Monthly Report: January 2026 Albums
1. Zach Bryan - With Heaven On Top
Zach Bryan took a break from cranking out an album a year in 2025, sort of -- he released a bunch of non-album singles last year, announcing With Heaven On Top as an EP and then upgrading it to a typically bloated 78-minute album at the top of 2026. This guy is really good at what he does, and he keeps marking these unlikely career milestones -- a multiplatinum album, a #1 single, record-breaking concert attendance -- without changing much about the earthy, intimate music he's been making since he was a cult indie artist. Little controversies and feuds keep piling up that make me wonder if he could crash and burn at one point, but he's still here for now, simply shrugging at "all of this fame and other corny shit" on "Appetite." Bryan teasing a song on Instagram in October that was critical of ICE prompted a whole news cycle with several responses from government officials, but now that "Bad News" is actually out it feels a lot less pointed Bryan collaborator and influence Bruce Springsteen's recent protest song "Streets of Minneapolis." Bryan released an acoustic of With Heaven On Top three days after the proper album to preempt complaints that it's "overproduced," but it's got the same unvarnished grit as all his other stuff, and I like the addition of horns and strings on some songs. Here's the 2026 albums Spotify playlist that I fill with new releases that I listen to throughout the year.
2. Nomad War Machine & Susan Alcorn - Contra Madre
Baltimore pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn passed away almost exactly one year ago -- the anniversary was on Saturday, and a day before that, her collaboration with the Philadelphia metal duo Nomad War Machine was released. When I interviewed Susan in 2023, we talked about several projects she'd recorded that hadn't been released yet, and this was the one that took the longest to finally see the light of day, and I was so excited to hear from my old City Paper mentor Lee Gardner a few months ago that his label VG+ Records would be releasing Contra Madre. It's a blast to hear Alcorn play in such a different context, "Face of Unknown Stars" is probably my favorite track but "Those Who Do Not Dance" and "Boing Vortex" are the ones where they really get wild and loud and show the full potential of this collaboration.
3. Peaer - Doppelganger
The Brooklyn-based band Peaer has been described as both slowcore and math rock, which sound almost like contradictory categories given that a lot of math rock is pretty intense and uptempo. But I've found that I really like the way that Peaer negotiates these tricky, unpredictable time signatures and meter changes at slower, more deliberate tempos on their 4th album, it allows me to savor the ingenuity of their arrangements. I particularly like the mid-album stretch of "No More Today" and "Rose in My Teeth."
4. Courtney Marie Andrews - Valentine
Arizona-born singer-songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews started her career as an auxiliary keyboardist/backing vocalist for Jimmy Eat World circa 2010, and has since carved out a pretty successful niche as a solo artist, even getting a Grammy nomination in the Americana category in 2020. Valentine is her 9th album, but the first one I've heard, and I like it a lot, great distinctive guitar tones and vocal melodies on the side 2 highlights "Only the Best for Baby" and "Best Friend."
5. Roc Marciano - 656
Hip hop careers are so often built on being around the right people at the right time, so I'm especially impressed by people who left a crew before their peak and created remarkable catalogs as free agents -- like Curren$y, who left Young Money before it became a star factory, and Roc Marciano, who left Flipmode Squad before they even released an album. Roc Marciano is a huge influence on the current wave of guys writing crime raps over drumless loops that define "underground rap" in the 2020s (mind you these guys are all pretty famous, underground just means they're not on the radio). But I think he still does it better than most of his disciples, his internal rhyme schemes are so tightly constructed and his punchlines can be so surprising and funny, and "Tracey Morgan Vomit" is my favorite kind of beat in that style, there's so many different textures but you still get a sense of a lot of empty space for the vocal to fill.
6. Ari Lennox - Vacancy
It really seemed like Ari Lennox's career was going in the right direction when she released 2022's Age/Sex/Location, her second album with J. Cole's Interscope-distributed Dreamville label. But then she had a very public falling out with the label, and parted ways and released her third album directly through Interscope. And this is a good, confident album full of unapologetically horny slow jams like "Pretzel" and "Deep Strokes." She's gotten a lot of criticism for the kind of thirsty, catchphrase-driven singles she's made like "Soft Girl Era," it probably would've been better to leave that off the album, but it sounds fine in the context of Vacancy.
7. The Soft Pink Truth - Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever?
Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt have created such a unique and ambitious catalog as Matmos that it's really impressive that Daniel has created a whole other very engrossing discography as The Soft Pink Truth that feels like its own little universe. Many of his albums zero in on a particular sound or genre -- dance or industrial or metal or punk -- while somehow all feeling like a connected tapestry of Daniel's various interests and convictions, and the classical instrumentation of Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? feels like a new frontier of conventional beauty in The Soft Pink Truth's catalog, with all these tickling, surprising textures embedded in the lush arrangements. And like many recent Soft Pink Truth records, it features piano by my friend and occasional Western Blot collaborator Koye Berry, big ups.
8. Galecstasy & Mike Watt Trio - Wattzotica
Mike Watt is such an inspiration, it means a lot to me that he's still making records and finding new people to play with and new ways to challenge himself. And his latest record, a collaboration with the L.A. experimental duo Galecstasy, is probably the closest thing he's done to a straight-up jazz record, a way for him to work out some of the things he's gotten from the Coltrane records he often puts on the PA before shows. Galecstasy's Jared Marshall aka Primary Mystical Experience can really swing as a drummer and makes a good rhythm section sparring partner for Watt.
9. various artists - Naive Melodies
Talking Heads were a great band in part because they were attuned to so much music outside of what contemporary rock bands were doing, and they molded those influences into a unique sound that belonged only to them. And it feels like a couple of generations of artists have taken the wrong lessons from the Talking Heads catalog and have simply imitating their particular quirks, streamlining them into a new default contemporary rock band sound, which is mostly what I heard on the star-studded 2024 compilation Everyone's Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense. The new tribute album Naive Melodies from British dance/hip hop label Barely Breaking Even, by contrast, feels more true to the spirit of Talking Heads because the artists are a lot less beholden to singing like Byrne or recreating Frantz and Weymouth's fidgety grooves. Astronne covers "Psycho Killer" without that iconic massline, EBBA rearranges "Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town" in a 7/8 rhythm, Pachyman does a dub reggae version of "Sugar On My Tongue," Theo Croker and Theophilus London do a jazz rap deconstruction of "Born Under Punches," and Bilal's version of "Seen And Not Seen" is a little quieter than the original, but it's not exactly R&B either. I already know the originals are great and can listen to them anytime I want, but it's fun to hear them in a new way and notice lyrics I never noticed before.
10. Lucinda Williams - World's Gone Wrong
Lucinda Williams has such an unusual yowl of a voice that it's taken a long time to grow on me, but I've begun to appreciate that she write songs that suit it. And she sounds justifiably righteous and pissed off about current events on World's Gone Wrong. I was also pretty excited to see that Brittney Spencer, the Baltimore-born country singer I interviewed two years ago, guests on the two fired-up tracks that open the album, "The World's Gone Wrong" and "Something's Gotta Give."
The Worst Album of the Month: SAULT - Chapter 1
I've enjoyed a decent amount of the British collective SAULT's voluminous output over the last few years, but I've been skeptical enough of their whole mysterious image and unorthodox career path that I was very amused last year when SAULT contributor Little Simz sued her mentor and SAULT mastermind Inflo over an unpaid debt (apparently a loan to fund SAULT's heavily hyped debut concert) and dropped a great album, Lotus, that repeatedly called out an unnamed "thief." Given that Simz is a rapper and Inflo is not, I didn't really expect this conflict to turn into a back-and-forth of diss tracks or anything, and since nobody's naming names on these songs that isn't necessarily what's happening here. But I put on Chapter 1 not really expecting anything that sounded like a respond, and the title track's refrain of "you're just a loser and hate that I'm a winner" just sounds like an incredibly childish and laughable thing to put out at this moment in time, and there's not much on this album of the caliber that attracted SAULT's diehard following anyway.
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