At 25, Baby Keem is already a major player amongst his peers, in large part due to his fantastic 2021 LP The Melodic Blue. But five years is a long time to be away in any genre, let alone rap. Thankfully, Ca$ino suggests that Keem can take as long as he needs between releases. Talent like his doesn’t expire or get stale. There’s a nice palette at work on Ca$ino. Ecstatic, exciting West Coast funk powers “Sex Appeal,” while the “I Am Not a Lyricist” title is a huge misnomer, because Keem raps about poverty, drug abuse, and systemic racism under the compelling vertical of a fading family. I feel confident in saying it’s the best song he’s ever released, showing up light-years ahead of “The Hillbillies,” which he made with his cousin Kendrick Lamar. Speaking of, Kendrick shows up on Ca$ino (as expected), filling in with verses on “Good Flirts” and giving us a sneaky Young Thug diss while he’s on the mic. The year is still very young, but Ca$ino might be the strongest rap album released in Q1. Baby Keem’s best was well worth the wait. —Matt Mitchell [pgLang/Columbia]
I appreciate it when bands title their albums correctly, because “Discombobulated” is a good way to describe the latest Hen Ogledd tape. Richard Dawson, his bandmates Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, and Sally Pilkington, and guest contributors (especially the great Matana Roberts) deliver us a synth-pop adventure buttoned up with spoken-word, post-punk wigouts, folktales, ambient sprawls, and jazz crescendos. It really is everything but the kitchen sink this time around. The electric guitar streaking across “Scales will fall” has been on my mind since I first heard it; the 19-minute “Clear pools” is seven or eight songs folded into one (everything between 5:40 and 9:05 is god-tier work), giving us the greatest-ever companion track to Sufjan Stevens’ “Impossible Soul.” Discombobulated is a fantastic project full of experiments. Improv may give the record its shape, but Hen Ogledd’s strange, furious, and itinerant impulses are the driving force. —Matt Mitchell [Weird World/Domino]
Liz Cooper: New Day
A switch-up in sound has plagued quite a few bands I’ve liked, to be honest. Liz Cooper’s OG style—Nashville-driven, good-hearted, cosmic-flavored rock and roll—grabbed me as soon as I heard it in 2016 and again in 2018, when she and her old band the Stampede released Window Flowers. That’s a damn good record (“Mountain Man” and “Outer Space” went platinum in my dorm room), and Hot Sass turned even more psychedelic three years later. Now, Cooper is going through total reinvention on New Day, ditching the Music Row singer-songwriter gig for something more experimental. Maybe this is how she was supposed to sound the whole time. Cooper has always been a great guitarist—and her instrument sounds really good on “IDFK” and “Boy Toy” (especially “Boy Tune”; what a tune)—but the keys on New Day bring a level of excitement to Cooper’s ideas that weren’t there before. She taught herself how to play piano, chased after big hooks, and came back with a smart, empowering record inspired by Beck, Lou Reed, and her pop-singer friend Caroline Kingsbury and full of queer catharsis. Working with producer Dan Molad was a good choice; “Baby Steps” and “Sorry (That I Love You)” are two of her best songs to date. Liz Cooper has never sounded so alive, and her new record’s title lives up to itself. —Matt Mitchell [Sleepyhead Records]
Megan Moroney: Cloud 9
In 2022, Megan Moroney introduced herself to the world with “Tennessee Orange,” a tender love song that detailed her romance with a blue-eyed Knoxville boy while nodding to her Georgia upbringing. Her three albums alternate between those picture-perfect romances and the relationships that are anything but. Moroney’s emo cowgirl persona—paired with her charred, charming voice—has always scanned as candid and sincere. But while she’s solidified herself as one of the leading women in country music, her songwriting has grown less specific. “I tell the stories,” she once told NME, “but then people make them their own.” Cloud 9, her latest, comes a little under two years after Am I Okay?, but it seems little has changed in Moroney’s world in the interim. The assorted losers and nameless heartbreakers she writes about here rarely have defining characteristics, while the sound is steadfast country pop basics. With the assistance of her regular producer, Kristian Bush of Sugarland, Moroney provides a tasteful blend of swaying acoustic guitars, sanded-down pedal steel, and the occasional electric melody. This isn’t crossover country with glossy stadium ambitions or the recent spate of neo-traditionalists. Instead, the subtle melodies and stately tempos are designed to redirect you back to considering Moroney’s whirlwind feelings. —Ethan Beck [Sony/Columbia]
Mirah: Dedication
It’s been a minute since we’ve seen Mirah in action. Seven years, a death, a birth, a pandemic, a near-silent stretch of motherhood—and on Dedication, the singer-songwriter doesn’t so much “return” as pick up the thread mid-sentence. Older and earthier and more weathered now, yes, but with that same razor-sharp focus and keening vulnerability. Backed by a small murderer’s row (Jenn Wasner, Meg Duffy, Andrew Maguire), she leans into warm folk-rock, letting pedal steel sigh and harmonies stack around stories that are almost disarmingly direct: crying on the New Jersey Turnpike en route to bury her father, trying to keep a marriage from buckling, singing a gushy love song to her kid. The younger Mirah hid barbs and kinks inside tape-hiss pop; here, the surprises come from how blunt she’s willing to be about middle-aged stakes—“Life is already hard enough / And I don’t want to throw away all of the good stuff we have”—and how gently the arrangements hold that earnestness without sanding it down. Dedication isn’t about reinvention so much as staying, choosing, recommitting: to family, to art, to the messy, unglamorous work of loving people while the world tilts, and to the stubborn belief that all of it, even the worst of it, is worth singing about. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Double Double Whammy]
MX LONLEY: ALL MONSTERS
This MX LONELY record snuck up on me. It was in my email for weeks and, after finally getting around to it a few days ago, I can safely say: this band has the juice. Maybe I’m just a sucker for big, muscular rock tracks that utilize an entire pedalboard. Or maybe ALL MONSTERS is just that good. Vocalist/synthesist Rae Haas and their band don’t just chase hooks; they obliterate them. You can hear touches of Show Me the Body, Pixies, and even, yes, Pinkerton-era Weezer in these eight songs. Big Hips” reaches a freakout climax but doesn’t bottom out, while “Shape of an Angel” doesn’t sacrifice any distortion in the name of cathartic sustain. “Blue Ridge Mtns” (which guitarist Jake Harms adapted from a folk song he wrote in high school) hits like a sedative with lucid, loping guitar sprawls. The noise swarming the “Return to Sender” melody suffocates, but “All Monsters Go to Heaven” plummets into this post-hardcore tsunami of riffs. From the first second of “Kill the Candle,” ALL MONSTERS is building into its finale, the seven-minute, blistering rupture of “Whispers in the Fog.” What a righteous, visceral, howling conclusion to reach on your debut record. MX LONELY makes sludge sound like a prayer. —Matt Mitchell [Julia’s War]
Peaches: No Lube So Rude
Most people mellow out with age. Peaches—god love her—has spent the last decade sharpening her dildo into a spear. On No Lube So Rude, her first album in over a decade, she’s still rhyming like a sex‑obsessed shock jock, but the target has shifted: post‑Roe politics, transphobes, ageism, all the miserable little forces trying to shame bodies back into compliance. “Hanging Titties” kicks things off like a demented victory lap, turning post‑menopausal boobs into blunt‑force weapons over sugar‑rush electro (“Older than you / Looking so cunt / … / My hanging titties hit like the punch” has got to be line of the week) while “Fuck How You Wanna Fuck” and “Not In Your Mouth None of Your Business” weld bratty slogans to pile‑driver beats like riot chants you can grind to. Recorded in Berlin with aptly-named producer The Squirt Deluxe, the record keeps mutating its filth: the title track and “Fuck Your Face” stomp around the EDM festival sandbox, “Panna Cotta Delight” slow‑grinds through a sticky, video‑game funk while she drags anyone who thinks “old” equals invisible, and closer “Be Love” sneaks in a genuinely earnest synth-pop ballad under all the lube gags. It’s not subtle and it’s not meant to be; if anything, the one‑note excess becomes the point, an overclocked defense of pleasure and bodily autonomy in a moment when both are being legislated away. There are sleeker, more nuanced records about sex and gender this year, but none that sound quite so thrilled to still be disgusting and sexy as hell in public—and in 2026, that feels like its own kind of protest. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Kill Rock Stars]
Phew & Danielle de Picciotto: Paper Masks
It’s great when labelmates collaborate with each other. Mute teammates Phew and Danielle de Picciotto team up on Paper Masks, a “mesmerizing exchange between two singular voices in experimental music,” as the liner notes succinctly summarize. The album isn’t a set of ideas so much as it is dialogues in German and English and intuitive interplay shared between the Berlin-based Picciotto and the Osaka hero Phew. The songs are electronic works that, even in their minimalism, find ways to be unpredictable. “Paper Memories” employs a spoken-word performance from de Picciotto that collapses into a glitch; “Pixelwissen” utilizes Auto-Tune aboard a buzzing organ drone; the bleeps and bloops in “The Cat” siren louder than de Picciotto’s voice but never overwhelm her harmonies; “Sugar Sprinkles” puts a sinister lacquer atop a collage of found sounds and vocal clips. Paper Masks is a dystopian yet tranquilizing noise. Language evolves as the record carries forward, as Phew and de Picciotto are woven into each other. I don’t know what to make of this music yet, but I think that’s the point. —Matt Mitchell [Mute Artists]
The Messthetics & James Brandon Lewis: Deface the Currency
Deface the Currency sounds like punk’s anxious itch got poured straight into a jazz record and left to ferment. Across seven tracks, the Messthetics—Fugazi’s rhythm section plus guitarist Anthony Pirog—and tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis take the punk‑jazz handshake of their 2024 debut and rough it up: the tempos lurch harder, the noise gets gnarlier, the quiet bits feel newly haunted. You can hear all those 150‑odd shows in the way they move as a single animal—“Deface the Currency” and “Universal Security” keep collapsing from locked‑in groove into total mayhem and back again, like they’re stress‑testing how much chaos the rhythm section can hold before everything splits open. Elsewhere, “Gestations” slinks along on noir funk before blooming into full Sonny Sharrock freakout, “30 Years of Knowing” briefly remembers how to be pretty, and “Serpent Tongue (Slight Return)” takes an old Messthetics bruiser and blows it out into a free‑jazz pileup, skronk ping‑ponging between guitar and sax until there’s nothing left to burn. It’s the rare “crossover” record that never feels like homework: the reference points are there if you want them—Impulse! lineage, DC punk, hard‑bop fire—but mostly it just plays like a band joyriding through all their shared obsessions, daring you to keep up. —Casey Epstein-Gross [Impulse!]