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Angine de Poitrine – Vol II
You ever meet up with friends and realise you all dreamed about each other last night? Angine de Poitrine feel like the sort of band that were catalysed into being from the simultaneous reveries of a prog fan craving complex showboating, of the kind of person who went to All Tomorrow’s Parties festival too many times and believed that the hypnotic weirdos playing at 3pm really could be pop stars if the public just gave them a chance, and of a little kid who just discovered the concept of riffs and now needs to gorge on them like Haribo. That collective hunger was met in two Quebecer dudes, dressed up like Mr Blobby via Hugo Ball, whose interlocking, ecstatic drums and dual-necked guitar/bass drilled them into the hearts of a disparate but dedicated fanbase. The vault in ambition from 2024’s more straightforward Vol I to this year’s addictively wayward Vol II really was the stuff that dreams are made of. Read our interview. LS
Otto Benson – Peanut
With what is a pretty rudimentary bedroom-indie setup – acoustic and electric guitars, bass, drum machine, synth, vocals – US singer-songwriter Otto Benson builds a warm twilit world, evoking a den made out of blankets, pillows and electric candles. His voice, and the country-tinged songs as a whole, have the soft weight of drooping eyelids – and yet the superb melody writing staves off actual slumber. BBT
Chalk – Crystalpunk
The breakbeat hacker-tech aesthetic of the Prodigy, Propellerheads and the kind of thing heard on the Matrix soundtrack was hauled into the 21st century with great passion by this Belfast duo, topped with Dave Gahan-grade goth-pop vocals by Ross Cullen. Highlights in this instant industrial-pop classic include the Underworld-esque Béal Feirste, a techno-tempo paean to their home city, and Can’t Feel It, which will rip off roofs this festival season. Read our interview. BBT
Olof Dreijer – Loud Bloom
Close followers of the former Knife member’s output will already be familiar with quite a bit of Loud Bloom, released in various EPs over the past few years. You might resent Dreijer for reconstituting them into his debut solo album if the combined results weren’t so giddy and life-affirming. On one hand, I could tell you about how this zippy, Technicolor record draws from global club rhythms such as kuduro and cumbia and features vocalists from Sudan to South Africa. On the other, it might be just as accurate to say that Dreijer’s trademark synth scrunches sound like a party in a coral reef: hard, bright, wiggly and irrepressibly alluring. Read the full review. LS
Dry Cleaning – Secret Love
Dry Cleaning’s third album is populated by awful designers mouthing meaningless platitudes about their work, edgelords whose cynicism curdles into gory violence, influencers spouting harmful wellness advice and a succession of apparently mundane characters whose lives are on the verge of spiralling out of control. All this is related via lyrics filled with weird lines and non-sequiturs and delivered in Florence Shaw’s characteristically deadpan voice, while Dry Cleaning’s sound – delivered in impressively concise bursts – expands out from the vinegary post-punk guitars of their past work into ominous electronics, hints of folk and funk. Inventive, unique and more emotionally engaging than their reputation as sprechgesang indie’s oddballs-in-chief might suggest. Read the full review. AP
Wendy Eisenberg – Wendy Eisenberg
For most indie-leaning artists, releasing a beautiful Americana record filled with love songs would hardly be worth remarking on. But for Wendy Eisenberg, a prodigious and complex guitarist known for their knotty, digressive songcraft – alone, with their bands Editrix and Birthing Hips, and as part of Bill Orcutt’s quartet; delving into rock, jazz and more – the genre fealty, clarity and brimming heart of this self-titled release hit like a shock of cold water. Having found a fully realised love with fellow musician More Eaze, Eisenberg said: “My ultimate goal is for these songs to sound beautiful because of their complexity.” The album is a finely tuned and unpredictable dance of walking bass lines, soulful pedal steel and chiming guitar, full of tension and strange time signatures – but it’s also full of songs that sound like timeless classics, radiant with melodic and spiritual resolution. “Every day, angels sing songs to me, tell me it’s finally here,” Eisenberg sings on It’s Here. “It’s here, little Wendy.” Read our interview. LS
Avalon Emerson – Written Into Changes
American musician Emerson was first the toast of underground clubland thanks to psychedelic techno odysseys such as The Frontier and One More Fluorescent Rush, then added a parallel career in new-wave vocal pop. Her latest album in the latter style is subtly but deeply ground in the former, with songs pressing relentlessly forward even at slower tempos, full of lyrics that contemplate friendship, romance and the measure of perspective you accumulate as your 30s spill away. BBT
Carla dal Forno – Confession
Inspired by a romantic fixation, the Australian coldwave singer-songwriter performs a series of vignettes that chart this intense connection from prickling excitement to listlessness and doubt. The emotional uncertainty is underlined all the more by the backings not necessarily tallying with the feelings essayed in each song. As well as prowling post-punk there’s much more chipper dub reggae and 80s-style indie-pop: counterpoints that ring true with the way love can hold so many other emotions within its bounds. Read the full review. BBT
Mabe Fratti and Bill Orcutt – Almost Waking
Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti and American experimental guitar stalwart Bill Orcutt had never met before she gave him a shout out in an interview and he hit her up about collaborating. You’d never know they were new friends from the deep interplay on the resulting album. It starts by sounding as if they’re bringing one another to life before wilding out; a clenched, frenzied midpoint yields to spacious open plains. By Todo Puede Ser Error, Fratti’s singing is as luminous as stained glass, held together by the tangled leading of Orcutt’s guitar. Warm and full of hope, Almost Waking is borderline sentimental at points – an unexpected emotion for either artist that speaks to how remarkably they catalyse one another. Read the full review. LS
Phil Geraldi – Rural Deceased Undiscovered
Los Thuthanaka’s Wak’a is not technically eligible for this list as it’s an EP, though don’t let that slow you from submitting to the Aymara duo’s signal-blasted primordial bliss. When you’re in need of a comedown from its ear-boxing crunch, reach for California composer Phil Geraldi’s latest: Rural Deceased Undiscovered drinks from the same pastoral pool but smears those country influences across a canvas as endless as Los Thuthanaka’s is compressed, a teeming shimmer of pedal steel and wistful, warped acoustic guitar. LS
Hekt – Forever
For all the boundary-pushing music coming out of Copenhagen, the scene wasn’t exactly pumping out bangers – until producer Jesper Nørbæk released his debut album as Hekt. Made with heavy collaboration from duo Smerz, Forever revels in tacky, sugary club excess – EDM drops, trance urgency, plasticky sheen, extremely silly bass, yearning anonymous vocals – and smart, avant garde touches that, crucially, avoid the pitfalls of over-intellectualising cheap thrills (calling Danny L Harle to the witness stand). Couple with Dreijer’s Loud Bloom for heady summer fun. LS
Bruce Hornsby – Indigo Park
If you haven’t been keeping tabs on Bruce “The Way It Is” Hornsby’s latterday career, Indigo Park could come as a surprise: still best-known in the UK as a purveyor of sophisticated 80s AOR, he’s long been a resident of the musical left field, big on improvisation and experimentation that draws as much on jazz and modern classical as it does rock. Accordingly Indigo Park is all over the place in the best possible way: warped R&B with guest vocals by Bonnie Raitt; off-centre New Orleans jazz featuring the late Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead; psychedelicised piano ballads; weird chord sequences and sudden wild shifts in mood and tempo. It’s adventurous, strange and incredibly engaging. Read our interview. AP
Grace Ives – Girlfriend
Bad recovery stories tie up everything neatly in a bow and declare happily ever after. Good ones know that sobriety isn’t a conclusion but a living beast that takes constant tending. (See also: Lena Dunham’s Famesick.) Grace Ives’ huge third album bristles with the chaos and misadventure of reckoning with what a mess life has become and trying to realign those shattered pieces – and the miracle of it is how she does so without judgment, and without diminishing the allure of the highs. Sounding recklessly, gorgeously alive, Girlfriend is a whirlwind of puckish beats and warm orchestral swells, the rush of the club and the muttered internal narrative of someone doing their best to keep a hold of themselves, shot through with fitting pop grandeur. Read the full review. LS
Lerado Khalil – Black Flag
Uttering his lyrics in a jaded, slurred, narcotised croak, it’s often hard to make out what the underground Minnesota rapper is even saying, but paired with a variety of producers given to distortion and smudges of ectoplasmic sound – including a hall-of-fame entry in the beat catalogue of cloud rap legend Clams Casino – he becomes a riveting presence. His knack for subtle melody enhances it further: Khalil is able to find a hook in a half-sentence mumble. BBT
Kim Gordon – Play Me
You might expect an 80s/90s alt-rock legend to balk at the modern world, which the former Sonic Youth bassist duly does on Play Me: tech bros, Spotify playlists, Maga and wellness influencers all get hit over the course of the album. But what’s really striking about Play Me is how alive Gordon remains to latterday musical developments: it would be easy to pander to nostalgia and retool Sonic Youth’s distinctive sound for 2026, but Play Me continues the work of her solo career to underpin her unmistakable vocals with music that takes its cues from trap, dub, electronica and hip-hop, to startling effect. Read our interview. AP
The Lemon Twigs – Look for Your Mind!
The D’Addario brothers are not musicians engaged in reinventing the wheel. As ever, their inspirations – from Merseybeat to Big Star to the Beach Boys – are very evident indeed on their sixth album. The point is that they’re so preposterously skilled as writers, their evident fandom is a joy to behold: every track on Look for Your Mind! sparkles. Modern life encroaches on Bring You Down – “they’re gonna take my job and give it to a metal machine,” it protests – but for the most part, it’s an album that exists in its own innocent universe, where the 21st century is the stuff of sci-fi. It’s a pleasure to visit. AP
Mandy, Indiana – Urgh
Its title alone would make it the defining album of this dire year; more impressive was how viscerally the Manchester- and Berlin-based band embodied that disgust in their churn of industrial noise, pile-driver percussion and French frontperson Valentine Caulfield’s delivery, so rhythmically tight that it seems to constrict like a cage. Even Francophones might struggle to discern the exact meaning of her lyrics amid the maelstrom, but her writhing horror – at complacency, rape culture and other injustices – was plain as day. Read the full review. LS
Mitski – Nothing’s About to Happen to Me
There are plenty of millennial singer-songwriters offering self-examining lyrics set to music that splits the difference between pop and alt-rock: it just so happens that Mitski is better at it than anyone else, a fact underlined by Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, an album that’s variously wrenching, hilarious, heartbreaking and thought-provoking. The sound flits between indie, alt-country and grandly ambitious 70s orchestral stylings; the lyrics are superb, and the atmospheres it conjures linger long after the songs are over. She sounds as unhappy as ever – longing for solitude or anonymity in the throes of romantic despair and the teeth of global success – but remains captivating company. Read the full review. AP
Kacey Musgraves – Middle of Nowhere
Kacey Musgraves made her name singing about life on the margins in rural Texas before 2018’s Golden Hour made her into a pop star. After a couple more albums that tried to please a broader audience, to diminishing returns, she returned to own her singular dusty dirt lane on this gorgeous and refreshingly specific seventh record. Across these weary, wry songs, she suggests that solitude is a salve – and also not for the faint-hearted, not cosplaying cowgirls or cowardly lovers who delude themselves that they’d rather run than commit. The truth of this heartbroken record is that at least nobody can hurt you when you’re alone, though for all that Middle of Nowhere is at ease with isolation, its sound is beautifully welcoming, mingling finely turned country with Tex-Mex, norteño and – the immaculate sound of loneliness – pedal steel. Read the full review. LS
My New Band Believe – My New Band Believe
After Black Midi’s tornado of alt-prog span itself out after three albums, its members were flung in very different directions, with Cameron Picton – who heads up My New Band Believe with a wide pool of collaborators – landing in a downy-soft bed of all-acoustic chamber pop. With shades of Van Dyke Parks and Jim O’Rourke’s most accessible moments, the arrangements are dizzyingly intricate and flexibly rhythmic, but they never crowd out Picton’s romantic, guileless songwriting. Read the full review. BBT
Picture – Eeeeeeee
In a very impressive display of quality control, the UK techno-ish label Short Span only started out in March 2025 but its 12 releases to date have all been unmissable, and Danish producer Picture’s amusingly titled album – with tracks including Tyyyyyyyyy, Waaaaaaaa and Qeeeeeeee – is first among equals. Some tracks whirr in a state of perpetual tension, like a piece of industrial machinery doing its job; others bump hard in four-four beats, but Picture applies a fine coating of peach-fuzz to them, slightly softening the impact and making them gorgeously tactile. Short Span’s other 2026 winners include Mammo’s gentle-hearted deep techno album Lateral, and Yu Su’s Foundry, which flits across ambient music, experimental pop, dub techno and perky electro. (Eeeeeeee is only available on vinyl, or digitally via Bandcamp.) BBT
Powerplant – Bridge of Sacrifice
No album is more deserving of being heralded as “a ripper” than this from a Ukrainian expat in London, Theo Zhykharyev, who writes and performs nearly every part of an opus where garage rock meets hardcore punk, psychobilly and black metal as if on a Transylvanian hillside under a full moon. Among the fist-pumping fuzz-rock riffs, there are plenty of slower moments too, where Zhykharyev goes into am-dram Phantom of the Opera mode. Read our feature. BBT
Pozer – Crossroads
The Croydon rapper grew up amid the drug trade and its attendant violence, and his debut mixtape is full of ugly weaponry and cold fatalism. His high-tempo flow, rattled out over equally peppy Jersey club beats, feels like an attempt to barrel through the horrors, but for all the bravado there’s a note of lamentation in his voice that betrays their emotional effects on him. It adds up to social realism of a kind that UK culture sometimes shrinks from: unredemptive and brutally honest. Read our interview. BBT
Reckonwrong – How Long Has It Been?
The chiming Rhodes piano, rainy atmosphere and bruised, boyish vocals of Alex Peringer’s debut full-length suggest a cult crooner propped up in the corner of an unloved seaside town, the flash of arcade machines spotlighting his innocent, lovelorn balladry. With its shades of Robert Wyatt, How Long Has It Been? is a million miles from Peringer’s earlier, supremely wonky club-focused releases, but even if you’ve never come across those, his luminous songcraft is no less startling. Read the full review. LS
Robyn – Sexistential
Behind the abysmal title of Robyn’s ninth album lurks a panoply of delights. Both Max Martin and Metronomy’s Joe Mount are on board, and Sexistential’s left-field electro-pop bangers are absolutely up to the standard set by her masterpiece, 2010’s Body Talk. The subject matter of her lyrics is similarly smart and funny: the title track touches on the curious business of hooking up while undergoing IVF, phone sex as a form of therapy is explored on Talk to Me, and she considers the nature of pleasure on Dopamine. The only criticism you can level is that, at half an hour, Sexistential is too short. Read the full review. AP
Jill Scott – To Whom This May Concern
The danger in leaving 11 years between albums is that expectations mount so high that nothing you release can hope to match them, but Jill Scott’s first album since 2015’s Woman is a total joy. Her voice still sounds extraordinary, and her rapping is spiked with real screw-you sass, perhaps the result of some well-publicised travails over the intervening decade (“I married a bitch,” she protests at one juncture). The music blends killer songwriting with experimentation – there’s neo-soul here, but there’s also blues-soaked big band swing, tough hip-hop-infused funk and, on The Math, impressively out-there abstraction. Read our interview. AP
Shabaka – Of the Earth
Of the Earth is the first release on Shabaka Hutchings’ own label, and the first album he’s released on which the British jazz star plays and produces everything, including sax, to which he’s returned after shifting entirely to flute on last year’s Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace. Like its predecessor, Of the Earth is an album you want to completely immerse yourself in, filled with implausibly beautiful textures and atmospheres, propulsive dance rhythms and the unexpected sound of Hutchings rapping. It feels like a culmination of sorts, a point where Hutchings’ varied talents perfectly coalesce. AP
Tony Bontana – My Name
Bontana is Birmingham’s most industrious rapper, with nearly 60 releases on his Bandcamp page since 2020 (not to mention plenty more such as brilliant side project Everything Is Psychedelic). My Name is the perfect introduction to his oeuvre, as he empties his lungs on impassioned soliloquies about social injustice and personal struggle, but often with wry humour. The beats are equally good, with mouldering blues, soul and 80s R&B samples extracted as if from the bottom of a compost bin, then shaped around lo-fi drums. Read our interview. BBT
Thundercat – Distracted
Thundercat’s fifth studio album boasts a heavyweight guestlist – Tame Impala, Lil Yachty, the Lemon Twigs, A$AP Rocky, Willow Smith plus a posthumous appearance from Mac Miller – but it’s very much Stephen Bruner’s show. This is a head-spinningly eclectic 45 minutes in which house music abuts soft rock, classic jazz-infused hip-hop, psychedelia, soul, shoegazing, R&B and P-funk, held together by his astonishing musicianship, the emotional candour he expresses in the lyrics – about self-sabotage, failed relationships and the distinct possibility he might have ADHD – and the sheer force of his personality. Read our interview. AP
Underscores – U
In a year thus far marked by pop big hitters – Harry Styles, BTS, Drake – delivering distinctly underwhelming albums, here’s an alternative from left field: the latest from hyperpop auteur April Grey is an infinitely more interesting, accomplished and better-written pop album than anything the major league has achieved in 2026. A little dialled-down compared to its dense, complex predecessor Wallsocket, U gives Grey’s skill as a songwriter more room to breathe, although its idiosyncratic and thrilling sound – a fizzing cocktail of EDM, Auto-Tuned vocals, 90s R&B references, acid house and dubstep-inspired electronics – retains a degree of chaos. Read the full review. AP
