What October 16, 2026 releases are YOU trying to stop the release of prior to October 16, 2026 so that everyone will hear them all at the same time on October 16, 2026?
I'd call this a "slightly above-average" week, quality-wise. Again, not a lot of recognizable names, but more than we've seen the last two weeks, and plenty of interesting new stuff overall.
I suspect most BEA folks will be most interested in the new Fontaines DC record, Dopamine Chamber. It's their fifth album, and the follow-up to their 2024 big breakout hit album Romance, which in turn was the follow-up to their 2022 big almost-breakout hit album Skinty Fia. Honestly, I think this is better than both of them — it's more ambitious and musically interesting, and it has better vocals too. Some of their fans will no doubt have preferred that they stay (or go back to being) more "punky" and avoid the electronics and effects, but — again, this is just my personal opinion — I think they're better doing this stuff, as they just didn't seem to have the right vocals and guitars for "punky." This album is closer to what they're good at, and while I'm still not crazy about them, I personally consider this to be their best album yet.
Eels, aka Mark Oliver "E" Everett, has a new one called Cookie Happened. (He's right; it did. I ate some of it.) It's been 30 years since Eels' debut LP, Beautiful Freak (a Top 1,000 album here on BEA, along with the follow-up, Electro-Shock Blues). During that time, Everett's voice has gotten even deeper; his songs have gotten more folksy and, I would say, conventional (and more world-weary too); and he has still yet to come up with a decent-looking album cover. It's okay, I'm not saying the album isn't good or anything like that, but if you're interested in the Eels discography then the early stuff is still probably where you should start.
More Old (and Deceased) Guy Stuff Dept.
Richard Thompson, who is about to celebrate 60 years in the music biz — starting with Fairport Convention, way back in the Hippie days — has a nice new LP called Hippies, Thugs and Heroes. His voice still sounds pretty good, and apparently he can still play too, because the album is surprisingly gutsy and sprightly for a folk-rocker of his age and background. Bang-up job, man!
Canadian folk-rock legend Bruce Cockburn has a new covers album out entitled The Blood of Others, since "The Songs of Others" was already taken. This covers album is slightly unusual because from what I gather, all of the songs were written before 1950, well prior to the "rock era" and mostly blues and R&B numbers. I don't usually take much notice of what Cockburn gets up to, but it's a nice gesture from him to give these songs some modern-day exposure.
I don't usually take much (if any) notice of "special product" reissues either, but it seems whoever is handling David Bowie's back catalogue has given the green light to a new pressing of the Labyrinth soundtrack, which they're calling the "Bog of Eternal Stench Liquid-Filled LP." If you haven't seen one of these liquid-filled LP things, what they do is stamp Side A on one disc and Side B on another, and then seal them together with various materials sandwiched in between — usually it's some sort of oily liquid, but I've also seen flowers, leaves, hair, postcards, half-eaten sandwiches, my missing car keys, and so on. They charge you about twice as much for this as you'd pay for an ordinary pressing, but I guess it's a nice collector's item, and of course they're all limited editions, etc.
Finally, Kid Rock is choosing this week to release Halfway 2 Jesus, his first Christian/Gospel/whatever-the-heck LP in which each song is meant as a plea to "Mister J-Town" to somehow provide him with just two simple letters so that he doesn't have to incorrectly substitute a numeral in his latest album's title. (Sources have suggested that J-Town did in fact provide Rock with two letters, just not the ones he specifically asked for.)
It's Round, Baby, Round Is What I'm Sayin' Dept.
I'll admit that many of my picks-of-the-week can be rather... obscure, including last week's. And, as it turns out, this week's too!
Sphere are a shoegaze-pop duo from Japan, consisting of songwriter and guitarist Makoto Gomi, who is also in a band called Zeppet Store, and a young (or at least young-sounding) woman named Shoko, from a band called Collapse. The album is called Circumstances, and I suspect the few people outside of Japan who give it a listen will just shake their heads in befuddlement... But hey, the guitars are super-loud and heavy, the twisting-turning chord changes are great (assuming you like chord changes), and the vocals are clearly intended to appeal to J-Pop audiences as well as waifgaze fans like me, though I'll admit I'm still not sure that's a real subgenre. There are subtle romantic-classical as well as prog-rock elements going on in there too, mostly in the background, but occasionally in the foreground, or just wherever. It's like nothing you've heard and everything you've heard, simultaneously. The only problem is that it was already released on Wednesday, so I already know that none of these other albums are likely to be better.
And Yet There's Somehow More Dept.
They Are Gutting A Body Of Water (TAGABOW), Kool Faith / Loosies II
The main guy in TAGABOW is Douglas Dulgarian, who apparently is a very outgoing and gregarious fellow indeed, as he's managed to find enough collaborators to make a 29-track album on which only 6 tracks were made without them. (The extent to which the three or four other TAGABOW band-members were involved is unclear.) Each track is intended to sound different enough from the others that the whole album comes across as more of a "mixtape," rather than a cohesive statement. It's a neat idea — it's just that the last TAGABOW album, last year's LOTTO, was such a major improvement over their previous stuff, it makes this one sound like a big step back, to me at least. I realize some bands don't care about this stuff, but if they do, I'd say TAGABOW is at a point in their career when they should be trying to keep their momentum going, not doing projects like this that have to be explained to their fans lest they have a WTF? kind of reaction. That said, it's not a bad record, though both the title and the cover art are frankly a bit sketchy. And there's still no word on what body of water it is they're gutting.
June McDoom, Follow the Light
The lovely Ms. McDoom is a wispy-whispery-waify singer from New York City, and this album lands somewhere between modern lite-acoustic dreampop and 60s-era French "ye-ye" music. In other words, it is not going to overwhelm you with BLISTERING POWER CHORDS. Get that idea out of your head right now! As it happens though, I have a strange personal fondness for ye-ye (which is probably based more on the idea of it than the actual music itself), and this album might just overwhelm you with how ridiculously soft and pretty it is.
Pardoner, Target Practice
Pardoner are a pretty good, and slightly jangly/twee-ish art-punk 4-piece guitar band from San Francisco, and this is their fifth album. It sounds like it's going to be a little less "fun-punk" and more artsy/post-punkish than their last one, 2023's Peace Loving People, and they might also be putting more effort into their vocals too. Probably a good idea, since that's likely to be the main thing keeping them from The Proverbial Big Time (other than maybe their terrible cover art). I wouldn't call them "math rock" because they're a bit too chaotic-sounding for that, but they've got some interesting song ideas and I really dig their guitar interplay. So if you like bands like Pavement, Polvo, and Pixies, maybe you'll like these guys too since their band names all begin with the same letter. Speaking of which....
Paint (Pedrum Siadatian), Whip of an Ear
Here's another interesting LP from Pedrum "Paint" Siadatian, who recently moved from LA to Brooklyn, because I guess that's where all the interesting art-rockers live now. To me, this record almost sounds "retro-experimental," because it would have been deemed simply "experimental" back in the 1980s, but these days there are too many people doing stuff like this, and the bleeding edge has moved further out. It isn't as weird as his first couple of albums either (this is his sixth), but it has its moments, and he still does a fairly good Lou Reed impression. (Not on every track, of course.)
Exploding Flowers, Alphabet Window
This is a kinda-nice, somewhat retro-pop act from Los Angeles, who seem to have latched onto the old "Paisley Underground" tag in their PR — probably just because they're from Los Angeles, since they don't really sound like any of the Paisley Underground bands, except maybe The Three O'Clock. They clearly have talent, but they lack "punch." You can be psychedelic and even a little "mellow" on occasion, but you've got to have "punch" if you want to be in the Paisley Underground. Those are the membership rules, and they're there for a reason. I don't just make them up out of whole cloth or anything like that, the way I do with all the other musical genres.
@, Autosmile
Having a band name like "@" (simply pronounced "at") is pretty much a guarantee of total commercial failure, but this male-female acoustic-experimental duo from Baltimore and Philadelphia was nevertheless signed by 4AD Records, so somebody must've thought they had some sort of potential. Maybe they were just looking for a challenge, but @ does have some interesting tunes here, with some fairly complex vocal harmonies sung over deceptively simple (in most cases) acoustic guitar and cello accompaniments. It's good if you're into that sort of thing, but then again, let's be honest — if they chose the name "@" just so they'd always appear at the beginning of alphabetized lists, almost anyone could have told them they should have gone with the tilde symbol (~) instead.
TVOD, The Farm
TVOD, who are presumably named after this 1978 single by The Normal, are a six-piece "egg punk" band from Brooklyn. I didn't know "egg punk" was even a thing until recently, since I've always been more of a "bagel-with-cream-cheese and fruit-bowl punk," but it turns out to be a lot of fun, actually! And it's not a bad album, either — despite the name, I'd largely ignored their earlier releases because they'd been tagged as "disco punk" (a ridiculous notion if there ever was one) and their cover art was uniformly terrible, but they seem to have corrected both of those problems. They have some decently high-energy songs, some of which are even sort of funny, in spots. I'd imagine they're a good live band too, assuming they're playing a venue that can fit all six of them onto the same stage.
The Keening, Devotion
Here's a nice gothic/dark folk record with metal tendencies, just in time for Halloween! "The Keening" is the nom de plume of Rebecca Vernon, from Salt Lake City, Utah, who apparently used to do doom metal in a band called SubRosa but probably (I'm just guessing here) got tired of seeing so many Republicans in the audience at live shows. I don't think that's her playing the cello on the album, but it could be. I guess it could be almost anybody, really.
The Lovecraft Sextet, Penance
This is the album that answers a question I think we've all asked ourselves at one time or another, that being "what happens when H.P. Lovecraft fans from the Netherlands make records where each track combines opera, jazz, black metal, trip-hop, plunderphonics, and droney ambient electronica, all in one big sloppy contraption with real saxophones?" Well, here it is — and it's actually not bad, and it too is just in time for Halloween! Apparently it's just one guy though, not a real sextet, but "sextet" just sounds more... sexy, somehow. I'm not sure why.
Little Side Notes Here and There Dept.
Fans of Sleater-Kinney might be interested in a new release from Heavens to Betsy called Baby's Gone, as this was Corin Tucker's band (duo?) with Tracy Sawyer before S-K was formed. They made one proper album, 1994's Calculated, and this record contains just about all of their other recordings - demos, live stuff, maybe a single or two. It's pretty rough, but there are probably still some S-K completists out there who will appreciate it.
For BEA confusion-reduction purposes, please don't be fooled by the new mini-album from XO, Need to Know — this is a different XO from the Portland, ME-based nugaze band that released the album Heart in 2014. The nugaze band is still around, but their name has now been hijacked by a UK girl group because nobody really cares about anything anymore and nothing is sacred.
Last but not leafed, Brian "Geologist" Weitz from Animal Collective has teamed up with a guy named Kyle Simon, who runs an observatory in the Mojave Desert, to release an experimental ambient-electronica record called The Sirens — consisting of one long composition derived from light collected by the observatory's telescope which is then electronically converted into... music! (Sort of.) The whole thing is explained here, but suffice to say they're probably not going to crack the Top 100 with this one.
Masked Band Dept.
This week's masked band is Corchorus, yet another new-ish "black-ambient"/dark-folk act from Portland OR. except that it's really just one guy (not an actual band) and he just wears a burlap sack over his head, plus a hat, so he looks more like a scarecrow than anything else. Maybe he'll be able to afford something more impressive if his newly-released debut album, Lost in Life's Great Shadow, becomes a big seller. I have to admit he's got an interesting concept going musically, since he takes black metal's raspy, strangled-sounding screamo vocal technique and tones it waaay down to a level more appropriate for a goth-ish folk-ambient record, without completely losing the effect. What would you call that, "whispereamo" maybe? That sounds too much like "emo"... I'll have to give this some thought, except "thought" isn't something I'm especially good at.
If you can wait until the 19th, which is really just three more days, there's a new album from the Pink Pussycats From Hell entitled Hellectricless. I'm not sure they qualify as "masked" though, because they're more of a "costumed band" —specifically they're a duo, with "Mighty Hunter" on guitar in a Mexican pro-wrestler hood and doing Tom Waits impressions, and "Danger Rabbit" on drums and in a full bunny suit. Every song title on each of their four albums begins with the four letters "Hell," so on this one, track 1 is "Hellpless," track 5 is "Hellucination," track 8 is "Hellton John," and so on. I should point out that most of the songs have been released on previous albums and are being recycled, probably because they assume nobody will ever recognize them on the street so they'll never be loudly accused of ripping people off in such a ham-fisted way. They're also not very good at music, as it happens. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier.
Next week...
The lack of big-name releases continues next week with the biggest names (as far as I can tell) being Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi, Chicago second-wave punks The Effigies, and Elephant 6 posthumous-revenants The Olivia Tremor Control — along with Gwar, who are releasing their third post-Oderus LP. I'll probably be more interested in the new albums by the Sour Widows, Caroline Rose, and the Phantom Handshakes... There should be a big increase in recognizable names the following week (Oct. 30), unless all of them cancel their releases out of pure spite. I don't know why they would though, since that's a full four days before "Midterms" Election Day in the USA, assuming the regime doesn't manage to cancel that too.
I wouldn’t call myself superstitious; for instance, I never stop when a black cat crosses my path. But the moment I start making jokes about dark forces, they never miss an opportunity to respond in kind. Sometimes these responses are quite harsh, which leads me to only one conclusion: they don’t understand jokes.
All in all, for the past three or four days, music has been the last thing on my mind. Or, to put it another way, my thoughts about music have been inextricably linked to a sharp sense of rejection toward anything alien to my own inner world. This, of course, makes for a poor foundation for forming an impartial judgment—let alone for sharing such views publicly.
This week, I was looking forward to albums from four female artists—none of whom I was particularly familiar with, nor had any of them ever held a significant spot in my rankings. I find myself constantly having to add the caveat, "if my memory serves me right." Unfortunately, as it turned out, none of the albums were worthy of being named "release of the week." I’d rather not label these performers with the cliché "little-known," but it seems that’s actually the case.
Initially, my personal ranking was quite clear-cut, as the advance singles varied significantly in quality. In the end, everything got jumbled, and I still find it very difficult to establish a definitive order of preference. Some releases feature standout singles, while others contain less striking—yet more consistent—tracks; the latter also came as a pleasant surprise by including previously unreleased material, something I always welcome.
Rather than following the trend of some reviewers who simply list releases in alphabetical order, I’ve put together a preliminary—but nonetheless genuine—ranking. After all, I can always revise it later; there’s no harm in that.
3. Margo Mann - Love Is A Dog (16/X-2026/42) (Album)
I had high hopes for this album by an Australian artist this week. I didn’t come across any mention of its release on the forums I frequent. Unfortunately, apart from a couple of videos that were released earlier, nothing has really stuck with me so far.
I wouldn’t call myself superstitious; for instance, I never stop when a black cat crosses my path. But the moment I start making jokes about dark forces, they never miss an opportunity to respond in kind. Sometimes these responses are quite harsh, which leads me to only one conclusion: they don’t understand jokes.
Interestingly enough, this comment of yours naturally reminded me of the song "Dark Forces" from Killing Joke's mid-career 2003 self-titled album, but it didn't come up as a track in the BEA search box. It turns out the title was misspelled as "Dark Forced," and there were two other spelling errors in there, plus the release date hadn't been filled in. The site of course did not allow me to make the corrections myself, because I don't have 100,000 mod points (getting that many points takes sincere and sustained effort, which acts as a major obstacle for me)... but someone will take care of it soon enough. So hey, nice work, man! You helped strike another blow for the dark forces of database accuracy! 😄
As for the four albums you listed, after admittedly cursory listens I would probably rank them (1) Thea May, (2) Flora Hibberd, (3) Margo Mann, and (4) Nieve Ella. The Thea May LP definitely belongs in the BEA database and I might have listed it here it too, except everyone (including May herself) insists on referring to it as an "EP" (though it has 7 tracks). I did listen to a bit of the Flora Hibbert album last week, but it's a bit too adult contemporary/soft rock-ish for my tastes... still, the album is well-put-together and she clearly has a decent amount of vocal talent.
That said, I'm actually much more embarrassed about overlooking the debut album from Chloe Slater, entitled Riot Youth and released back on Oct. 9 — she's not a shoegazer, as the LP lies somewhere between Olivia Rodrigo and Violet Grohl on the hardness/rockness/popness scale, but I like the songs better on it than a lot of what I've been hearing in the female pop-star category lately. Also, I've always liked the approach of singing angry lyrics over catchy pop tunes. It's fun! (And oh by the way, Violet Grohl's father Dave played drums on the aforementioned Killing Joke "Dark Forces" track, which has nothing to do with Chloe Slater whatsoever!) So that one's probably going into my 2026 Top 100 year chart, which means something else is probably going to have to come out. This is why we need bigger charts...😠
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MadhattanJack
