Chicago's Ratboys have been releasing albums for over a decade but I didn't really know anything about them until hearing the Singin' To An Empty Chair single "Anything" on WTMD a few times piqued my interest, and I absolutely love this record and need to go back and hear their earlier albums now. I particularly like how the first three tracks kind of gradually ramp up in tempo and intensity to reach "Anything" on the fourth track, it's a really thoughtfully sequenced album with a strong emotional throughline, which becomes even more apparent in Tom Breihan's track-by-track Stereogum interview with frontwoman Julia Steiner. Marcus Nuccio is a great drummer, really elevates these songs with creative fills and always driving the tempo forward even on the slower, gentler songs. And I actually like the country-ish Ratboys songs more, which is not at all the case with a lot of the new school country-adjacent indie buzz bands. Here's the 2026 albums Spotify playlist I fill with new releases throughout the year. 

In 2023, I interviewed Department, aka Adam Kyriakou of Melbourne, about his sample collage project Dumb Angel, and even then it sounded like he was planning on revising what he'd done next rather than crafting a follow-up. And now he's back with basically a longer, fleshed out version of that record, Audacity Files, as his debut album, and he's getting more press and has thousands of plays on Spotify, I'm happy to see his career thriving. I'm still getting into the new version and catching things that weren't in the earlier release, but it has the same basic appeal, this very melodic, emotional approach to mashups with lots of '60s wall of sound pop, indie rock, and bits of modern pop and R&B and hip hop all rising and crashing in these almost operatic movements. 

J. Cole ended 2018's KOD with the "intro to The Fall Off" and spent the next 8 years fitfully teasing it as his farewell album with a multitude of stopgap projects and other stalling tactics, seemingly trying to set it up his closing argument for being the best rapper of his generation. Now it's finally here and it's a double album, and I think nearly a decade of throat-clearing really backfired and it didn't feel like a grand career sendoff like The Black Album (which also felt like a fake retirement even at the time, but I'm always skeptical about rap retirements). I think it's really good, probably in his top 3 best projects. The first disc in particular has some great production, some slightly more novel flows and perspectives, while the second disc falls into the usual J. Cole doldrums of navel-gazing about the music industry ("What If" in particular is some ridiculous '90s rap fan fiction) and gratuitous samples and interpolations from the classic rap albums he's emulating. Between Bad Bunny, Ratboys, and J. Cole, empty chairs on album covers are so hot right now. 

A soundtrack can be a great opportunity for an artist to make a record that exists as its own thing and not "their new direction" or the official follow-up to their last record, and Charli XCX did that really beautifully here. I never thought Brat was her absolute best work, and in some ways this brings back a little more of the melody and drama of her 2010s stuff. There's still a dance pop pulse on some of the tracks, but it's often buried under orchestral strings. It's one thing to regularly namedrop the Velvet Underground as an influence, but to open an album with a slow, ominous John Cale collaboration at the height of your fame is pretty badass. 

Elizabeth Nelson's dense, dark, dryly funny lyrics are justifiably usually the focal point when people talk about The Paranoid Style's records. But more than their previous records, I'm drawn back to Known Associates for the tunes and the textures as well, the jaunty organ lines and the lush horn arrangements and the anxious lead guitar lines and the backing vocals that underline the catchier melodies

I have been following and appreciating the output of Out Of Your Head Records since the label's inception, and the new album from Chicago-based cellist Tomeka Reid seems to be easily their most praised and talked about release to date, and with good reason. I feel like you don't often see a cello and an upright bass together in a small jazz ensemble very often, and it's really fun to hear Reid and bassist Jason Roebke coexist in a counterintuitive way that feels really natural. Guitarist Mary Halvorson kind of gets the higher frequencies to herself, but leaves a lot of space for the cello and bass to dominate and duel. 

Rarely do young musicians with famous parents actually act like they have the financial freedom and public platform to make whatever weird music they want, but Willow Smith really just fearlessly darts around and gets more interesting to me with almost every release. The intricate, jazzy arrangements on 2024's Empathogen really blew me away, I thought that was a huge step forward for her creatively. With a surprise release and a 26-minute running time, Petal Black Rock feels like an intentionally low key continuation of that sound, but she seems to be flexing her musicianship a lot more. Willow played guitar on a few songs on Empathogen while Chris Greatti and guest musicians played the majority of the instrumentation, but she produced and played just about everything (guitar, drums, bass, keyboards) on Petal Black Rock outside of the three tracks that feature, respectively, Jon Batiste, Kamasi Washington, and Merril Garbus of Tune-Yards, and she's got some pretty serious chops and cool ideas. 

I love when someone arranges songs for a completely different instrument and sound than how they were originally recorded, particularly something like this, with Georgia guitarist and Bill Orcutt collaborator Shane Parish doing fingerstyle acoustic solo guitar versions of ten tracks by "intelligent dance music" poster boys Autechre. Obviously Parish picked some of Autechre's more melodic work for this collection, but it's still kind of fascinating how faithful he was able to be to their tracks, and how this made me kind of rethink Autechre's whole rep as really out there experimental dudes, I think the weird song titles might've done a lot of heavy lifting there. 

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