The 40 Best Albums of 2026 So Far
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Biggest pimp of the year: Jill Scott (Photo by Kennedi Carter)
40. Bill Orcutt, Music in Continuous Motion
I’ve never played Harry Pussy or at least 50 of his other releases, just this and Music for Four Guitars. And if you dug Music for Four Guitars, you’ll dig this. If you’re somehow a fanatic for Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Sonic Youth who hasn’t heard it, start there. Lovers of deep-tissue body music and repetition that feeds back comfort and chaos equally will feel right at home, especially on the Allmanesque “And Warm to the Touch,” and they might even wonder how many stories there are in the building. Should they sample any of his at least 50 other releases I’d love to know myself.
39. NMIXX, Heavy Serenade [EP]
The title song indeed flirts with metal Ariana, and why not throw in a rap section, but that’s just another day in the lab for the purveyors of 2025 classic “Blue Valentine” and its Dr. Strange-like manipulation of tempos. Even the trip-hop of “IDESERVEIT” gets treated like silly putty shifting five gears (and drum breaks) like Odelay or something. At what point does this simply become prog? “Different Girl” and its fucking Donald Fagen chord change might have the answer. Finale has the biggest surprise of all: “I wanna love you loud / Need a microphone speaker just so I can scream it out.”
38. The New Pornographers, The Former Site of the New Pornographers
Guilty of turning the phrase “powerless-pop” pejoratively, I’m impressed by how fully this album inhabits the notion in a useful way. 2023’s Continue as a Guest was their sleepiest ever, and initially this felt the same, but the New Pornographers’ tenth album is more sleepless, weary, alert for all the wrong reasons. And that was all before their drummer of more than a decade was convicted of felony possession of CSAM. Carl Newman can barely muster up his British affections when he sums up our current empire as “pure sticker shock / at the price on my head / in a pure sticker shock / thought I’d get more for it.” So they “give up on eloquence” and “have one more bonus Mai Tai” “in case I don’t make it back.” Same song shouts out the Thompson Twins. Rolling Stones-to-Fiona-Apple session master Charley Drayton takes over on rather sparse percussion compared to the heavy krautrock of Whiteout Conditions that informed the decade-long depression they’ve been battling now. One of the more hopeful titles here is a postcard from that foxhole: “Wish You Could See Me I’m Killing It.” And the not much snappier “Votive” is presumably the single for saying the quiet part out loud: “I’m just trying to keep the lights on.”
37. Olof Dreijer, Loud Bloom
As the Knife, Olof and Karin Dreijer had no generational peer except Sophie as sound designers who knew songwriting, and Sophie never lived long enough to explicate an interest in radical leftism if any. Karin’s made some great music as Fever Ray that engages both economics and sex, though 2023’s Radical Romantics felt a little sonically staid even though Olof reunited for a chunk. Maybe without the Knife the power balance is off, because sonics are everything on Olof’s solo debut, starting with that signature Knife synth that occupies “Rosa Rugosa” 20 years after perfecting it on Silent Shout. This is the most traditional dance music either utensil has made, though, less dark because what’s the point, and on a track like the Diva Cruz turn “Acuyuye,” the percussive give and synthesis with synthetics recalls the ebullient super-collective Les Amazones d’Afrique. What’s missing is less Fever Ray’s songcraft than the Knife’s exploratory structures, gender-bending framework, socialist urgency, not to mention the fact they didn’t always limit themselves to synths. But Olof throws a party if not a political one, and he used to rely on frontpersons like his sibling or Robyn to do that. Even flirting with conventional dance music his sound design still shakes the habitual.
36. Dry Cleaning, Secret Love
The big surprise, besides the Grammy itself, is how much the Grammy affected them. Or at least MVP guitar stylist Tom Dowse, who let Florence Shaw talk so much on 2022’s Stumpwork it unscrewed the song structures. Here the rhythm section locks into a reliable, unoriginal pulse and Dowse is suddenly all about nonstop hooks. “Joy” or “The Cute Things” could even buttress talkwave godmother Patti Smith. Shaw’s free associations are not her most far-out (a feat for the woman behind phrases such as “blood for breakfast”), but more than ever the most avant thing about them by far, and when they’re grooving like this even she can’t disrupt it. This comfort food won’t win new fans, but it feeds old ones just fine. Not a trace of punk here, though, post- or otherwise. I hope they don’t get any bright ideas about giving Idles a call when Life Without Buildings are back.
35. GENA, The Pleasure Is Yours
You know it’s gonna be funky when the acronym is so stupid, so “God Energy, Naturally Amazing” is Liv.e and Karriem Riggins (drummer for Robert Glasper types but also Paul McCartney) loosening up with downbeat broken loops rather than the ADHD-paced drum’n’bass of Girl in the Half Pearl. “Unspokern” is on Dilla time, “Doobie Doo Wow” is Low End Theory night dub, and, given their pedigrees, there’s simply no way the solo on “This Is So Crazy” isn’t consciously referencing Robert Fripp’s “Wimshurst guitar” on Eno’s classic “St. Elmo’s Fire.” So these stoned neo-soul miniatures are more than sketches if not quite songs, and Liv.e’s too sharp to ever set any vibe adrift on memory bliss. Her “I’m thinking ‘bout giving you the blues right now / I’m thinking ‘bout giving you a bruise right now” proves pain can be pleasure, too.
34. Robber Robber, Two Wheels Move the Soul
“The Sound It Made” primes you for something more dangerous than this turns out to be, but it’s hard to not root for haywire, drum-forward new indies who resist easy description for 30 minutes and prioritize sonic whiplash. Tunewise they’re close enough, but it’s the “hard stop, land flat, good talkback” that will bend your ear. They’re more confident about not knowing what they’re doing than the new Olivia. How about “Avalanche Sound Effect?” Good song, great genre.
33. Al Green, To Love Somebody [EP]
From algreen.bandcamp.com, one of the century’s finest singers (Black) singing four songs by three of its most celebrated artists (white): R.E.M.’s eternal “Everybody Hurts,” two Lou Reed selections, one of them my favorite Velvet Underground tune, and the Bee Gees’ title track, so indelible that Billy Corgan and Robert Smith tried it once. Would love to sic Cameron Winter on that one, or perhaps the Reverend on Cameron Winter. “Husbands” more than “Love Takes Miles.”
32. Buck 65, Do Not Bend
As tempting as it is to not call this 53-year-old white boy the most skilled, reverent, best hip-hop nostalgia act of all-time (sorry Jurassic 5), it’s even more tempting to listen to the fifth B-boy bouillabaisse of Buck’s world-beating 2020s comeback, which (finally) starts with the “Good Times” bassline and the credo “I like drum breaks and the stories they tell.” Next track bends it into an upright while “The Wooga” crescendos to a velcro-like ASMR and the second half has plenty of human beatbox. This might be his best in the way that King of Drums, Super Dope!, Punk Rock B-Boy, and Keep Moving might all be his best, though it’s closer than Punk Rock B-Boy. If only it had more rapping, because “ever lick a nine-volt battery / Can’t see myself working in a blindfold factory” and what sounds like some ICE taunting on “Don’t Forget the Chaos” could make one think they took the previous bricolages for granted. So no need to “hold your breath hostage” and definitely don’t “die for the sake of the art.”
31. Zach Bryan, With Heaven on Top
He’s almost certainly not the first asshole to namedrop Elliott Smith, whose tunes were fussy and undisciplined by comparison. Other than his interminable penchant for 78-minute, 25-song doorstops, this is as straight-ahead as rock gets, leaving no phrase unturned without any of them (or the copious brass and string additions) getting in the way of his steak-and-fries balladry. And it’s no data dump; feel free to nominate any cuts because I’m stumped. He should take his own advice in re: treating one’s baby better, but everyone else could use his two cents in re: crafty corn. “You were smiling like a thief with your cheek-tearing teeth.” “I’ll start a forest fire with my family tree.” “Your soul’s like an old Kentucky coal mine.” And of course, “she likes romance, good sex, music, and ruling the world.” But no, I’m not playing the acoustic version.
30. Angine de Poitrine, Vol. II
These viral virtuosos can’t possibly be prog’s first groove band but they have closed a major loophole for the genre being a duo who relies on loop pedals live. Which means the guitarist is also the bassist. Which means things do have to stay on the grid. Which means no multi-part beat-switch bullshit. Which means a normal drummer could pound out these spidery Eastern-scale workouts that call up everything from Tal National to Taraf de Haïdouks — admittedly a narrow stretch of the alphabet as well as the territory — just more punked up. “Utzp” and “Angor” climax in the proximities of Omar Souleyman’s sazman and Group Doueh, respectively. Analogies can go all night — how about Marc Ribot joins Man Man? Unlikely to top Christopher R. Weingarten’s “Lightning Bolt trapped inside Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” in Pitchfork, though.
29. Megan Moroney, Cloud 9
From “what doesn’t kill you calls you six months later” to “put your pretty head on my shoulder / See if over’s really over,” this whip-smart wrangler of the airtight three-minute song doesn’t always turn a cliché on its side, upside-down, or inside-out. But most of the time her aerodynamic deliverables sound like she did. Sometimes her husky drawl manages to catch each syllable around the hook so deftly that the cliché evolves on its own. But while her third set is about as musically assured as the first two, the first two didn’t make me think about clichés at all. Or make me want to chop the final four tracks.
28. Butthole Surfers, After the Astronaut
Five years after the great Beck jack “Pepper” ruled alt-airwaves apropos of n90sthing, this circus of a band let down everyone who still cared with the major-label compromise Weird Revolution, which shared more than half the tracks here as well as cowrites by Kid Rock and “Sweet Jane.” Thirty years after “Pepper” (and two months after S.G. Goodman covered it), they’ve reunited just to set that record straight with a bricolage of Cornershop trip-hop, White Zombie noise, and Gibby murmuring through a megaphone, evoking sound-rainbow winners from Karl Stephenson to No Age. Call it Bran Van 2026. All that’s missing is, well, “Pepper,” which would have made a poetic closing ceremony like “Good Vibrations” on Brian Wilson Presents Smile.
27. Olivia Rodrigo, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love
For someone really wearing her collegiate influences on her babydoll dress sleeves — album’s first 45 seconds are dead ringers for Rodrigo coverees the Magnetic Fields, Robert Smith gets two shout-outs in addition to one ill-fitting duet — the pastel chamber-synth production and on-the-one rhythms of her second breakup cycle in three records recall her homeschooled homegirl Taylor Swift more than anything else. This doesn’t make her most sodden and on-the-nose record bad; Swift hit a dependable baseline for years if not an irresistible one. So it’s to Ms. Rodrigo’s credit that Swift would never, ever write a song called “Maggots for Brains.” You’ll remember how the singles go (the pseudo-‘90s baby bends not “Lovesong” but “Disarm” and “Everlong” to her will on “The Cure”), but you’ll only sing along with “U + Me = <3” (“I know everybody changes / But I hope that we don’t”), the Chappell ruboff “Expectations” (“I won’t settle for a guy with a fake job”), and “Stupid Song,” OR3’s lone theater-kid classic. It’s a loaded question whether pop stars who double as young women owe us pleasure, but they certainly owe it to themselves. That’s why she’s been listening to CMAT. These days, we’ve got expectations.
26. B0YG1RL & Novagang, Exit 2B
I know better than to spin B0YG1RL’s other two 2026 albums that didn’t get Best New Music, even though it’s tempting. This type of quickstepping chaos screams lightning in a bottle: 24 minutes of woofer-rattling chants (don’t play “Rage & Rave” around annealed glass) and incompetently loud 8-bit synths and hyperdigitized takes on kompa and bouyon and other Caribbean dance musics I know less than nothing about. As trans Haitians double-targeted by the most pathetic presidency ever, the only appropriate stage-setter is dubbed “My People Will Destroy You.” When an English hook occasionally surfaces, it’s “I don’t give a fuck, baby.” The perfect soundtrack for your next Stonewall or fake hillbilly hunt.
25. Kim Gordon, Play Me
I finally came to terms with this being the captain of my favorite band’s solo sound, a disjunct blend of inorganic noise and borrowed hip-hop environments she feels compelled to sound off over but never sing. This music being beats, they’ve occasionally congealed into hooks, possibly even ones she designed, and there’s more of those on the first half of this than her other two Matador LPs combined. Then we arrived at “BYEBYE25!” an update of a two-year-old laundry list of free associations over a cool quasi-rage beat that now plays like Bob Guccione Jr.’s idea of hot-button bullet points: transgender, Hispanic, abortion, “men having sex with men.” Hearing it was a shock, the first thing this woman synonymous with a significant number of people’s idea of “cool” has done that’s inescapably “cringe.” Turns out it’s all words flagged by the radioactive administration putting Project 2025 into action. This is only a relief artistically. So strike the mean things I had to say about how the track included the term “privilege” but not “cultural appropriation.” Everything Trump touches turns to dysentery. Hopefully “Post Empire” proves prophetic, if not a party.
24. Pony, Clearly Cursed
Sam Bielanko and Matty Morand’s third half-hour of power- in twice as many years is the one that finally clicks as -pop: immediate, fizzy, bombastic, crafted, even a little disruptive on raucous highlight “Every Little Crumb.” Namely, hard to resist. Rocks harder than Letters to Cleo and Beebadoobee but not Charly Bliss or Bully. About as much as the live-action Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack.
23. Hemlocke Springs, The Apple Tree Under the Sea
Naomi Udu has toured with Chappell Roan, Doja Cat, and Ashnikko; that triangulates her theater-kid new wave as least as good as any description like “crushes Wednesday the show, not the band.” On her first true full-length, she hopscotches around an audio spectrum that veers from Dresden Dolls-cum-Disney villain songs to word-drunk disco you’ll want to follow with a lyric sheet. From the racial epithets uttered by a 73-year-old to his child bride/slave on “w-w-w-w-w” to “I paid a pretty penny to procure the pirates of Perai” on “head, shoulders, knees and ankles” (who gives a fuck about an oxford comma), no one else in pop is more eager to have her songs unpacked. “Milli Vanilli meets Scritti Politti” somehow isn’t queer enough.
22. Gogol Bordello, We Mean It, Man!
Their voracity for new sounds to subsume is second only to their momentous momentum — these lifers never get the chance to be exhausting when they only rattle off two fistfuls of anthems every 3-5 years. So the synths and circular New Order melodies mesh refreshingly with their natural wedding-band pulse and as always, they mean it, man: Bernard Sumner is Eugene Hütz’s most surprising duet partner yet. Even Hütz feels a little exhausted for once — by reality, who isn’t — figuring “we exist in a mystical realm and nobody knows how it works,” “‘cause in the end we are all only small-time mystics.” And in the latter, one of the most rousing new ones, he won’t even talk you out of suicide. But he knows it’s not the angels who deserve to die.
21. Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman, Miami Lice: Season Four [EP]
The Boy Sand and Aes Rock have never strengthened each other’s weaknesses more than on their fourth Lice collab and first in nine years. When Sand’s KRS-One-esque teacherisms veer too close to Paul Ryan (“Stop saying living’s hard / We all get dealt different cards”), Aesop injects necessary whimsy (“I’ll wash out any itsy bitsy spider who was once a gifted climber”). Each gets a solo showcase for the first time, with Aesop’s “Moving Day” a looser-limbed excursion than Sand’s “The 1,” another highlight where he makes being uptight sound dope (“The one who don’t swear like a minister / Who isn’t on Insta, think it’s too sinister”). Aesop the human Wikipedia rattles off boasts like “my keyboard only plays Earth tones” while Sand trash-talks the universe (“It’s nice to have some company / I was ahead of my time, glad you all caught up with me”). He also rhymes “emoji” with “born an OG.” And on the ultimate Rorschach test for their imaginations, what’s in “The Burgers”? Aes suggests “twisted limbs from triple murders” while Sand offers “history meets mystery meat,” and oh yeah, “junk mail from healthcare providers.” They’ve always got more. So bring on Lice Five: Interstellar Overdrive.
20. Girl Scout, Brink
Ordinary Swedish alt-rockers with a confident hit ratio peaking with 2024’s rapid-fire “I Just Needed You to Know” and its better-than-ordinary parent EP Headache finally unveil a debut album that plays more like a sophomore one. Strong but not stronger, ever so slightly more sophisticated in its structures, arrangements, and production, they pile on the reverb masquerading as heft and may not be able to nail it down with songs as good as “Same Kids,” “Uh-Huh,” or “Operator” forever. Local H couldn’t. But then they never tried to cop some of that sweet Alvvays money.
19. Itzy, Motto [EP]
Somehow, K-Pop is massaging the ADHD again after some years where the stuff that floated my way wasn’t much more interesting (re: denser) than Western pop, which imo is its job to be. You know “Glitch” will do the job, and “You and I” is even weirder with its degraded-mp3 Aesop Rock beat. Title song revives the slam of the boy-band boom only busier. After those come five “solo” tracks (you think they had a say?) with no loss of fizz, the best being Yeji’s velcro-Timbaland-salsa-huh “Pocket” but Lia’s arena ballad “Asylum” (immigration not psychosis) arrives just in time to let the ADHD breathe.
18. Black Nile, Indigo Garden
Grammy-nominated bassist and saxophonist who are also brothers claim Los Angeles enough to namedrop Nipsey Hussle in the press release, yet their shading and threading around this winding music they own feels secondary to the varying colors of keys and especially the drums, which explode into quasi-d’n’b or hang back as needed. Aaron Shaw’s blowing comes to the front around “Day Break” before a two-note tease glides into some authoritative, Eastern-mode soloing on centerpiece “City of Silent Angels.” But that doesn’t give the drums a break. Not at all. “Slauson Fog” makes that clear.
17. The Paranoid Style, Known Associates
Invokeés include Sonic Youth, Talk Talk, the Strokes, LCD Soundsystem, Linda Ronstadt and Pavement by way of allusion, Roy Buchanan, Danny Gatton, The Exorcist, Guys and Dolls, Jean-Luc Godard, Marcel Cerdan, Edith Piaf, Marlon Brando played by Chris Elliott, Hector & Achilles, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Rodgers & Hart, Lieber & Stoller, Leopold & Loeb, Cain & Abel for that matter, John Henry, King Midas, and “a U.S. Open of klonopin in hell.” Not all the associations are known and in seven of the first eight songs they function as calls to the titles’ response. It’s to Elizabeth Nelson’s eternal credit that her never-not-clever turns of phrase make great patter between refrains/mantras/what-have-you. And the Clarence-inspired squawks of Mountain Goats saxman Matt Douglas for providing a musical throughline on her most oblique offering since Underworld U.S.A. almost a decade ago. Major exception: “There’s people who should know better being led around like cattle.”
16. The Cucumbers, As You Heard Me: Songs From the Novella “Hello George”
“My Boyfriend” was the claim to fame of a short career for the Jersey couple of Deena Shoshkes and Jon Fried that transitioned into an occasional outlet after the ‘80s and returned with surprising potency after COVID, even though Shoshkes never stopped writing tunes. They gathered up a handful of gems for 2023’s Old Shoes, which found their son Jamie Fried on drums. And this year’s As You Heard Me: Songs From “Hello George” is even better. “Hello George” is a short story that the elder Fried, now a novelist, was inspired to pen based on Shoskes’ demos, about a character he named Daisy Steinberg, a thinly veiled analogue for his wife and bandmate. As You Heard Me has the same charming-ditties feel of the Cucumbers’ best ‘80s work with a little more roots in its DIY, which is probably why Steinberg is writing country hits in the story.
15. ILLIT, Mamihlapinatapai [EP]
NewJeans’ scabs/understudies are unquestionably victims of the same oppressive K-Pop-industrial complex that will unleash scores of tell-all docuseries in hopefully less than a decade. But they’re also not biting their predecessors anymore than NewJeans were biting PinkPantheress or Ariana Grande. This 13-minute tour de force starts NewJeans and quickly turns “Gnarly,” hyperpop, Carly Rae Jepsen, and “Dear Prudence” in that order, respectively. All of them impress, especially the latter. Maybe Hybe could replace the Beatles while they’re cleaning house.
14. Roc Marciano, 656
The man who invented sleep-rap; I prefer him self-produced and this is his most homemade-sounding record yet, full of twice-baked soul and rhyming “Spanish fly” with “Canada Dry” and postmodern Illmatic-isms like “not even death can make me acquiesce” and Del the Funky Homosapieisms like “haberdashery.” The lane of threatening-yet-playful has been wide open for 30 years now since Reasonable Doubt but that doesn’t mean the likes of “rappers looking like maggot dinner on Fear Factor” or “they gon’ have to ask for skin grafting, I been nasty” have surfaced before. In fact — pinched nasal wisp aside — this batch of sample chop-suey and half-narrative might be your best bet to reassess imperial Ghostface’s stream of consciousness. To wit: “I beg your pardon / Neiman Marcus darling / Floor seats at the Garden like Olive Garden / Your garbage made Tracey Morgan vomit.”
13. The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, Deface the Currency
Their aesthetic isn’t a mess to me. Fugazi’s rhythmic backbone plays straight and blunt rock with Anthony Pirog on guitar while Lewis wails on sax in these parameters that are rare enough to equal a sound. Their eponymous 2024 debut had hooky moments even compared to Fugazi, and this one establishes real footholds, hitting harder and aiming higher. It all leads up to “Clutch,” one of 2026’s most exciting musical moments before it even crunches to a climax, and the most epic performance of Joe Lally and Brendan Canty’s careers with just four chords.
12. Effie, pullup to busan 4 morE hypEr summEr it’s gonna bE a fucking moviE [EP]
Other than the epileptic capitalization, this 11-minute sachet of Pop Rocks scans even less like “hyperpop” to me than, you know, pop. Though if the genre (finally) keeps up with the brisk pace of Ninajirachi’s Art Angels variation and Effie’s trap-flavored derivative, it could well be the new Hi-NRG. Yung Lean is (thankfully) to her what Kodak Black is to Cardi B, a signifier for her Pitchfork decimals and little impact on her vastly superior tunes. And her most K-Pop move goes out to NewJeans: “LET’S FIND A GOOD MANAGER.”
11. Tierra Whack, Whack’s Museum
The opening lines are “they said I should rap more / What more could I ask for” and I’m so glad we’re on the same page. At 30, she sticks with it like Fun Dip, stands out like hard nips, and puts her prints on you like she’s got purple on. She pushed the envelope so her reputation is stamped, and she gets deeper than ants. She’s so sick she really thinks you should mask up. Playing both sides? Isoceles. All the shit you talk? She’s surprised you don’t eat ass. Beats evoke the detuned boom-bap psych of Griselda and Mach-Hommy with a bit of Chance’s watery Chi-Town gospel; rapping calls to mind both the rock-solid Rapsody and the forever scatterbrained Lil Wayne as well as the triple-time Das EFX. And she makes clear that in the wake of Doechii’s runaway success she wants her money and flowers.
10. Joyce Manor, I Used to Go to This Bar
An emo-identified band I didn’t get at all in the 2010s other than respecting their impressive concision; friendly but hookless albums still felt normal-length, that’s rough. But once they started crafting their sub-20-minute LPs for four years at a time with 2022’s 40 Oz. to Fresno and now this inauspiciously titled delight with even faster tempos, they were hookless no more. “After All You Put Me Through” has even spent time in the weight room with Michael Jackson’s “Black or White,” and a harmonica breaks open the joy fighting to be released from “Well, Don’t It Seem Like You’ve Been Here Before.” But we have to talk about those awful titles, an area where they need to work on impressive concision. They’ll only ever truly escape emo when they figure out lyrics. Brevity is the soul of the what?
9. Robyn, Sexistential
To temper my own first-listen enthusiasm, let’s ascertain this is not Body Talk. This is the under-half-hour pop album it feels like she can make in her sleep, even though she hasn’t done so in the last 15 years. Consistently tuneful and pleasure-button-y more than Great Songwriting like “Call Your Girlfriend.” The hyperpop-juiced production — bending bass synth on “Blow My Mind,” scrambled guitar solo on “Really Real,” various laser-tag vwoops and vwurps — you’ve been waiting for, the somewhat stingy quotient of quotables mostly limited to the title banger not. And the horny single-mom conceit has been hers for the taking. Still might be one of the year’s best — or a slight, necessary “Dopamine” hit, sex can be hard to tell. Best coup: rewriting 2002’s sexistential “Blow My Mind” about her son and his “scrumptious little face.”
8. Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon, As of Now
Sonically, Charlotte’s finest (since, gulp, DaBaby) bears all the marks that made me fall in love with Billy Woods and Ghostface Killah. That is, fully realized sample-scapes of many musical tones, led by the one constant: Ogbon’s original-enough jabber, which sounds more like the voice actor in a headlining rapper’s series of skits, or a neighbor prone to arguing with the pigs. His rapid-fire comic rasp is a feast of forebears from the young Chance of Acid Rap to Wiki to Devin the Dude, and following word by word can be work but also a treat: “My bitch just got a BBL, the label paid for it / N****s broke but want a feature, better save for it,” “little sister beat your ass like Hovi and Solange.” The wide assortment of excellent beats vary from the best Navy Blue since Song of Sage to Noname bossa nova to the skittering synth oddity “I’m Getting Too Famous,” which Danny Brown would’ve been all over. His idea of realism is “in my spot we take Cashapp and EBT,” his idea of a pickup line is “Cardi B lookalike contest, come try out.” Well, now Jah-Monte’s the headlining rapper and he hires actors (well, actresses) for skits of his own. Not getting too famous, but it’s a relief he’s concerned.
7. Emperor X, Unified Field
Chad Matheny’s prettiest album is his least subtle. He’d never put something as fat-baiting as flawed masterstroke “Renee Nicole Nicole Renee” on a real album but “Praise Jesus! Hail Reagan!” sums up the spittle he’s wiping off his chin after spending considerable time in wartime Ukraine up close, as does “fuck your reticence to fight / that’s fucking impolite.” After the metaphysical and ecological disturbances of The Lakes of Zones B and C failed to catch on and left him “Feeling Nothing,” not to mention “Pissing With the Flashlight On,” here the doomsayer mode won’t make that mistake twice. “My wife and I bought a Cybertruck / That’s a lie ‘cause we’re not rich enough / So instead we paid our power bills / And the lawyer for our living will” is as abstract as he’s willing to get, even going as far as explaining his own Marianne Faithfull reference and “citing three recent examples” on possibly the best moment of an Emperor X record ever. The unfussy acoustic palette’s ‘cause no time to program machines and they’ll just grow sentient and turn on us anyway. Cue the massed choir from “hold my hand as we vaporize.”
6. Boards of Canada, Inferno
After my disappointed review, I never stopped playing it, until it became my most-listened-to 2026 album by far, at least thrice as much as any others. At very least, I’m still proactively figuring it out. But Backrooms licensed it for a reason: the brothers Sandison’s biggest hit is a harshly lit, deceptively dull labyrinth of unsettling corridors and nothing as nightmarish around the corner as whatever your anxieties conjured up. Does that make it, um…comfort music? Let’s never find out.
5. Carsie Blanton & The Burning Hell, Everything Is Great
Many are put off by the presupposition of novelty; not me. But my initial feeling was to worry about how the Sesame Street/Avenue Q muppets in the videos/voices in the mix would affect replayability. So far, so good. Instructional children’s music about how “nobody wants to talk about what you should do if your government is starting World War III” or how “my bank is a system that borrows money from me, interest free, to invest in an oil company” strikes a novel tone for both mocking Chuck Schumer and getting the right (or left) laughs. Children’s music is also extraordinarily catchy, which is important for putting across a jaw-dropping stanza like “private equity / is buying my dad’s nursing home / cutting the wages of the woman on staff / who’s wiping my father’s ass / she’s from El Salvador / where we backed a coup and a civil war / to keep them from doing land reform / and who do you think all that was for?” Then there’s the rhetoric, which correctly talks guillotines and “turning the one into the zero percent” unlike most folk (or, ha, punk) that gestures at revolution — this is where we’re at, kids. Having been arrested on a flotilla to aid Gaza herself, she’s understandably tired of waiting for us to get off social media and join in. And the male-sung closing ballad from the POV of a “weary arms dealer” (“I sold drones and anti-drone guns / it was buy one, get one free / I sold warheads to assorted warlords / sold more to their enemies”) shows Blanton isn’t the only star of the show even if she’s the biggest. Democracy!
4. Twisted Teens, Blame the Clown
Believe it or not, throaty baritone twang-garage doesn’t always share, say, Parquet Courts’ sense of propulsion. Definitely doesn’t always have the songs. This Beefheart-voiced duo has both, without sounding too twisted or at all teenaged. Blaming the clown is a necessity, of course, though I don’t hear much of that either unless “Hurricane” is a FEMA indictment. What I hear are those blown-out string bends, and the strums interwoven with accordion drone on “White Hot Coal.” Most-universal-in-show: “100 Bill Is Gone!”
3. Jill Scott, To Whom This May Concern
I admit I was afraid AI authored “Beautiful People” (“Our love is the art of war / Conquering all algorithms”) because organic overreach is so quaint. So indulge in the quaint: a 53-year-old who spent the last decade acting leads this hour of things she’s gathered up to say since then with “Be Great” of course and no known awareness of girlboss memes. So bless her for persevering for the intelligent freaks of Norf Philly when “I could give you my all but is it ever enough.” Bless her for “Pay U on Tuesday” undoubtedly being the least fashionable (R&)B song that will see release in 2026. Bless her for addressing that on the very next track: “I wasn’t the aesthetic / I guess, I guess I get it.” I do wish she had more to add in re: pimps or the tabla from “What Happened to That Boy.” But no one has come along in a decade to match her organic overreach for sex.
2. Feeble Little Horse, Bitknot
Lydia Slocum has her lyrical charms even if she’s “too shy for New York,” but her band’s all about the sonics in a way few still are, save for Water From Your Eyes, should they count as a band. So even though their best album’s 25 minutes leave room to tack on last year’s dynamic rollercoaster “This Is Real,” it’s got the pennywhistle-acting recorder on “Poison,” the Girls Against Boys hypno-screech on “DMT,” the g-funk-cum-”Jackals, False Grails” synth on “Dior,” better-than-the-real-thing Bladee imitation on “Upside Down,” weirdo waltz “Paris,” fiberglass fuzzbombs aplenty, and two of their prettiest-ever songs in “Rewind” and “Cradle.” And if such a thing can be said, it’s all so neat and lined up it brings Deerhunter’s Monomania to mind minus the spacier coda. Right, Monomania wasn’t so neat either. And sometimes all the lyrical charm you need is a credo: “This is our club because we’re us and no one else is.”
1. Kehlani, Kehlani
From Cloud 19 to SweetSexySavage to While We Wait to It Was Good Until It Wasn’t, the era’s most dependable R&B recordmaker has been neither much of an innovator nor that big of a star. Didn’t expect “Folded” to change that, but who expected “Folded” in the first place? Now it sits comfortably near the front of their best album ever, an event by association with no guest newer than their most successful partner-in-song Cardi B: Usher, Clipse, Missy, Weezy, Brandy, still-spicy jester Big Sean, and don’t miss the T-Pain/Lil Jon snapper that’ll really make you miss 2007. All of them sound lovely, and all of them juice a reliable melodist and increasingly ambitious singer with just enough personality and hip-hop soul to push this wondrous album above merely what a great block of “urban” radio may have sounded like circa 2011. And then Kehlani Ashley Parrish tops them with “Unlearn” all by themself.