Summer is dead and gone, and after another particularly sweltering one where I squeezed all there was to get out of a good summer, I’m ready for Fall. But first, before we get the sweaters and plastic skeletons out of the closet, let’s take a look back at some of the best music to come out during the warmer months. Considering this post ended up being a lot longer than I was anticipating, this apparently was a pretty good summer for me music-wise, filled with both some enjoyable high profile releases as well as more under-the-radar stuff. Let’s dive in!
I might as well start off with the album that was a great early jump-start for music releases this summer, kicking off the season with one of our most talented pop stars stepping up her game once more. As its title would indicate, this isn’t an album necessarily chalked full of good-time summer jams, and yet Olivia Rodrigo’s pop instincts are so natural that the album still felt like an easy one to put on repeat. Here, Miss Rodrigo and her longtime producer Dan Nigro leave behind the angsty pop-punk and equally angsty bedroom ballads of their previous two albums, and mold Rodrigo’s big feelings into something a little more emotionally rich, noticeably influenced by the drippy yearning of ’80s synth and goth rock.
While the album doesn’t quite have a standout catchy single on the level of a “good 4 u” or “bad idea right?”, the album has a cohesiveness that her earlier albums lacked, anchored by the songs forming an album-wide exploration of intense love and the fallout from those feelings. While I’m not sure I entirely relate to the content of You Seem Pretty Sad, maybe I’m just impressed with the amount of poise and precision Rodrigo seems to employ while delving into messy emotions that shouldn’t sound so effortlessly woven into a great pop song. Meanwhile, Rodrigo’s recent victory lap at the Daisy Chain festival has cemented her as an artist who can seemingly do no wrong, even though I’m sure she eventually will. But for now, this feels like the moment we’ll look back on years from now when she really hit her peak as an artist, even if she has plenty more great music to come.
One of the stranger things about this summer that I think we’ve already moved on from was the fact that this 4th of July saw America’s 250th birthday. And considering a lot of the country’s current mixed feelings (to put it lightly) about the ol’ U.S. of A., it was hard to know how to feel about the semiquincentennial, even if you lived in the city where the signing of the Declaration of Independence took place. Here in Philly, the 4th of July celebrations were pretty muted, mostly overshadowed by the more international celebrations accompanying the World Cup. Hell, the most memorable thing about Philadelphia’s history being celebrated this year was our current administration’s attempts to cover up the fact that our most prominent founding father owned slaves.
Anyways, this bizarre environment was what perhaps made Vince Staples’ Cry Baby feel like the most fittingly American album to come out in the summer of 2026. It feels like Staples puts out another solid album every couple of years that I give a spin, but for whatever reason, this one grabbed me from the get-go. Perhaps chalk it up to Staples’ more overtly political lyrics, whose immediacy feels like both a departure and a natural fit for the rapper’s pervading cynicism. Also, there’s a liberated quality to the fact that the album saw Staples breaking from his label and signing to the more indie-minded Loma Vista after supposedly being encouraged to remain in a decidedly hip-hop vein. But here, he’s free to explore his more rock-minded interests, retaining the darkness of his hip-hop records but combining it with a garage rock swagger that feels instantly accessible regardless of which genre is your preference.
Another hip-hop album that had an easy time sinking its hooks into me was Philly’s own Tierra Whack and her nimble return to the genre on Whack’s Museum. Whack, as you might recall, burst onto the scene back in 2018 with the mixtape Whack World, whose 15-minutes spread across 15 tracks embraced a curious flavor of bite-sized, mosaiced-together song construction. While Whack’s Museum feels a little more luxuriant in comparison, its 27-minute runtime still feels like it doesn’t waste a second while allowing Whack to delve a little deeper into whatever little thing is on her mind.
While I enjoyed Whack’s debut album World Wide Whack, a spacy venture into pop and R&B territory, I find her a little more compelling in this world-hardened hip-hop mode here. She’s just a phenomenally talented MC, oscillating between tongue-twisting precision and more laid-back ruminations from track to track, displaying a range that makes it obvious why she doesn’t necessarily feel constrained by the music world she came up in. And while this mixtape perhaps feels more like a fresh reset than a defining statement, its playful beats and rhymes were a welcome companion any time I had a half hour to kill this summer.
One of my favorite early 2026 releases that I only discovered later in the year was Twisted Teens’ sophomore release, Blame The Clown. With its blend of lo-fi buzz and dirtbag wisdom, it’s one of the more intriguing takes on indie-country I’ve heard in a while, since it has a kind of rough-around-the-edges quality lacking in this genre lately. Not afraid of going back to the well too soon, Twisted Teens released another album this year in July that felt more like a companion to Blame The Clown than its own thing, since it’s hard to expect a band this young to reinvent their sound in a mere 5 months.
Despite their profile being lifted just a bit, Twisted Teens’ sonic palette on Florida Water Blues is just as down and dirty as before, while the lyrics of these New Orleans lads continue to mine the backwoods and swamps of the Weird South. There’s something a bit ramshackle-sounding about this band whose brand of boogie sounds like it’s being belched out of a vintage FM radio, but after seeing them open for Kurt Vile this summer, that was no longer my perception. These guys sounded as locked in as any other young hungry band, while the scratchy vocals of frontman Caspian Hollywell provide a mix of sneaky warmth and beer-soaked brashness.
I’m not entirely sure what to say about this album, since my main takeaway from any new Kelela album is mostly that the vibes are good, which makes for an easy, pleasurable listen. Which is how an album like New Avatar ends up being one of my most listened-to albums of this summer even though it’s far from the first album that comes to mind when thinking about what summer 2026 sounded like.
Kelela has been working in this dark, shadowy vein of alternative R&B for a while, so it makes sense that she takes on a more synth-rock-oriented sound on New Avatar, bridging lots of various sounds that were sitting on the edges of mainstream R&B and pop in the ’80s and ’90s. The songs are maybe just a tad bit more immediate and catchy than a typical Kelela release, but it’s still an album all about vibe, inhabiting a kind of nocturnal world where romance feels like a doomed proposition.
There’s nothing quite like exorbitant ticket prices to get you in a cranky mood.
After seeing how much it would cost to see Phoebe Bridgers in concert this Fall, it had me contemplating whether or not this bastion of melancholy with far more famous friends than solo albums was still worth the hype. Especially after revisiting Bridgers’ previous release, Punisher, and not finding it quite as captivating as I did back in 2020 when we were much more susceptible to sad, introverted indie folk. Well, listening to Lost Weekend for the first time on a pleasant train journey through the heart of Ireland changed my mind completely, as the album sees Bridgers expanding on her sound in all the right ways.
First off, the songwriting here is better than ever, featuring that signature Bridgers introspection combined with a further embrace of bigger choruses and more hummable melodies, but not to the point of resembling conventional pop music. The production here is also what takes Bridgers’ songs to another level, influenced by more ambient music but also not afraid to go big and anthemic when it feels inclined to. I honestly haven’t spent too much time pondering the lyrics of the album, but it supposedly was influenced by the death of Bridgers’ father and a couple of recent breakups with some famous partners. It’s the kind of album that shows that no matter how successful you become, you’ll always have things to be sad about, and it especially helps if you know how to put it into song.
In talking about my listening habits this past summer, it’s worth mentioning that I was sidetracked a bit from listening to new music by exploring the music of Ireland and Scotland, since I went to both countries for my honeymoon about a month ago. One revelation I had was that there have been just an insane amount of cult rock bands to come out of Scotland (and particularly Glasgow), considering how small of a country it is. Of those many bands, the most potent recent discovery was Trashcan Sinatras, a band whose persistent pleasantness belies their charmingly trashy name.
While hitting their stride with their first couple of albums in the early ’90s, riding a wave of jangly guitar-pop coming out of the UK that sometimes flirted with the mainstream, Trashcan Sinatras have thankfully stuck around. And as fate would have it, while I was exploring their early catalogue, they came out with a new album this summer, their first in over a decade. Ever The Optimist is by no means a revelation for the band, but it finds a nice sweet spot of them doing what they do best, combining the buoyant melodies and sweet harmonies of their early records with the wistfulness of their mid-career standout, Weightlifting. Sadly, the album’s release coincided with guitarist and vocalist John Douglas passing away, serving as a swan song to the band’s long-running original lineup and giving the album an added poignancy.
I’ll leave you with the album I’ve been listening to the most lately, this one also by a veteran band whose original lineup contains a kind of magic that’s hard to replicate. Ever since Dinosaur Jr.’s original trio of J Mascis, Lou Barlow, and Murph got back together in 2005, they’ve released a new album every 4 or 5 years, and every time they’re without fail pretty darn enjoyable. Luckily, There Near is no exception, containing the same furious fuzz and aching melodies of a great Dino record, but with a tad bit of the bittersweetness of aging thrown in. Maybe the bittersweetness is a little more prevalent than usual here, with Mascis looking at the alienation of middle age on songs like “No Friends” and “Walk Me Back”. Yet, even with these softer shades thrown in, the band still has this indefatigable bigness that has the power to bludgeon eardrums that had probably already been shattered years ago.