Jungle/drum'n'bass was my favorite style of electronic music back in that initial American mainstream embrace of electronic music in the late '90s and early 2000s. And while I dug albums by Plug and Squarepusher and Roni Size, it really excited me to see artists from other genres incorporate those jagged, jittery d'n'b rhythms into vocal-driven songs, the things that Bjork and Nine Inch Nails and Soul Coughing and the Roots and Outkast and David Bowie did with jungle beats was so cool to me. And incorporating drum'n'bass production into melodic songwriting has had a nice resurgence in recent years with British women like PinkPantheress and Kenya Grace and Nia Archives, whose aptly titled new album Emotional Junglist goes all in on introspective songs over slamming jungle breaks. "There Goes Ma Head" and "Get Me Down" are so good and so exactly what I hoped for when I saw the album's title. Here's my 2026 albums Spotify playlist that I'm constantly updating with new releases. 

The cover of Music, Fashion, Film flexes Charli XCX's taste and clout with a cover photo featuring three legendary old white dudes from each of the three titular mediums: John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese (David Cronenberg is also the album's only feature, with a spoken cameo on the closing track). If that seems vaguely self-important, though, the lyric that the album title is taken from, on the single "SS26," instead evokes a fragile feeling a lot of us get these days, looking at bleak headlines about world politics or climate change when you've devoted a lot of your life to art and creativity, and the things that usually matter to you about can feel so useless and trivial: "We're walking on a runway that goes straight to hell/ Nothing's gonna save us, not music, fashion, or film." So far I like Music, Fashion, Film's four advance singles more than any other songs (although "Persona" is growing on me). But I like those four songs more than the whole of Charli's celebrated 2024 album Brat, which I liked but maybe never quite loved. As I suspected, the lead single "Rock Music" wasn't really a sincere indication of the musical direction of the album, but I like the way she incorporated more guitars into the glitchy hyperpop aesthetic, and her husband, a member of a chart-topping rock band, didn't even have anything to do with the album. 

The New York trio Parts & Labor had a killer run of records from 2006 to 2011, making massively loud, catchy noise rock anthems on three albums with Christopher Weingarten on drums and then two with Joe Wong on drums. Each member of the band has done lots of cool stuff outside the band, particularly those drummers -- Wong scored TV shows and interviewed drummers on his podcast The Trap Set, and Weingarten is a prolific and accomplished music critic that I can call a friend and peer (he's also one of my most argumentative peers, but a genuinely sweet and talented guy). So I was pretty elated by the news this year that Parts & Labor was coming back this year, this time as a quartet with Weingarten and Wong bringing double drummer chaos for the first time. The 79-minute Set of All Sets is appropriately by far the band's longest album, and very maximalist at times, but they use that larger canvas in part to alternate more peaks and valleys, patiently building up to the big crescendos to great effect. On early listens my favorite tracks are "Haunted Limbs" and "Better Run."

I don't mind being ahead of the curve, I was telling people that Brian Ennals was dope 16 or 17 years ago, and a growing number of people all over the place know how good he is now. After breaking through on his albums with Infinity Knives, Ennals is now branching out and working with other people, including NY indie rap veteran Blockhead on Boatshoes. And his dark sense of humor just gets sharper with every release, the way he can rap about addiction and parenthood and far left politics while throwing in clever internal rhymes and pop culture punchlines is really compelling. Blockhead's a good foil for him, too, I particularly like the jazz sample stuff like "Bareback." 

Future has the kind of longevity that's both an asset and a liability in rap. It's incredible how long he's been operating near his peak musically, really most of his 16-year career. But with that kind of Rolling Stones-like consistency, people might think they've already heard everything there is to hear from Future, which is fair to some extent, because he never reinvents himself, but his ability to keep writing great Future songs is impressive. There are some fun experiments on The Real Me like "Hollywood" and Alice" but they're closer to novelties than innovations -- appropriately, if you map his career over the Stones', he's roughly in the year of "Emotional Rescue," not "Miss You." The Real Me is solid, though, some of my favorites so far are "Trench Coat," the Glen Campbell string loop on "Weight Up," and Future bringing back the hilarious flow from 2018's "King's Dead" on "2018."

Madonna is someone else whose only competition at this point is her own back catalog. I always cast a suspicious eye at artists making a sequel to one of their more beloved albums, but I guess she had to give you part 2 of her Confessions, and in a way this album feels much more personal and autobiographical than the original Confessions on a Dancefloor, all the songs that touch on her club kid past and articulate how she views her career and dance music itself. I wish "Danceteria" didn't sound like the "American Idol" theme song, though, that's the song everybody likes that I don't think really works, I prefer "Bizarre" and "My Sins Are My Savior." It's hilarious that Madonna does so much speak-singing on this album and finally dropped the British accent to the point that people don't recognize her speaking voice anymore, but she still kind of sings Britishly. 

Willow Smith produced and played almost everything on the album she released in February, Petal Black Rock, which really impressed me. The Thread is a bit more like her other recent albums, with Chris Greatti co-producing and playing a lot of the instruments. But I still think she's really just growing musically in some remarkable ways, making these twitchy, intricate jazz fusion songs like "Tall Baby," which is in the time signature I am famously obsessed with, 5/4. The Thread's songs are also a bit more fleshed out and expansive, it has two fewer tracks than Petal Black Rock but is ten minutes longer. 

The Strokes made two great albums with a particular sound, and it was certainly a derivative sound with influences that were easy to spot. But in the ways that matter, it was their sound, they owned it and knew what to do with it. There's nothing wrong with a perfecting an aesthetic and then moving on, but it's good to know where you're going next, but it was clear from their 3rd album's lead single "Juicebox" that were just taking that leap without knowing where they'd land, and they're still flailing and falling 20 years later. Julian Casablancas's affection for AutoTune has attracted the most criticism on Reality Awaits, but the other four guys deserve plenty of the blame for these inert first draft arrangements and lifeless performances that no longer the sound like the work of alluringly aloof cool kids. "Going to Babble On" and "Going Shopping" are decent but wouldn't be highlights on a good record. I think people have overcorrected a little on dismissing Rick Rubin's work as a producer because he's absolutely helped some artists make their best albums when he clicks with them, but he doesn't have that chemistry with the Strokes.