lamentation-led Gumar, this EP sharpens Al Qadiri’s habit of turning vernacular culture into highly designed electronic form. The weight sits in that mix of mockery, confrontation and regional specificity.

Marina Herlop – Dja Dja

Marina Herlop approaches Dja Dja as one continuous structure rather than a run of isolated songs. The Barcelona-based composer built its architecture around the Hero’s Journey, distributing intensity across 15 tracks while holding aggression and delicacy in the same frame. It is also her first self-released album, after the piano-led early records and the electronic radicalism of Pripyat and Nekkuja on PAN. Singles “Jaque,” “Vas volant” and “Bliss” opened the door. The classically trained pianist and vocalist now treats the album itself as a composed environment, with its own dramatic gravity. Control here is not a smaller gesture. It is the point.

Dawn Richard – creole culture

Dawn Richard’s creole culture, out today on Merge, is the third movement in her extended study of New Orleans, following new breed and Second Line: An Electro Revival. The album frames Creole identity as a living, progressive force, connecting R&B, soul, hip-hop, pop and jazz without reducing the city to heritage imagery. Created with Katalyst Collective, the Los Angeles ensemble, the 11-track record turns cultural memory into forward motion. Big Freedia, Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph, Tarriona “Tank” Ball, Durand Bernarr and her father Frank Richard of Chocolate Milk enter a world that honors lineage and still points at the present. Richard is not closing a trilogy so much as refusing to leave the story unfinished.

HAAi – DIGITiSE

HAAi follows 2025’s HUMANiSE with DIGITiSE, a faster, club-focused companion on Mute, built around the energy of her all-night DJ sets. The closing choir from the previous album reappears at the start, so reflection hands directly into physical release. Across ten tracks, the Australian-born, London-based producer examines technology, artificial intelligence and digital alienation through rave pressure and collective movement. Echonomist, Pat Alvarez, James Massiah, Skybreak and Medellín children’s choir Cantoalegre appear across a record she has called HUMANiSE’s bigger, ravey sibling. The dance floor is not decoration here. It is the answer to technological isolation.

Girl Ultra – RRRomeo

Girl Ultra leaves the softer contours of her earlier R&B behind on RRRomeo, an eight-track study of romance as rebellion, out today on Big Dada. Co-produced with Chromeo’s Dave 1 and recorded between Mexico City and Los Angeles, the album moves through analogue funk, synth-pop, darkwave, dub and the nocturnal atmosphere of the city she comes from. Buscabulla, Empress Of, Jean Tonique and Chromeo enter a world of leather, lust, memory and exaggerated intimacy. Mariana de Miguel has said Girl Ultra can be whatever she chooses it to be in the moment. Rather than using the 1980s as costume, she draws on its physicality and tension, and desire becomes performance, mythology and self-authorship.

Jeremiah Chiu – Edge Conditions

Los Angeles composer and modular synthesist Jeremiah Chiu brings electronic composition into a groove-led, jazz-adjacent space on Edge Conditions, out today on International Anthem as LP, CD and digital download. Streaming follows on 27 October. The 11-track record balances synthesis, acoustic instrumentation, rhythmic detail and moments of noise improvisation, fluid enough for close listening and physical movement. Collaborators include Marta Sofia Honer, Booker Stardrum, Ben Lumsdaine, Patrick Shiroishi, Takako Minekawa, Marquis Hill and Will Miller. Chiu’s wider practice spans graphic design, conceptual art, solo electronics and the ensemble SML. Here that thinking becomes musical architecture. Synthetic and organic materials meet at their boundaries, and the record is shaped less by genre than by texture, improvisation and spatial awareness.

Slayyyter – i think he’s got a girl

Slayyyter turns suspicion into widescreen grunge-pop on “i think he’s got a girl,” out today via RECORDS / Columbia and the latest preview of December’s wor$t man in america. Produced by Austin Corona and Wyatt Bernard, the track trades the harsher blog-house charge of her recent work for a slower emotional escalation centred on infidelity and collapsing trust. Her self-directed video places vintage Hollywood glamour beside Midwestern domestic imagery, raccoon pelt and charcoal grill included. As a companion piece to WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, the forthcoming album shifts the focus toward male failure. This single gives that idea its most vulnerable form so far.

Interplanetary Criminal – Memories

Manchester producer Interplanetary Criminal releases “Memories” as a three-track, 13-minute package through ATW Records, the label he co-founded with Main Phase. The extended format places the title track inside a functional club context, closer to a compact dance release than a standalone streaming single. After the chart reach of “B.O.T.A. (Baddest of Them All)” with Eliza Rose, and a run of garage and breakbeat collaborations, this one stays with the room. The selection is the format itself. Thirteen minutes is enough time for a record to do its job without asking to be a statement.

The Through Line

What connects these eight releases is a shared refusal to treat the drop date as the whole event. Each one arrives with a clear sense of its own world and the time it asks from the listener. Al Qadiri designs slang into structure. Herlop holds a long form together by hand. Richard rebuilds New Orleans as present tense. HAAi answers digital distance with collective movement. Girl Ultra authors desire instead of illustrating it. Chiu composes at the boundary and lets the stream wait. Slayyyter lets suspicion slow the tempo. Interplanetary Criminal keeps the package useful for the floor. In different ways, they all remind that attention is earned through intention, not volume.