Logic1000 leads the week with Confirmation!, a second album that takes her well beyond the dancefloor into trip-hop, big beat and synth-pop, with guests including Christine and the Queens and Jam City. Electronic music runs right through this week: Max Cooper’s fabric presents mix splices 30 years of club music into edits and bootlegs, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith pushes her synths through 174bpm breakbeats, Zora Jones returns after six years with a heartbreak album, and The Koreatown Oddity returns on Stones Throw.
From Ireland: Vaticanjail’s breakup EP, Laurie Shaw’s South Kerry album that comes with its own board game, a third album about friendship and growing older from Cork and Clare trio Diveboy, PureGrand’s synth-pop diary, The Dying Seconds’ streaming-free fourth album and a farewell from Kodaline.
Elsewhere, Swans sign off their “Big Sound” era with a two-and-a-half-hour live farewell from Berlin, Deerhoof tell the story of the Earth from the Sun’s point of view, Fat Dog go full rave, Susanne Sundfør strips back to voice and church organ and Greg Freeman stretches out on a double album. There’s also new music from Clutter, Johnny Marr, Blossoms, Master Peace, Emily A. Sprague, The Fall and Jeremy Cunningham. It’s also Bandcamp Friday, so today’s the day to buy direct.
Nialler9 keeps a rolling list of Irish album releases for 2026.
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Logic1000 – Confirmation!
The second album from Samantha Poulter, the Sydney-born, Berlin-based DJ and producer, follows her 2024 debut Mother and her DJ-Kicks mix. It widens the frame beyond the dancefloor into trip-hop, big beat, 80s synth-pop and indie.
The guest list includes Christine and the Queens, yunè pinku, FAUZIA, Tiffi M and Kučka, who sings on lead single ‘All In For You’. ‘Jersey’ with Jam City is, in her words, “meant to be played full volume in a car.” Out on Therapy / Because Music.
Max Cooper – fabric presents Max Cooper
The Belfast-born producer’s entry in the long-running fabric presents series pulls together more than 30 years of his relationship with club music, moving through techno, IDM, breakbeat, ambient and neo-classical, from 90s classics to current electronic music.
Rather than a straight DJ mix, Cooper reworks many of the tracks into edits and bootleg-style hybrids, layering familiar sounds over heavy club rhythms. It’s also the first release in fabric’s history available in Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos. Lead tracks are ‘Flecks’, a drum and bass collaboration with LSB, and his remix of Bredren’s ‘Hash’. Out on fabric Records.
Zora Jones – 50 Bullets To The Heart
The Barcelona-based Austrian producer’s first album in six years follows 2020’s Ten Billion Angels, and arrives on her new label Bellyfat after an extended pause and a shift away from Fractal Fantasy, the audiovisual platform she co-founded with Sinjin Hawke.
Written in the wake of heartbreak, it moves between tenderness and force across her mix of footwork, deconstructed club and neoperreo. Of the title track she says: “’50 Bullets’ to me is pain turned into power… It’s about finally seeing things clearly and reclaiming my voice.”
The Koreatown Oddity – Purdy
The LA rapper and producer’s new album for Stones Throw is full of reflections on fatherhood and everyday absurdities, as he describes it, “the artist inside the painting and the observer of the painting while the painting is being painted.”
Fifteen tracks with titles like ‘Ragu & Prego’ and ‘Halloumi & Watermelon’, guests including Gary Wilson, and final single ‘Astro Turf’, which compares tending a lawn to surviving the music industry.
Vaticanjail – this could have been a text EP
The new seven-track EP from Vaticanjail, the Dublin-based Chilean producer, was made during a real breakup in her life. this could have been a text captures the point in a relationship where affection turns to affliction, and it’s no typical breakup record: it’s an electro-pop, manic dissection of a relationship ending, tracing the path from attachment through resentment and indifference to the freedom of finding yourself again on your own.
Lead single ‘BUBU’ is the frenzy before the realisation that a person’s whole emotional world is about to shift. Built on her signature magical realism and absurd sampling, its racing drums and bass lines make it feel like a party, relief through hedonism when we’re not ready to face what’s falling apart. ‘DVSL’ (Double Vodka Soda Lime) is the hyper-pop rebirth that follows: high bpm, bouncy leads and the euphoria of a girl who no longer wants to be in her relationship reclaiming her own worth.
The rollout included a filmed five-hour tramp stamp session as a piece of performance art.
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Ruin: It’s Not Just Music
After two albums last year, the ambient-leaning Gush and the orchestral Thoughts On The Future, the Buchla wizard has made a hard left turn. Inspired by jungle and drum and bass, Ruin fractures breakbeats through her synthesis at 174bpm.
“I realised I needed to make something confrontational, almost like sonic combat,” she says. It’s the first release on Someone Special, the label she co-founded with James Daniel.
Deerhoof – Divine Schism
A year and a half after Noble and Godlike in Ruin, Deerhoof have made what they call a sci-fi oratorio: the story of the Earth told from the perspective of the Sun, pairing some of their rawest crust-core with the richest orchestral textures they’ve put on record.
It’s their first fully self-released album, made with Joyful Noise’s blessing and recorded partly at home and partly at Russian Recording with Mike Bridavsky. It’s not on streaming services of course: physical copies are a tour-only LP and CD, and digital is on Bandcamp only.
Fat Dog – Cancel Me (I’m Tired)
The South London seven-piece follow 2024’s WOOF. with a second album made with producer Oli Bayston (Kelly Lee Owens, mary in the junkyard), pushing them further from dance-punk towards rave-rock. The title track was inspired by John Lennon’s ‘How Do You Sleep?’ and frontman Joe Love’s idea of Altın Gün on a club floor.
Lyrically it runs from addiction and family (‘Call It What You Want’) to a doomed relationship (‘Shit Love’), aliens, AI and H&M, with country and psych detours along the way. A UK and European headline tour, including Dublin, follows the release.
Laurie Shaw – Born In The G.A.A.
Six months after Felted Fruit vi, the Wirral-born, Kerry-based bedroom pop recordist is back with an album about small-town politics and rural dramas in and around South Kerry. It folds 80s pop rock, stuttering electronics and dreamy synth together, with Kate Bush, Springsteen and Cate Le Bon in the mix.
Part of it was recorded at YAWN Studios in West Kirby, co-produced by Bill Ryder-Jones, who adds backing vocals, guitar and piano. The vinyl comes with a board game of the same name on the back, complete with player cards, pawns, dice and a betting notebook holding the lyrics. Launches at Plugd Records, Cork tonight and Prim’s Bookshop, Kinsale on Sunday, backed by the Shandon Street Band.
The Dying Seconds – Feast
The fourth album from Irish band The Dying Seconds, who say it’s the record they’re proudest of, built on their shared experience as a “found family.” In a principled move, they’re keeping Feast off streaming platforms entirely, arguing the model is unsustainable for artists and cheapens discovery for listeners. It’s on Bandcamp, and free to download from their website. It’s a collection of driving indie, alternative rock and pop songcraft with touches of Talking Heads, Bell X1 and Wild Beasts.
PureGrand – An Hour of Forever
Dublin musician and filmmaker Luke Faulkner’s second album as PureGrand follows 2022’s False Starts. He went on hiatus after that record and wasn’t sure he’d come back, but songwriting turned out to be how he makes sense of things. Made entirely by Faulkner at home over four years, it swaps the nostalgia of the debut for a diary of entering your 30s, apathy and learning to carry on when the future looks different to how you pictured it.
The sound runs from Pet Shop Boys and Patrick Cowley to the structures of Motown and Bacharach. ‘Seven Up’ was a hi-NRG opener for the campaign, and new single ‘Not In The Mood’ started life as a ballad before a four-to-the-floor beat and staccato strings turned it into disco, with a self-made video nodding to Bond title sequences and Saul Bass.
DRM – The Delphi Coracle
Cult Dublin label Apartment Records returns after a three-year hiatus to mark its 15th anniversary with the debut album from Dublin musician and producer DRM, its most expansive solo release yet. The Delphi Coracle is a hard-to-pin-down mix of electro-acoustic experiments and home-made modulated electronics: celestial drones and cosmic, stepping electro wrapped around breakbeats and glitchy hypnosis. The album takes its inspiration from John Brunner’s sci-fi novel The Shockwave Rider. Out on tape and digital, with the tape including an exclusive mix of the album by Galway DJ Lolz.
Swans – Newly Sentient Being
Michael Gira’s Swans recorded the final concert of their 2010 to 2025 “Big Sound” era in Berlin last November, and this is it in full: five pieces across two and a half hours, including a lot of material never recorded anywhere else, plus a DVD of the show directed by Marco Porsia and Peter Harton.
It’s a goodbye to this line-up of Gira, Norman Westberg, Kristof Hahn, Dana Schechter, Larry Mullins, Phil Puleo and Christopher Pravdica, with ‘Newly Sentient Being’ itself running past 50 minutes. Gira describes the music at its peak as “a raging, sentient autonomous beast that played us.” Out on Young God and Mute.
Diveboy – In Orbit
The third album from the Cork and Clare trio of Tony O’Donovan, Peter Piggott and Cian Doherty, and their first since changing their name from The Burma. Produced by Ruadhrí Cushnan, In Orbit is about growing older without growing apart: the friendships that take more effort as adulthood kicks in, and the nights in the pub where it all picks up exactly where it left off.
‘Chosen Ones’ channels the anthems of the band’s youth, while ‘Built-In Heartbreak’ takes its title from a phrase Bob Dylan used on a radio show. Album launch at Whelan’s, Dublin tonight, with Cork shows at Coughlans (November 6th) and Sirius Arts Centre (November 20th) to come.
Blossoms – Songs From The Wedding Cake
The Stockport band’s sixth album takes its title from the local nickname for the town’s Victorian town hall, where Tom Ogden got married. It’s a record about the ordinary everyday of married life, as heard on ‘Joke About Divorce’ and ‘Husband’, the latter with a video in which Jack O’Connell makes a cottage pie from start to finish.
Recorded live to tape with Shawn Lee of Young Gun Silver Fox, it leans into 80s funk and disco, with Kid Creole among the reference points and Declan McKenna guesting on ‘Additional Driver’. Out on ODD SK / Distiller, with a Dublin date at the 3Olympia Theatre on November 24th.
Master Peace – if i don’t love you, who will ?
The second album from Peace Okezie, the South East London-raised artist who grew up with Skepta and Giggs in his brother’s headphones and The Kooks, Bloc Party and Vampire Weekend in his own. His 2024 debut How To Make A Master Peace won him an Ivor Novello Rising Star award and support slots with Franz Ferdinand and The Streets, and this year’s Stupid Kids EP got more personal.
This one moves between indie, punk, rap and R&B to explore young romance in all its forms, from lovelorn to bolshy. Singles include ‘Love Hate’ with Thomas Day, ‘ONE of ONE’, ‘sucker punch !’ and ‘act like you know ?’ with Muni Long. Out on Big Family Music.
Clutter – Sugar Rush
The debut album from the Swedish four-piece follows their Clutter Loves You EP and was recorded with producer Ove Jerndal at his family home in rural Sweden. It’s louder and heavier than before, moving from riot grrrl thrash and grunge fuzz to lo-fi ballads across ten tracks like ‘Grease Baby’ and ‘Everything Suxx’.
Written between studies, part-time jobs and touring, it’s about becoming an adult on your own terms. Out on PNKSLM.
Emily A. Sprague – Cyano
The Florist songwriter’s solo synth work takes a new turn on her fifth solo album: she sings on it. Every sound on Cyano is synthesised, mostly on her Eurorack, with no samples or acoustic instruments. The record grew out of an interest in cyanotype photography and the botanical images of Anna Atkins, which led Sprague to imagine a planet whose inhabitants are relearning how to express emotion. It follows last year’s Cloud Time and is out on RVNG Intl.
The Fall – Post Script
Billed as the final Fall studio album, Post Script sets nine unreleased Mark E. Smith vocals to music made after his death by Fall associates Ed Blaney and Simon Archer. Not everyone is on board: Smith’s last partner and manager Pamela Vander maintains he considered 2017’s New Facts Emerge the final album.
Susanne Sundfør – Revelations of Divine Love
The Norwegian artist’s eighth album is her most stripped back: just her voice and a church pipe organ, recorded live at Bragernes Church in Drammen with British organist and pianist Kit Downes, who co-wrote the music. The lyrics come from Grace Warrack’s 1901 translation of 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich, the first known book written in English by a woman.
Since 2023’s blómi, Sundfør has had two children and moved to the countryside. She wanted the opposite of the usual booming organ record: “soft, whispered, as understated as possible.” Lead track ‘I It Am’ sets the tone. Out on Bella Union.
Greg Freeman – All Set The Bone
The third album from Greg Freeman, the Vermont songwriter whose last record Burnover turned a cult following into something much bigger. This one is a 70-minute double LP on Transgressive, made after he left his longtime home of Burlington and quit odd jobs as a cemetery landscaper and line cook to do music full-time.
Pre-Good News Modest Mouse and early Pavement are in there, with Fugazi and Unwound colouring the heavier moments like ‘Hail Mary’. Opener ‘Cahokia’ takes its name from the ancient Indigenous mounds on the Mississippi, and the record is full of unsettled characters: a voter buried in credit card debt, a town of bent necks. Freeman puts it simply: “Every album should scare you.” A tour follows in February.
Johnny Marr – The Age Of Everything
Marr’s fifth solo album and the follow-up to 2022’s Fever Dreams Pts 1-4. It was written in London, developed live on the road across the East Coast of North America and recorded in Manchester. He calls it his most cathartic record, with the title a nod to the overwhelm of the moment: “it’s not necessarily a negative statement.”
Ten songs, led by ‘Spin’ and the Shakespeare-inspired ‘Ophelia’, ahead of his biggest solo headline show yet at Wembley Arena later this month. Out on BMG.
Jeremy Cunningham – Passing Fires
A new album from drummer and composer Jeremy Cunningham on Northern Spy, moving between jazz, alternative and psych. Single ‘To The Sky’ features Makaya McCraven and Sen Morimoto.
Also out today
- Jon Hassell – Music Is Invisible
- Kate Bollinger – Shop Girl EP
- Kodaline – We Were Only Young
- Lustmord Lombardo (Lustmord and Dave Lombardo) – The Pulse of Atoms
- Meshell Ndegeocello – Synonym
- Steve Reich – Recordings on ECM
- Stevie Wonder – Songs In The Key Of Life (The EP)
- Swervedriver – Raise (35th Anniversary Edition)
- The Beatles – Rubber Soul (Special Edition)
- Victoria Monét – Frequency of Love
- Wasps vs Humans – The Day Homo Sapiens Destroyed the Earth
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.
