Every week, we update our Best New Songs playlist with several tracks that catch our attention, then round up the best songs of each month in this segment. Here, in alphabetical order, are the best songs of January 2026.
Avalon Emerson & the Charm, ‘Jupiter and Mars’
Shimmering through heartbreak is nothing groundbreaking in indie rock, the genre that DJ-producer Avalon Emerson’s recently revived band the Charm broadly falls under. But on ‘Jupiter and Mars’, the cosmic airiness of Emerson and Rostam Batmanglij’s production occupies the blurry space between a proper breakup and unrequited love unlike most songs that simply hang around it; it’s danceable, but not in the cathartic style of pop songs engineered to make you feel better. Still, it eases you into the process of saying goodbye, or recognizing the grief in the absence of what was never really there, except perhaps interdimensionally. “And in a light-year or two down the line/ When it all collapses on itself, folding time/ And our dust finds each other in the thin/ I’ll understand if you leave me again,” Emerson sings, voice like powder, searching.
deathcrash, ‘Somersaults’
As the title track of deathcrash’s third album, ‘Somersaults’ feels like a strange kind of homecoming. Anyone affected by the chorus of “This is shy town all the way” understands the nostalgia has little to do with place, but the people that populate it and the unspoken tensions between them: “As you grew up into an elegant life/ My childhood room was still the centre of mine.” The tenderly slow-burning instrumentation makes the song sound like it originated right there, in those four walls. The narrator – a self-described “softly spoken guy” – has a lot on his mind that he would never say, but sings enough of it to paint the outlines of a story you could latch onto for the rest of the record. It’s an opening equal parts nostalgic and whimsical.
Jessie Ware, ‘I Could Get Used to This’
We don’t know yet where ‘I Could Get Used to This’ is placed on Jessie Ware’s upcoming album Superbloom, but the invitation at the start of it – “Step into my secret garden” – reminds me of the intro to the lavish world of Kali Uchis’ Red Moon in Venus. The celestial symbolism is aligned, too: “Let’s stay here for infinity/ Pablo silhouette/ Venus energy,” Ware sings in the breathlessly infectious lead-up to the chorus, which finds her playfully repeating the titular words less like an affirmation than manifestation. She’s still in the pleasure-seeking disco mode of her last two albums, but there’s an added layer of gauze and fantasy one can only imagine expanding throughout the album. Between the “I-I-I”s, fluttery strings, and key changes, though, there’s plenty of hidden delights in what we can only assume is just the opening act.
Kim Gordon, ‘Not Today’
Kim Gordon’s new album is called PLAY ME, and its lead single seems to demand: Play me first thing in the morning. Restless and hypnotic, ‘Not Today’ finds a strange kind of beauty in the mundane disarray of waking up; “Not a mess with you,” she half-sings, a sweet moment somewhat undercut by the earlier confession that there’s a hole in her heart. It’s been hard not to talk about chaos in describing the solo music Gordon has made in collaboration with producer Justin Raisen; here, it’s mostly subject matter, and even then “chaos” is too heavy a word. There’s a lightness even the song’s persistent rhythm, suggesting she’s not afraid to leave this not-a-mess behind.
Mandy, Indiana, ‘Cursive’
Unlike Jessie Ware, Mandy, Indiana do not invite you into their secret garden – although the experimental band’s latest single ‘Cursive’ was “a step into the unknown,” according to synth player Simon Catling. (I don’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, but I remember obsessing over the singles Jessie Ware and Mandy, Indiana put out the same week in April 2023. History repeats itself, baby!) Catling further describes ‘Cursive’, from their imminent new album URGH, as probably their most collaborative track to date, and it is uniquely synergetic: vocalist Valentine Caulfield frantically paces around the four walls of Simon Catling and Alex Macdougall’s impenetrable rhythm section, while a searing synth interjecting around the halfway point like the worst intrusive thought. Still, they make it sound like a room you’d die to be in.
Mitski, ‘Where’s My Phone?’
Gone is the heavenly taste of a lover’s leftover coffee; now the caffeine, clearly a bad choice, is mingling with our protagonist’s perpetual state of anxiety. Echoing as it might Bury Me at Makeout Creek’s grungy, distorted guitars and irreverent attitude, the lead single from Mitski’s upcoming Nothing’s About to Happen to Me is hardly a regression. An older Mitski song might have ended around the two-minute mark, but the wordless, orchestral bridge of ‘Where’s My Phone’ ushers it into a surreal realm where future survival becomes more urgent than yesterday’s madness. “If night is like you punched a hole into tomorrow/ I would fuck the hole all night long,” Mitski sings – and it’s as if the louder the fuzz on the guitar solo, the stronger the fist.
Snail Mail, ‘Dead End’
“Do you wonder where I’ve been?” Lindsey Jordan asks at the end of her new song ‘Dead End’. It’s been half a decade since Snail Mail’s most recent album, Valentine, but Jordan has mostly kept her fans up to date: she launched her own festival in her Baltimore hometown, moved from there to North Carolina, and appeared in and contributed to the soundtrack of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow. When she made the news for getting a doppelganger on Jeopardy!, some may have wondered if she’s been working on a new album. Now we know Ricochet is on the way, led by ‘Dead End’, an irresistible slice of alt-rock that bears the mark of producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch’s main band Momma. It’s one thing to sing about perennial rain and sunlight rocking you to oblivion; another to have the guitars make it taste so sweet. “I still wonder about you,” Jordan concedes, but seemingly puts the car back in drive, no longer stuck at the same dead end.
