Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - May 22, 2026

Aja Monet is a Surrealist Blues Poet in the business of goosebumps and heart-gut-telling truths. Her poems are harmolodic, vulnerable, and insurgent. As the youngest recipient of the Nuyorican Grand Slam Poetry title, she first cut her teeth in New York City's Lower East Side poetry clubs and bars, honing her voice and craft on the storied stages of a burgeoning grassroots poetry movement. She follows in the long legacy and tradition of poets organizing in social movements for change. Her collaborative spirit has seen her shape and shift culture alongside internationally renowned artists, scholars, activists, and organizers.aja's first full collection of poems, my mother was a freedom fighter (2017), is a powerful tribute to women who embody freedom, earning a nomination for a NAACP Image Award for Poetry. Her debut poetry album, when the poems do what they do, was nominated for a Grammy Best Spoken Word Poetry Album in 2024. The album explores themes of resistance, love, and the inexhaustible quest for joy. As a poet and touring bandleader, she has performed at festivals, concert halls, and theaters across the globe including but not limited to, the Guggenheim, Lincoln Center, Newport Jazz Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, North Sea Jazz Festival, Fremantle Biennele and the Barbican Centre to name a few.Aja Monet's awards include the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry (2019), the Nelson Mandela Changemaker Award (2024), The Harry Belafonte Voices for Social Justice Award (2024), the EBONY 100 Artist In Residence Award, and the Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Vanguard Award (2025). She also serves as the Artistic Creative Director for V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls. In 2022, she created "VOICES," an audio play amplifying the stories of Black women across the diaspora and the African continent.Aja Monet's most recent book of poems inspired by several years living and organizing in South Florida is called, Florida water on Haymarket Books. Her sophomore studio album the color of rain, is set to be released in May 2026 with drink sum wtr.

In circles and ever changing, Who’s Keeping Time? is a musing on life’s seasons—fleeting truths of beauty and chaos. For 10 days in August of 2025, we made this record in the attic of my 1892 Victorian home in Portland, Oregon, where all the songs were written. The scene felt kindred to a mouse house: a cozy world built of antique quilts, musical instruments, sound baffles, relics, marigolds, great-grandma’s dolls, old photographs, paintings and brightly coloured rugs. Sunshine poured through the skylights as Maggie the cat slept atop the pre-amps and inside guitar cases. We played these songs together in one room: no click tracks, no tricks, and no fuss. This is music from the hearts and breathing bodies of human beings, imperfect as we may be. I hope we can all take pause, and remember what is real — thanks for listening.

Bleachers' new album "everyone for ten minutes" will be released on 22 May 2026. Described by The New York Times as "anthemic, life-affirming pop rock," Bleachers are fronted by eleven-time Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, musician, and producer Jack Antonoff. Over the past decade, Bleachers have built a massive, devoted following, renowned for their impressive live show and infectious camaraderie. Bleachers' self-titled fourth studio took the band to new heights including a sold-out Madison Square Garden & the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

Ed O'Brien, the acclaimed guitarist and singer-songwriter known for his role in Radiohead, announces Blue Morpho, his absorbing, second solo album and first under his own name.Named for the iridescent butterfly, Blue Morpho was written during lockdown and recorded at The Church Studio, London and Seven Sound in Wales. The tranquil Welsh countryside proved inspirational, capturing a sense of reflection, healing, and acceptance. Musically the album blends a collage of hypnotic psych-folk, jazz, trip-hop, radiant guitars and rhythm sections. Blue Morpho marks a fresh and deeply personal chapter in O'Brien's musical journey.Produced by Paul Epworth (Adele, Coldplay), with additional production from Riley MacIntyre (Ezra Collective), and mixed by Ben Baptie (Sault, Little Simz). The album features an array of musicians, such as Shabaka Hutchings (flute), Dave Okumu (guitars, bass), Philip Selway (drums), and The Tallinn Chamber Orchestra.

Future Islands are an emotionally charged synth pop group, known for their dexterous melodic touch, stately momentum and impassioned delivery. Over the past twenty years they have travelled a rare arc, from promising newcomers to best-kept secret, from cult favourites to heroes of the genre. As they reach this remarkable milestone, they resist the obvious move. Instead of a 'best-of' compilation victory lap, Future Islands present From a Hole in the Floor to a Fountain of Youth - an immediate and accessible collection - half of which have never appeared on streaming services - comprising alternate hits, rarities, and fan favourites that showcases the band's palette and bringing further colour to their uniquely universal appeal. Twenty songs for twenty years, four members of the band, four sides of vinyl."The best synth-pop band of the 21st century [...] a band of renaissance men who can make a sublime and meticulous genre like synth-pop feel grandiose and loose" - Paste

Gun Outfit is a long running lifestyle band out of Los Angeles, California. For two decades the group has been making unclassifiable underground rock music that strives to remain humble and true to life. This has been documented on several releases through fine imprints like Post Present Medium, Paradise of Bachelors and Joyful Noise. Beginning as a crude duo, they have solidified into a crack five piece; a post punk band playing experimental folk rock with a local flavour. The sound has grown mellower, more expansive and more intimate in response to the schizophrenic environment in which we live. Process and Reality is their most ambitious record yet. Self-recorded over the course of a month on a ranch in Pine Flat, California while a forest fire burned ten miles away, the album is an apocalyptic improvisation on a passing world. A series of sonic landscapes and a set of discrete and inviting songs, Process and Reality is maelstrom of vibe grounded by lyrical engagement and limited means. Dulcimer, autoharp, keyboard, melodica, sitar and a variety of other instruments in novel arrangements widen the sound, a collaborative approach to songwriting broadens the emotional scope and intuitive mixing and a commitment to analogue gear gives the production a subtle mystical resonance. Principle songwriters Dylan Sharp and Carrie Keith grew up in rural Washington state, forming Gun Outfit in Olympia in 2006. Daniel Swire has been drumming in the band since 2010; on this record he plays a variety of other instruments as well. Multi-instrumentalist Henry Barnes (of Amps For Christ) joined in 2015, but this record emphasizes his virtuosity on his homemade instruments and electronics. Kayla Cohen has been playing bass in the band since 2019. Other collaborators - Chris Cohen, Warren Lee, Danny Sasaki and others - have all left their mark on this majestic double LP. Process and Reality takes its name from the book by the philosopher AN Whitehead, who articulated a metaphysic that emphasizes the primacy of intuition, experience and creativity and the inherent sociality of the unfolding of being. Gun Outfit was inspired by this work in the sense that it is a grounded critique of the vulgar cartesian materialism which remains in charge, pretending to be certain of the nature of our world. In order to preserve what is meaningful in our culture, we must resist technological encroachment and use those tools which respect and encourage our way of life. Music is a gift, because of the mysterious way it carries meaning. Process and Reality is an attempt to give and preserve meaning through obscure methods.

Forged from the fire of internal struggles, Loraine James was wrestling with confidence and a desire for change when she embarked on "Detached From The Rest Of You". A guiding hand came through producing 2025's "Clandestine" EP with singer Anysia Kym, which gave her the experience of a more 'pop' setting and the tools and insight to work her instrumentals into more conventional shapes; a shift from club driven sounds and winding instrumentals into more precise song forms.Loraine's production is stripped to the bone, soundscapes of clicks and glitches inspired by Aoki Takamasa, Ryoji Ikeda, and the early-00s Clicks & Cuts school. Here, often with not much more than sparse keyboard chords to fill in with subtle colouring, she uses the space around the sounds and vocals to draw the listener in to a succinct and direct album, her most confident yet.Guest contributors include vocalist Sydney Spann on "In a Rut", Alan Sparkhawk (Low) on downcast anthem "Peak Again", Miho Hatori (Cibo Matto) on "Flatline", Anysia Kim on "Score", and Tirzah on "Habits and Patterns". Finally her old spar, the rapper Le3 bLACK returns to spit fire with the jazz-indebted track "Ending Us All" with Fyn Dobson backing on tumbling drums.

Chart topping British singer-songwriter Maisie Peters returns with much anticipated third studio album Florescence, co-produced with 2x Grammy Winner Ian Fitchuck with collaborators including Marcus Mumford and Julia Michaels. reflects on how the right love can help heal the wrong ones. It’s an album about perspective, self-realisation, healing, and ultimately, learning how to flourish. This lands as Maisie’s first new LP since she became the youngest solo British female artist in almost a decade to land a UK No.1 album with Tback in 2023. Since then, she’s had the A-list co-signs via Phoebe Bridgers, Sam Smith and Olivia Rodrigo. She’s had a fiercely devoted fandom flock to headline tours around the world. And she’s played shows from Wembley Arena, to Glastonbury, to stadium slots with Taylor Swift and Coldplay. “Florescence means ‘the process of flowering, of developing richly and fully’ and to me, this album describes exactly that. These 15 tracks depict a blossoming of myself from ages 23 to 25 and a blossoming of a true real love that anchors both me and this record. It tells the story of the last few long winters, with all of their villains and thorns, heartbreaks and rains, and it leads you, by the end, into a perfect English spring, into the hope and catharsis that comes when the first wildflower blooms. It’s a true representation of healing, of finding hope and peace and strength not just in somebody else, but in yourself. It is clear skies, cherry pits on the grass, windows flung open - it is Sussex country roads and London corner shop wine that leaves a stain when you kiss. It is the feeling of flying, then falling, then flying again. It is knowing that there was a point to all the sadness of before, and the point is the woman you see in this mirror now, and the person you see by her side. Love is weaved into every strand of every song on this album and for good reason - love is timeless, love is pure, love is organic and simple and effortless and real. I hope you find this album to be that as well.”

Marisa Anderson’s music transcends borders. The topography of her work interrogates the intersections of artistry and expression with form and tradition. Anderson crafts pieces bursting with equal parts reverence and curiosity, contouring familiar shapes into work that is wholly her own. Anderson has spent decades mining the veins of the complicated, interconnected American folk traditions she was steeped in from a young age, stretching beyond those traditions and incorporating the vocabulary and techniques of vernacular folk music from around the world into her work. Eschewing replication or revival, Anderson’s music lives in conversation with tradition. “My approach to tradition is with the hands that I have and the history that I have,” notes Anderson. “In that way it’s a collaboration–you don’t go into collaboration trying to play like the other person, you go in trying to find out how to play together.” The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music is drawn from nearly one thousand songs culled from the private record collection of the late Harry Smith. For this record, Anderson works on music from places that the United States has been in conflict with since 1970: Southeast Asia, the USSR and the Arabic and Islamic regions of the world. In Volume 1 Anderson presents her own deeply personal iterations of nine songs from the Anthology. Composed, transcribed and arranged through a process of trial and error, deep listening and research, Anderson charts a musical course across the globe. Each piece on the album stands as a dialogue between Anderson and the original source recordings, refracted through the prism of her unique musical lens. Anderson’s contribution to this dialogue ultimately invites asks: “Who are the people we’ve been told in our lifetimes are “unamerican?” What have we lost or been denied access to in the fallout from that label?”

Images of Life is the career-spanning, 3xLP retrospective boxset illuminating the staggering breadth and depth of Detroit's unheralded songwriting genius, Ted Lucas. Disc one "Strange Mysterious Sounds (1965-1970)" highlights Ted's flirtation with psychedelic major label clout via his bands the Spike Drivers, the Misty Wizards and the Horny Toads. "Rainy Days (1970-1974)" will be the solo acoustic warmth and charm most familiar to folks already aware of Ted's selftitled "OM" album from 1975. "Impossible Love (1979)" the lost second Album finds Ted smooth and nearly "yacht rock" while never betraying the true artistry and craft of the once-in-a-generation talent of Ted Lucas

The realest-deal storyteller in indie-rock today is the Tampa-born, New Orleans-based singer/songwriter Thomas Dollbaum, and Birds of Paradise is his most powerful and dynamic work yet. Following up his critically acclaimed Wellswood (Big Legal Mess, 2022) and Drive All Night EP (Dear Life Records, 2025), Birds of Paradise is a goodbye letter to lost loved ones and former selves. These songs find Dollbaum searching for acceptance in the transient in-between places: Florida's pine flatwoods, backroads leading to 1-95, where birds fly across the water. And even though the ghosts of his alt-county predecessors Townes and Molina are definitely present, on Birds of Paradise, Dollbaum emerges from their shadows-waving to the past, sounding all the more like himself.This moment-this album-is long overdue. Both of Dollbaum's previous releases had taken way too long to record, due to circumstances out of his control, leaving him frustrated. And after having been away from his home for eight years, the place he had left was no longer the place he remembered, and the unchanging of the natural world felt like a constant he wanted to write about. With a sense of immediacy, he wrote Birds of Paradise in three months. Called up the musicians he trusted and admired the most-Nick Corson, Josh Halper, and Jake Lenderman- and asked them to meet him at Dial Back Sound in Water Valley, Mississippi with producer/engineer Clay Jones. They learned and tracked the album in four days, capturing lightning in a bottle, a sonic revelation Dollbaum's writing has always been waiting for.With the help of Lenderman, Halper, Corson, and Jones, Birds of Paradise is Dollbaum's hard-won breakthrough. Alive and echoing like the poems and short stories you can't shake: coyotes howl, birds fly south, kids chase rabbits through the sugar cane, and cigarettes are four dollars a pack. Birds of Paradise reminds us where we come from-the things inside ourselves we've forgotten-we just needed Dollbaum to show us. Here's how to look back without fear or shame. Here's authenticity.

Paradessence, Visible Cloaks' third full length, is a work of emergence and illusion. The album's fourteen songs shift, heave, and shimmer against a faintly luminous backdrop of night, a cavernous space shaped by sparse hyperreal representations of the natural world. The arrangements are simultaneously grandiose and fragile, both an inversion and culmination of what came before and as adventurous as anything they've produced so far.Since transforming from Cloaks to Visible Cloaks in 2014, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile have mapped a complex matrix of oppositional concepts: organic and artificial, chance and deliberate, authentic and replicated. The album title itself, drawn from author Alex Shakar's satirical portmanteau of "paradoxical" and "essence," reflects these tensions directly: the paradessence of consumer product is the "schismatic core" that gives rise to it's desirability (in Shakar's example, coffee is desired because it is both relaxing and stimulating simultaneously). The balancing act of Paradessence brings these strains into greater urgency as life in the 21st century is reordered by these same tensions.Silence is an important character in Paradessence, felt not only in the sculpting of sound but in the pressure it exerts on everything and what emerges. The group took influence from architectural theorist Christopher Alexander's concept of "positive space," an idea that the same degree of care can be given to the shape of the void around an object as the construction of the object itself. We hear how sounds carry their own silence, oscillating in and out of existence, running through life cycles like a microorganism.There is a collectivity to the instruments that underpin Paradessence. They move like a herd, as when wind drifts over a field of leaves and the air becomes visible in the absence of motion; multiple species cohabit the same song, protruding, receding, and transforming over the course of several minutes. "Instead of creating pieces that function horizontally as environments," says Doran, "we wanted to conceptualize them as living material changing in space, continually in flux." Song-forms steer away from ambience towards pure abstraction. Utopianism hovers at the edges; a relationship to imagined futures which is neither naïve, cynical, nor nostalgic.