Queens of the Stone Age are our album of the week with Perfecth, their first record in three years. John Talabot returns as OR with an ambient euphoric album, DIIV hand the controls to A. G. Cook, Andy Stott is back after five years with Elaine Howley among his voices, and Vancouver’s PISS make their Sub Pop debut. Kali Malone, Ex:Re, Moses Boyd, RIP Magic, Clinic and The Big Moon also have new albums, while Skee Mask teams up with North Americans in the EPs.
It’s a strong week for Irish releases too, with new albums from Córas Trio, Murky, Good Swim, SAL, 8-bit Funk, Noble and Jimbo Jones takes our most recommended album on the homefront with We Only Want the Earth positing a utopian future based on community.
See the full list in our 2026 Irish album releases.
This week’s releases
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Album of the week
Queens of the Stone Age – Perfecth
Queens of the Stone Age return with Perfecth on Matador, their ninth album and the follow-up to 2023’s In Times New Roman…. Josh Homme and Michael Shuman produced it, and the record was pieced together on the road in studios from New Orleans to Los Angeles, with the current line-up of Homme, Troy Van Leeuwen, Shuman, Dean Fertita and Jon Theodore.
The title is a deliberate corruption of “perfect”. Homme’s reasoning is that perfection is dishonest because it doesn’t exist, and the album takes its cue from kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Its nine songs are about love in its many forms, from the loves that break a person to the ones that help them recover.
Overall, this is a moodier more introspective record than Queens have ever released, with the riffs toned down, and the cinematic psychedelic vibe amped up. ‘Easy Street’, featuring Nikki Lane, was the first new Queens music since 2023, and the Rolling Stones-esque ‘Insignificant Other’ is a song about the disorientation of distance, left by someone who was once your whole world.
If you want the band at an earlier heavier peak, we’re playing Songs For The Deaf in full at our vinyl listening parties in November.
Recommended albums out now
John Talabot / OR – Music for Empty Stadiums
John Talabot’s debut album fin was a defining record of the 2010s electronic landscape when it was released in 2012 but the Barcelona man never actually followed it up with another full-length album until this one, Music for Empty Stadiums, under the new alias OR on AD 93, the label’s 100th release.
Catalan producer Oriol Riverol made the album during lockdown (you would have thought we are past its recorded reach by now), when touring stopped, the 17-track, roughly 95-minute album began with a question: “What might the most euphoric possible variant of ambient sound like?” The answer is an almost entirely beatless “anti-ambient” record, sequenced in the order the pieces were made, like a diary of that period. The stunning polyrhythmic synth Tangerine Dream-esque track ‘Nokik Messiah’ was one of my recent tracks of the week. A long, absorbing listen.
DIIV – ZIRP!
DIIV’s fifth album arrives produced by A. G. Cook (Caroline Polachek, Charli XCX). The title stands for the zero interest rate policies that fuelled a decade of failed start-ups, and it takes the themes of 2024’s Frog In Boiling Water (Palantir, societal breakdown, streaming’s endless hamster wheel) and sets them to lighter, brighter songs.
Cook insisted on live drums before most songs were finished and spent weeks on guitar parts and specific pedals, with as little time as possible on a computer. ‘The Fountain’ opens the 11 songs, with ‘Kid’ and ‘Trillions’ among the singles. Their punchiest melodies yet.
Andy Stott – Late Loop
Andy Stott’s first album in five years, out on Modern Love, began with a set of rules: no basslines, no reverb, and no effects except a delay unit. It was “like learning a new language”, he says. The songs, mostly about a separation, are carried by Alison Skidmore, his vocal foil for more than a decade, and the Irish singer-songwriter Elaine Howley, whose ‘Something In Mind’ appeared in our best songs of the week. A drum machine played through speakers and recorded back into the room, plus a pump organ cleared out of the loft, give the eight tracks a loose, primitive feel with every stitch on show.
Jimbo Jones – We Only Want the Earth
Five years in the making and Arts Council-funded, Jimbo Jones’ concept album documents the destruction of our environment, our society and ourselves, and offers an imagined alternative, a utopian future based on community. Recent single ‘Lost All My Time to the Television’ is melancholic, euphoric trip-hop about technological addiction, and the first time he has sung on record. It follows ‘Modern Day Business Man’ with Dublin rapper Curtisy, and the record got a Bandcamp New and Notable feature. All proceeds go to The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-run aid project in Gaza. Very much recommended album from an underappreciated Irish artist.
PISS – you made me / skin on linen
Vancouver art-punk four-piece PISS release their debut album, you made me / skin on linen, via Sub Pop Fronted by Taylor Zantingh and recorded with Colin Stewart in January 2025, it blends punk, poetry and sound collage in a portrait of a childhood shaped by violence, using art-making motifs as metaphors for the marks we carry. Zantingh says ‘time loop at hot slit’ “will always belong to the femmes, queers, and weirdos in the Vancouver underground community”, while ‘blocking a scene you can’t remember’ sets a spoken-word monologue against slowcore guitars. Harrowing and uncompromising.
Sampa the Great – Nu Zamrock
Sampa the Great’s third album, on Loma Vista and executive produced by Cadenze, began with a family discovery: while reconnecting with relatives in Zambia, she learned her blood uncle George Kunda was a founding member of WITCH, the 1970s Zamrock pioneers. She reimagines that sound through hip-hop, poetry and soul. “Nu Zamrock is not nostalgia,” she says. “It is the future remembering where it came from.” Guests across the 16 tracks include Sia, KAMAUU, Mwanjé and Nicole Gumbe, and ‘Simon Says’ takes aim at an industry fixated on perception.
Kali Malone – Burning Song
The Stockholm-based composer and organist returns with her first solo collection since 2024’s All Life Long, recorded over two nights in August at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, where J. S. Bach was cantor for the last 27 years of his life. Malone is the first musician to perform contemporary works on the church’s Bach Organ, which is tuned to baroque-style systems. Engineer Francesco Donadello placed more than 20 microphones around the room, and Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on bowed acoustic guitar join her for ‘Heavy With Fruit’, one of seven pieces on Ideologic Organ. Slow-burning in every sense.
Ex:Re – Save As
Daughter’s Elena Tonra revives Ex:Re for a second album on 4AD, eight years after the self-titled debut. She hadn’t planned a follow-up, but in 2023 she took song sketches into the studio with Fabian Prynn, who produced the first record, and their chemistry took over. With Josephine Stephenson on cello, Hinako Omori on synths, Ben Reed on bass and Jethro Fox on guitar, the nine songs map the gnawing minutiae of consciousness, overthinking and memory, which Tonra admits is “not always very good”. Lead single ‘Radio Station’ starts as an acoustic strum and morphs into a trippy road-trip song.
Jordan Rakei – A Safe Place To Be Wild
The London-based soul singer and producer releases his seventh album on Fontana, following 2024’s The Loop, which earned him an Ivor Novello nomination for Best Album. Shaped during his year as the first resident at Abbey Road Studios and at the home studio he built outside London, its 14 songs deal with self-acceptance, vulnerability and the parts of himself that emerge when outside expectations fall away. Lead single ‘Enemies’ is a 1970s psych-soul strut he calls “an ownership song about not taking any more crap”.
Clinic – Wild In The Streets
The Liverpool duo of Ade Blackburn and Jonathan Hartley reach album number 10 on Domino, nearly 30 years after forming as a quartet. Blackburn says they drew on exotica, dub reggae, Cabaret Voltaire and early rock ‘n’ roll, sometimes cutting whole verses to add momentum, while Hartley’s drum machines and electronics shape the rhythms. It runs to 12 songs, including ‘Model Citizen’ and ‘Back to Nature’, with lead single ‘You and I’ doubling as a jab at the music business. Acid-punk pop that still sounds like nobody else.
Fujiya & Miyagi – New Shiny Object
Brighton’s kosmische pop band mark 26 years together with their first major release in four years, on Impossible Objects Of Desire. David Best, Steve Lewis, Ben Adamo and Ed Chivers made it at their Newhaven studio, and it’s consciously the work of older musicians, wryly covering loss, fatherhood and middle-aged spread over Can-style beats and found sounds. ‘Lowest Common Denominator’, a post-punk bassline workout opens the nine tracks, and ‘158’ remembers the late Matthew Collins of Grunder, an early member.
RIP Magic – 1,2,3
RIP Magic, a London four-piece of Marco Pini, Felix Bayley-Higgins, Beth Boswell-Knight and Pedro Takahashi, release their debut album on section1. The twelve tracks make up a rock record without guitars, with live drums and bass colliding with synths, vocals and samples, and they include the James Murphy-produced ‘5words’, ‘Screwdark’ and ‘Light Over There’. The band treat images and references like samples, drawing on a fascination with ostentatious American culture. Their first year took in a sold-out Tame Impala arena tour and an invitation from Jack White to open his UK and Ireland tour. A restless, playful debut.
WHY? – Oh Golly / Yes Lord
Yoni Wolf, who has recorded as WHY? for nearly 30 years since his Anticon days, delivers his ninth album on Waterlines. I fell hard for Alopecia when it was released in 2008. Following 2024’s The Well I Fell Into, it considers life in the aftermath of that breakup: “trying to date again, living on the internet, this pathetic, solitary life”, as Wolf puts it. Nate Mercereau produces, with contributions from Andrew Broder and Ryan Olson. Wryly bruised.
The Big Moon – Forever
English indie band The Big Moon return with their fourth album on Fiction Records, co-produced with Sam Cohen (Kevin Morby) and recorded over three weeks at Bam Bam Studios in Norfolk. Frontwoman Juliette Jackson says writing it was “pretty much existential, because writing songs is my job and my identity”, while bassist Celia Archer says Jackson “has shown us you can face all this stuff and choose to be hopeful and find power from it.”
Yr Knives – Begin Yr Singing
A Chicago supergroup of Tortoise’s Douglas McCombs, Brian J Sulpizio of Health&Beauty, jazz guitarist Andrew Trim and drummer Quin Kirchner, brought together when composer Paul Karner wanted two unrelated guitar voices on a recording of his own music. They realised they were a band, and tracked six pieces live over a few days at the now-closed Palisade, mixed with Cooper Crain on Western Vinyl. The sound is two overdriven guitars fusing, with touchstones from Sonny Sharrock to Neil Young and Crazy Horse, and the closer ‘White Gladys’ adds improvised horns from Jason Stein and Mai Sugimoto.
Eerie Enterprise – Places Remember Events
Eerie Enterprise is the duo of upsammy (Thessa Torsing, whose 2020 Dekmantel LP Zoom was a delicate-precision standout) and Piezo (Luca Mucci, of PPP with DJ Plead and DJ Python). After years of admiring each other’s work, they carved out two open-ended, hardware-oriented days in the studio in July 2024, then spent a year and a half developing the sketches into nine tracks of “elegant, angular electronica” on Dekmantel. It has an unapologetically nostalgic, golden-era streak, meant to soothe rather than shock.
Disgusting Sisters – Skin & Blisters
The London-Paris sister duo’s debut is out on Source Records, the Anglo-French label of Air, Phoenix and Kings of Convenience. Written and recorded mostly DIY with producer and live bassist James McManus, with Oli Bayston (Barry Can’t Swim) pushing early tracks towards Viagra Boys and Getdown Services, the 10 deadpan, absurdist songs cover hopeless exes, sugar daddies and the 9-5. Josephine says every lyric comes from moments that actually happened. They tour the UK in November.
Córas Trio – Birth Is Upon Me, Death Is Upon Me
The Belfast trio of Kevin McCullagh (fiddle, electronics), Paddy McKeown (guitar, electronics) and Conor McAuley (drums) follow their 2024 debut with a second album on Coracle Records. Working without a compositional leader, they use the studio as an instrument, with melodies emerging from otherworldly textures and musique concrète abstractions, and echoes of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic and Reich-like pulses. Mixed and mastered by Seán Mac Erlaine, it runs on themes of impermanence and renewal. The Wire has praised their “boldly investigating 21st century Irish identity” approach.
Chloe Qisha – Fantasize
London pop artist Chloe Qisha releases her mixtape Fantasize via Columbia. It follows her self-titled 2024 debut EP and 2025’s Modern Romance, and arrives after the previews ‘So Sad So Hot’, ‘YDH’, ‘Surprise Surprise’ and ‘Baby Girl’. The last was written with Oscar Görres and Caroline Ailin, and Qisha describes it as “me at the club, thinking to myself: Do I want to be her, or do I want to be with her?” Glossy, flirtatious pop with a wink.
DeathbyRomy – Teenage Fever Dream
Los Angeles singer-songwriter DeathbyRomy (Romy Maxine Flores) follows 2025’s HOLLYWOOD FOREVER with her second album. Mixing dark pop, industrial and metal, it deals for the first time with her teenage years, including sensuality, identity and running away from home. “It was the most chaotic process I’ve ever had writing any of my projects,” she says, and warns “I don’t think people are ready for some of the turns I take sonically.” Abrasive and confessional.
Anna Meredith – Wicker (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Scottish composer Anna Meredith releases the soundtrack to Wicker via Mercury KX. The film is a romantic fantasy comedy directed by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer and starring Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård, which premiered at Sundance. Her score is led by recorders rather than electronics, and it follows her work on Eighth Grade and The End We Start From. The 28 cues include the single ‘Escape on Cart’, and many run to under a minute and a half. It lands ahead of her next studio album DARLING, due in February 2027. A compact, recorder-led detour.
THAO – Show Me
Thao Nguyen’s first album in six years arrives on Kill Rock Stars, made with Nate Brenner and Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards, who both appear alongside Neko Case, The Linda Lindas and Adrian Quesada of Black Pumas. The press release calls it a suite of primal, expansive, sexy and wrenchingly tender-hearted songs.
Moses Boyd – Songs For Sinners
Mercury Prize-shortlisted London drummer, composer and producer Moses Boyd releases Songs For Sinners on Exodus, his first album in six years. Raised in a Pentecostal household, he fuses gospel, jazz, soundsystem culture, Caribbean rhythms, 808s and choir harmonies, with guests including Chuck Strangers, Raelle, Shantéh and Amber-Simone on ‘Criticise’. Boyd’s own family make up the “kitchen choir”.
Murky – Ollamh
The second album from Murky Anyango, the Dublin-based Irish-Kenyan electronic trans musician, hyperpop singer and underground rapper. Ollamh is thematically centre on Irish culture and identity with the metaphysical location of a medieval fantasy video game, suggested through harp and bodhran instrumentation, mixed with synths and sub bass.
The title ‘Ollamh’was a poet or bard of literature and history in medieval Ireland. The highest ranking ‘Ard Ollamh’ would have a title equal in rank to that of the High King. MURKY takes this word and applies it to a lone warrior character who, throughout the course of the album brags about killing fictional English kings, being unmatched in battle, and being a heartbreaker. This is a tongue and cheek deflection of how it feels being visually an outsider to Irish culture due to her skin colour while actually being well versed and proud of her Irish culture and history. The lyrics deal with paranoia, pride, heartbreak, and frustration over Ireland being overlooked. Taking influence from the music of Jane Remover, Esdeekid, Kavari, and 2hollis, this album strives to energise people to dance, learn more about their history, and to take pride in themselves.
You can see her singing both her first album and Ollamh live in its entirety on November 20th in Daylight, and November 21st in The Belfast Barge as part of the Irish leg of Saoirse Dream and Estelle Allen’s international hyperpop tour.
The album will be on Bandcamp today.
8-bit Funk – Level Design
The Dublin jazz-funk quartet, led by Leon Laisne, argue that 90s and 2000s video game music already has the melodies and harmonies of jazz standards, much as jazz players once built repertoire from Broadway tunes. Level Design arranges six themes, from Pokémon Gold & Silver, Super Mario 64, Chrono Trigger, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Sonic the Hedgehog, through organ funk, fusion, neo-soul and electro-rock, with ‘Bob-omb Battlefield’ as the first single. They launch it at Doyle’s Corner in Dublin tonight.
‘Green Hill Zone’ is the jam here.
Susy Good – Lost In Your Glory
Susy Good, who previously made pop under the name GOOD THING, releases her debut album under her own name – a collection of alt-pop and contemporary folk categorised by the artist mantra “a coming-of-spirit” story, with inspiration from Cleo Sol, Maggie Rogers, and Amanda Cook.
Good Swim – The Mountains Sure Don’t Give A Damn About The Sea
Good Swim is Belfast folk artist Dave McConnell, and this debut, produced by Michael Bell, is his first recording in 12 years. It was previewed all year, from ‘Paper Tiger’ about isolation and the need for human connection to ‘Solstice’, which got BBC Introducing play, and a May EP, Many as One. ‘Simulation Theory’ starts as a love song and ends in emptiness, and ‘Friend of a Friend’ is the focus track. An indie-folk album for fans of Fionn Regan and Damien Rice.
Noble – The Witching Hour
Out on Blowtorch Records, the debut album from the Galway alt-pop band comes from Si Noble, a Connemara-based songwriter with two decades in the West of Ireland scene, first as frontman of Mugger Dave and later of Cranky Face. He contacted Mercury-nominated Ed Harcourt on Instagram and Harcourt ended up producing the record. ‘Warm Air’ builds from acoustic guitars and strings to an Elbow-like crescendo, and ‘Kiss Goodnight’, mastered at Abbey Road, is 60s Brit-rock energy with a brass crescendo. They launch it at the Blue Note in Galway on Sunday November 1st with Sakura in support.
Aphex Twin – Drukqs (25th Anniversary Edition)
Richard D. James’s wild 30-track opus gets its first vinyl pressing since 2001 through Warp, completing his Aphex Twin catalogue on vinyl. It’s a 45 RPM 4xLP set in a gatefold, with 2xCD and double cassette versions, and a limited box set with a poster and stencil from the AFX store. From detailed breakcore to the prepared piano of ‘Avril 14th’, it still sounds like nothing else.
Phil Lynott – The Story of My Life
Philip Lynott grew up in Crumlin and died in 1986, and the 8CD box set The Story of My Life marks 40 years on with what UMR/Mercury calls “the most comprehensive collection of Philip Lynott’s solo recordings ever released”. Compiled by Thin Lizzy archivist Nick Sharp with the full support of the Lynott estate, it gathers Solo in Soho and The Philip Lynott Album alongside rarities, demos and 29 previously unreleased songs. The centrepiece is Fatalistic Attitude, an earlier version of the second solo album that was judged too dark in 1982 and reworked. The preview, the demo ‘Can’t Get Away’, was recorded with Huey Lewis and it also contains the fantastic ‘One Wish’. An essential archive set for devotees.
EPs out today
Skee Mask & North Americans – Final Circle
The producer Bryan Müller, aka Skee Mask, teams up with Los Angeles guitarist Patrick McDermott, aka North Americans, for Final Circle, a five-track collaboration on City Slang. It is the first joint release for both. The pair swap Skee Mask’s usual pounding bass for dub-indebted ambience, with McDermott’s dreamy Americana guitar drifting through blurry keys and soft, reverb-drenched textures. Tracks are titled by date, from ‘05012023’ to ‘30122021’, and the mood is patient and unhurried. Bleep call it “lush and verdant common ground”. An unexpected pairing that sounds natural from the first listen.
Also released today
- Editors – Surface, Echo & Sound
- Foy Vance – IF: WE EP
- horsegiirL – HARDCORE HEALING EP
- Lowly – Softly
- Ministry – Hate To Go (Take Out Or Delivery)
- Mariah Carey – Glitter (25th Anniversary Edition)
- Sparks – Music That You Can Dance To (40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)
- The Who – The Who By Numbers (Deluxe Edition)
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.
