Best New Albums This Week: Four Tet, Madonna, Sailing Stones, Wah Wah Wino, Jack Talty and more

Nialler9 keeps a rolling list of Irish album releases for 2026.

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New Albums + EPs

Album of the week:

Four Tet (00000ooooo) – Symbols side-project

A surprise new album from Kieran Hebden dropped this morning on his 00000ooooo Bandcamp, the symbols alias he has used across the years for a small, cherished corner of his prolific catalogue. Hebden’s Bandcamp-only releases under this alias have leaned toward the more experimental, patient and ambient-adjacent end of his practice, and the new record continues that thread. A properly stealth-drop Friday release from one of the artists whose next move has always been worth stopping to check on. All very familiar Four Tet noise – twinkling bells, beats, bass and split between starry-eyed and propulsive production. A couple of the tracks are either previously released or new versions of previous KH songs like ‘Feelings’ which is track five on this.

Listen on Bandcamp.

 Madonna – Confessions II (Warner Records)

The sequel arrives. 21 years after 2005’s Confessions On A Dance Floor reshaped the mainstream pop landscape and remade Madonna’s own critical reputation, Confessions II lands today on Warner. The original was Madonna at her most fully realised in the electronic-pop mode, a record that took Stuart Price’s production language into the middle of American radio and left it there. A second volume in that world, at this point in Madonna’s career, is both an unusually pointed act of self-reference and a real event.

Whatever Confessions II turns out to be as a record, it is one of the more anticipated pop releases of the year for anyone who remembers exactly where they were when ‘Hung Up’ arrived.

mary in the junkyard – Role Model Hermit

The debut album from the London trio mary in the junkyard, the project of Clari Freeman-Taylor, Saya Barbaglia and David Addison. Signed to Marathon Artists, the band have built a serious buzz over the last couple of years on the strength of a run of decent singles and EPs, threading violin and folk touch-points through jagged, emotionally direct indie rock. One of the more anticipated UK debuts of the summer.

Jack Talty – Coire an Cheoil (Raelach Records)

A landmark new album from concertina player, composer and Raelach Records founder Jack Talty, gathering 32 original compositions performed by a remarkable cast of Irish traditional musicians. Cormac Begley and Steve Cooney anchor a line-up that also takes in Aidan Connolly, John Carty, Ruairí McGorman, Colm Murphy, Mark Redmond, Michael McCague, Diarmuid Ó Meachair, Áine Bird, Saileog Ní Cheannabháin, Matthew Berrill, John Blake, Síle Denvir and more, moving across jigs, reels, hornpipes, slides, polkas, waltzes, barndances and hop jigs, with electronics quietly threaded through the mix on a handful of pieces. As substantial a statement in Irish traditional composition as the year is likely to produce, and a compelling case for Talty as one of the most quietly important figures working in Irish trad today.

Morgan Buckley & Ben Donohoe – Sworx (Wah Wah Wino)

The new album from Morgan Buckley and Ben Donohoe, out via Buckley’s own Wah Wah Wino imprint. Buckley has been one of the most singular voices in Irish experimental electronic music for years, with Wah Wah Wino carving out a reliably left-field corner of the wider club-adjacent scene. Sworx is a 12-track sprawl framed around an “omniscient dialup modem” of the same name, threading Arthur Russell-adjacent mood pieces through screwed Aphex jams, Necks-doing-electro prepared-piano workouts on ‘OpportuniXt’, an early-AFX-vocaloid electro zinger on ‘The System Works’, and Oval-esque sublime on ‘breathwx (half_life)’. As with the wider Wah Wah Wino catalogue, freakishly playful and quietly essential.

Boomkat and specialist vinyl stores are stocking it.

Sailing Stones – Slow Magic

Following on from the recent premiere of the maternal anxiety-themed ‘The Colour of The Sun’, Bristol-based Irish singer-songwriter Jenny Lindfors releases a second full length album under the Sailing Stones moniker.

Slow Magic as a whole takes the experience of matrescence – the physical, psychological and emotional shift that comes with becoming a mother – as its subject, though Lindfors gets at it sideways, through vignettes and sensation rather than declaration. She’s spoken about wanting a record that spoke to her experience the way Joni Mitchell’s Blue spoke to female vulnerability around heartbreak – not to replicate it, but to find her own equivalent register.

 “I remember telling my partner, I really want to write about this, but I’m too knackered, too sleep deprived.” Lindfords says. “I didn’t know who I was anymore. But I wanted there to be a record that spoke to my joy and my pain and my thin-skinnedness likeJoni Mitchell’s Blue spoke to female vulnerability around heartbreak. Not that I could write another Blue, but I knew I had to navigate the idea of writing about motherhood, especially as there’s a lot of shame tied around it.”

Slow Magic draws on Bobbie Gentry’s country warmth, Scott Walker’s dramatic reach and Linda Perhacs’ uncanny folk. Hazy woodwind, warm guitars and electronics fed through malfunctioning tape machines.

Various Artists – Slacker 85 Presents: He Ain’t Here

Seth Troxler’s new Slacker compilation features 35 tracks from Krystal Klear, Sahar, Audion and more and arrives with this statement:

“When I created Slacker I wanted to make something to remind me of my youth in the ’90s. Being born in ’85, the ’90s was a decade that defined me. Culturally America was at a pivotal point. Post Reaganism of the ’80s, the ’90s was defined by the anti-hero. The idea that we had had enough. From grunge to hip hop, house and techno.

“This was the time of independence and indie music. Life without boundaries. A world where everything felt possible and a belief that the future was coming. Home game consoles, futuristic new sports like the X Games. It was about being radical. Living life on the edge and turning away from the imaginary cookie cutter American dream.

“I feel we are in similar times. The future we were promised every day seems more like a nightmare than a utopian dream. And all we have left are our minds and bodies, but who knows how long our freedom to be an individual will exist.

“This compilation is protest – from fight songs to moments of joy. It’s about living, dancing and being. It’s for the freaks, perverts, for the rebels, for those who forever were other, and dared the impossible to just be themselves in a world where everyone wants to be the same. The revolution will not be televised because it’s within ourselves. It’s about being unapologetically individual.

Freedom is a state of mind as well as a state of being. Being a slacker is as much about pushing, as it is about being. Not giving a f#ck about the rules and making your own. I’m a slacker, you’re a slacker, a loser and nobody. History will forget me, history forgot Elvis.

“The world is about to change. Might as well have a bit of fun while it burns. Welcome to our dysfunctional family. Join us for the bonfire, I promise you things are going to get weird, in the best possible way. HE AIN’T HERE. 

Donato Dozzy & Batu – Exhale

Exhale is the debut collaborative album from Batu and Donato Dozzy, out now on Timedance via !K7 Records The two first connected in Japan in 2019, discovered a mutual fascination with each other’s work, and eventually played a surprise B2B set at Draaimolen Festival in the Netherlands in 2023 that went viral. The album itself was made in February 2025 when Batu visited Dozzy’s studio in Rome – a week of instinctive hardware sketches that became the bedrock of the record.

As Batu, Omar McCutcheon has built his reputation channelling soundsystem-rooted dubstep principles into mutations that resist easy categorisation, running Timedance as one of the most respected labels in club music. Dozzy has been a leading figure in European techno since the mid-2000s, pioneering deeply immersive, ambient-charged dance music.

Dozzy: “In the last years there has been a very interesting hybridization of genres. Many techno producers got interested in the drum and bass world, and also the opposite happened. This made it a good time for a project like this to happen.”

Also released this week

• Anish Kumar – AK Cuts 4
• Shimmer Boy – In The Aftermath, We Bloom (Cork artist)