In this segment, we round up the best albums released each month. From Dry Cleaning to Joyce Manor, here are, in alphabetical order, the best albums of January 2026.
Dry Cleaning, Secret Love
I can’t make up my mind whether Dry Cleaning‘s new album Secret Love, the follow-up to 2022’s Stumpwork, is their darkest or most optimistic, precisely because it blurs the line between harmlessness and real horror, self-growth and destruction. In that way it’s certainly their dreamiest, with subtle, reconstructive production from Cate Le Bon, who helps the band break out of their shell by making them sound more like themselves. It’s hard to take that the wrong way. Read the full review.
Jana Horn, Jana Horn
Patient and pensive, the follow-up to 2023’s The Window Is the Dream is marked by its open-endedness, recognizing that behind every loss and human sense of finality churns the cyclical nature of change. Documenting her first year of living in New York, where she moved after completing a creative writing MFA in Charlottesville, Jana Horn and her band refuse to paint a portrait of an artist unstuck from the past, unmissing, or untroubled by a changeless future. It would be absurd to try to force it. They simply inch towards an answer to the album’s final question: “I don’t know, how do you feel about that?” Read the full review.
Jenny on Holiday, Quicksand Heart
Although Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton wrote the songs for their 2022 Let’s Eat Grandma LP Two Ribbons separately, it saw them untangle loss, love, and their own evolving friendship with renewed confidence, which is the same feeling that drives Jenny on Holiday‘s debut album, Quicksand Heart. The pair may be pursuing individual projects, but they still turn to each other as they do; in addition to hearing the demos – later fleshed out in London with producer Steph Marziano (Hayley Williams, Nell Mescal), who helped find their quickened pulse – Walton also sings backup on several songs on the record. Soaring, childlike, and ultimately swept up in desire, Quicksand Heart feels like shifting up a gear, bracing for the interlocking joys and horrors a new year brings.
Joyce Manor, I Used to Go to This Bar
Joyce Manor have never quite made a song like ‘All My Friends Are So Depressed’. They’ve found ways to refine their sound while going out on a limb on at least a couple of songs on every album, and their latest is no exception. “Regular depression,” as Barry Johnson once put it in describing their self-titled album, has hardly lost its regularity and fans can all rally around it no matter the musical style it’s presented. But two decades is enough hindsight to say what it really used to be like, and no matter how dark, the comforting thing about I Used to Go to This Bar is the sense that Joyce Manor could be doing the same in as many years from now. Read the full review.
Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore, Tragic Magic
Over the past decade, Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore performed live together and collaborated on singles, but it wasn’t until they were invited to record an album in Paris, using the vast and historic collection of instruments at the Musée de la Musique, that a joint full-length finally materialized. The ambient composers have shown admiration for each other’s spiritual world-building, but, in the same way that they use technology and looping to elevate their respective instruments, their kinship heightens and bends the reality they mutually absorbed towards the cosmic – from the strange survivor’s guilt of leaving California in the midst of last year’s tragic wildfires to the reverie of a once-in-a-lifetime creative opportunity – towards the cosmic. Read our In Conversation feature with Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore.
Sassy 009, Dreamer+
Following a series of mixtapes, including 2019’s KILL SASSY 009 and 2021’s Heart Ego, Sassy 009 toiled away at her debut proper for years, struggling to funnel a fantastical narrative in which intrusive thoughts become reality into a digestible record; in essence, squaring the nightmarish with the catchy. But with notable assists from Blood Orange, yunè pinku, and BEA1991, Oslo-born artist Sunniva Lindgård – playing a character described, better than by the album’s namesake, on the title track as an “in-betweener” – embodies the blurry, fluid qualities of Dreamer+ with undeniable kineticism. It’s the kind of dream more likely to haunt you down than fade from memory.
Victoryland, My Heart Is a Room With No Cameras in It
The Brooklyn-based project of Julian McCamman quietly released its first tape, Sprain, just a week before the musician’s former band Blood released their debut and final album, Loving You Backwards. The wiry, whimsical, and emotionally piercing new album finds him continuing his collaboration with producer Dan Howard, who worked on both of those records, honing their mid-fi pop ambitions to brilliant effect. “Was it even worth trying/ Knowing someone is crying for us/ Watching an infinite loop of our lives,” McCamman sings at one point; even at its most desperate, the album sounds like it’s somehow enjoying running back the tape.
