Phoebe Bridgers returns with Lost Weekend, her first solo album in six years and one of the year’s biggest indie releases. Limerick’s God Knows teams up with his brother Godwin for the Heihachi Riddim EP, the pick of this week’s Irish releases. Jungle bring the sunshine, L’Rain goes gloriously genre-defiant, James Ellis Ford returns with a luminous, hard-won solo album, and Open Mike Eagle joins forces with Kenny Segal for the first time. King Gizzard turn a record called Alien Metal into a full-on techno album. Plus new records from Channel Tres, Hovvdy, Sweeping Promises, The Womack Sisters and Getdown Services, and Irish releases from Ultras, Rodney Owl and Ollnóva.
Nialler9 keeps a rolling list of Irish album releases for 2026.
New Albums and Releases
New Albums + EPs
Album of the week:
Phoebe Bridgers – Lost Weekend
The third solo album from Phoebe Bridgers is finally here, her first in six years and the follow-up to 2020’s defining Punisher. In the years between, Bridgers reunited boygenius with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, dated Kildare man Paul Mescal (he’s mentioned), then went almost dark, resurfacing this summer with a run of phone-free pop-up shows that built to a surprise gig at Madison Square Garden. Lost Weekend lands as one of the most anticipated records of the year.
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First impressions are it’s clearly her most sonically ambitious record to date – 16 songs across three “sides” but still under an hour, co-produced with Jack Antonoff and Alex G and stacked with collaborators like Baker and Dacus, Caroline Shaw, Christian Lee Hutson, Damien Jurado, Maya Hawke, Geese’s Cameron Winter (as Son-John Johnson) and Nickel Creek bluegrass guitarist and singer Chris Thile among them.
Proceeded by the single ‘Lost Boys’, the songs move from the breakup with Mescal, the grief of losing her father (who appears on the song ‘Never Going Back!’ in voice note form) to the giddy rush of new love, funny, spooky and devastating by turns. There are sonic textures on this record that echo some of Bon Iver’s experimental sonics, some beautiful ambient-leaning angelic backing vocal passages, with the songs wrapped up in starbursting production – the title track is a quiet choral hum that does a lot with a little until it lifts – without losing sight of the folk, indie and rock songwriting that got Bridgers where she is. Dips into country and bluegrass are more pronounced on ‘Haunted’ and ‘I Can’t Wait’, and ‘Panorama’ is practically a jazzy interlude band intermission until the astral outro.
“Crying in a suit and tie,” she sings through a vocoder on opening track ‘The Outside’, before the punchline comes “But you should see the other guy.”
Lost Weekend is a journey through the last six years of Bridgers life with grief, breakup and new love the themes throughout a triumphant record that first impression caveat – sounds like her best album.
Bridgers plays two nights at the 3Arena in Dublin this November.
Getdown Services – Massive Champion
The second album from Getdown Services, the Bristol duo of Josh Law and Ben Sadler, whose deadpan disco-punk pairs very British, absurdist wit with a real knack for a groove.
It’s the follow-up to their cult 2022 debut Crisps and out via Breakfast Records, Massive Champion spins British childhood and everyday detritus into thirteen tracks of anarchic joy, off the back of a relentless touring run that has turned them into a serious and very silly live draw. There are songs here that sound like Status Quo, Baxter Dury with dashes of synth pop and electro house and there’s one track about very British idea of the public right of way. Fun, loud and lairy for the most party but also some fine softer songs throughout.
Jungle – Sunshine
The fifth album from Jungle, the London group led by Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland with vocalist Lydia Kitto, who have grown from a mysterious production project into one of the biggest modern soul and dance acts in the world. Their 2023 album Volcano earned them a BRIT Award and the runaway hit ‘Back on 74’, turning them into a festival-headlining, arena-filling proposition. Led by the singles ‘Carry On’ and ‘The Wave’, Sunshine leans into exactly the warmth the title promises, and demonstrates a band who have softened into a rhythmic summer soul groove confident in their long-playing focus as opposed to the single-led campaigns that made their names.
God Knows & Godwin – Heihachi Riddim EP
A joint EP from God Knows and his youngest brother Godwin, out on 4 The headz. The Zimbabwean-Irish, Shannon-raised rapper is one of the defining figures in Irish hip-hop, a Choice Music Prize winner with Rusangano Family and, more recently, a solo force in his own right after last year’s debut A Future of the Past. Godwin handles production, and Heihachi Riddim puts the brothers’ chemistry front and centre. This goes hard in the dance.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Alien Metal
King Gizzard’s EDM album? It would appear so. The 28th studio album from King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, the absurdly prolific Australian genre-hoppers is a full-blown techno and rave album. Grown out of the modular-synth experiments of 2023’s The Silver Cord and the band’s recent rave sets, Alien Metal was built from a lengthy Eurorack jam and pushes them further into hard electronic territory than ever. Out on their own p(doom) Records and led by ‘Level 5’, it is one of their boldest swerves yet, which for this band is saying something.
Channel Tres – Enigma POV
The second album from Channel Tres, the Compton producer, rapper and singer whose slinky fusion of West Coast rap and Detroit- and Chicago-indebted house has made him among the most distinctive figures in modern dance music.
Enigma POV follows a hard reset: after 2024’s Head Rush he was dropped by his major label and parted ways with his management, retreating to Topanga Canyon to regroup and question whether he still had it. The answer is a defiant, dancefloor-facing record made on his own terms and released through his own Alta Music. He takes it on the road on the Enigma Tour from later this month.
L’Rain – fata morgana
The fourth album from L’Rain, the project of the Brooklyn musician, composer and curator Taja Cheek, out via Mexican Summer, and among the most adventurous voices in contemporary experimental pop. fata morgana completes a four-record arc that runs through 2021’s Fatigue and 2023’s I Killed Your Dog, folding dancehall, gospel, tape collage and crunching rock into a singular left-field record arc.
The Womack Sisters – The Womack Sisters
The self-titled album from The Womack Sisters, descendants of the Womack and Cooke musical dynasties, who carry that extraordinary soul lineage into a contemporary blend of R&B, funk and gospel-tinged harmony. Their voices lock together with the kind of family blend that cannot be taught, and the record is a warm, assured introduction.
Open Mike Eagle & Kenny Segal – DOOMED!
The first full-length collaboration between the art-rap mainstay Open Mike Eagle and the producer Kenny Segal, out via billy woods’ Backwoodz Studioz. Friends and occasional collaborators for nearly 20 years, the pair have finally built a whole body of work together: a 15-track break-up concept album, wry and absurdist, framed as rap songs about a relationship that ends in every possible universe. Lead single ‘Unfinished Concrete Initials’ features Hemlock Ernst, the rap alias of Future Islands’ Samuel T. Herring, with billy woods guesting elsewhere. Open Mike Eagle’s conversational wit over Segal’s warm, off-kilter beats makes for a real highlight of the week in hip-hop.
James Ellis Ford – Lost in Another World
The second solo album from James Ellis Ford, among the most in-demand producers in British music, whether as half of Simian Mobile Disco or behind the boards for Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Pulp and Fontaines D.C. Out on Domino, Lost in Another World was written and recorded in just over two weeks in early 2025, on a hospital ward between rounds of chemotherapy after Ford was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. By his own account the result is often surprisingly bright and hopeful, a pep talk to himself set to music, and the follow-up to 2023’s Mercury-nominated The Hum is all the more affecting for it.
Sweeping Promises – You Say I Romanticize
The new album from Sweeping Promises, the Kansas duo of Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug, whose wiry, DIY post-punk is recorded with a distinctive single-mic technique that gives it a bracing, live-in-the-room snap. After the widely loved Hunger for a Way Out and Good Living Is Coming For You, You Say I Romanticize sharpens the formula further.
Ultras – I Love Where I’m From
The debut album from Ultras, the Dublin indie rock five-piece is built on Irish pride, community, football and faith. here I’m From is produced by David Virgin, Rohan Healy and Al Quiff at Beardfire Music and led by recent single ‘Irish Sun’,
‘’I Love Where I’m From’’ is a celebration of life in Ireland in 2026. A kaleidoscope of sunshine, lashing rain, fears, tears and faith, tricolours, keep-ups, 99’s and greener grass, pints, pals and sandy crisp sandwiches. Five mates taking it one day at a time with an attitude of gratitude, making the best, come what may, making
They launch it with an in-store at Spindizzy Records today and a set at the Beardfire Festival in the Workman’s Club, before Whelan’s on September 20th.
Rodney Owl – Loneliness Is Contagious
The third album from Rodney Owl, the recording name of songwriter Mark McConville, a Lurgan, Co. Armagh native based in Galway since the late 1990s. Following Truth Is Broken (2023) , Loneliness Is Contagious is a warm, folksy and literate set of guitar-picked songs, a sound that has drawn comparisons to Lambchop, early R.E.M. and Nick Drake.
Recorded at Night Owl Studios in Galway and reckoning with immortality, memory, grief and speaking your own mind, it arrives with a pointed stance: no generative AI was used in its making, and it is out on every platform except Spotify.
A Tribute To Smashing Pumpkins: Sending Hearts To All My Dearies
A various-artists tribute compilation gathering reworkings of Smashing Pumpkins songs. The project has been personally endorsed by Billy Corgan, who also approved the album’s title, taken from a lyric in the band’s beloved Siamese Dream track ‘Mayonaise’.
Tribute records live or die on the imagination of the reinterpretations, and this one was kicks off with a Tame Impala cover of ‘Hummer’ alongside covers by Barns Courtney, Alice Glass, Yonaka, The Midnight, Meg Myers and Carpenter Brut. This is a curio.
Ollnóva – A Glimpse of the System live album
A live album from Ollnóva, a new jazz-rock band from Dublin, released alongside a music video of the 17-minute release.
A Glimpse of the System is a live musical performance filmed in the Bunker. It consists of 3 songs from our album in the works; “Vistas of the System”. Each song describes a fantastical feature somewhere in our solar system. From the hot, steamy atmosphere of Venusian Skies, to the deep stormy rage of Great Red Spot, finishing on the strange other-worldliness of Oort Cloud Interlude, this 17 minute spectacle is a sci-fi adventure for the ears.
Also released this week
- Carly Simon – Comes In Waves
- DjRUM – I Wander EP
- Everything Is Recorded – Cut Off Your Nose EP
- Fatboi Sharif & E L U C I D – Invasion Body Camera
- Hovvdy – Big World
- Icona Pop – Ritual
- Laura Veirs – Temple Songs
- Ninajirachi & Frost Children- deadAir Transmission no. 16: Ninajirachi & Frost Children
- Rochelle Jordan – Disc 1
- The Afghan Whigs – Soft Control
- The Trip – Clubdance2026 II EP
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.
