At the helm of the decade’s post-punk groups, Dry Cleaning have been churning out this blend of Shaw’s interior monologues and art-rock backdrops since their 2021 breakout debut New Long Leg, and they quickly followed it up with the slightly more muted Stumpwork just one year later. With Secret Love, the South Londoners’ compelling combination reaches a zenith. In the four years since their last outing, the quartet doesn’t succumb to diminishing returns but instead delivers more of what made them such a draw in the first place. The star of the show, as on Dry Cleaning’s previous two records, is Shaw’s writing. Certain lines jump out of the mix, like reading a book with small sections highlighted by a previous owner. On “The Cute Things,” she details twin siblings at an impasse, capturing familial disconnect in one pithy sentence: “We’re meant to be from the same egg, but you confuse me.” “Let Me Grow And You’ll See the Fruit” follows a narrator who professes their unmatched ability to ward off solicitous distractions, only to indulge in a different distraction of their own choosing. “I can watch this TV show for however long, Armstrong,” Shaw deadpans. Her character delights at not being interrupted by a “video call or a survey or a dick pic or a loud bang or a smell that comes up.” In a similar vein, “Evil Evil Idiot” staunchly defends microwaved meals, defiantly dismissing those “malicious studies” that underline the heating device’s carcinogenic effects.
Euphoria Again & Dogwood Tales: Destination Heaven
Euphoria Again (featuring members of the band Knifeplay) and Dogwood Tales got together and made a record called Destination Heaven, and I’ve been chewing on it since Wednesday. It’s a pretty lovely thing, but I can’t stop wondering if it should have just been an instrumental album. I say that not because the sing-songy parts aren’t good (they’re very good) but because these are some of the most inspired arrangements I’ve heard on a record in months. “Prelude” is a damn majestic sprawl (one of the finest releases of this entirely-too-short year so far), while “Candy” and “Nah Nah Nah” erupt in colossal jams. “At Least I’m Not Lonely Tonight” is a 6-minute folk gas, and “Slackers & Go Getters” kicks up a fuss with splintering guitars and highway croons. The last track, a roaring and rambling cover of Neil Young and the Santa Monica Flyers’ “Albuquerque,” is a faithful, exciting tribute to one of the greatest songs of all time. I think Destination Heaven often sounds like a lot of other alt-country ideas. But the fruits of making an album in the Shenandoah Valley are immense. I suppose your take on an album like this comes down to how much room you’ve got to spare for more songs full of pedal steel and multi-layered singing. Lucky for me, I’ve got a lot of real estate in my heart for a record like Destination Heaven. Give it a whirl. —Matt Mitchell [Born Losers Records]
Jenny On Holiday: Quicksand Heart
The first great pop album of 2026 belongs to Jenny Hollingsworth, one half of the great and deeply missed band Let’s Eat Grandma. Hollingsworth’s short discography with Rosa Walton has floored me for almost ten years, but her coming-out party as a soloist (cheekily under the name Jenny On Holiday) is filling that LEG-sized void. I think the whole record is wonderful, exciting, but “Every Ounce of Me” is remarkably catchy. The song is ecstatic, pilled by ‘80s FM radio synth voicings and box-office-sized rhythms. The chugging, skittering programming briefly reminds me of that in Kenny Loggins’ “Playing With the Boys,” and Hollingsworth’s vocal inflection drips from the egos of Debbie Gibson and Pat Benatar. “Every Ounce of Me” flashes and fascinates at every note. And that burst of stadium-melting electric guitar that barrels into view as the track concludes? Wowza. I suppose I could wait a lifetime for the next Let’s Eat Grandma album (Hollingsworth confirmed the band is not over, but taking a sabbatical), especially if it means getting a hundred more songs like “Every Ounce of Me” first. Quicksand Heart isn’t reinventing the wheel, but it sounds lovely all over. —Matt Mitchell [Transgressive]
Joe Glass: Snakewards
Joe Glass plays with Kai Slater in Sharp Pins, and Slater’s own label, Hallogallo Tapes, put out Glass’ new record this week. Snakewards is everything you’d expect from someone running around with the power-poppers in Chicago. Glass himself describes the album as “13 scrap-rock sketches straight from the heart to the gut” and makes a good admission: “Maybe we can keep rock’n’roll alive for one more day? Who knows.” I dig these songs just like I dig Slater’s Sharp Pins songs. They’re coated in the candy of the dB’s, Guided by Voices, and the Beatles, if you ran the Beatles through a tape machine and then fucked it all up. “Dust on Your Halo” and “New Pose” are big standouts, and not just because they’re the first two songs on the album. “Buck Wild” has a little sound of Eels to it, while “Felicity Crunch” lives up to the chew in its title, blasting at you like punk rock spit out of a meat grinder. “Freight Train Woman” might be the best song here—not because it’s the most hi-fidelity of the batch, but because Glass’ harmonies are brain-rattling. He’s got one hell of a good knack for those fuzzed-out pop-guitar moves that I can’t get enough of. —Matt Mitchell [Hallogallo Tapes]
Mon Rovîa: Bloodline
Mon Rovîa wants his music “to heal with others—with every nation and tongue, in due time.” The Liberia-born singer-songwriter was rescued by missionaries as a child, escaping a prescribed life of being a young soldier, and, after living in different places as an adopted refugee, he settled down in Tennessee. His new album, Bloodline, is a “culmination of these experiences blended with the empathy I feel for the experiences with others.” What I’m getting at is: Bloodline is a special, hopeful project. The effort is sprawling—16 folk songs that traffic in quiet magic—and the storytelling is personal, poetic, bare. “Shiver ‘til the river runs out, or follow those whispering winds south,” Rovîa sings on “Oh Wide World.” “And what you thought a frightful dream becomes another thing, and your worries return to the clouds.” I sit longest with “Whose face am I,” which begins with a telephone message before identity and its confusions spread into beauty: “I been reaching through lonely seasons, trying to give meaning to phantom feelings—yearning in my soul for a name I’ll never know. Whose face am I?” Once Bloodline reaches you, Mon Rovîa is a name you’ll remember forever. These are defiant, oft-powerful songs that ought to do what he wants them to: heal the soul, the people. —Matt Mitchell [Nettwerk]
Pullman: III
It took seven years to makeIII, the first Pullman album in 24 years. The supergroup, formed by Rex’s Curtis Harvey, Come’s Chris Brokaw, and Tortoise’s Bundy K. and Doug McCombs (and later joined by Tim Barnes), is a symptom of Chicago’s turn-of-the-century post-rock heyday. Their 2-track guitar debut Turnstyles & Junkpiles put them in conversations with the likes of Fahey and Kottke in 1998. Viewfinder went more electric three years later. Now, III is a full-bodied rhythm—folk music played like post-rock; the tone of an unignorable sprawl through memory and sustain. Barnes revealed an early-onset Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2021 but continued to work almost daily, often remotely with Bundy K., and their collaborations spawned into III. It’s one of the more intimate, sombre albums I’ve encountered recently, and that would be true even without the context of Barnes’ condition. This music, especially the gradual, 13-minute “October,” is flush with impressive cooperative energy. The players are adrift and droning but spiritually, emotionally interlocked. The music is grievous but never sentimental. III is a valuable, affecting project to sit with. —Matt Mitchell [Western Vinyl]
Will Epstein: Yeah, mostly
Will Epstein makes songs out of the kinds of thoughts that usually evaporate before you finish having them. Nothing on Yeah, mostly announces itself as important: a dishwasher cycle, a half-remembered apartment, the dull ache that follows you from one room to the next. But that’s the point, I’d argue. These songs feel overheard rather than performed, sung softly enough that you lean in without realizing it. The arrangements are modest and unshowy, with warm tape grain, gentle rhythms, and melodies that don’t rush to resolve all leaving space for Epstein’s voice to sit unprotected in the center. His background in scoring seeps into the arrangements—each track feels framed, lit just enough—but the emotional pull comes from how plainly he lets things sit. It’s the patience in Yeah, mostly that makes it linger. It’s rare to find a record that understands how much of a life is made up of minor repetitions, passing dread, and brief flashes of relief—and that treats all of it as worthy of attention. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Fat Possum]
Winged Wheel: Desert So Green
On their third record, Desert So Green, Winged Wheel sound less interested in blowing the doors off than in deciding exactly which doors to open, and how wide. The album doesn’t abandon the krautrock churn and hard-earned momentum of Big Hotel so much as reroute it, compressing that energy into tighter, stranger shapes. The songs feel worked-through without feeling sanded down: guitars coil and scrape, synths throb and smear, percussion locks into grooves that feel ceremonial rather than explosive. There’s still aggression here—Steve Shelley’s drumming alone makes sure of that—but it arrives sideways, embedded in texture and repetition instead of obvious release. Tracks like “Speed Table” snap into a muscular, forward drive, while others hover in murkier zones, piling sound until the weight itself becomes the point. Even when melody surfaces, it does so uneasily, half-lit and provisional. Desert So Green doesn’t sprawl, but it doesn’t relax either; it’s the sound of a band learning how to aim its force, and proving that focus can hit just as hard as volume. —Casey Epstein-Gross 12XU
Zach Bryan: With Heaven On Top
January has been a whirlwind for Zach Bryan. On New Year’s Eve, he got hitched in a marriage ceremony in Spain. A week later, he’s putting out With Heaven On Top, his much-anticipated sixth record. The Oklahoma singer-songwriter’s got a lot to live up to nowadays. He’s the biggest crossover star in America, selling out 100,000-person college football stadiums in the Midwest. His voice has become a balm for hard-working people, and it doesn’t take a room full of 50 songwriters to make that so. His last effort, The Great American Bar Scene, had a lot to love (“Pink Skies” landed on our SOTY list in 2024 for a reason), but it also had a lot of room for error. That comes with the territory of making a double album. But Bryan’s not afraid to stretch himself thin. With Heaven On Top is 25 songs long, beginning with a harmonica puffing and a pedal steel aching (“Runny Eggs”) and ending with one of his best efforts to date, the wayward, sweeping title track (“With Heaven On Top”). Elsewhere are reckonings on the loss of his mother (“DeAnn’s Denim”), addiction spread across generations (“Down, Down, Stream”), the American Dream (“Appetite”), and the roads you gotta drive down to find it (“Miles”). Ten years ago, artists started putting out 2xLPs to game Billboard’s adaptive album sales formula (a formula that counts 1,500 individual song streams as one album sale), conflating streaming cheat codes with creative abundance. Yet, Bryan’s prolific streak arrives sincerely. Not every song is great, but I don’t think any album with two dozen songs on it ever does. I enjoy his sprawls. —Matt Mitchell [Warner]