In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on March 20, 2026:
Grace Ives, Girlfriend
“I’m no stranger to that sage advice/ If you love her, let her find her life,” Grace Ives sings on the outro to the penultimate song of her incandescent new album, Girlfriend. Headed for the freeway, she’s “off with my little mind,” and if you’ve loved Ives’ past work, you know “little” is the kindest compliment. Charting her journey to sobriety, she and co-producers Ariel Rechtshaid and John DeBold dig through the wreckage to uncover an artist more big-hearted, bold, and buzzed with life than the introvert who’d shrink at the scale of it. You can catch Ives on the road on many of these songs (and playing them); you can also hear her marveling. Read the full review.
BTS, ARIGANG
BTS are back with a new album. ARIGANG is framed as the K-pop stars’ reflection on their Korean roots and identity; “As an extension of that process, we also revisited the significance of our background as a group comprised entirely of Korean members,” Jimin remarked. About the lead single ‘SWIM’, the boy band said, “I hope it resonates with many people as they move through each day, taking each moment as it comes, splashing along, and continuing to swim forward. The more you listen, the warmer it feels, so I hope it becomes a source of strength as people go through their lives. Also, just like the folk song ‘Arirang’, which has been passed from mouth to mouth and stayed with people through generations, I hope ‘SWIM’ will remain close to people’s hearts for a long time to come.”
underscores, U
U is shorthand for underscores, but it’s also how, at least 50 times on her sort-of-self-titled album, April Harper Grey spells her object of desire. U has a compressed, equalizing power, leveling the playing field when it comes to mathematizing its relationship to I, which gets a typical definition early on: “I get what I want and then find out right after I get it, I don’t even want it.” It’s a reductive way of looking at underscores’ own trajectory, as U abandons the complex conceptual framework of 2023’s Wallsocket for a concise, escapist psychodrama, which is a way of understating that it’s an early contender for the most irresistible pop album of the year. In truth, you get what you want and then you find out right after you want it all over again: that’s U in a capsule. Read the full review.
Gladie, No Need to Be Lonely
Hooky and galvanizing, Gladie’s new album, No Need to Be Lonely, was produced by Jeff Rosenstock. They journeyed to Jack Shirley’s Atomic Garden studio in Oakland to record the follow-up to 2022’s Don’t Know What You’re In Until You’re Out, and you can feel the sense of camaraderie even in its quieter moments. Earlier this week, the Philly band shared the single that best encapsulates the album’s uplifting spirit, ‘I Want That For You’, which stemmed from a conversation with a friend. “We were talking about how it’s strange and difficult to be a human sometimes,” Augusta Koch recalled. “I often think about how easy it is to see the beauty and wonderful qualities in someone else but how hard it is to apply that same love to yourself. ”
Avalon Emerson & the Charm, Written Into Changes
Avalon Emerson deepens her emotive songwriting on Written Into Changes, which is billed not as diaristic but rather “memoiristic.” It encompasses five years of constant travel, including moving from Berlin to Los Angeles to New York. “Making Written into Changes felt like unlocking a fence and running into a big green field,” Emerson shared. “I wanted to be more direct and vulnerable with my lyrics and voice, and for the instrumentation I wanted to be bolder. This album is a collection of songs about change, shards of life, and relationships whose echoes I still feel every day. I collaborated with old friends, like Bullion, Hunter and Keivon, and also new producers and musicians such as Rostam, Jay Flew, and other brilliant musicians. We made this record in the English countryside, London, and LA. I love making this kind of music and I’m so happy people can hear this album now.”
Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso, FREE SPIRITS
Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso’s playful, imaginative genre-blending sounds seamless on FREE SPIRITS. It arrives on the heels of the Argentine duo’s breakout effort PAPOTA as well as their viral Tiny Desk concert, though none of their success has dampened their madcap sensibilities. Sting gets cast as the CEO of “the Free Spirits Wellness Center,” while Jack Black adds to the absurdity of ‘Goo Goo Gaga Gaga’. Anderson .Paak features on the previously unreleased ‘Ay Ay Ay’, but the standout non-single is the abrasive ‘Ha Ha’. It’s a healing journey unlike any other.
Otracami, Runoff
There’s a spell-binding quality to Runoff, the second LP from Otracami, the Brooklyn-via-California project of Camila Ortiz. The emotions are hazy and fractured, as they often are in times of displacement. “I was trying out leaving for the first time – people and jobs and situations with family,” Ortiz explained of the album’s backstory. “Sometimes that really worked and felt liberating, and other times I had to turn around and go back. It was a period of big experimentation.” As a result, “Runoff felt fluid and flowing – still pulling murky stuff with it, collecting grime, but moving. And that feels like a lot of these songs too – emotionally just letting something flow but trying to figure out a place where a feeling can get absorbed or settle.”
more eaze, sentence structure in the country
The blurriness of more eaze’s new album, sentence structure in the country, is no obstacle to its intimacy. If anything, it’s one of the Texan-born multi-instrumentalist’s most invitingly emotional releases, from its lush, actually country-inflected performances to mari rubio’s tender (mostly) AutoTuned vocals. The album features Wendy Eisenberg on electric guitar, piano and voice, Henry Earnest on electric guitar, Alice Gerlach on cello, Jade Guterman on acoustic guitar, and Ryan Sawyer on drums. “I couldn’t let go of the heart of the material and what it was trying to tell me,” the artist reflected. “Playing with these different combos helped me determine what the very core elements of the pieces were and then the songs also took on a life of their own this way. It’s like a feedback loop: as we continue to perform them, there’s this precedent that is set with what the piece could be.”
Green-House, Hinterlands
Olive Ardizoni and Michael Flanagan have returned with a new Green-House album called Hinterlands. Bound by “the idea of legitimizing certain emotions within music that often aren’t taken seriously in art, like happiness and joy,” as Ardizoni puts it, the record incorporates influences from folk, tropical pop, pan-flute mountain music, jazzy lounge, film scores, and more. “There’s freedom in music, not requiring nuance in order to share an emotion or a fantasy or a utopian ideal with others,” Ardizoni added. “I’m an anarchist and an artist. I don’t have to explain that. I can just put the emotion in and hope that it can be used as a tool, to be comforting or inspiring for people.”
Other albums out today:
Luke Combs, The Way I Am; Ladytron, Paradises; Hurray For the Riff Raff, Live Forever; Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, & Macie Stewart, BODY SOUND; Alessia Cara, Love or Lack Thereof; Nubiyan Twist, Chasing Shadows; The Dandy Warhols, PIN UPS; Colleen, Libres antes del final; Carlos Niño & Friends, Bubble Bath for Giants; Cassia Streb & Tim Feeney, Lampworking; Mike WiLL Made-IT, R3SET; Filth Is Eternal, Impossible World; Poison the Well, Peace in Place; Andreas Tschopp, What If We Align Our Breath.
