Well, it’s a new year and I’m not getting any younger. It’s always hard to know when exactly the right time is to start digging into new albums and trying to make sense of what’s worth listening to. Especially when I often find myself listening to new albums just for the sake of turning the page on the previous year and trying to embrace the new sounds of the future. During a lot of my year-end music coverage of 2025, I talked about how it was a little harder to get as much joy out of music as I had in years past, but so far I’m not feeling quite that way about 2026, even if the world’s just as much of a mess as ever. Either way, I’ve already found plenty of albums to keep me chugging along through the frigidly cold months of this East Coast Winter. Luckily, it’s officially Spring and now we can all actually turn a new leaf, since turning a new leaf on a year doesn’t mean much when you’re stuck inside clinging to your proverbial radiator.
Before I get to talking about new music, I figured I’d talk about my time-honored tradition that I embark on every winter in the wake of posting my Top Ten Albums list. After unburdening myself of thinking of all the best music I’ve heard in the past 12 months, I look back a bit further and dive into the discography of an older artist I’ve long neglected. As is sometimes the case, this year’s deep dive happened to coincide with the passing of a boomer rock star, since the passing of Bob Weir in January felt like a real bit of closure to the long strange trip the Grateful Dead (and their post Jerry Garcia iterations) went on for the past 60 years.
I can’t speak too much to Weir’s importance within the band, since I am by no means a bona fide Deadhead, which was what made me curious to do some deeper diving into the Dead’s output. Since I had more or less already listened to the band’s best studio albums (American Beauty, Workingman’s Dead, Anthem of the Sun, etc.), I felt compelled to listen to some of the band’s albums I hadn’t listened to (Aoxamoaxa, Blues for Allah), but mostly found myself digging into their live recordings, which have always felt so numerous and extensive that it’s always seemed a little overwhelming to tackle. Luckily, I had the help of a mild Deadhead friend to give me some suggestions while also diving into the seminal Europe ’72, which I had listened to before, but never really gave as much attention to as I should have, I’m sure just because it’s gal darn triple album.
Anyways, I listened to this along with some choice Dick’s Picks as well as a few bootleg recordings that are particular favorites of fans. Now, I would still say I’ve remained a pretty casual Grateful Dead fan, since I still think the band’s songwriting has always been a little weak compared to their incomparable live sound and knack for reinvention and improvisation. But in these live recordings, you get the kind of band chemistry that very few groups of musicians have matched, particularly in the rock realm. It’s the kind of music that I can understand why Deadheads love so much. There just aren’t a lot of bands that sound live the way these guys did, even if a million jam bands over the decades have tried to recreate that same druggy Americana magic.
I also wanted to give a little shout-out to a band that I started listening to just to scratch that Grateful Dead itch, but then I ended up listening to far more than I expected. Little Feat are not really one of the more popular or critically acclaimed groups of the 1970s, but they are pretty darn easy to enjoy if you’re in the right kind of boogie woogie mood. Since I certainly was of that temperament after my Grateful Dead comedown, I found this band that also happened to mix country, blues, folk, and psychedelic rock pretty darn hard to put down, especially when frontman/slide guitar maestro Lowell George happened to be a surprisingly economical songwriter despite Little Feat being pegged as a jam band. It’s a shame that George’s early death at the age of 34 didn’t make him into a cult hero, but I guess it hurts when your music isn’t as dark as that of the other musicians who died young in the late ‘70s. Either way, it was a blast listening to the first few Little Feat albums along with their 1978 live album Waiting For Columbus, which I’d put up against any live album from that era, even if I’m still not sure what to make of its sexy tomato cover.
I went through a brief pop-punk/emo phase earlier in the year while reading Dan Ozzi’s Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore 1994-2007, so a band like Joyce Manor coming out with a new album would naturally appeal to me during this phase. This Torrance, CA band arrived on the scene back in the 2010s, riding a wave of more indie-minded pop-punk/emo bands that seemed natural in the wake of the drying up of the kinds of major label opportunities chronicled in this book. Since I never quite latched on to this movement at the time (despite them encompassing many Philly bands), the release of I Used To Go To This Bar finally hooked me with its songs of beleaguerment and detachment from your younger days (hence the album’s title). Yet it still has that catchiness and punchiness of another 20-minute Joyce Manor album, which like the band’s earlier records, has made it an easy album to spin over and over again.
Lead-off track “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives” has been one of my go-to tracks in the early months of 2026, with its hard-hitting floor toms and insatiable refrain of “Train coming down the tracks / And it almost gave me a heart attack”. The rest of the album is a little more on the introspective side, ruminating on days gone by and allegiances that have come and gone between friends, lovers, and everything in between. Funnily enough, the album was produced by Brett Gurewitz, the Bad Religion frontman and Epitaph Records founder who’s a recurring character in Sellout, and the album’s production has a kind of lean, muscular power to it that evokes the best pop-punk records of the ‘00s and yet also has a kind of maturity that those records never foresaw.
Probably my favorite album of the young year would have to be Singin’ To An Empty Chair, since it’s the kind of album you love to see garnering acclaim and respect for a band like Ratboys that have been plugging away in the indie rock trenches for over a decade. I myself could admit to being guilty as taking this band for granted, since they’ve been on my radar for a while. However, I never took them too seriously until I saw them open for Kim Deal last year and found that their mix of sweet melodies courtesy of lead singer Julia Steiner, sludgy guitar solos courtesy of Dave Sagan, and sloppy synergy courtesy of the rest of the band are a well-oiled machine. So when they announced a new album this year and produced a single as ear-wormy as “Anywhere”, well l was more than ready to get hyped for a new Ratboys album for the first time.
Miraculously, Singin’ To An Empty Chair managed to defy my expectations, as this band sounds as good as they ever have and the album’s mix of punchy sing-alongs and longer jammy songs really captures this band’s live sound while also feeling like a well-rounded studio effort. While some of the songs serve as showcases for Steiner’s melodic bite and Sagan’s big guitar productions, there’s also a winsomeness that seeps into the band’s more country-leaning songs, because of course every indie album has to have a least a little bit of a country slant these days. The best of these is “Penny In The Lake” that somehow manages to turn up the twang and distortion in equal measure, combining the album’s push and pull of quieter introspective moments and bigger, lurching, buzzed out guitar jams.
At Home In My Mind was the first “out of nowhere” records to really impressed me in 2025. The album’s lead-off track “God Help Me Now” struck me as instantly compelling when I heard it on KEXP, with it’s pulsing drone and big yearning vibes. It’s opening line “I think too much / I’m all out of fucks / The worlds on fire / I’m just getting drunk” maybe doesn’t feel like the most unique sentiment these days, but maybe that’s more a commentary on Ellur’s ability to tap into big broad feelings. The album as a whole is consistently sturdy as far as dreamy indie pop goes, having a sweep to it that’s easy to get swept up in and songwriting that’s hooky enough to keep you coming back. At the moment, I’m not sure Ellur has gained too much traction outside of the UK, but this debut packs a lot of promise, as a lot of these songs remind me of classic anthemic rock songs of the past few decades, showing she’s studied the greats but also has the ability to mold them into something of her own.
Despite my affinity for a lot of modern R&B artists with an unconventional bent, for whatever reason, I’ve had a hard time getting into rapper/singer Liv.e. I remember her 2023 album Girl In the Half Pearl containing just a few too many stylistic left turns, making her chameleonic sound a little hard to get a handle on. So I’ve had a fun time grooving to GENA, her new collaboration with producer Karriem Riggins, who brings a more classic R&B and jazz sound to Liv.e’s playful inscrutability. This of course appeals to someone like me who loves soul music of the 60s and 70s and I couldn’t help but be intrigued by The Pleasure Is Yours’ album artwork, which looks like it’s straight out of a dusty collection of Trammps or Spinners records. Yet, this album never feels like retro bait, having a classic studio pristine that harkens to classic sounds but also feels attuned to more recent hip-hop and neo-soul sounds of the ‘90s and ‘00s that makes for the kind of amalgam of these artists’ styles that leaves a lot to dig into, but has a pulsating warmth to it that always feels welcoming.
After bursting onto the indie scene in the late 2010s, Mitski has kept pretty busy with new albums, though I’d be lying if I said I’ve been as dazzled by her releases since 2018’s Be The Cowboy. In fact, her last album I’m not sure I gave more than a couple of listens, even though I feel like it was generally well-received. Maybe it was just a little too low-key for me, since I was first enamored with the raw, fuzzy anthems of her earlier work. Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, Mitsuki’s latest, perhaps isn’t a revelation, since its many references to cats (there’s literally a song called “Cats”) feels especially Mitski, considering her more introverted nature these days. But there’s a nice mix of both the quieter side and the more angsty side of Mitski.
This is particularly apparent from the album’s get-go, as album opener “In a Lake” is this nice little meditative number ruminating on the great big city vs. small town divide. This then leads into the more blaring “Where’s My Phone”, which indulges Mitski guitar-driven bigness combined with an all-too-relatable chorus that feels like it would do well on TikTok. It’s an album of remarkable consistency despite the inherent duality I mentioned, and has had me thinking maybe I’ve been underestimating Mitski as one of the more reliable songwriters of her generation. She’s probably not going to write something quite as transcendent as “All American Girl” or “Nobody” again, but the assuredness seen here proves she doesn’t have to.