Here’s a rundown of new releases out today, including new albums and EPs on DSPs and physical releases in record shops this week.
Nialler9 keeps a rolling list of Irish album releases for 2026.
New Albums and Releases
New Albums
Joshua Idehen – I know you’re hurting, everyone is hurting, everyone is trying, you have got to try (Heavenly)
The longest album title of the week, and possibly the most necessary record on this list. London spoken word artist Joshua Idehen, in collaboration with producer Ludvig Parment, releases his debut full-length on Heavenly.
Following the viral success of ‘Mum Does The Washing’, Idehen takes his craft somewhere more expansive: 17 tracks built around house-inflected beats, jazz elements, choral arrangements and his own ruminative, warm, deeply humanist spoken word style. Contributions come from saxophonist Pete Fraser, vocalist Amanda Bergman, and Shabaka Hutchings on flute – a fitting link to today’s other essential release. Themes of grief, hope, collectivism, morality and human connection, delivered with exuberant energy. I hear strains of The Streets, Real Lies and Joy Anonymous on this one.
Idehen plays Dublin’s Button Factory on April 25th.
War Child Records – HELP(2)
Thirty years on from the landmark 1995 Help album – which recruited Oasis, Radiohead, Blur, Manic Street Preachers, Sinéad O’Connor and more for War Child – the charity returns with a sequel that’s just as stacked. Fontaines D.C. contribute a poignant cover of Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Black Boys on Mopeds’, Grian sings on ‘Flags’ with Damon Albarn and more and Galway rising songwriter Dove Ellis also appears alongside Anna Calvi, Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell and Nilüfer Yanya on ‘Sunday Light’.
Among the new originals, Arctic Monkeys, Wet Leg, Foals and Cameron Winter of Geese all contribute. Olivia Rodrigo and Graham Coxon of Blur take on The Magnetic Fields’ ‘The Book of Love’, beabadoobee covers Elliott Smith.
The collaborative album was record with producer James Ford in November 2025 in Abbey Road, during one single week. A genuinely well-assembled record for a worthwhile cause.
Features Anna Calvi, Arctic Monkeys, Arlo Parks, Arooj Aftab, Bat For Lashes, Beabadoobee, Beck, Beth Gibbons, Big Thief, Black Country, New Road, Cameron Winter, Damon Albarn, Depeche Mode, Dove Ellis, Ellie Rowsell, English Teacher, Ezra Collective, Foals, Fontaines D.C., Graham Coxon, Greentea Peng, Grian Chatten, Kae Tempest, King Krule, Nilüfer Yanya, Olivia Rodrigo, Pulp, Sampha, The Last Dinner Party, Wet Leg and Young Fathers.
Seamus Fogarty – Ships
Mayo-born, London-based Seamus Fogarty returns with his third full-length and his most expansive album to date. Written in the wake of 2020’s A Bag Of Eyes and road-tested on tour with Lisa O’Neill around Ireland and the UK, Ships blends motorik rhythms, folk tradition and leftfield electronics into a richly detailed nine-track collection. The collaborators alone signal the ambition: string arranger Emma Smith (Pulp, Beth Gibbons), drummers Chris Vatalaro (Anohni, Radiohead) and Aram Zarikian (Grasscut), horns from Joe Auckland (Madness, Oasis), with additional production from Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, Jon Hopkins) and Mike Lindsay (Tunng, Lump).
The songs are pure Fogarty – funny, strange, deeply human. ‘I Passed Your House’ is a lushly-layered requiem for a lost friend and the October bleakness of County Mayo. The title track, inspired by a Tracy Emin neon artwork on Margate harbour, sails on a breeze of sweeping pop worthy of prime Brian Wilson. ‘The Last Days of Watchmaker Joe’ is a spoken word lament about a man who built his own coffin using no nails or screws. ‘They Recognised Him’ – Cillian Murphy’s favourite Seamus Fogarty song, from the Hee Haw EP, here remastered at Abbey Road – finally gets a proper album home.
“I think there’s a few miserable songs on there for sure – obligatory at this stage, but to my mind there’s something strangely uplifting about this collection, more so than anything I’ve released before. I know I have it better than most people but I still find it hard to persevere and keep going and that’s probably the main theme of the album. It’s honest in a way that my other albums haven’t always been, which is why I’m so sure it’s going to be a massive hit.”
Gigs:
LIVE
May 2nd – CQAF – Sunflower Public House Belfast
May 3rd – KILKENNY ROOTS – Billy Byrne’s Kilkenny
July 31st – Aug 2nd – All Together Now Waterford
ELIZA – The Darkening Green
North London alt-R&B artist ELIZA – eight years on from walking away from Parlophone and the Eliza Doolittle name – returns with her third independent album, her first in four years – I loved A Sky Without Stars.
Co-written and co-produced with Finlay ‘Phairo’ Robson and Emil Larbi (Loyle Carner, Sampha), the nine-track record takes its title from a William Blake poem and circles the idea that our emotional and ecological worlds mirror each other – the city wound, distraction traps, yearning for green space and softness against a backdrop of concrete and noise.
Harry Styles – Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally
Four years on from the Harry’s House, Harry Styles returns with his fourth album and a sound that has shifted significantly since the last time out. Produced with longtime collaborator Kid Harpoon, the 12-track record draws from time Styles spent in Berlin clubbing – how unique. And as you can hear on lead single ‘Aperture’ Harry has now heard ‘Someone Great’ by LCD Soundsystem. He has described the record as a “life mantra” centred on love, though the delivery is far more textural and restless than Harry’s House‘s warm domestic pop. The Together Together Tour follows.
Shabaka – Of The Earth
The debut on his own newly formed Shabaka Records imprint, Of The Earth finds the British multi-instrumentalist – known from Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming – stepping into fully self-sufficient mode: entirely written, performed, produced and mixed by him alone. Built from beats and loops assembled on portable devices while travelling, with choral alto flute melodies soaring above the rhythms, it traces a story of diasporic movement through jazz, electronics, reggae pulse and soca’s kinetic lift simultaneously.
Of The Earth return to saxophone – Shabaka had stepped back from the instrument for over a year before performing at Louis Moholo’s memorial concert in 2025. He treats it as an orchestration device rather than a lead voice, weaving it into an ecosystem of flute and sampled phrases. For the first time on record, he also raps, drawing on an admiration from André 3000.
Denzel Curry & The Scythe – Strictly 4 The Scythe
Denzel Curry forms a supergroup of sorts and goes back to his roots. The Scythe brings together Curry, A$AP Ferg, Bktherula, TiaCorine, and Key Nyata – the last of whom formed alongside Curry in SpaceGhostPurrp’s Raider Klan back in the early 2010s, over a decade before this collaboration. The result is eight tight tracks and 30 minutes of energetic, Southern-rooted rap, channelling old-school Memphis and Houston sounds through a contemporary lens, with production from Working on Dying across much of the project.
Daniel Avery – Tremor (Midnight Versions)
A self-remix of his acclaimed sixth album Tremor – Avery takes the entire record and reworks it himself, stripping it back and redirecting it firmly toward the dancefloor. “For every tremor there’s a reaction,” he says. “These are the Midnight Versions. Songs reimagined and sent directly into the night. Club edits aimed squarely at the strobe light.” Featuring reworked versions of collaborations with Alison Mosshart, Art School Girlfriend, Yunè Pinku, Cecile Believe, Julie Dawson (NewDad), Walter Schreifels, bdrmm and yeule. The release is timed to coincide with Avery’s month-long Friday residency at Phonox in London – and he has a Dublin date on April 3rd lined up too.
Essential for anyone who loved Tremor and wanted it darker.
Modeselektor – Classics Vol. 1 (We tried hard and failed again… enjoy!)
The Berlin duo take a unique approach to their back catalogue: rather than reissuing old tracks, Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary rebuilt eight of their older records entirely from scratch – reconstructing ‘Kill Bill Vol.4’, ‘Edgar’, ‘Tetrispack’, ‘Blockchain’ and more from the ground up, starting fresh without the original files. The result is less a retrospective than a glimpse forward, an experiment in what these tracks could be rather than what they were. ‘This Track Kills Fascism’ remains politically pointed. The self-deprecating subtitle – “We tried hard and failed again” – is pure Modeselektor deadpan. More new music reportedly coming from Monkeytown this year.
Flying Lotus – BIG MAMA EP
A blast of spontaneous, maximalist energy from FlyLo – and notably, his first release issued solely through Brainfeeder, the label he founded back in 2008 which has been home to Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, Hiatus Kaiyote and more all this time.
Big Mama was made in a rush of momentum following the completion of his sci-fi horror film Ash, and it sounds exactly like that. Seven tracks packed into a single continuous composition with no loops anywhere – every bar unique – described by Ellison himself as “experimental, maximalist, hyperfast, electronic burst of energy. Like a fuckin’ computer gone awry. Like a machine that had just lost its mind.” Tracks like ‘Antelope Onigiri’, ‘Brobobasher’ and ‘Horse Nuke’ rip through the runtime at speed. Brief (16 minutes), but that’s the point.
waterbaby – Memory Be A Blade
Stockholm-based singer-songwriter waterbaby releases her debut full-length on Sub Pop, a darker and richer follow-up to the 2023 EP Foam. The record was shaped by two consecutive relationship endings during the writing process, and the emotional shift between them: songs written in the safety of one romance taking on entirely different meaning once that relationship ended.
Recorded with producer Marcus White across Stockholm, south Sweden and Los Angeles, with a classical-trained ensemble (strings, horns, piano) framing lyrics discovered through extended freestyle sessions. Her brother ttoh appears on the drifting, flute-driven ‘Clay’ and piano-heavy ‘Beck n Call’. The two-part ‘Minnie’ and the title track are both stunning. Chamber pop and R&B and bedroom folk folded together into something genuinely personal.
NIMF – Sirenoscape
New Jersey-based Irish composer, sound designer and performance artist Aoibhín Redmond aka NIMF brings pastoral experimentalism, field recordings, avant-folk horror and ambient to bear on a four-song cycle.
Sirenoscape was made in close creative partnership with Alexander Kuribayashi – whose contributed diegetic scene design, sound editing and photography.
An album of transmutation and transcendental terror. Comprising four scenes, the album functions as a sequence of ritual enactments: diegetic musicians performing within acoustic worlds that gradually dissolve into immateriality and ecstatic transit by way of metaphysical rupture..
Autumn Owls – Here in the Bardos
Formerly a full band, Autumn Owls these days is the solo band work of Gary McFarland, who after several years living abroad – found himself back home in the converted shed behind his family home he calls Insomnia Lodge, thanks to the pandemic.
During this period, McFarlane revisited and completed a previously abandoned album Three Winters in the Capital, which he released in 2021. New songs did flow and he wrote the songs while making new homes in China, Thailand, and later France.
Here in the Bardos is an album trying to make sense of death and the ghosts of adolescence. Its songs trace young lovers around old streets, and their medium-sized beliefs.
Here In The Bardos doesn’t sound like a bedroom or small space record – opener ‘Marjorelle’ channels early REM with big strings, and this record is bursting with big 2000s-era indie-rock vibes.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy – We Are Together Again
Will Oldham’s 31st album under the Bonnie “Prince” Billy name, and he’s back in Louisville for it – recorded closer to the Ohio River than anything he’s made since the 1993 Palace Brothers debut. The record was actually started before last year’s country-leaning The Purple Bird, then set aside and finished last spring with his touring band – flutist/saxophonist Jacob Duncan, multi-instrumentalist Thomas Deakin – plus brother Ned Oldham on bass for the first time in two decades, and Ryder McNair on string arrangements. Framed by two versions of the same song (‘Why is the Lion?’ opens, ‘Bride of the Lion’ closes), it circles fear and love at personal and infinite levels simultaneously.
Yebba – Jean
Five years on from her debut Dawn – named after her late mother – Yebba returns with her second album named after her late grandmother, Jean. The Arkansas-born vocalist has kept a relatively low profile as a solo artist since then, while appearing on records by Drake, Tyler the Creator and others.
Jean was made over five years with longtime collaborator John Rooney and composer James Francies across Arkansas, Dallas, and Electric Lady Studios in New York, and documents what Yebba calls her “adulting years” – the stretch when you realise no one fully knows what they’re doing. “The more I felt healed, the more lost I felt,” she says.
Where Dawn was driven by raw grief, Jean circles inheritance, strength, faith and the quiet steadiness passed down from the grandmother the album honours. Lead single ‘Yellow Eyes’, built around acoustic guitar and her vocals close and unhurried, is a beautiful reintroduction.
Smag På Dig Selv – This Is Why We Lost
Copenhagen trio Smag På Dig Selv (Danish: “Taste Yourself”) return with their second album, and it’s a significant step on from their 2024 debut. Oliver Lauridsen (tenor sax), Thorbjørn Øllgaard (baritone and bass sax) and Albert Holberg (drums) have built their reputation on explosive, genre-defying live shows rooted in Freetown Christiania – described by one reviewer as “poundingly hypnotic breakbeat jazz” – and This Is Why We Lost, produced by TMI Tammi, channels that energy into something more deliberate, more melodic and more emotionally open. Trance ballads sit alongside gabber anthems; a Palestinian folk song appears; their mums close the album on ‘Our Mothers Made A Punk Band’. Opener ‘Like A Word I Never Knew’ has Leftfield’s ‘Phat Planet’ energy and barely lets up from there. One of the more distinctive records out today, and well worth a listen if you’re into the intersection of jazz improvisation, techno and punk urgency.
Unique Freaks (THEE U.F.O) – Hairy Frog Fish EP
Dublin psych-garage-pop duo Darragh Hansard and Beth Doyle – who featured on Nialler9’s best Irish albums of 2025 with Enjoyment Planted – are back with a four-track EP on their Bandcamp today.
The Hairy Frog Fish EP collects songs that grew out of the same synth patch used on the album but didn’t make the cut, including the EP title track which appeared on Enjoyment Planted. New track ‘Explode Ur Head’ gets its own video – described by the band as “a cheesy workout rage video, inspired by Jane Fonda and WWF’s attitude era, made on a Wednesday over a few beers” – and is exactly as chaotic as that sounds. ‘Letting Go Of The Controls’ is the more serious one: Darragh on his own control issues, “saying a lot with little.” ‘Kick It Down!’ is pure fun.
The band also have a headline show at Whelan’s on Friday, September 25th.
Also released this week
- Alice Sara Ott – Jóhann Jóhannsson: Piano Works
- Barry Can’t Swim – Late Nite Tales
- Fred again.. – USB002 REMIXES
- Gnarls Barkley – Atlanta
- Isabelle O’Connell – Cocteau
- Katherine Priddy – These Frightening Machines –
- Morrissey – Make-up is a Lie
- snake eyes – cash rich
Recent posts on New Albums:
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.
