My recommended best long playing albums and records of the last month. This is what I listened to and loved the most.
Boards Of Canada – Inferno (Warp Records)
The Scottish electronic duo of brothers Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison released their first new album in 13 years on Warp, following 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest. A return this long-awaited carries a weight that goes beyond the music itself, with cryptic messaging, worldwide listening parties and a Guardian review that prepped fans for disappointment.
Thankfully, Ben Beaumont-Thomas’ assessment of Boards Of Canada’s fifth album is wildly off the mark, Inferno has a depth charge to its sonic world that is fresh for BOC’s 30 year discography.
The DNA of retrofuturistic sounds drawn from snatches of dialogue of degrading media is of course, present with the themes of religion, occult and spirituality all dominant.
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Boards of Canada have always made music that feels older than the technology that produced it – sun-bleached analogue synths, frayed-tape rhythms, half-glimpsed melodies suggesting both ’70s educational films and something more uneasy underneath.
Inferno, the title alone setting a darker tone than the pastoral hauntology of earlier records, sounds like a deepening of that world rather than a reinvention.
The construction of the record is also something new for the brothers. Writing and production is credited solely to Mike Sandison with Marcus Eoin and Sandison credited on the album as instrumentalists and sound designers.
Yet, if ‘Prophecy at 1420 Mhz’ suggested a twist towards more John Carpenter-esque horror scores and there is plenty of eerie synths and lulling meandering atmosphere to unsettle, Inferno is not without its moments of rapture – the hymnal beauty of ‘Age Of Capricorn’ being the most surprising with ‘You Retreat In Time and Space’ also achieving a weightless euphoria towards the end of the record.
Inferno is also full of sounds that are new for BOC that sit alongside their established palette – the new-age Hare Krishna chant of ‘Naraka’, the serene slowed down shoegaze vista of ‘Memory Death’, the Air Virgin Suicides-esque robotic atmosphere of ‘The Word Becomes Flesh’ and the sitar playing on ‘Blood In The Labyrinth’.
Inferno, in its music and the surrounding fervour is a ritualistic and communal as recorded music can get these days. Boards Of Canada still manage to make music as if it’s beamed from another dimension but Inferno, this time around feels it has one foot in the fractious modern world.
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 and 2020’s Sundowner similarly explored the Middle American twilight), Little Wide Open brings Morby home to the Midwest, his “badlands” – “the big sky, the small lives” of the place that shaped him.
The album is the pinnacle of Morby’s songwriting to date as he writes fully informed by the inherent musicality he feels in the Midwest American experience, the small towns, the people, the cicadas, the atmosphere of place.
The arrangements stay warm and in-the-room rather than slipping into prestige-indie polish, and by way of endorsement as well as colour, Justin Vernon adds falsetto to opener ‘Badlands’ and 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 aka Waxahatchee. 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.
Morby’s songs operate at an inquistive tilt that draws you in to his world and the places he illuminates.
Broken Social Scene – Remember the Humans (City Slang/Arts & Crafts)
The first new album in nine years from the Toronto indie collective, since 2017’s Hug of Thunder.The reunion that made it possible is with David Newfeld, who produced their breakthrough You Forgot It in People (2002) and 2005’s self-titled record – and who hadn’t worked with the band in 20 years until Kevin Drew got back in touch. “A hurricane of fun,” is how they’ve described the studio sessions. During the making of the record, both Drew and Newfeld lost their mothers. “Our moms would have wanted us to do this, and get it right after 20 years of not working together,” Newfeld says.
The collaborator list runs deep, as it always does with Broken Social Scene: Feist, Hannah Georgas and Lisa Lobsinger all step into the foreground at different points.
Across the 12 tracks the arrangements are dense and enveloping as you’d expect from BSS – horns, guitars, voices, electronics layered into a lattice – but melody stays to the fore, as does the band’s warm-hearted songwriting that functions like an encouraging pat on the back from an old friend.
Dublin show with Metric and Stars is also confirmed.
Aldous Harding – Train on the Island (4AD)
The fifth album from the New Zealand singer-songwriter, her fourth for 4AD, and the follow-up to 2022’s Warm Chris. Harding has described her process as “treading the line between flow state and dissociation – being present and being somewhere else,” and Train on the Island is full of that quality – songs that feel half-remembered and still rearranging themselves in real time.
The record continues the partnership with producer John Parish that has shaped her last several albums. Harding has been quietly building one of the most singular catalogues in contemporary songwriting – folk-adjacent but never quite folk, uncanny vocal phrasing, songs that hum with simmering ambiguity – and this is continues to be a unique track she’s chugging down.
Rua Rí – Tell Your Mother I Saved Your Life (Soft Boy Records)
The debut album from Rua Rí who is Cobh singer-songwriter Seán Damery – produced by Kean Kavanagh and out on Soft Boy Records. Rooted in specific places – Cobh, Cork, nearby fields and familiar streets – and in the emotions those places hold. We covered his announcement back in March; the singles that have come since, ‘Johnny Workman’ and ‘Makeover’, have confirmed him as one of the most distinctive voices in Irish folk right now.
Octo Octa – Sigils For Survival (T4T LUV NRG)
The fourth album from New Hampshire producer Maya Bouldry-Morrison, released yesterday via her own T4T LUV NRG label is grade A dance music. The record marks a decade since Maya publicly came out as transgender in November 2015, and it is explicitly autobiographical – eight tracks conceived as a spell. For each one, Maya drew a personal sigil: a handmade symbol intended to bind magic to the song and seal its intention. These drawings were incorporated into the album’s artwork by her sister, the New York artist Hope Morrison, whose paintings translate each sigil’s energy into vivid form. The physical edition design was laid out by João Ervedosa.
“Sigils For Survival is my attempt to encapsulate the intentions and techniques that I used to move through life into a spell,” Maya says. Created entirely on hardware instruments and later mixed in Logic, the album maintains the feel of MIDI-clock drift and off-grid recording to preserve a human, tactile quality. It builds on the nocturnal acid, house and breakbeat terrain of Resonant Body while pushing deeper into texture and spaciousness. Maya often writes sigils on her vinyl records before playing them in a DJ set; the practice runs all the way through this record as a through-line of intention and ritual.
Jump Source – Fold (NAFF Recordings)
The debut album from Montreal electronic duo Jump Source – Patrick Holland (FKA Project Pablo) and Francis Latreille (Priori) – out on their NAFF label. Holland and Latreille met in Montreal after Holland relocated from the first wave of the Canadian house boom of the 2010s; they built a studio together and have since become one of the most reliable production teams in the underground, writing and producing for James K., Maara, Car Culture and Tiga’s HOTLIFE. Fold is their most ambitious project: echoing the electronic LP boom of the early 2000s while balancing peak-hour anthems with an anything-goes pop sensibility.
The guest list spans billy woods and Nick León on ‘Empty Bars’; Helena Deland on ‘Shattered’ and the title track (the latter with CFCF); Deaton Chris Anthony on ‘Fade City’; BEA1991 on ‘Endlessly’; Loukeman on ‘Affect’; Japanese trip-hop artist POiSON GiRL FRiEND on closer ‘Close’. Moving fluidly between candy-glossed hooks, folktronic balladry, club techno and unexpected rap turns.
Modern Woman – Johnny’s Dreamworld (One Little Independent Records)
The debut album from the London art-rock outfit fronted by primary songwriter Sophie Harris. Harris met violinist and composer David Denyer, who brought a background in experimental composition; Juan Brint-Gutiérrez joined on bass and saxophone, Adam Blackhurst on drums; producer Joel Burton (Naima Bock, Katy J Pearson, Vanishing Twin) helped realise the live immediacy Harris had always been building toward.
The record explores what Harris calls “the strange poetry buried within the ordinary” – dream logic, fantasy and lived experience filtered through a literary precision shaped by admiration for Björk, Sinéad O’Connor and Cat Power.
Nialler9 has featured three singles from the album – ‘Dashboard Mary’, ‘Neptune Girl’, and the title track – and each one has confirmed Modern Woman as a band with breakout potential in the mould of English Teacher before them, yet there is a more overt pop style in the vein of The Last Dinner Party at play also. On the title track, Harris is more lupine than ever, with a knowledge of post-punk tension coming through the music – it has that early PJ Harvey instant ignition feel.
Feeble Little Horse – bitknot (Saddle Creek)
The long-awaited new album from the Pittsburgh fuzz-pop band, the follow-up to their 2023 breakout Girl with Fish. Few American indie bands of the last few years have built as devoted a following on as little, with their hazy, sample-and-noise-laced songcraft sitting somewhere between bedroom-pop intimacy and shoegaze blur. Lydia Slocum’s vocals remain the centre of gravity, and bitknot is one of the indie releases of the year.
Dublin show in November just announced.
Lemoncello – Perfect Place (Claddagh Records)
The second album from the Dublin duo of singer-songwriter Laura Quirke and cellist-arranger Claire Kinsella, out today on Claddagh. Co-produced by Ruth O’Mahony Brady (Lisa O’Neill, Gorillaz) at her studio in Cabinteely. The album evolves from the folk-soaked roots of their critically acclaimed 2024 self-titled debut, weaving synths and electronic percussion into the duo’s organic sound without losing the intimate core of what they do. The record began with a residency in late 2023 in a cabin overlooking the Skellig Islands, followed by a year of voice notes and demos before the studio sessions began.
‘Articulate Animal’, the album’s opener, came out of a five-minute creative writing exercise designed to bypass the critical mind entirely – solo voice over a cello drone before the full arrangement arrives and Cormac Begley features. ‘Meet Me Halfway’ preceded it. Following Irish dates supporting Ye Vagabonds, Lemoncello head to the UK in May to support Joshua Burnside. Album launch headline shows in Liverpool and London follow, with festival appearances at Night & Day, Deer Shed and WOMAD later in the year.
AE MAK – Folk Songs for Mama & Papa
The debut album from Aoife McCann’s AE MAK project represents a shift from the electronic-leaning art-pop she is known for. Folk Songs for Mama & Papa is a “cosmical, spiritual folk record rooted in voice, breath and emotional resonance”, influenced by Björk, Judee Sill, Aldous Harding and Paul Simon and named in reference to her own parents.
The songs were written in a Berlin winter at a friend’s piano, during a period of emotional self-reflection. McCann then worked with Brián Mac Gloinn of Ye Vagabonds, who co-produced and engineered the record with her, alongside Cian Hanley on drums and Kevin Corcoran on piano and bass.
The emphasis on the voice is what’s immediately apparently on Folk Songs.., no big surprise considering how individually magnetic McCann’s voice has been no matter what tapestry it is woven to. Folk Songs for Mama & Papa draws on the warmth of classic folk and baroque pop.
Kurt Vile – Philadelphia’s been good to me (Verve)
The new album from the Philadelphia singer-songwriter and guitarist, the follow-up to 2022’s (watch my moves). The title is a small, characteristic Vile move – a sideways, generous statement that doubles as the record’s emotional centre. Kurt Vile has spent the last decade and a half making a body of work that quietly accumulates rather than chasing peaks, full of long guitar reveries, shaggy melodies and wry, half-mumbled wisdom.
JPEGMAFIA – Experimental Rap (AWAL)
The sixth studio album from Barrington Hendricks, the rapper, producer and self-described cultural disruptor i his first solo full-length since 2024’s acclaimed I Lay Down My Life for You. Self-produced with lead single ‘Babygirl’ teasing the album’s precise and urgent chaotic sonic sound – like his best work – blown out red-hot productions, noise-shifting, sample-heavy, guitar-clanging, restless rap songs that sound like no other and doesn’t sit still for a bar. There’s a lot going sonically, and Experimental Rap sounds like some of JPEGMAFIA’s best work to me thought the reaction from fans have been divisive, with substandard lyrics an oft-seen criticism.
Principleasure – III
The third album from Principleasure, the Los Angeles-based producer of Iranian origin who hails from Northern Ireland, the result of almost four years of work in his vintage-synth-loaded LA studio. The press release describes a “Spinal Tap-esque collection of vintage analog synthesisers”, and the records bear it out – melodic techno of ’90s vintage, early EBM weight, soundtrack-leaning melancholy and electro-tinged disco glide, all assembled by an artist who calls himself a “backward technologist” and builds his own software synthesisers on the side.
One Leg One Eye – CRONE (AD 93)
The second album from One Leg One Eye, the project of founding Lankum member Ian Lynch and veteran noise musician George Brennan, out today on the consistently excellent AD 93 (home to James K, Moin, Martha Skye Murphy and YHWH Nailgun). It follows their 2022 debut …And Take The Black Worm With Me, a set of ambient drone pieces partly recorded in an abandoned Dublin factory. We flagged the album back in April off the back of the wild opening track ‘Many are my Names Besides’.
Four tracks, conceived as a sonic invocation of the sovereignty goddess who personifies the land and the right to rule it, in her darkest and most terrifying form. The towering presence on the record is Olwen Fouéré (Operating Theatre), the legendary actor, performer, writer and director, whose guttural, elemental vocals run through the album. She recorded her part in a single day, improvising over the already-composed music while channelling the Morrigan, the crow-haunting war goddess of Irish myth, drawing on text Lynch sent her from the Ulster Cycle.
“Listening back, at this time in our world, I can only wonder at how much blood and war the Crone/Crow of sovereignty is preparing to unleash now,” Fouéré says. Much of it was recorded by Lynch and Brennan back in 2021, before One Leg One Eye fully existed as an entity, with Brennan working on CRONE while Lynch built …And Take The Black Worm With Me.
Alela Diane – Who’s Keeping Time? (Fluff & Gravy / Loose Music)
The seventh album from the Portland singer-songwriter, the follow-up to 2022’s Looking Glass, and a record shaped by loss and a renewed pull toward community. Part of its genesis traces back to the death last year of Portland folk mainstay Michael Hurley, the “godfather of freak folk,” who Diane counted as both influence and friend. Performing at a tribute show in his honour caused her to reassess her relationship with music: “It was an epiphany to realise how much I missed my community. I felt very clear about what I wanted in that moment: I want to be alive. I want to see live music. I want to play it.”
11 songs, co-produced with Sam Weber and recorded live over 10 days in August 2025 in the attic of her 1892 Victorian home in Portland, where the songs were written. No click tracks, no tricks, the whole band playing together in one room, with Maggie the cat asleep on the pre-amps. Anna Tivel (vocals and violin), Lucius’ Peter Lalish (guitar), Danny Austin-Manning (drums) and Sebastian Owens (bass) feature, the arrangements pulsing with chamber-folk orchestration. Lead single ‘California’ opens the record. A lyrically deft, impressionistic storyteller in the lineage of Kris Kristofferson.
Mick Flannery – The House Must Win (One Riot Records)
The ninth studio album from the Cork singer-songwriter and his first ever double album, drawn from the stage musical of the same name premiering at the Pavilion Theatre Dun Laoghaire and the Everyman Cork. The conceptual roots go back two decades to Flannery’s 2005 debut Evening Train, which was originally written as a college project at Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa in Cork City and grew from a single song into a narrative of love, gambling and betrayal between two brothers in a small Irish town. The House Must Win reimagines the songs from that debut alongside ten new compositions written specifically for the stage production, with American musician and Hadestown music supervisor Liam Robinson handling all the orchestrations. Recorded at Monique Studios in Cork with Flannery’s long-time collaborator Christian Best.
The guest list runs deep. Anaïs Mitchell, the Hadestown writer and Grammy winner, duets on lead single ‘Rising Tide’, a delicate ballad built around a near-drowning memory used as metaphor. Lisa Hannigan takes ‘Grace’s Waltz’. Susan O’Neill features on ‘The Rebel’. Jenn Grant is on ‘Creak in the Door’, the song that started it all in 2005. Portland songwriter Jeffrey Martin is on ‘Talk to Me’. West Cork folk singer Marybeth O’Mahony joins Yvonne Daly on ‘One Chance’. Tabitha Smyth, Brian Flannery, Eamonn Flannery and David Flannery are also throughout.
The stage production stars Tommy Tiernan, Tabitha Smyth, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Niall McNamee, Orlagh de Bhaldraith, Damian Kearney and John McCarthy, directed by Julie Kelleher with Ciarán Bagnall on set and lighting design.
White Flowers – Dreams For Somebody Else (The state51 Conspiracy)
The second album from Preston duo Joey Cobb and Katie Drew, produced by Hot Chip and LCD’s Al Doyle alongside the band.
Dreams For Somebody Else expands on the dark-hued dream pop of their debut, channelling the structure and catharsis of dance music into repetitive song forms, with Cocteau Twins and early 4AD as the clearest touchstones. Cobb and Drew’s overlapping vocals float above shuffling percussion with the production is deep and bright in equal measure.
Video Blue – Eyes On Sticks
The fourth album from Bray-based musician Jim O’Donoghue Martin, recorded in Bray and Hackney.
The title comes from a line on the record: “…all I wanted was art, with my eyes on sticks watching Euro ’96…” Contributions from Gavin Murray of Trick Mist, art historian Evie May Hatch, Dave Phelan (Low Fidelity Section) doing poetry on ‘Hydra’, and Gökhan Demirdöğmez on clarinet.
Lead single ‘Exhibition Wine’ is a stream-of-consciousness word association paired with an airy synth backdrop, and that is how much of the record progresses – a pensive spoken word collection of shoegaze-inflected electronic songs – a bit like the style of A-House’s ‘Endless Art’ updated from the London diaspora.
Action Bronson – Planet Frog (self-released)
The eighth studio album from the Queens rapper, chef, fine artist and devoted New York City sports fan, his first since 2024’s Johann Sebastian Bachlava the Doctor. Thirteen tracks of his signature surreal, food-obsessed, half-improvised hip-hop that always hits when the mood is right. Production from Harry Fraud, Daringer, Human Growth Hormone and Bronson himself. The guest list spans Lil Yachty and Paul Wall on lead single ‘Triceratops’ , Roc Marciano on ‘Peppers’, Meyhem Lauren on ‘Mandem’, and Yung Mehico and Julian Love throughout.
Kneecap – FENIAN (Heavenly Recordings)
Kneecap’s new album arrives forged in legal battles, cancelled tours and scrapped recordings, and Dan Carey’s production gives it a darker, more spacious sound than anything they’ve made before.
The third album from the Belfast-Derry trio of Mo Chara, Mógláí Bap and DJ Próvaí arrives having been through everything – a terrorism charge against Mo Chara (later dismissed), the loss of their US visa sponsor following pro-Palestine statements at Coachella 2025, a cancelled North American tour, a scrapped first version of the album they were dissatisfied with – and comes out the other side sounding like none of that broke them….
The Leon Stax Equation – In View
The third album from the Galway-based soul and funk band led by Ben Duffy (Leon Stax), the second-youngest of 10 siblings, multi-instrumentalist, drummer and vocalist.
The Equation features a five-piece line-up around him: Sam Wright (bass, of My Fellow Sponges, Big Jelly, The Whileaways and The Rains) anchors the rhythm section, Jack Sherrard on guitar and backing vocals, Orán O’Neill on trombone, and Tom and Aidan Duffy swapping between keys, percussion, saxophone, backing vocals and guitar.
Reference points span The Leon Michels Affair, Holy Hive, Khruangbin, Menahan Street Band, Sharon Jones, Lee Fields and Brad Stank and this is has a analogue warmth and live-recorded feel – an ear pointed firmly at the live bandd soul and rock classics of the 1960s.
Matias Aguayo – Anenoa
Anenoa finds Chilean-German techno and electro producer Aguayo in exploratory, rhythmic form, threading together his idiosyncratic voice work with loose-limbed percussion and psychedelic electronics. The record leans into his long-standing fascination with communal dance music, but it feels more meditative than peak-club focused, full of playful textures and organic grooves that drift between experimental pop, minimal techno and leftfield electronics. There’s a restless curiosity to the album that rewards close listening, even as it maintains an inviting pulse.
Recent single ‘El Internet’ is a quietly brilliant bit of off-kilter dancefloor music that somehow isn’t on this record.
Hannah Peel & Beibei Wang – The Endless Dance (Real World)
The first collaborative album from the Northern Irish composer and producer Hannah Peel and the Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang. The pair met while working on Manchester Collective’s 2023 album NEON, and the record is structured around the 24 solar terms of the traditional Chinese calendar, a journey through the natural year rendered in sound.
Recorded across five days at Real World and produced by Mike Lindsay (LUMP, Tunng), it pairs Peel’s synths, prepared piano and programming with Wang’s traditional and unconventional percussion, taking in rice bowls and a jawbone, with Hyelim Kim guesting on the Korean daegeum flute. A step away from both artists’ classical grounding into something freer and more playful. As Wang puts it, the album is “two women talking in totally different languages that had a wonderful chat.” Nine tracks, with names like ‘Wild Geese Arrive’, ‘Awaken The Insects’ and ‘Thunder Begins To Soften’. A live performance follows at the Barbican, London on October 24th.
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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.
