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
WU LYF – A Wave That Will Never Break (LYF Recordings)
This band have all the hallmarks of some bullshit but they are not. 15 years after Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, one of the more improbable and genuinely electric debut albums of the early 2010s, WU LYF return with their second record, produced by Sonic Boom and recorded at Lisbon’s Namouche Studios and in Wales in 2025. The album is not available on major streaming platforms. Instead the band are releasing it exclusively through their LYF community at worldunite.org alongside journals, early ticket access, exclusive merchandise and fan forums.
“The vision for the L Y F has been with us since the start,” they write. “Way back in 2010, when we first sold the white on white bandana with the Heavy Pop / Concrete Gold 12-inch, we foresaw a community of like-minds that would gather around the flame of our music.”
The seven tracks carry the scale of a sermon delivered at full volume, music that feels physical, devotional and cathartic. Frontman Ellery Roberts back with the strangulated yarl intact, but the band are mellower and it’s just as glorious in their epic reach.
Available on vinyl and CD, but digitally only through the LYF subscription or Bandcamp.
David Kitt – The Big Romance (Kittser’s Version) (Allchival)
The Big Romance turns 25 this year. Kitt’s second album, released on V2 Records in 2001 and his first time working in a professional studio, was recorded at Pulse Studios off Camden Street in Dublin with producer Ken McHugh and sold 60,000 copies in Ireland alone. For the 10th and 20th anniversaries, Kitt approached the label about a reissue and got nowhere. The rights remain with Warner, under a contract that grants the label ownership of the master recordings for, as Kitt describes it, “the universe forever.” So for the 25th, he did what Taylor Swift did: recorded the whole album again from scratch at his home studio in Ballinskelligs, with the invaluable help of Ken McHugh, drawing on 25 years of experience with synths and samplers.
The new version features all ten original tracks, three new songs, and the B-side and fan favourite ‘Saturdays’. Tracks on the original included ‘Song From Hope St. (Brooklyn, NY)’, ‘You Know What I Want To Know’, ‘Step Outside in the Morning Light’, ‘Strange Light in the Evening’, ‘What I Ask’ – a fusion of acoustic and electric instrumentation with underground electronica and hip-hop references that was, Kitt says, “pretty fresh for the time.”
“I feel I’ve landed on a document that has the sonic and emotional DNA of the original – and at times improves on it, a record that will be cherished by fans of the original and would get the seal of approval from my 25-year-old self.”
Tonight and tomorrow he plays it in full at the National Concert Hall in Dublin with an all-star band including Dylan Lynch, Rachael Lavelle, Katie Kim, Ryan Hargadon, Paul G. Smyth, Eamon Brady and Gareth Averill.
Lone – Hyperphantasia (Greco-Roman)
First album in five years from Nottingham’s Matt Cutler, following 2021’s Always Inside Your Head. Lone describes it as “unhinged, unrestrained, self-indulgent bat-shit pop music from an alternate dimension. A beautiful, synthetic hall of mirrors head rush… Like taking every style I’ve worked with, amping them up to 11 and firing them off a cliff.” Hyperphantasia is defined as a condition characterised by exceptionally vivid and detailed mental imagery, and this is the album as that condition: house, rave, ambient and electronica pushed through into something that sounds like all of them at once.
The most significant shift from previous Lone records is the deepened relationship with vocals and guest collaborators: Greco-Roman affiliates Ell Murphy and Lou Hayter, Barcelona singer Bikôkô, Nottingham rapper Juga-Naut and London-via-Hong Kong artist Merry Lamb Lamb all appear. ‘Life Spark’ embraces early-’90s hardcore rave. ‘Big World’ features Lou Hayter. ‘Sickly, Sweetly, Summer Movie’ and ‘Ascension.png’ previewed the album’s range.
Stephen Star – Newt
Little is known about this Dublin singer-songwriter Stephen Sorensen aka Stephen Star except he is part of the Mirrorworld label and Irish music community that also features Finn Carraher McDonald aka Nashpaints, Isaac Jones, and Henry Earnest, who all help out on the record along with guitar and backing vocals from Ellie O’Neill who had a debut album out last month too.
Newt is a collection of reflective and intimate Elliott Smith-style indie folk songwriter tracks.
Squarepusher – Kammerkonzert (Warp Records)
Tom Jenkinson’s sixteenth studio album and first since 2024’s Dostrotime. The title is German for chamber concert. Resident Advisor describes it as “a harmony-led, chamber orchestra-style electronic concerto.” 14 tracks, each titled with a K prefix followed by a place or concept: K1 Advance, K2 Central, K3 Diligence, K4 Fairlands, K5 Fremantle, K6 Headquarters, K7 Museum, K8 Park, K9 Reliance, K10 Terminus, K11 Tideway, K12 Uplands, K13 Vigilant, K14 Welbeck. The press description: “a riot of onyx-hard, hyperfast riffs, fiendish orchestral themes and handbrake turns through varieties of progressive, ambient, electronic and experimental music.”
Lime Garden – Maybe Not Tonight (So Young Records)
Second album from the Brighton indie quartet, produced and mixed by Charlie Andrew. The band came up through the So Young Records ecosystem alongside the wave of British indie guitar bands that emerged in the early 2020s. Their debut drew comparisons to early Wet Leg and Hot Chip. Maybe Not Tonight follows in 2026 with a bit of Le Tigre post-punk playful pop vibe here and there on this.
Vocalist and guitarist Chloe Howard says: “The album is about a night out, from start to finish. As the night progresses, you’re having a great time, until your ex walks in with someone else. You hate the way you look but rather than going home, you press the big red button and get even more drunk. Eventually, you take yourself home full of melancholy, chaos and anger.”
My New Band Believe – My New Band Believe (Rough Trade)
The debut album from My New Band Believe, the solo project of Cameron Picton, who played guitar and vocals in Black Midi before that band went on hiatus in August 2024. The name came to him in a fever dream in a Chinese hotel room where he was seriously ill, the words arrived as a fragment, and he knew immediately it had to be the name. The album is described as almost entirely acoustic with minimal effects and electronic processing – a striking departure from the maximalist noise-rock of his former band. Collaborators include Kiran Leonard, Caius Williams, Steve Noble and Andrew Cheetham. Touring Europe from April, ending in Oxford in May.
Melanie Baker – Somebody Help Me, I’m Being Spontaneous!
Debut album from Newcastle’s Melanie Baker, a 12-track exercise in cartoon realism and absurdist humour with the Truman Show-referencing title signalling exactly the register she’s operating in. Pounding drums, fuzzy guitars and tender lyrical precision, reclaiming the grit and spirit of ’90s alt-rock through a queer, modern lens.
Damos Room – All Shall Go (Long Gone)
The debut album from Damos Room, the trio of Huw Olesker, Luke Miles and Nicholas Elson. They strip dub to ghost-logic and negative space, staging what Soundohm’s description calls “a slow, pressurised unravelling where tension, not impact, becomes the main event.” Nine tracks on Long Gone, an imprint from Dáire Carolan (First Second Label). Not easy listening but deeply felt: corroded textures, distant disembodied voices, harmonic material arriving like rusted sheet metal bowed and buckling. Vocals drift at the edge of legibility, more apparition than statement.
Gretel – Squish
The debut album from West London singer-songwriter Gretel, formerly known as Gretel Hänlyn, five years on from her debut single ‘Slugeye’ in 2021. 12 tracks recorded live over five days at RAK Studios with producers Seth Evans (Black Midi, Geordie Greep, HMLTD, Shame) and Margo Broom. She describes the sessions as “messy live takes” – returning to her instincts for a grungy, immediate, guitar-led record. “It felt like returning home and trying to squish back through the front door.”
“It’s all the things that press down on you over time to make this uncomfortable, deformed desire inside,” she says of the title track, which opens the record. Singles ‘Maybelline’ (contemplating beauty standards and generational insecurity), ‘Unbloom’ and ‘Darkness, be my friend’ have already landed. Gothic storytelling filtered through grunge textures, PJ Harvey and Kate Bush in the verses, something closer to Pulp in the choruses – urgent, almost frenetic. Themes of desire, jealousy and resilience; vulnerability as a combustible force. London headliner at Oslo on April 14th.
Upsammy, Valentia Magaletti – Seismo
The first collaborative album between Amsterdam-based electronic producer upsammy and Italian-born London drummer and percussionist Valentina Magaletti. The album grew from a commission by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to soundtrack an exhibition featuring major works from the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam – Mondrian, Picasso, Kusama, Dalí, Kiefer among others. Rather than responding to the paintings directly, the duo wandered the museum’s maze of rooms and recorded improvised percussive sounds throughout, using the architecture, the reverb of each space, the plants and the water features to inform rhythms and textures later sculpted into the record.
STANO – Before May I Will Change (LOSCANN)
The new album from Dublin post-punk pioneer and sonic architect STANO – a figure who has been operating at the experimental edges of Irish music since the early ’80s. The album features a remarkable cast: Aidan Gillen (Game of Thrones, Peaky Blinders, The Wire) on spoken word; John Perry of The Only Ones on guitar; Ian Lynch of Lankum on hurdy-gurdy and uilleann pipes; Korey Thomas of Bricknasty on drums; Billy Farrell on keys; plus guitarists Jeen Rabs, Ro Byrne, Niwel Tsumbu and Eoghan Scott; Thomas Haugh on the Mo Chara – Michael O’Shea’s unique instrument). Produced by STANO and engineered by Joe McGrath at Hellfire and Loscann Studios in Dublin.
The album grew from foundations laid during lockdown – ambient soundscapes and fractured industrial sounds gathered with tape recorders and found sounds, a return to STANO’s earliest methods of working before he had a studio. Six albums’ worth of material emerged from that period; Before May I Will Change is one of them, shaped around short poems STANO wrote and edited during that time. The process of working with Gillen was deliberate: STANO didn’t let him hear the backing tracks in advance, not wanting the sounds to influence his reading. “Aidan as an actor seemed to recognise exactly what it was I was trying to express,” STANO explains. “It was a really interesting experience for me to hear someone else inhabit my words and deliver them almost like a character in a play.”
808 State & Humanoid – In Place of Language EP (De:tuned)
The first collaboration between Graham Massey of 808 State and Brian Dougans, the mind behind acid house landmark Humanoid and one half of The Future Sound of London. Both played key roles in shaping the UK’s early rave and acid house movement, and after decades of circling each other with occasional remixes, this four-track 12-inch delivers.
The press release positions it as something drawing on the ’89–91 era without nostalgia: warm bass pressure, fluid synth work, finely tuned rhythmic drive, all shaped by decades of studio craft.
Also released this week
- Aja Ireland – Moult Mouth (Infinite Machine)
- Holly Humberstone – Cruel World
- Laufey – A Matter of Time: The Final Hour
- Melanie Baker – Someone Help Me, I’m Being Spontaneous!
- Pictish Trail – Life Slime
- Sack – Adventura Majestica (25th Anniversary edition)
- Snoop Dogg – 10 Til Midnight
- Steve Gunn – Shape of a Wave EP
- The Future West – Back To The Future III
- The Itch – It’s The Hope That Kills You
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.
