Our recommended new album and EPs releases this week.
Nialler9 keeps a rolling list of Irish album releases for 2026.
New Albums and Releases
New Albums + EPs
This week’s roundup spans a strong mix of new releases, from Kevin Morby’s latest to big-name drops from THREE ALBUMS FROM DRAKE, Smerz, and Rostam, alongside some records from Bleech 93, Genesis Owusu, Spencer Krug, Dua Selah and others. It’s a broad snapshot of the week’s most interesting albums, covering everything from indie and experimental pop to more mainstream releases, with a few standout picks that are especially easy to recommend.
Album of the week:
Kevin Morby – Little Wide Open (Dead Oceans)
The eighth album from the Kansas City songwriter, produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner. Where 2022’s This Is a Photograph took him to Memphis (that was a pod favourite), Little Wide Open brings Morby home to the Midwest, his “badlands” – “the big sky, the small lives” of the place that shaped him. “There’s something unintentionally musical about the Midwest; cicadas chirping in the trees, a train passing, a tornado siren going off,” he says. “If you listen, there are these almost ominous sounds taking place beneath the wide-open sky, its ugliness and its beauty and how the two are often working together simultaneously.”
Dessner’s fingerprints are everywhere but the arrangements stay warm and in-the-room rather than slipping into prestige-indie polish. Justin Vernon adds falsetto to opener ‘Badlands’. Lucinda Williams brings gravel and gravity to ‘Natural Disaster’. Katie Gavin of MUNA sings on the title track. Meg Duffy, Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso and Mat Davidson all contribute. ‘Javelin’ is the immediate single – an uptempo recall of Morby’s early days with partner Katie Crutchfield. The album takes in mortality (‘Die Young’), the inevitability of time (‘Little Wide Open’), and what comes next – all the more pressing given Morby is a father-to-be.
Drake – ICEMAN / Habibti / Maid of Honour (OVO / Republic)
The first solo album from Drake since 2023’s For All the Dogs, dropped today alongside not one but two surprise companion albums. ICEMAN is the headline release – the album campaign that began in Toronto in April with a 25-foot ice sculpture concealing the album title and release date, hacked open by streamer Kishka.
The marquee features on ICEMAN include Future and Molly Santana on ‘Ran to Atlanta’, and 21 Savage on ‘B’s on the Table’. Habibti and Maid of Honour arrive without prior warning and without singles though this Peggy Gou-sampling Sexxy Red track has already got a lot of early notice. His last collaboration with PARTYNEXTDOOR, $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, came out in February 2025. What we all want to know is how he’s going to address his beef with Kendrick? Well there’s a song called ‘Ran To Atlanta’ with Future on ICEMAN, the title referencing ‘Not Like Us’ lyric – “You run to Atlanta when you need a check balance.”
Rostam – American Stories (Matsor Projects)
The third solo album from Rostam Batmanglij, the Iranian-American songwriter, producer and Vampire Weekend co-founder, and his first solo record in five years since 2021’s Changephobia. The “American stories” in question are Rostam’s own: a record that braids his Iranian heritage into the most American of forms, country and folk, looking for what he calls the productive friction of “the rub” between Western chords and Middle Eastern microtonal saz melodies.
Opener ‘Like a Spark’ reimagines Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks as if Van had been into Middle Eastern music the way Harrison was into Indian classical. Centrepiece ‘Back of a Truck’ is a pedal-steel-drenched road-trip reverie co-written with Tobias Jesso Jr. ‘Hardy’ features Clairo on spoken word in its second act. ‘Young Lion’, the original Vampire Weekend track Rostam wrote and recorded as a teenager, gets a fully realised reimagining. Closer ‘The Weight’ details a student demonstration: “Warm heads on the pavement… calling out a broken government.”
Genesis Owusu – REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE (Ourness)
The third album from the Ghanaian-Australian rapper, songwriter and disruptor, following 2021’s ARIA-winning Smiling With No Teeth and 2023’s Struggler. 14 tracks of post-apocalyptic neo-soul, alt-pop, synth-punk, deep funk and Brit-rock, written as a piercing reflection on the political, social and economic flames engulfing contemporary society. “Living in the 2020s has been such a strange experience,” Owusu says. “I feel like hatred and greed, prejudice, have become cool again. It’s a plague, or a scourge, a worldwide scourge.”
Owusu pulls few punches. Opener ‘Pirate Radio’ takes aim at Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Kanye West inside three minutes, backed by claustrophobic juddering beats and clever references to The Prodigy’s ‘Breathe’. ‘Most Normal American Voter’ is grubby Viagra Boys-esque punk. ‘Hellstar’ is squelching Thundercat-style funk. ‘Life Keeps Going’ is drum and bass. ‘4LIFE’ is a warped one-synth oddity. He invokes Nina Simone: “The purpose of an artist is to reflect the times they live in.” Tour with IDLES and Royel Otis to follow, plus a London ICA date on June 23rd.
Spencer Krug – Same Fangs (Pronounced Kroog)
The new album from Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, Moonface and Swan Lake, on his own Pronounced Kroog label. Krug has been one of the most idiosyncratic voices in Canadian indie rock for two decades, weaving art-rock, chamber pop and prog into songs that always sound entirely his. Same Fangs continues the run of solo records that have shaped the second half of his career, with the spectral piano-led arrangements and gnomic lyrical universe that define his best work.
/artwork=small/transparent=true/” seamless>Detached From The Rest Of You by Loraine JamesSmerz – Easy EP (Escho)
The new EP from Norwegian-Danish duo Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg, following last year’s excellent Big city life album.. Smerz remain one of the most distinctive electronic-pop projects working: whispered vocals, blown-out drums, classical samples, club rhythms shuffled into something that sits somewhere between art-pop and contemporary classical without committing to either.
Jeff Parker & ETA IVtet – Happy Today (International Anthem)
The new album from the Chicago jazz guitarist and Tortoise member, with his ETA IVtet of Jay Bellerose (drums), Anna Butterss (bass) and Josh Johnson (alto sax). Their previous album, 2022’s double LP Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, documented the band’s long-running Monday night residency at the Highland Park venue in Los Angeles, and earned widespread acclaim for its meditative slow-build approach to live jazz improvisation. Happy Today brings that quartet back into the studio for another patient, deeply rewarding exploration of texture, groove and minimalism.
Dua Saleh – Of Earth & Wires (Ghostly International)
The new album from the Sudanese-American non-binary artist, producer and actor (Sex Education, The Wonder Years), the long-awaited follow-up to a string of acclaimed EPs and 2024’s debut LP. Saleh’s voice operates in a register all its own – warped, soulful, processed – over production that draws as much from experimental electronic music as from R&B and hip-hop. Of Earth & Wires finds them widening the palette further: more acoustic textures, more organic instrumentation woven through the digital framework.
Eluvium – Virga III (Temporary Residence Ltd.)
The latest album from Matthew Cooper’s ambient project, completing the Virga trilogy that began in 2022. Virga III is a long-form drift through piano, treated guitar, choir and field recording: music for slow time, atmospheric and devotional. For fans of Stars of the Lid, Grouper, William Basinski and the cinematic end of the ambient spectrum, this is essential.
PARTYOF2 – AMERIKA’S NEXT TOP PARTY! (Extended Cut) (Def Jam)
The extended cut of the debut album from LA duo PARTYOF2, the project of SWIM and Jadagrace, formerly of Group Therapy. The original 11-track AMERIKA’S NEXT TOP PARTY! arrived on Def Jam in October 2025 to widespread critical acclaim – Billboard, XXL, Uproxx, NPR, Complex, Pigeons & Planes and Rolling Stone all flagged it as one of the year’s strongest debuts, and Anthony Fantano gave it a “light 7” while noting how much potential it showed in just how out-there and ambitious some of it was. Jazz-rap textures, dance flips, Kanye and Kendrick and Brockhampton DNA all sit alongside rap-rock and pop-R&B without any of it feeling forced.
The extended cut adds new tracks led by ‘2 NIGHTS IN LA’, which premiered on Jack Saunders’ BBC Radio 1 New Music Show and fuses distorted electric guitar riffs with booming drums into an anthem of self-reflection, gratitude and resilience. “It’s been a year of extreme highs and some very real lows, and we haven’t really had a moment to pause and process it all,” the duo say. “We’ve been going nonstop, on the road, on stage, in the gym, and in the studio.”
Bleech 9:3 – Bleech 9:3 EP (Polydor)
The self-titled debut EP from Dublin-formed, London-based alt-grunge four-piece Bleech 9:3, out today on Polydor. Four of the five tracks have already landed as singles, with ‘No Surprise’ the one previously unheard. The band have already collected praise from The Guardian, NME and Kerrang!, heavy rotation on BBC Radio 1 and 6Music, and a sold-out headline show at London’s Scala on May 16th.
Frontman Baz Quinlan (vocals, guitar) and Sam Duffy (guitar) met at AA, where Baz was Sam’s sponsor, and built the band around that foundation of plain-dealing honesty. Baz’s brother James Quinlan is on bass, with Luke O’Neill on drums. The pair relocated together from Dublin to London in 2024.
“I think the vulnerability of those meetings helped us be a lot more comfortable with each other from the get-go,” Baz says. “Bad worship is a theme that runs through the EP. I felt driven to write about how it twists love into something else. How the twisting becomes the thing that you end up wanting.”
The sonic reference points run from Yuck and Dinosaur Jr. to early Ash and the heavier end of ’90s grunge, with a Korn-adjacent bass squall on opener ‘Jacky’ as the calling card.
Summer support slots with Keo, Wunderhorse and Nick Cave, plus festival appearances at The Great Escape, Latitude, and Reading & Leeds (August 28-29).
Mark Geary – Antebellum EP
The new EP from the Dublin-via-New York singer-songwriter, his second-ever EP release, following 2024’s acclaimed In The Time of Locusts. Six tracks of tender acoustic guitar and the reflective, world-weary lyricism that has defined Geary’s writing across six studio albums.
The EP came out of one of Ireland’s stormiest New Years on record. “I stared out to a January of rain and cold and thought, ‘I need to get back to my desk’,” Geary says. “If I stayed watching the news, or in a cycle of streaming shows, I’d crumble. I threw out my telly and set up a writing room by my bed. Tuned all my guitars and would jump out of bed and sing. These songs are what came of it: fear, regret, love, romance, terror, and the weather forecast.” Geary plays a Spindizzy Records in-store today at 5.30pm, and Coughlan’s, Co. Cork on May 21st.
Also released this week
- Ital Tek – Mind Abandon
- Kelley Stoltz – If You Don’t Know Me, Buy Now!
- Martyna Basta – Winged in Collapse
- SALEM – Red Dragon
- Tank and the Bangas – The Last Balloon
- TELEHEALTH – Green World Image
- Towa Bird – Gentleman
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
