Here’s a rundown of recommended 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
Robyn – Existential (Konichiwa/Young)
Eight years since Honey, and Robyn arrives crash-landing. That’s how she describes it: like a spaceship coming through the atmosphere at a really high speed – all those experiences searching too far out into space, now crashing back into herself. Made with longtime collaborator Klas Åhlund, with Oscar Holter also producing, the 29 minute Sexistential is a conscious return to the euphoric, punchy electro-pop instincts of the Body Talk era.
Lead single ‘Dopamine’ set the tone in November. ‘Talk to Me’ marks her first collaboration with Max Martin since 2010’s ‘Time Machine’. The title track is something genuinely rare: a rap about having one-night stands while ten weeks pregnant after IVF, conceived as a riposte to André 3000’s admission that he didn’t know what to rap about anymore. “It was my cue,” she says.
The album navigates her life as a new single mother and her refusal to let that circumstance dampen sensuality, desire or creative ambition. “The purpose of my life is to stay horny, it doesn’t even have to be about sex, but it’s feeling sensual and attracted to things that I enjoy, and not letting anything take over that.”
Robyn opens world tour in Dublin this summer
Fcukers – Ö (Ninja Tune)
The debut album from New York dance-pop duo Shanny Wise and Jackson Walker Lewis, recorded in a two-week studio session with producer Kenneth Blume (formerly Kenny Beats, working here with Geese and IDLES in his recent past), with additional production from Dylan Brady of 100 Gecs across four tracks. Eleven songs in 28 minutes. It’s just over a year and a half since they debuted with the indie sleaze DFA-vibe of ‘Homie Don’t Shake’.
The album guides the listener through the highs and lows of a metaphorical night out. Pure kinetic energy, peak-time party music built by people who understand the mechanics of it.
Dublin show at the Button Factory, Tuesday May 19th.
Snail Mail – Ricochet (Matador)
The third Snail Mail album arrives five years after Valentine and finds Lindsey Jordan doing something she’s deliberately avoided until now: writing about mortality. The move from New York City to North Carolina changed her perspective. Vocal polyp surgery before the Valentine tour, then speech therapy, then a long silence. When Jordan came back, she wrote the instrumentals and melodies first on piano and guitar, then filled in the lyrics over a year. “I’ve never done this before,” she says. The result is her most expansive, most controlled record.
Sonically, the record has been described as Smashing Pumpkins at their sunniest, Radiohead at their most Britpop, Catherine Wheel shoegaze, Ivy power pop. Produced with Momma’s Aron Kobayashi Ritch at Fidelitorium Recordings in North Carolina and studios in Brooklyn. “Misery feels safe to write about because I am good at it,” Jordan says, “but I’m not bathing in my own agony anymore.”
Courtney Barnett – Creature of Habit (Mom+Pop)
The fourth Barnett album and her first since 2021’s Things Take Time, Take Time, nearly five years, during which she closed Milk! Records, relocated from Melbourne to Los Angeles and battled a writer’s block severe enough that she’d forgotten how songwriting worked. She powered through it by challenging herself to write a new one every morning. Ten songs produced by John Congleton, Stella Mozgawa and Marta Salogni. The central preoccupation, as the title suggests, is chronic indecisiveness, fear of wasting your life, the comfort of familiar patterns and the anxiety of stepping outside them.
Fixity – Assurance (Moot Tapes)
The new album from Cork experimental music project Fixity, led by drummer and composer Dan Walsh. First album since 2024’s solo-produced FIXITY8, but Assurance is the first full-band LP since 2019’s No Man Can Tell, it marks a return to ensemble work at a larger scale half recorded at Studio Sickan in Malmö in 2022, half at Cork’s Heavy Meitheal Studios in 2023, augmented by a string ensemble with arrangements by New York/Cork-based arranger Aine Delaney.
The Fixity project embodies a free-wheeling experimentalism that sits at a centrepoint of jazz, psychedelic rock and roll and kosmische motorik sounds.
Flea – Honora (Nonesuch)
After nearly five decades as one of rock’s defining bassists, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea releases his first full-length solo album playing bass and trumpet with covers of Frank Ocean, Funkadelic and Glen Campbell. The title is drawn from his grandmother’s name. It features his Atoms for Peace bandmate Thom Yorke on ‘Traffic Lights’. On Nonesuch, home to Kronos Quartet and Feist – not an obvious landing place, but solo Flea was never going to follow an obvious path.
How I Became A Wave – How I Became A Wave
The eponymous debut album from the Atlantic-inspired alt-folk ensemble led by Cork singer-songwriter Pat Carey, formerly of The Hard Ground. The album draws on a substantial cast of collaborators: former Hard Ground bandmates Davie Ryan and Hugh Dillon, pianist Rory McCarthy, harpist Aisling Urwin, cellists Laura McFadden and Aoífe Burke, and Matthew Berrill, baritone clarinettist , with string and piano arrangements by Cormac McCarthy, known for his work with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.
Focus single ‘Zero Sum’ lives in what Carey calls the “bargaining stage” of loss – the aftermath and in-between, the realisation of what you’d give up just to get back what’s gone. The album is presented as a limited edition 12” gatefold vinyl with cover artwork based on an original oil painting by Scottish artist Ellis O’Connor, design by West Cork creative Megan Clancy, and handwritten liner notes by Carey.
I Became A Wave registers as quietly powerful music, a richly arranged album wrought with vulnerable and delicate deliberate songwriting.
- UPCOMING LIVE DATES
- Mar 29 – Dublin – Whelan’s (Joan Shelley support)
- Apr 12 – Cork – Coughlan’s, 3:00pm (Full band show)
- Apr 12 – Cork – Coughlan’s, 7:30pm (Full band show) – SOLD OUT
- Apr 17 – Dublin – The Unitarian Church (Full band show)
- Apr 19 – Kinsale – Prim’s Bookshop
- Apr 30 – Donegal – Balor Arts Centre
- May 16 – Ballydehob – Levi’s Corner House
- Jun 4 – Galway – Townhall Theatre (Lisa O’Neill support)
Leila Bordreuil & Kali Malone – Music for Intersecting Planes (Ideologic Organ)
The first collaboration between New York cellist Leila Bordreuil and Stockholm-based organist Kali Malone was recorded at night by candlelight in the Temple de Saint-Théodule in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland. Each of the four pieces captured live, in one take, with all the idiosyncrasies of the room and the moment left intact. You can hear church bells ring in the distance. Motorcycles pass outside. These aren’t accidents in the mix; they’re the point. The environment itself is part of the composition.
The album sits at a genuinely productive intersection of both artists’ practices: more tonal and formally composed than Bordreuil’s typically looser experimental work, more raw and textural than the meticulous pipe organ minimalism of Malone’s solo records. Bordreuil plays cello and feedback; Malone plays a 1995 Liardon/Felsberg organ and sine waves.
“Minimal in means yet expansive in effect”, as the album press says.
RAYE – THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. (Human Re Sources)
The follow-up to My 21st Century Blues, Raye’s her Brit Award-winning, number one debut – is a 17-track conceptual album structured around the four seasons, with each side of the record representing a different phase of human experience. RAYE worked again primarily with collaborator Mike Sabath. Guest appearances include Hans Zimmer on ‘Click Clack Symphony’, Al Green, her grandfather Michael on ‘Fields’, and her sisters Amma and Absolutely on ‘Joy’. ‘Where Is My Husband!’ is on here. So is ‘Nightingale Lane’ and ‘I Know You’re Hurting’. “Music is medicine,” she says. “I wanted to create something that is a hug or a bed or a soft place for that person who needs it.” After the fierce, confessional anger of My 21st Century Blues, this one turns toward faith, endurance and community.
Holy Fuck – Event Beat
The sixth album from Toronto’s Holy Fuck, self-produced and recorded across several locations – Nova Scotia, Toronto, Canning and Ohio. Features include Lucia Tacchetti on ‘Lost Cool’ and Sarah Bonito (Cibo Matto) on ‘Airport Dreams’. One of the most consistently vital electronic-rock acts in Canada, still building dense and kinetic music in their own entirely idiosyncratic way. Bit of a jazzier psych vibe to this latest one.
Slayyyter – Wor$t Girl in America
The third album from Missouri-born hyperpop and bubblegum pop artist Slayyyter, featuring singles ‘BEAT UP CHANEL$’, ‘CANNIBALISM!’ and ‘OLD TECHNOLOGY’. An idiosyncratic voices in contemporary pop, with a devoted following and a knack for making cheap-glam production feel like genuine artistic intent.
Florence Road – Spring Forward EP
The Wicklow four-piece of Lily Aron (vocals), Emma Brandon (guitar), Ailbhe Barry (bass) and Hannah Kelly (drums) release their second EP, after the Fall Back EP in. Spring Forward includes singles ‘Storm Warning’ ‘Rabbits Can Swim’, a tender ballad of longing, and arrives ahead of North American dates supporting The Last Dinner Party.
Florence Road are in their early years but their melodic earworm pop-rock is prestige at this point.
Tom Misch – Full Circle (Beyond The Groove / AWAL)
The long-awaited second album from the London guitarist, songwriter and producer, his first solo release since Geography in 2018. Misch stepped back from his career after it began to snowball, spending time on his mental health and with his family.
Written across London, Cornwall, Portugal and Nashville with collaborators Matt Maltese, Ian Fitchuk and Adam Jaffrey, Full Circle trades the danceable grooves and digital polish of his earlier work for tape warmth, vintage textures and live performance energy. Acoustic arrangements largely replace the electric guitar. Inspirations cited: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, JJ Cale.
Actress & Suzanne Ciani – Concrète Waves (Werkdiscs)
One of the more improbable collaborations of the year: Darren Cunningham, the Birmingham producer who has spent two decades building his Actress project into one of the most singular bodies of work in contemporary electronic music, joins forces with Suzanne Ciani, the five-time Grammy-nominated Buchla synthesizer pioneer and one of the founding figures of American electronic music. Ciani recorded her first album in 1969 and has been making records since 1982’s Seven Waves. Cunningham calls his practice “R&B concrète” with atmospheric twinkling ambience and furrowed noise meeting sodium-lit field recordings and bassy warped drum sequences. Ciani evokes the natural world through synthesiser melodies, sound colours and swelling waves. What they share is a rare ability to build atmosphere through electronics, texture and timbre, and the album lives in the space between those two worlds: where roots entangle city infrastructure, where ocean waves crash into modern life.
Concrète Waves documents live performances co-commissioned by Barcelona’s Sónar festival and London’s Barbican Centre, the two artists having first begun discussing collaboration in 2024. The 21 tracks are drawn directly from those shows, split across London and Barcelona sessions, and presented here as the first release in a new series on Werkdiscs. The duo play Rewire festival in The Hague on April 9th and Nantes’ Variations on April 11th.
Charlotte Cornfield – Hurts Like Hell (Merge)
The Toronto singer-songwriter’s sixth album and her Merge debut, written after the birth of her daughter in 2023. Feist, Buck Meek of Big Thief, Christian Lee Hutson and Maia Friedman all guest. The Feist collaboration ‘Living With It’ came about through a group chat for mothers who tour. The title track has Buck Meek’s harmonies sitting alongside her voice in a Nashville Skyline-meets-Harvest warmth.
The Clockworks – The Entertainment (V2 Records)
The second album from Galway via London four-piece The Clockworks, their debut for V2 Records, arrives three years after the Exit Strategy, which was produced by Bernard Butler at Abbey Road. James McGregor (vocals/guitar), Sean Connelly (guitar), Damian Greaney (drums) and Tom Freeman (bass) moved to London from Galway, built a following that includes support tours with Johnny Marr and festival slots at Rock Werchter, Eurosonic and Electric Picnic. The Entertainment is self-produced, led by Connelly.
Lead single ‘Through The Looking Glass’ lands in the centre of their world: “This song centres around that moment of telling someone you love them and not hearing the same thing back. It’s the desperation, longing and futility of building yourself up beforehand to pour your heart out and obsessively retracing the moment a thousand times in your head afterwards.”
Pheono – Comfort In The Knowing
The debut album from Dublin electronic-pop duo PHOENO who are Adam Matthews (vocals) and Liam Corbett (composition) arrives today after six years in the making.
The name comes from Phoenix Park, where the two long-term collaborators began running together during lockdown, talking through sounds, lyrics and themes on those routes that eventually became this record. Recorded in the UK and Ireland with producer Richie Kennedy, this is an album of synth-indie open-hearted pop with exploring grief, hope, friendship and renewal, pairing intimate storytelling with a widescreen sound.
Album launch show at Lost Lane, Saturday April 11th.
DEAD GOAT – Dead Goat (AV8 Records)
A debut album from a Northern Irish supergroup with Mark McCausland, known as one half of The Lost Brothers, Stevie Scullion of Malojian, Mourne songwriter Matt McGinn and Omagh drummer Decky McManus.
The album started accidentally coming out of lockdown. Every time they met up they would write a song or two and throw down a demo before parting, intending to return and record properly later. Realising the demos were the record, Dead Goat features a collection of bluesy Americana-rock and folk songs.
Also released this week
- Bad Mothers Union – Sore Losers
- Butler, Blake and Grant – Murmurs
- David Gray – Nightjar
- José González – Against The Dying Of The Light
- Loreen – WILDFIRE
- Rita Perry – Kill Your Darlings EP
- Sofia Kourtesis – DJ-Kicks
- The New Pornographers – The Former Site Of
- The Twilight Sad – It’s The Long Goodbye
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.
