Monthly Report: April 2026 Albums
1. Jai'len Josey - Serial Romantic
Between this album and the recent Leven Kali record, Def Jam is putting out some quality R&B from people who aren't household names or even getting any radio play yet. Atlanta's Jai'Len Josey co-wrote Ari Lennox's hit "Pressure" and has some of her own stuff in the same wheelhouse, but I feel like she's got her own distinctive way of emoting and stacking harmonies, great voice. And I don't think there's a single track on here that I don't like, but the album really hits its highest peaks on the second half with the breakbeat house of "Serial Romantic" and the piano ballad "I Believe (Selfish)." Here's the 2026 albums Spotify playlist that I constantly fill with new releases.
2. Friko - Something Worth Waiting For
I heard the Something Worth Waiting For single "Seven Degrees" on WTMD a few weeks back and immediately had to look up this Chicago band and and see that their album was about to come out. Niko Kapetan's singing is mannered and dramatic (I was a little surprised to see that they're American and not British or something), but it adds a little welcome oomph to their ragged guitar-driven jams. It's always exciting to hear a band so fully figure out what they're doing with total confidence and purpose on their second album, my favorite songs so far are "Still Around" and "Alice."
3. They Might Be Giants - The World Is to Dig
TMBG's debut will turn 40 later this year, and I'm really impressed by the sheer volume of songs they've written over the years. The majority of them are 2 minutes long and have absurd or comedic premises, but there's an incredibly high level of craft and consistency. On some of the later albums, John Flansburgh's more broadly goofy lyrics tend to dominate, but The World Is to Dig is a pretty John Linnell-heavy album. And he's in great form, there's a lot of unspecified menace and dread drifting just out of frame in "Character Flaw," "What the Cat Dragged In," and "Je n'en ai pas."
4. Julia Cumming - Julia
The promotional literature for the debut solo album by Sunflower Bean frontwoman Julia Cumming boasts of "echoes of Burt Bacharach and Dionne Warwick," so I expected some swinging '60s retro aesthetics. But both the language and the production are fairly contemporary -- two of the best songs are named "Fucking Closure" and "Emotional Labor." Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's really the architecture of the songs, the way Cumming sings long, articulate sentences with poise over rhythmically intricate jazz pop, that justifies that lofty Brill Building comparison.
5. Ella Langley - Dandelions
Ella Langley was my favorite breakout country star of 2024, but I was still a little thrown by how quickly "Choosin' Texas," currently in its 9th week at #1 on the Hot 100, took off in ways that no solo song by a female country singer has in arguably decades (Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" and Jeannie C. Riley's "Harper Valley PTA," are the closest points comparisons, both from long before Langley was born). Miranda Lambert, who knows a thing or two about creating good, cohesive mainstream country albums, co-wrote "Choosin' Texas," which led to her executive producing Dandelions and appearing as the album's only featured guest on "Butterfly Season" (a Morgan Wallen duet was tacked onto the album 2 weeks after the initial release, but I'm going to ignore that and keep listening to the original release). And Dandelions feels like a step forward from Langley's debut creatively as well as commercially, and "Low Lights" and "Loving Life Again" in particular are great displays of the subtly expressive power of her voice. And I like that the album's one cover feels like a nod to the historical lineage she's now a part of: "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" by Kitty Wells, which was the first country #1 for a solo woman on Billboard way back in 1952.
6. Jackson Dean - Magnolia Sage
On Saturday, Jackson Dean will headline a music festival at the Maryland high school he graduated from in 2019, which is just 20 minutes from where he lives. I interviewed Jackson a few years ago and am friendly with one of the guys in his band, and I'm happy to see his continued success with his third Big Machine album. He's one of those singers who had this cool raspy tone even as a teenager and he's just getting more and more in command of his instrument with time, I think "5th of July" and "Make a Liar" are some of his best vocal performances to date.
7. Bruce McCulloch - Dark Purple Slice
Shame-Based Man, the album that Bruce McCulloch released in 1995 at the end of the original TV run of "The Kids in the Hall," is one of my favorite comedy albums of all time, I really think it's a masterpiece. So I was delighted to see a few days ago that Brucio just released a new album -- I thought it was his second but it's actually his third, I need to go find 2002's Drunk Baby Project, which isn't on streaming services. Dark Purple Slice isn't as consistently hilarious and strange as Shame-Based Man, but I'm still so hyped that it exists, this guy has such a huge influence on my sense of humor, my favorite tracks so far are "Sad Mall," "Songs That Didn't Make The Record," and "Sobriety."
8. Noah Kahan - The Great Divide
The Great Divide outpaced J. Cole's album for the biggest first week of 2026, at least for the time being until that record gets officially broken by Drake in a few days. And that's not a surprise per se given that Kahan's last album, 2022's Stick Season, is four times platinum, but it's still kind of fun and unlikely that a folky singer-songwriter from Vermont is in the big leagues with the superstar rappers. The album is 77 minutes long, and a week later he released a deluxe version that's 96 minutes long, so it's really a lot for someone like me who never had very strong feelings about Kahan before The Great Divide's excellent title track. But he's really growing on me, there's a darkness and lacerating wit in songs like "Haircut" and "Dashboard" that I didn't expect.
9. Kehlani - Kehlani
"Folded" became the biggest song of Kehlani's career pretty quickly, so I was skeptical about her releasing an album more than 10 months later, like maybe she wasn't capitalizing on the song's momentum. But I was wrong, because "Folded" is still top 3 on both R&B radio and pop radio right now, and she's made an album that strikes the same delicate balance of evoking '90s and early 2000s R&B without leaning on samples and interpolations to do that most of the time like hacks like Tory Lanez. There are a lot of guests, many of them from that era, but they're mostly used to great effect, I particularly like the songs with Missy and Usher.
10. Nine Inch Nails & Boys Noize - Nine Inch Noize
My brother had a couple tickets to Nine Inch Nails in Wisconsin a few months ago and offered one to me, but it fell on one of the busiest weeks of the year for the company I work for, so I had to pass. Ultimately I wound up not even working the day of the concert, so maybe I could've made a flight out, I dunno, that was a bummer. But one of the things that people loved about the Peel It Back Tour was the B-stage where Trent Reznor and the tour's opening act, German producer Alex "Boys Noize" Ridha, would do live remixes of NIN songs, and now there's an album of those remixes (that I guess was recorded on the tour, because you can occasionally hear crowd noise). I particularly like the version of "Heresy" on here and that they resurrected one of the songs from Reznor's underrated How To Destroy Angels project.
The Worst Album of the Month: Zayn - Konnakol
I never really cared whether One Direction would reunite, but I at least kinda hoped that the other guys would be united on some level by the tragedy of Liam Payne's death, and was encouraged by the news that Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson were making a road trip docuseries for Netflix. And then production shut down amidst reports that Zayn punched Louis, and there were earlier allegations of violence in his relationship with Gigi Hadid, so I think this guy might just be a piece of shit, I'm kind of glad that his U.S. tour was canceled. Konnokol features the most Zayn collaborations with Frank Ocean producer James "Malay" Ho since his debut, but I never really liked the 'alt R&B' vibe of Mind of Mine, I think Nobody is Listening might quietly be Zayn's best solo album.
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