Nialler9 keeps a rolling list of Irish album releases for 2026.
New Albums and Releases
New Albums + EPs
Album of the week:
Vince Staples – Cry Baby
The seventh album from the Long Beach rapper, picking up where 2024’s Dark Times left off. Vince Staples remains one of the smartest, driest and most quietly experimental voices in mainstream hip-hop, his production choices and conceptual framings always a few moves ahead of the conversation.
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Cry Baby is a politically-charged album drawing on hip-hop, funk, soul and rock sounds with a live band backdrop. ‘The Big Bad Wolf’ features a Slick Rick sample and the songs are informed by racial and class injustice. So far, this sounds like a vital American rap record of 2026.
Thomas Bangalter – Mirage – Ballet for 16 Dancers
The new long-form classical-leaning work from the former Daft Punk co-founder, following his 2023 ballet score Mythologies. Mirage – Ballet for 16 Dancers is another collaboration with the contemporary classical world, an orchestral score for a new ballet. Bangalter’s post-Daft Punk phase has been unwavering in its commitment to a different kind of music-making apart from that whole Fred Again B2B..
Loah – Materia Medica
The second album from Sallay Garnett, LOAH, the Sierra Leonean-Irish singer-songwriter whose self-coined “ArtSoul” sound brings together jazz phrasing, alt-pop production and a vocal as central as anything in current Irish music. Materia Medica is her long-awaited debut album five years in the making.
The title for the record comes from an ancient pharmacology textbook about healing plants. Materia Medica draws on her friends and collaborators – it was co-produced with Brian Dillon (of Meltybrains? and The Line) and Daniel Forde. Alongside a song cowritten with Eoin French of Talos, guests include Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu, Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, her sister Fehdah, Gambian kora player Suntou Susso, harpist Allanah Thornbourgh, producer Ben Bix (Meltybrains?), drummer Dylan Lynch (Soda Blonde, Little Green Cars), and the Crash Ensemble amongst other musicians and producers, along with samples of 16th century lute music and Rachmaninoff to more contemporary sounds like 808 and Afrobeats.
“The ambition was to create a hypermodern body of work that sonically exemplifies the changing definition of what Irishness is, what femininity is and indeed what musical ‘genre’ is and its flexibility in the modern context. We have many excellent producers and musicians on this album – it is a collage of sound!
One of the earliest themes was around musical identity, ancient and modern – there are instruments such as kora (the ancient African harp), lavta (an ancient Mediterranean lute-like instrument), samples from 16th century lute music, Rachmaninoff, as well as 808 and Afrobeats! Other themes emerged – modern Irish womanhood, love, bereavement, spirituality, all of which are explored through the lens of an individual raised in two cultures.
We are in a dynamic and challenging world full of uncertainty. I see any act of creation at this time as raising the hope for an enlightened and unified approach to how we run our nation, and indeed how we run our planet. It is within this stirring context that I endeavoured to fuse seemingly disparate sonic and cultural identities to state my first case in album form as a unique Irish creator.”
Modest Mouse – An Eraser and a Maze
The new album from Modest Mouse, their first since 2021’s The Golden Casket and the band’s first album since the death of founding drummer Jeremiah Green in 2022. It is also the first to feature new members Simon O’Connor (guitar), Damon Cox (drums) and Keith Karman (keyboards).
Isaac Brock’s long-running project remains one of the more singular American rock institutions of the last 30 years, somehow holding together the woodsmoke-and-broken-glass sound of their early Up Records years and the wider scope they grew into around Good News for People Who Love Bad News. An Eraser and a Maze is the kind of record only Modest Mouse make: paranoid, melodic, unsettled, deeply human.
DJ Seinfeld – If This Is It
The new album from Armand Jakobsson, the Swedish producer who emerged in the mid-2010s as one of the most affecting voices in the so-called lo-fi house wave and has since grown into a full-bodied dance producer with a real songwriter’s heart. If This Is It follows his 2023 record Quarter Past Eight, and the early singles suggest more of the bittersweet, melody-led 4/4 he does so well.
Bedouine – Neon Summer Skin
The new album from Bedouine, the project of Aleppo-born, LA-based singer-songwriter Azniv Korkejian, the follow-up to 2021’s Waysides. Bedouine has spent her career building one of the most quietly beautiful catalogues in contemporary folk, her voice and acoustic-led arrangements drawing from the Joni Mitchell and Vashti Bunyan lineage but always rooted in her own warm, conversational songwriting.
Laura Misch – Lithic
The second album from the London-based saxophonist, producer and singer Laura Misch, the follow-up to her acclaimed 2023 debut Sample the Sky. Lithic continues Misch’s quietly singular project of pastoral electronic music built from breath, sax, field recording and patient programming. One of the more emotionally generous voices in current UK electronic.
Navy Blue – Sir Render
The new album from Sage Elsesser’s Navy Blue project, the LA-based rapper, producer, poet and Supreme skateboarder whose lo-fi, jazz-tinted hip-hop has carved out one of the more singular corners of the underground rap conversation. Sir Render extends a run of beloved records including Navy’s Reprise, Songs of Sage and Ways of Knowing, and continues Navy Blue’s wider creative orbit with Earl Sweatshirt, Wiki, MIKE and the loose collective of artists making some of the most patient, internal-sounding rap of the era.
Ka, Earl Sweatshirt, and James Earl Jones all feature.
horsegiirL – NATURE IS HEALING
The debut full-length from horsegiirL, the German house producer and viral DJ persona whose horse-masked sets have become one of the most talked-about live experiences on the dance circuit. NATURE IS HEALING takes the project from internet-novelty curiosity into something more substantial, a full-length statement from one of the more divisive but undeniably entertaining figures in current club culture.
Wallis Bird – I Can See Your House From Here (Bród Records)
The eighth album from Wallis Bird, one of the great singular voices in Irish music for the best part of two decades, lands today on her own Bród Records imprint. I Can See Your House From Here follows 2022’s self-titled record and features her trademark folk, rock, acoustic and pop.
Bird has always made records that feel uncommonly close, her voice and percussive guitar playing pulling listeners directly into the room she’s writing from. I Can See Your House From is “is about personal and collective grief,” namely the genocide in Gaza and the sudden passing of Bird’s close friend, fellow Berlin resident Kevin Ryan – they had lived and worked together, and on Wallis’ own records – 2014’s Architect and 2016’s Home, as well as helping Bird and her partner on a 150-year-old farmhouse they bought. “A lot of these songs were written to help us get through it by singing together.””
ZASKA – Nectar
Wicklow bandleader Max Zaska returns with a friends-and-family collaborative record as is his ilk – with guest turns from Melina Malone, jarjarjr, Mik Pyro, Gemma Dunleavy, J Smith and Shiv.
Previous singles include ‘Play The Game’ and ‘Ever Cross My Mind’ – expect smooth full band soul and jazz with rap and lifting voices.
Lizzo – BITCH
The fifth studio album from Lizzo, her first full-length since 2022’s Special. BITCH has been positioned as a pointed re-statement of intent after a turbulent few years for the artist publicly, with harder-edged production and sharper lyrics signalling a deliberate move away from the major-pop polish of her recent run.
Rosa Walton – Tell Me It’s A Dream (Transgressive Records)
The debut solo album from Rosa Walton, one half of Let’s Eat Grandma and the writer of ‘I Really Want to Stay at Your House’, the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners-launched viral hit.
Tell Me It’s A Dream is her first proper outing as a solo artist, and from the singles it sits in a sharper, more electronic-pop place than her work with Jenny Hollingworth aka Jenny On Holiday in Let’s Eat Grandma, who features here.
Zoh Amba – Eyes Full
A new album from the Tennessee-born, New York-based saxophonist and composer Zoh Amba inspired by their hometown of Kingsport – and the roots, , Appalachian folk, blues and marginalised people left behind by society. Along with their free jazz background and a focus here on the guitar as a primary instrument, Zoh Amba’s voice is more than a little Adrienne Lenker-coded with a more stretched edge.
“I hope these songs touch people’s hearts,” Amba says. “They’re about people who really need to be seen and heard.”
Tara Clerkin Trio – Somewhere Good
The new album from the Bristol-based experimental trio led by Tara Clerkin, following 2023’s much-loved On the Turning Ground. The Trio’s work moves through ambient, jazz, dub-adjacent atmospheres and quietly cracked-open vocal phrases, building one of the most distinctive sounds to come out of the UK underground in recent years. Somewhere Good should further cement their reputation as a band operating entirely on their own terms.
Skrillex – SOMA
The new album from Sonny Moore’s Skrillex, extending the prolific second-life phase he kicked off with 2023’s back-to-back Quest for Fire and Don’t Get Too Close, the former was a particularly fun record.
SOMA continues Skrillex’s omnivorous, genre-promiscuous approach to dance, bass, pop and rap collaborations, the kind of record that touches more corners of contemporary music than most release calendars will manage between them.
Widowspeak – Roses
The new album from the Brooklyn duo of Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas, one of the most quietly consistent indie partnerships of the last decade. Widowspeak make a particular kind of dusk-coloured dream-folk that sits somewhere between Mazzy Star and Hope Sandoval’s Warm Inventions, and Roses looks set to deepen that.
Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mouse on Mars – Spatial, No Problem
A long-anticipated collaboration finally arrives: the late, great Jamaican dub pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry, in his final studio sessions before his death in 2021, working with the German experimental electronic duo Mouse on Mars (Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma). Mouse on Mars’ restless playfulness and dub fluency finding a deep companion in Scratch’s open-ended cosmic vision. A record that lives up to the legacy of both artists.
Death Cab for Cutie – I Built You a Tower (ANTI-)
The new full-length from Ben Gibbard and Death Cab for Cutie, the follow-up to 2022’s Asphalt Meadows. 30 years in, Death Cab continue to be the band a generation of indie listeners trusts to write the song they need at the moment they need it. Gibbard’s writing has only deepened with time, and I Built You a Tower, their 11th album, addresses his life in flux after divorce.
Gibbard has said, the only way to deal with it was to “compartmentalise” every night in order to perform onstage. “I kind of stumbled into this metaphor of building a tower and placing in your kind of emotional landscape and placing trauma or pain or suffering into it.”
Beat up Face – What’s So Funny About Peace Love & Understanding?
The new album from the Drogheda and Dublin-based alt-rock band Beat up Face, formerly known as Spit. The title is a nod to Nick Lowe’s ‘(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding’, a song that has lived many lives since Elvis Costello first put it on the map.
Beat up Face’s own take on the question is rooted in their restless, experimental approach to guitar music, an album that twists and squalls and pulls itself back together across its runtime.
The album was actually released on May 1st but I put it down to June 1st in my list.
Jalen Ngonda – Doctrine of Love
The second album from the Maryland-born, London-based soul singer, the follow-up to his much-loved 2023 Daptone debut Come Around and Love Me. Ngonda is one of the most exciting new voices in contemporary soul, his songwriting and falsetto drawing direct lines back to Curtis Mayfield, the Delfonics and the great Philly soul records of the early ’70s. Doctrine of Love is one of the most warmly anticipated soul releases of the year.
Wu-Lu & Poison Anna – Bakerz Dozen
A new collaborative project from Wu-Lu, the South London artist and producer Miles Romans-Hopcraft whose 2022 Warp debut Loggerhead made him one of the most singular voices in UK post-punk-meets-hip-hop, and Poison Anna. Bakerz Dozen brings Wu-Lu’s familiar mix of grunge, dub, rap and noise into conversation with a new collaborator, the kind of left-field crossover release that the UK underground has been doing better than anyone for a few years now.
SLIFT – Fantasia (Sub Pop)
The new album from the Toulouse psych-rock trio of Jean and Rémi Fossat and drummer Canek Flores. SLIFT make some of the most thunderously heavy psychedelic music on the European continent, taking the lineage of Hawkwind, Sleep and early Kyuss into a wide-screen, mythological territory entirely their own. Fantasia will be an essential pickup for anyone who’s followed them this far.
Dea Matrona – Hate That I Care
The new album from the Belfast band Mollie McGinn and Orláith Forsythe aka Dea Matrona, the follow-up to their breakthrough debut For Your Sins. Dea Matrona have spent the last few years building one of the more confidently full-throated rock revivalist sounds in Irish music, all big harmonies, bigger riffs and a pre-streaming-era widescreen ambition that has translated into a live following on both sides of the Irish Sea.
Hate That I Care 2026 UK & Éire Tour
Sunday 22 November 2026 — Leeds, Wardrobe
Monday 23 November 2026 — London, Islington Assembly Hall
Tuesday 24 November 2026 — Bristol, Thekla
Thursday 26 November 2026 — Glasgow, SWG3 Warehouse
Friday 27 November 2026 — Manchester, New Century Locker
Saturday 28 November 2026 — Dublin, The Academy
Prospa – Free Your Mind
The new record from Prospa, the Leeds-formed duo of Harvey Blumler and Goose who have spent the last few years quietly becoming one of the UK’s most exciting hands-in-the-air dance acts. Free Your Mind leans into the euphoric, rave-tinted house and trance touch-points that have made their festival sets some of the most viral moments in recent dance culture, the kind of record built for stage smoke and a sunset main stage.
Also released this week
- Converge – Hum of Hurt
- Deer Tick – Coin-O-Matic
- Fatoumata Diawara – Massa
- Holly Humberstone – it’s a real Cruel World
- Jim O’Rourke & Jos Smolders – Albumin
- of Montreal – Aethermead
- Wu-Lu & POiSON ANNA – Bakerz Dozen
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.
