Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - March 13, 2026

Alexis Taylor is one of the UK’s most distinctive singer-songwriters. A singular voice, he’s built a substantial body of solo work over the years. Paris In The Spring is his most revealing album yet, baring sentiments both specific and universal. The subject matter doesn’t shy away from hard-hitting themes, but musically, it’s carefree, brightly-lit and contemporary, drawing on elegant disco-house, voluptuous basslines and Vangelis-inspired soundscapes. Testament to his skill as a curator, he’s called on some impressive personnel to help create its effervescent sound world: Air’s Nicolas Godin, The Avalanches, Lola Kirke, Oli Bayston, Étienne de Crécy, Elizabeth White of Pale Blue and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, to name but a few. In this world, the confessional style of country is charged by the pop melodicism of Paul McCartney, the futuristic funk of Sly and the Family Stone and, as Taylor puts it, “synthesisers left out in the rain”. It’s where British Americana meets Gallic flair, somewhere on Mars. Thankfully, no synths were harmed in the making of the album. The title references a psychological test where things are not as they seem. “You have to look for those double meanings, or what’s hiding under the surface.” Ultimately, this is an album about freedom from constraints, from preconceptions, from genre. Taylor experiments with all different musical styles – country, folk, disco – and has weaved it together here into something unique.

Anjimile has forged a distinctive musical path characterised by unflinching introspection and deep honesty. Giver Taker, hailed by Rolling Stone as one of the year's best albums, positioned him as a compelling voice exploring enduring themes of spirituality, identity, and liberation. With The King, Anjimile intensified his examination of Black and trans existence amid personal and societal turbulence, reaffirming his courageous commitment to navigating discomfort as a means of liberation. You’re Free to Go, picks up where The King left off, but with its hands open wide - a central question being: what happens when you let go and let love in? On You’re Free to Go, he learns to trust life again. The album’s title symbolises Anjimile’s expansive perspective on love and personal freedom, influenced profoundly by his relationship with his partner and their joyful embrace of non-monogamy. Elsewhere, You’re Free to Go explores heavier, darker truths; But even in its most searching moments, the record radiates light. Each song holds space for healing – for turning pain into something tender, communal, and free. Spirituality remains the heartbeat of Anjmile’s work. “Songwriting feels like a prayer, a plea, or a question,” he says. Across the album, sacredness feels alive and imperfect — a practice of breathing, wondering, forgiving. The album hums with that same sacred energy: messy and full of grace. You’re Free to Go is a portrait of transformation — not as a wound, but an opening. Richly textured, this collection of songs is an honest reflection of life's fluctuations. It holds space for contradiction and finds liberation in tenderness. In every note, Anjimile provides space for each listener to reflect and uncover their own truths, while gently reminding us that freedom isn’t the absence of pain, but the courage to love, to ask, to keep beginning again. A1. You're Free To Go A1. You're Free to Go A2. Rust & Wire A2. Rust & Wire A3. Waits for Me A3. Waits for Me A4. Like You Really Mean It A4. Like You Really Mean It A5. Turning Away A5. Turning Away A6. Exquisite Skeleton A6. Exquisite Skeleton B1. The Store B1. The Store B2. Ready or Not B2. Ready or Not B3. Point of View B3. Point of View B4. Afarin B4. Afarin B5. Destroying You B5. Destroying You B6. Enough B6. Enough

Transmitter is Max Clarke's fourth full length record as Cut Worms. Produced by Jeff Tweedy at Wilco's Loft studio, Transmitter marks a deepening of Clarke's abilities and the convergence of two artists whose work searches for grace amid dislocation. These are places shaped by the myth of self-reliance, where people sold the idea of connection through technology have been reduced to quiet transmitters-data points bought and sold, manipulated and measured, their lives distorted through the very networks meant to unite them. The first signs of Transmitter came when Cut Worms were on the road supporting Wilco in the summer of 2024. At the end of the tour, Tweedy invited the band to record at the storied Loft in Chicago, and plans were soon made to commence that fall. In the Loft's warm clutter of guitars, amplifiers, and books, Clarke and Tweedy quickly found common musical ground and a shared instinct for songs that hold complexity. While Clarke's voice and writing formed the framework, Tweedy's guitar and bass lines sketched the rooms the songs inhabit. Tweedy's presence as a producer revealed itself not in heavy-handed choices but in how he colored spaces and continually offered new textures. Between them, their like-minded sensibilities bridged a generational gap to create something more nuanced than either might have made alone. If previous Cut Worms releases were steeped in Brill Building decadence and madcap Americana, the sound on Transmitter feels darker, richer, more saturated with the anxiety of contemporary living. "Long Weekend" accelerates time itself, carrying the melodic urgency of Big Star or Dwight Twilley. "Evil Twin" wrestles with bitter disappointment, it's talky guitars recalling the jangling heartache of The Replacements and The Go-Betweens, and "Windows on the World" leans toward the sun of the future with a melancholy that drifts somewhere between Elliott Smith and Miracle Legion. Closing track "Dream" brings us back to a familiar plane: Clarke alone at the piano tender and unresolved, pondering the fate of dreams and the risk of falling short or getting lost en route. Transmitter finds Clarke in full stride, writing with the conviction of someone who's made peace with uncertainty. These songs reckon with the cost of comfort and return to the idea that beauty, connection, and love are not luxuries but necessities for survival. Clarke is drawn to paradox-the friction between intimacy and escape, faith and doubt, shadow and light. His forgiveness, like the cut worm's, comes through transference: the act of releasing something fragile into the noise and trusting it might still be felt.

English producer, songwriter, and musician James Blake returns with 'Trying Times', his seventh studio album and first fully independent release. Written between London and Los Angeles, the album confronts the turbulence of the last several years - global unrest, fractured discourse, and personal reckonings while searching for empathy, connection, and love amid chaos. Available on 2 LP Gatefold Vinyl and CD.

Johnny Blue Skies & the Dark Clouds, along with the label High Top Mountain Records, have joined forces with Atlantic Music Group’s Atlantic Outpost for the forthcoming release of Mutiny After Midnight. Arriving March 13, 2026, on vinyl, CD and cassette only, the new album follows Johnny Blue Skies’ 2024 debut, Passage Du Desir, and the venture marks the latest move in a career that will continue to defy industry stereotypes through a catalog of songs built on poetic songwriting, constant evolution, and the democratic brotherhood of a band.

Kim Gordon's third album, 'PLAY ME,' is distilled and immediate, expanding Gordon’s sonic palette to include more melodic beats and the motorik drive of krautrock. “We wanted the songs to be short,” Gordon says. “We wanted to do it really fast. It’s more focused, and maybe more confident." The follow-up to 2024’s Justin Raisen-produced, two-time Grammy-nominated 'The Collective' processes, in her inimitable way, the collateral damage of the billionaire class: the demolition of democracy, technocratic end-times fascism, the A.I.-fueled chill-vibes flattening of culture - where dark humor voices the absurdity of modern life. Despite its frequent outward gaze, 'PLAY ME' is an interior record, one in which a heightened emotionality pulses through physical jams, rejecting definitive statements in favor of an inquisitiveness that keeps Gordon searching, ever in process. A1. PLAY ME A2. GIRL WITH A LOOK A3. NO HANDS A4. BLACK OUT A5. DIRTY TECH A6. NOT TODAY B1. BUSY BEE B2. SQUARE JAW B3. SUBCON B4. POST EMPIRE B5. NAIL BITER B6. BYEBYE25!

Lamb Of God’s tenth album, Into Oblivion , sees them embracing their position as music veterans; Beholden to no one, with nothing to prove. Drawing from the tumultuous nature of the American political and cultural landscape, the band explores new sonic territory while simultaneously referencing their roots and doubling down on their signature groove. Into Oblivion is a blistering manifestation of decades of exploring, refining, and pioneering the metal of the 21st century.

Laurel Halo returns with an album of original soundtrack music, composed for the film Midnight Zone by visual artist Julian Charrière. Following the path of a drifting Fresnel lighthouse lens as it descends through the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone — a remote abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean, rich in rare metals and increasingly targeted for deep-sea mining — the film traces a descent into one of Earth’s last untouched ecosystems. Charrière’s film reveals the deep not as void, but as a luminous biome teeming with fragile life: bioluminescent creatures, swirling schools of fish, and elusive predators. The suspended lens becomes an abyssal campfire, attracting species caught in the tides of uncertainty, their futures hanging in the balance. Echoing this tension, Halo’s compositions evoke a sensory freefall, where gravity falters and light and sound flicker in uncertain rhythms. Midnight Zone is a sonic drift through the space between what we seek to extract, fail to understand, and must protect. Halo’s score evokes the life that exists beyond our physical airbound capacity. The material features long, subtle passages of electro-acoustic ambient, drone and sound design, slowly flowing and unfolding with rich detail. The music, composed largely on a Montage 8 synthesizer and Yamaha TransAcoustic piano at the Yamaha studios in New York City, possesses an uncanny quality: that of synthetic waveforms being amplified and sung through the stringboard of the physical body of the TransAcoustic piano. Combined with stacks of violin and viol da gamba, the music on Midnight Zone possesses trace elements of a human hand in an otherwise sunken landscape. Patient, submerged, and alive. The album will be the third on Halo’s imprint, Awe. The film is central to Charrière’s current solo exhibition Midnight Zone. The exhibition engages with underwater ecologies, exploring the complexity of water as an elemental medium affected by anthropogenic degradation. Reflecting upon its flow and materiality, profundity and politics, its mundane and sacral dimensions, the solo show acts as a kaleidoscope, inviting us to dive deep.

Fresh off the GRAMMY-nominated success of Happiness Bastards (2024), Chris and Rich Robinson wasted no time getting back to work. In early 2025, the brothers returned to Nashville to reunite with producer Jay Joyce and recapture the spark that powered their last record. This is the result. Reflective of their mood and expression, The Black Crowes have created a rock record that's loose and funky, dark and heavy, sensuous and jagged, Flesh and bone… A pound of feathers Or a pound of lead Look out below and mind your head

Through this process of creative renewal, the Manchester-based trio The Orielles - completed by drummer Sidonie Hand-Halford - have managed to weather a pandemic, defy the fickleness of a trend-led music industry, and emerge with something familiarly Orielles, yet altogether different. Recorded in two locations - Hydra and Hamburg - over the summer of 2024, the 11 tracks of Only You Left see the band consolidate the bold experimentation of their previous LP Tableau (2022), with a return to the more stripped-back, song-led approach of their early origins. Originally from Halifax, the Orielles first came to recognition in 2018 with their debut album Silver Dollar Moment, which is approaching it's eighth birthday in February 2026, marking a full-circle return to a familiar place as different people. By exploring binaries and contrasts, the Orielles are finding shapes in the chaos and confusion of the world around us - an undertaking that benefits from more than 15 years of close collaboration, driven by friendship and the artistic compulsion to find meaning in music.