2026 is halfway over, and in that time, there has been great music from both new names and returning stars. Our staff has picked what they think are the best albums of 2026 so far. Our picks range from a quirky and buzzworthy math rock duo to the return of two of the biggest stars in music.
Angine de Poitrine – Vol. II
The year’s most unlikely breakthrough act comes from Quebec and is an instrumental math rock duo with an eye-catching concept. Angine de Poitrine’s two members, who go by the names Khn and Klek, wear giant papier-mache masks and polka-dotted outfits. The gimmicks wouldn’t matter if the music wasn’t great, and on Vol II, it is. Khn plays a unique combination of guitar and bass and loops around Klek’s kinetic drumming. They play angular prog rock and flip through micro-tunings and unusual time signatures with astonishing speed, sometimes with brief interjections from the two members that amount to the only vocals on the songs.
The album feels like you’re on a roller coaster for its whole duration. Even with a loop pedal, it’s tough to believe this is all being done by two people if you didn’t see it with your own eyes in their breakthrough KEXP video. Vol. II has just six songs in its 37 minutes, all of them running over six minutes. The album never drags, and it demands repeated listens to their dizzying, spellbinding sound. They are one of the bands to watch for a reason, after all. [Ryan Gibbs]
Boards of Canada – Inferno
As a band whose legacy has cemented them as one of the most premier masters of mood and atmosphere in electronic music’s history, it almost feels like a fool’s errand to try to describe the feeling that listening to a Boards of Canada can induce. Even harder still would be to put into words what exactly makes Inferno, their first release in 13 years, feel so shocking and unique in an airtight discography that most of us assumed had already been nailed shut.
The band still operates mostly through the juxtaposition of electronic “dance” music and organic soundscapes, melding ghostly field recordings with chopped-up inhuman vocal samples and understatedly catchy synths, but here they add a heavy dose of spirituality, infusing their amorphous recipe with a new flavor.
A clear reaction to the turbulence of the modern era, this album uses live instrumentation and references to various religions (the biblical conversations of Father and Son sitting alongside the Hare Krishna chants in Naraka mesh surprisingly well) to make a slightly more uplifting, or at least hopeful, take on the end times they already engaged with in the hellish Geogaddi or post-nuclear Tomorrow’s Harvest. There is something purposefully obtuse and unknowable about Boards of Canada, but there is also something to be said for how timely each of their releases has felt, and the anxiety and apocalyptic darkness of Inferno sees them once again untouchable when it comes to tapping into the cultural zeitgeist. [Quinn Parulis]
BTS – Arirang
In their first release following the members’ mandatory military service, BTS returns to re-establish their critical voice in the musical landscape with Arirang. They do this by refusing to deliver on the unspoken assumption that they would return to the confectionery pop numbers such as “Dynamite” and “Butter,” notes they ended on before their hiatus. Instead, their return hearkens back to their early days as a group that prioritized R&B and hip-hop sonic cues.
Delightfully grungy and laden with a club aesthetic, Arirang melds cultural sensibilities, singing in English while layering the album’s standout number, “Body to Body,” with South Korea’s oldest folk song. There’s a refreshing playfulness to the album that eschews expectations for something bolder and darker, and, necessarily, more adult. The production across the board is phenomenal, as the songs emphasize the dynamic talents of the group’s most prominent songwriters, RM, J-Hope, and Suga, as rap takes the forefront. At the same time, the vocalists Jungkook, Jimin, V, and Jin enrich the atmospheric space the album exists in.
That willingness to play and not adhere to a prescribed style or a radio-friendly Western market is what makes the cohesive return so emblematic of who BTS are as a group. As they dabble in everything from trap beats to shoegaze and the synths of Dijon and Bon Iver, they prove they’re a group who refuses to rest on easy, instead pushing themselves as artists. [Allyson Johnson]
Avalon Emerson & The Charm – Written into Changes
Avalon Emerson’s second outing with The Charm sees the San Francisco DJ putting her popstar shoes back on and doubling down on her unique approach to dream pop and electropop. Written into Changes comes three years after & The Charm, where Emerson pivoted from techno to dream pop, disco, and shoegaze.
With this new record, the songs have undergone all-around refinements and moved into bolder sonic territories. The melodies are stickier, production is denser, and Avalon Emerson’s vocals feel even more alive. “Jupiter and Mars”, the album’s second track, is one such example with Emerson painting a picture of cosmic proportions that touches on love and missed connections. In a just world, it would be a smash hit and playing on every radio station. [Mark Wesley]
Friko – Something Worth Waiting For
Nothing about Friko’s debut album could have prepared us for the overwhelming level-up they seem to have experienced between that release and their sophomore album, this year’s crowning achievement of scrappy indie-rock Something Worth Waiting For. While their first album flirted with chamber-pop dramatics and early 2000s indie flavorings, this album finds them firing on all cylinders and releasing one of the first true heirs to the bygone sounds of Modest Mouse’s shaggiest eras, Titus Andronicus’s most declarative punk epics, or early Arcade Fire’s heart on the sleeve communal exuberance.
Part of Friko’s success can be attributed to something as simple as their unabashed sincerity, with none of the obvious throwback irony or overstuffing of quirky bells and whistles like their would-be peers in Black Country, New Road or Geese. Friko foregoes that in favor of straight-up rocking out in a way that feels almost quaint, with some tracks unafraid to get overly literate, baroque, and dramatic sequenced alongside ones that build to explosive climaxes or are as soft and delicate as the best of The Beatles’ ballads.
There is a youthful and unapologetic urgency to Something Worth Waiting For that makes it feel important, the kind of event-release that actually cares about being a complete album rather than a collection of singles, and hopefully, this mentality carries forward and lifts the sails of the tentatively resurging world of rock and roll. [Quinn Parulis]
Noah Kahan – The Great Divide
Noah Kahan could’ve easily followed up Stick Season by simply making everything bigger—bigger choruses, bigger wounds, bigger campfire-ready sing-alongs. The Great Divide does something far more satisfying, though. It preserves the communal sweep of his breakthrough while letting more doubt and adulthood into the frame.
Kahan’s gift has always been his ability to make private shame sound like something a crowd might sing back to him, and here that gift feels newly sharpened. The songs still carry the earthy momentum of modern folk-rock, but they’re less interested in catharsis as an endpoint than in what remains after the catharsis fades. He writes about family, memory, stasis, and self-sabotage with the plainspoken directness that made him famous.
But The Great Divide complicates his emotional palette. It’s an album about distance. The distance between who you were and who you are. Between home as refuge and home as trap. And Kahan makes that distance feel both crushing and strangely survivable. [Jon Negroni]
Paycheque – Paycheque
The LA duo Paycheque have the sophsti-pop record of the year with their debut album. Its vocal tag teams, melodies, and guitar interjections draw inspiration from the likes of Prefab Sprout while doing its own thing. They know their way around a hook, and it shows on infectious tracks like “Generic Actress” and “Repeater”. “Temporary Love,” on the other hand, builds on the sounds of vintage italo disco to make something conversant with modern electronic and new wave. The shimmer of late 80s new wave can also be found in the vintage synth sounds throughout the album. If this album were dropped out of a time machine to 1986, it would be all over the year. Instead, in 2026, Paycheque has a wonderfully relistenable record that provides a fresh take on a throwback sound. [Ryan Gibbs]
Ratboys – Singin’ to an Empty Chair
Mixing alt-country and indie rock is one of the big sounds in rock music today, so how does a band separate itself from the pack? If you’re the Chicago band Ratboys, the answer is to just write a set of killer songs full of hooks. On “Singin’ to an Empty Chair”, Julia Steiner and her band do just that, delivering heartland rock stompers that recall ’80s cowpunks Lone Justice (“Penny in the Lake”), a bracing opener full of jangly guitars (“Open Up”), catchy power pop tunes (“Anywhere”), and driving indie guitar jams (“Light Night Mountains All That”). The band sounds like they’re firing on all cylinders throughout the whole record, and their enthusiasm for playing together is infectious. They have one of the best rock records of the year so far. [Ryan Gibbs]
Olivia Rodrigo – You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love
Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love proves that her greatest subject was never heartbreak alone, but the performance of feeling too much in a world that keeps asking young women to make pain look tidy. Her third album expands the volatile pop-punk and piano-ballad language of SOUR and GUTS into something more theatrical. More structurally ambitious. And honestly? More emotionally unstable in the best possible way.
Rodrigo still writes like she’s live-texting from the scene of the crime, but the album’s power comes from how often she turns that immediacy against itself. Love, here, isn’t a cure for melodrama. It’s another stage on which insecurity, desire, resentment, and self-mythology fight for the spotlight. The songs are hooky and acidic, but also unusually self-aware about the stories people tell themselves when they want romance to redeem them. In that respect, Rodrigo doesn’t try to outgrow her messiness or become an “adult.” She learns how to orchestrate her shortcomings into her best work yet. [Jon Negroni]
Suzy Sheer – Pure Pulse, Slow Decay, Soft Release
One of the producers leading the way in the witch house/electroclash revival is Suzy Sheer, a duo consisting of artists boysinblush & tuchscreen. Their contributions on fakemink’s breakout hit, “Easter Pink”, put them on the map for many fans who, like many of us, yearn for the days of early 2010’s witch house and electroclash. With their debut album, Pure Pulse, Slow Decay, Soft Release, the duo delivers leaps and bounds above expectations.
The record is witch house at its most refined and pure; All killer, no filler. Songs like “Bulbs”, “Slow Decay”, and “Last Year” are magical and downright starry-eyed with their twinkling synths, colorful textures, and catchy hooks. And the title track, the shimmering “Pure Pulse”, which should immediately be everyone’s song of the summer. This is music for rolled-down car windows in July and club nights with your closest friends. It’s for walking outside in the city, seeing a clear sky, and watching the lights around you slowly come into view.[Mark Wesley]
Tigers Jaw – Lost on You
Formed back in 2005, the rock group Tigers Jaw has earned an enduring following due to their tireless consistency. That pays off on an album such as Lost on You, a tight and cohesive work that reaffirms the band’s best assets. From observational, self-deprecating lyrics that play on painful truths to the emo-inspired riffs and stripped-bare vocals, Lost on You understands why we return for each release.
Twinged with notes of melancholy that undercut the jaunty, rhythmic instrumentation, songs such as “Primary Colors,” with its rolling drum start and slow build, and “Ghost,” with its buzzy guitar and catchy chorus, stand out as some of the band’s best. And, more than anything, the album underscores something so universal about music, and that’s what it means to age alongside a band you’ve followed since your formative years. As it explores the highs and lows of being human, the album refuses to relinquish the joy that fuels its soundscape. It’s painful sincerity mixed with the feeling of laughing at ourselves. Fun escapism with an earnest center. [Allyson Johnson]
Underscores – U
Underscores, the electronic-pop project of April Harper Grey, sounds like the clash between music’s past and future. More specifically, it sounds like what happens when an extremely online artist grows up equally influenced by the glossy radio-pop of the early 2000s, the digital breakdowns of 2010s dubstep, and the overt earnestness of that era’s emo and pop confessionals. The result is an album that hits the intersection between the earnest romantic grief of Ethel Cain, the autotuned to death hyper pop chaos of 100 Gecs, and the sleekly booming bass of classic Timbaland (the beats on “Music”, “Do It”, and “Innuendo” are the filthiest of the year), all the while retaining a uniquely strong sense of personality that separates her from the scores of other bedroom-producers that populate the internet.
With a brisk runtime spread across 9 tracks that explore every facet of the aforementioned sounds (Lovefield in particular checks off every box in one go), U is the sound of pop’s future, picking up the torch from genre icons Sophie and Charli XCX and sprinting past the finish line. With a high-profile gig as the opening act on Charli’s upcoming arena tour, Underscores is poised to make a mainstream breakout any day now, and in an endless sea of peers, there couldn’t be a more deserving artist. [Quinn Parulis]
Kurt Vile – Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me
Kurt Vile has always made drifting sound like a philosophy, but Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me turns his habitual looseness into something minimally monumental. The album moves with the unhurried sprawl of a long walk through familiar streets. Full of loops, muttered revelations, shaggy guitar figures, and thoughts that seem casual until they suddenly open into something profound.
Vile’s music has never depended on dramatic reinvention, yet this record finds fresh depth in his patience. Songs stretch, circle, and amble, trusting repetition to reveal what direct confession might flatten. Philadelphia becomes more than a hometown backdrop. It’s a whole psychic weather system, a place that has shaped his humor, his melancholy, and his stubborn refusal to hurry toward resolution. The result is one of Vile’s most generous records ever. It’s funny, expansive, deceptively intricate. It’s full of the kind of lived-in wisdom that sounds tossed off until it keeps echoing in your head, hours later. [Jon Negroni]
To let us know what your favorite album of the year so far is, let us know at Bluesky or our Discord.
