Our recommended new album releases this week, featuring words on records from Broken Social Scene, Lykke Li, MUNA, Max Cooper and more.
Nialler9 keeps a rolling list of Irish album releases for 2026.
New Albums and Releases
New Albums + EPs
Broken Social Scene return with their first new album in nine years, reuniting with producer David Newfeld for the first time in two decades. Lemoncello return with the long-awaited follow-up to their critically acclaimed debut. London Windmill Scene five-piece 1000 Rabbits release their debut EP. Loraine James returns to Hyperdub with her “IDM popstar album.” Little Simz drops a surprise four-track EP. Aldous Harding releases her fifth album on 4AD. Lykke Li releases what she has framed as her sixth and final studio album. MUNA deliver their fourth on Saddest Factory and Dead Oceans. . Olof Dreijer of The Knife releases his debut solo album. Cola release their third on Fire Talk. Mick Flannery delivers a 22-track double album drawn from his stage musical, with Anaïs Mitchell, Lisa Hannigan, Susan O’Neill, Jenn Grant, Jeffrey Martin and Marybeth O’Mahony all involved. Action Bronson goes to Planet Frog….
Album of the week:
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 – horns, guitars, voices, electronics layered into a lattice – but melody stays to the fore. “In 2026, you’re going to see a lot of resurgence of people going back to the roots of who they are,” Drew has said. “Things in their lifetime have gotten quite lost. I think we’ve let each other down, and I think it’s art that always tries to prevail and tries to get us back on track.”
Dublin show with Metric and Stars is also confirmed.
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.
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 by all early accounts another step forward.
Little Simz – Sugar Girl EP (AWAL)
A surprise four-track EP from the North London rapper. Her first new music since last year’s sixth album Lotus, which arrived in June 2025. Sugar Girl follows the pattern set by Drop 7 in 2024 – a short, focused project sitting between full-length statements. Four eclectic tracks featuring JT, DEELA, and 070 Shake on the dreamy finale ‘Telephone’. Each one different from the next; each one unmistakably Simz.
Loraine James – Detached From The Rest Of You (Hyperdub)
The fourth solo album from the South London IDM producer and her fifth on Hyperdub, following 2023’s Gentle Confrontation. James half-jokingly calls this her “IDM popstar album” – her vocals are higher in the mix than ever before, the song forms more conventional, the production stripped to the bone in the lineage of Aoki Takamasa, Ryoji Ikeda and the “clicks and cuts” era of early-2000s electronic music. The shift partly came from producing 2025’s Clandestine EP with singer Anysia Kym, which gave James the experience of a more pop-shaped setting and the tools to channel her own ideas into more direct forms.
Lead single ‘In a Rut’ is a duet with New York-based artist Sydney Spann. Tirzah appears on ‘Habits and Patterns’ . Low’s Alan Sparhawk is on ‘Peak Again’ with drums by Jason McGerr. Cibo Matto’s Miho Hatori takes ‘Flatline’. Anysia Kym is on ‘Score’. Le3 bLACK and Fyn Dobson appear on the closer ‘Ending Us All’.
Lykke Li – The Afterparty (Neon Gold Records)
The Swedish singer-songwriter has framed this as her sixth and final studio album. Recorded in Stockholm with a 17-piece orchestra, produced by Björn Yttling, Dave Sitek, Rick Nowels and Lykke Li herself. The follow-up to 2022’s Eyeye was largely written in Los Angeles in what she describes as her “existential era” – an album about the lower self, about revenge, shame, despair, and the darker parts of the psyche rather than the climb toward a higher one. To match that, the sound is deliberately heightened: dramatic orchestral arrangements pushed against unconventional sonic choices that she has described, memorably, as “apocalyptic bongos.”
Lead single ‘Lucky Again’ samples composer Max Richter and sets the tone – orchestral, dread-tinted, far from the indie-pop she emerged with in the late 2000s. ‘Knife in the Heart’ and ‘Sick of Love’ followed in March and April. If this really is the last one, it is an ending on her own terms.
MUNA – Dancing on the Wall (Saddest Factory Records / Dead Oceans)
The fourth studio album from the LA indie-pop trio of Katie Gavin, Naomi McPherson and Josette Maskin. 13 tracks, self-produced. The album was previewed by three singles – the title track in February, ‘So What’ in March, and ‘Wannabeher’ in April – alongside a Bandcamp-only release of ‘Big Stick’ with proceeds going to Pal Humanity. After the breakthrough self-titled record on Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory label, MUNA arrive here as one of the most reliable indie-pop bands working: queer joy, ear-worm choruses, dancefloor catharsis and emotionally raw lyrics in equal measure.
Olof Dreijer – Loud Bloom (DH2)
The debut solo album from Olof Dreijer, one half of the legendary Swedish electronic duo The Knife, on Dirty Hit’s electronic sublabel DH2. Fourteen tracks named almost entirely after flowers and plants – Rosa Rugosa, Plastic Camelia, Cassia, Iris, Laurel, Verbena, Coral, Lantana, Shisandra. The album collects work from Dreijer’s recent EPs on Dekmantel, AD 93 and Hessle Audio alongside new material, and explores joy and protest in equal measure, taking inspiration from Nigerian author Akwaeke Emezi and their ability to make progressive themes feel accessible.
To challenge what he describes as white, male and Western hegemony in club music, Dreijer collaborates with Sudanese singer MaMan, South African MC Toya Delazy and Colombian artist Diva Cruz. The result toys with the tension between pure pleasure music and his unrelenting thirst for the new: the bones of a Chicago house track or a classic drum machine hit, but pulled into shapes you haven’t quite heard before.
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. 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. The album was announced via a video clip in which Bronson appeared as a contestant on Wheel of Fortune alongside Ryan Seacrest and Vanna White, with a magical dolphin in the audience helping him solve the puzzle. Of course.
Max Cooper – Feeling Is Structure (Mesh)
The new album from the Belfast-born electronic composer, multi-disciplinary artist, label founder and former scientist, on his own Mesh label. Ten tracks of spatial audio-visual works exploring the relationship between physical form and human emotion – how structure in sound, architecture, biology and art shapes the way we feel. Cooper has built a career out of music that operates at this exact intersection of science, philosophy and immersive sound design, and this is another addition to that catalogue.
The full work is designed to be experienced spatially, with accompanying visual pieces – another step in Cooper’s ongoing project of treating electronic composition as something more than pure aural experience.
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.
Cola – Cost of Living Adjustment (Fire Talk)
The third album from the Montreal trio of Tim Darcy (vocals/guitar, formerly of Ought), Ben Stidworthy (bass) and Evan Cartwright (percussion). The title is the band’s acronym for itself reframed: C.O.L.A. is also “a fitting conceptual framework for the band’s third record,” they say – a record that considers, among other things, “socialism vs. hell,” the rolling of the dice of life, and the eerie pangs that nostalgia can provoke.
Insufficient Funs – Chunk (Diatribe Records)
The debut album from the Ireland/Belgium-based avant-jazz and improv duo of drummer-composer Matthew Jacobson (Ensemble Ériu, ReDiviDeR) and bass saxophonist Sam Comerford (Umbra, AERIE) – two of the preeminent figures in Ireland’s creative and improvised music scene. Available digitally and as a bespoke set of dice in a satin pouch.
The duo formed out of Jacobson’s 2016 Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Musician-in-Residence award and have spent the decade since establishing themselves on the European improv circuit. The press release reaches for Ed Blackwell and Don Cherry, Eric Dolphy, but also Autechre, Nirvana and Radiohead in the atmospheres they generate. Comerford’s 1936 bass saxophone shifts seamlessly from anchoring grooves to splintered textures while Jacobson’s percussion sustains both structure and momentum. Two standards make it onto the record – ‘The Song Is You’ (Jerome Kern) and ‘Tea For Two’ (Vincent Youmans) – alongside Jacobson’s own compositions, used in the Coltrane sense as starting points to be unravelled. Singles ‘RoJa’ (with hand-drawn animation by Melissa Culhane) and the title track ‘Chunk’ (video by Louise Gaffney) preceded the album. Launch performance was at New Music Dublin on April 18th.
Caroline Keane – Rise
The second album from the West Kerry concertina player and her first fully interdisciplinary work – bringing together music, film, visual art and design. Filmmaker Michael Kelly unifies the visual world; artist Karen Sherwood paints the album’s front cover in real time in the video for ‘Mon Père Vit Dans Les Étoiles’, set against a West Kerry sunrise and the Atlantic shoreline. That track, composed by Sébastien Lagrange, features Steve Cooney and Keane’s mother Cecelia Keane on a duet about the father she lost when she was young: “Playing this piece with my mother brings that connection directly into the music. It feels like the project coming full circle.”
Cooney’s presence runs throughout the record, but it is Keane’s playing that leads decisively – direct, grounded, deliberate. The album builds on ideas first heard in her earlier ‘Three Sisters’, inspired by the West Kerry landscape and the generations of women connected to it; Rise is dedicated to her mother and grandmother. “Becoming a mother made me more certain of my voice. There’s less time, so the work has to matter.” Live: The Commercial Bar Limerick (May 23rd), Whelan’s Dublin (August 13th), The Crane Galway (October 16th), Return to London Festival (October 25th), Ennis Trad Festival (November 5-9th).
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. The studio sound leans on tape effects, analogue warmth and live-recorded feel – an ear pointed firmly at the soul and rock classics of the 1960s.
The follow-up to 2024’s Coloured In Full, recorded in the band’s own barn studio with minimal overdubbing, with New York-based singer Paul Spring contributing additional vocals to lead single ‘Do You Really Want Me’ – a song about having a friend who doesn’t get you and pretty much having to break up with them. Reference points span The Leon Michels Affair, Holy Hive, Khruangbin, Menahan Street Band, Sharon Jones, Lee Fields and Brad Stank, with electronic touches from St. Germain, Bonobo and Jitwam in the mix. Gigs in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Limerick.
silk – Auralux (Blowtorch Records)
The debut mini-album from Galway noise-pop band silk, out yesterday on the West coast Irish independent Blowtorch Records. Pressed on limited edition purple vinyl with gold, yellow and white splatter, with a one-sided printed insert. A blend of noise and pop – ringing guitars and walls of melody, each play seeing a different track shine.
Various Artists – Bibliotek: UFO (Evenings & Weekends)
The launch of a new compilation series from Dublin label Evenings & Weekends, paying homage to the golden age of library records, mood music and cinematic soundtracks – the loose first volume themed around UFOs, alien abductions, science fiction and deep space mystery. The hook: in November 2018, several commercial pilots flying over County Kerry reported a bright object travelling at extreme speed alongside their aircraft before vanishing. Ireland’s aviation authorities logged and investigated the incident through standard procedure. The truth, as ever, is out there.
14 tracks drift through 1970s soundtracks and library records, psychedelic breaks, soul, dub and jazz, synth-heavy kosmische, electro transmissions in the lineage of Kraftwerk, Drexciya and Boards of Canada, exotica and 1950s experimental rock’n’roll, and studio-as-instrument production techniques inspired by Joe Meek, Lee Scratch Perry and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
1000 Rabbits – Are We Friends Yet? EP (Young Recordings)
The debut EP from London five-piece 1000 Rabbits (formerly Rabbitfoot), the latest band to emerge from the Windmill Scene that gave us Black Country, New Road, Black Midi, Caroline and Jockstrap. Six tracks digital today on Young Recordings, with vinyl following on July 24th. The EP gathers the previously released singles ‘Virgin Soil’ and ‘Rubik’s Cube’ alongside four further tracks (‘Bear Hunt’, ‘Cinema Aisle’, ‘White Horse’ and closer ‘Spring Cleaning’), assembled across two years of rehearsal rooms, living rooms and stages. Each one moulded through repeated live performance.
The title comes from a phrase frontman River asks the audience near the end of ‘Spring Cleaning’, which closes both the EP and every set the band play.
Leevy – Baile Mhúirne or The Soldiers March the Paps of Anú
The debut album from the West Cork five-piece, led by singer-songwriter Amhlaíbh McSweeney with Darren Faul (drums), Johno Kool (lead guitar), Booby Wolfe (banjo, mandolin) and Diarmuid Wolfe (bass). The record was made in their home area of the Múscraí Gaeltacht and Kickstarter-funded by their following. Thirteen tracks of folk-rock poetry, raucous punk delivery and Irish traditional undertones – songs that can roar with pounding drums, banjos, whistles and heavy guitars or sway with beautiful folk arrangements and harmonies that tie the band’s raucous live show back to tradition.
From tales of sacrificial burnings at wakes to forlorn songs of loss and the death of the natural world, Baile Mhúirne dances around the threshold of this world and the next. “There is rhythm in the sadness; there is rhythm in the sod.” Lead single ‘Burn the Casket’ is a rural punk ballad full of manic energy and lyrical grotesquery, built on a driving rhythm section, gritty electric guitars, and frantic mandolin and whistles that sound pulled straight out of an other-worldly céilí. Album launch at Levis’ Cornerhouse, Ballydehob on May 9th, with an Irish tour to follow.
Scustin – The Lock-In EP
The follow-up EP from the Irish post-funk quartet, after their September 2025 debut album Confessions of a Pub Talker – a concept piece that told the story of Larry, a barman in his mid-to-late 20s navigating the social and economic uncertainties of Irish life. Both records are produced by Richie Kennedy at Black Mountain Studios. The band’s self-coined genre, “post-funk,” comes from a sound built by imagining what would happen if Blindboy, Mike Skinner and Jamiroquai went for a boozy night out in Bray and wrote an album about it.
Lead single ‘Dodgy Box Pyramid Scheme’ was the satirical opening salvo. Follow-up ‘Scustinism’ is the band’s self-declared manifesto on Irish identity – tackling head-on what frontman Eddie describes as the “risk of Irishness becoming commodified and turned into cultural capital.” The track interrogates and dismantles “gift shop” Irishness in favour of something more fluid, surreal and authentic. “It’s not about splitting the ‘G’ or Aran sweaters, it’s about humour, honesty, defiance and sincerity.”
Also released this week
- 1-800 Girls – LOVE
- Alabaster DePlume – Dear Children of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue EP
- Deb Never – ARCADE
- Elder Island – Hello Baby Okay
- Girli – it’s just my opinion
- Kasper Bjørke Quartet – Passages In Time
- Laurie Anderson, Sex Mob – Let X = X
- Linda Perry – Let It Die Here
- sadie – Better Angels
- Thaiboy Digital & swedm® – Paradise
- The Lemon Twigs – Look For Your Mind!
- TYGAPAW – Together You Gather All Power Applied Worldwide
Previous New Albums features:
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.
