In this segment, we round up the best albums released each month. From underscores to Snail Mail, here are, in alphabetical order, the best albums of March 2026.
Anjimile, You’re Free to Go
After working with Shawn Everett on 2023’s starkly dramatic, grief-stricken The King, his 4AD debut following 2020’s critically acclaimed Giver Taker, Anjimile linked up with Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee, Hurray for the Riff Raff) to help craft the airier, relaxed, and quietly cathartic songs that emerged from a period of renewed freedom. “It comes in waves/ Memory and empathy/ It stays and waits with me,” he sings on ‘Waits for Me’, patiently letting them ripple across and crash into his music, often retreating into a question instead of resolving. Whether for something as abstract as freedom and embodiment or palpably simple like kissing a partner, you want the desire to wash over you, and Anjimile makes it sound easy. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Anjimile.
Avalon Emerson & the Charm, Written Into Changes
Avalon Emerson deepens her emotive songwriting on Written Into Changes, which encompasses five years of constant travel, including moving from Berlin to Los Angeles to New York. “Too young to die/ Too old to break through,” she sings on the glistening chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’, getting more reflective in the verses: “I have wasted all these years/ Collecting and perfecting this game.” But whatever the extent of Emerson’s sonic perfectionism and industry know-how, it builds no barrier to vulnerability on her second album with a band, or to cosmically upscaling her writing, like on the early single ‘Jupiter and Mars’. But just as she zooms out to the solar system, Emerson homes in on the small, persistent pleasures that seem equally, even frustratingly, miraculous, like drinking a cold beer. “How dare it cradle me in my tears so gently?” she wonders. Listening to Written Into Changes, you might find yourself asking the same question.
Gladie, No Need to Be Lonely
By the time Augusta Koch sent demos of Gladie’s galvanizing new record, No Need to Be Lonely, to Jeff Rosenstock, they weren’t just demo friends but friends friends, putting Rosenstock in the general category of people that many songs on the album feed off of and serve to uplift. “I brace myself to embrace you,” roars the chorus of one early single; “Know that I look to you, just to keep myself moving,” goes another. Rosenstock decided to produce the record, and they tracked it live to tape with Jack Shirley at Atomic Garden in Oakland. It’s no surprise the most dynamic songs on No Need to Be Lonely end up sounding eruptive, but the collaborative spirit enriches and sweetens the quieter songs, too, from the devastating catharsis of ‘Fix Her’ to the raw confessions of ‘Blurry’. It’s the rare gut-punch of a record that makes you feel lighter each time you play it. Read our In Conversation feature with Gladie and Jeff Rosenstock.
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.
Kim Gordon, PLAY ME
As ‘BUSY BEE’ weaves in a sample of Kim Gordon and her Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz co-hosting MTV’s Beach House, a sentence reverberates through its clattering noise: “The pressure to relax, it was just too much for her.” Sure enough, Dave Grohl’s drums thunder back in, resuming PLAY ME‘s gnarly flow. ‘BYE BYE’, a highlight from the Sonic Youth co-founder’s previous solo album The Collective, spawned TikTok videos of teens going through their own packing list, as Gordon chaotically did on that track – can you imagine going on vacation these days, she now seems to say, let alone enjoying it? The pressure to make music for “chillin’ after work,” as she puts it on the opening track, is too much for Gordon – so she soundtracks the doomscrolling, the brain fog, the post-Everything. Shorter and more spontaneous than its predecessor, PLAY ME‘s restlessness is nearly just as fruitful. Read the full review.
Robyn, Sexistential
At one point on her self-financed, self-titled, and first independently released album, Robyn assumed the role of a captain attempting a crash landing before launching into a song called ‘Crash and Burn Girl’, echoing her description of Sexistential as feeling “like a spaceship coming through the atmosphere at a really high speed.” More than two decades after Robyn, and aided by early collaborators like Teddybears member Klas Åhlund, Sexistential still prioritizes the pleasure principle – “I’m never inspired by pain,” she told one celebrity fan, Tinashe – while defiantly eschewing the trappings of a “maturing” pop star. Read the full review.
Snail Mail, Ricochet
There was a time when Lindsey Jordan harboured the illusion that she could only write in her Maryland childhood bedroom, where she made the songs that brought her indie fame right on the cusp of adulthood. By the time she was in the process of making her latest record, Ricochet, she’d bought her own house, dodging any impulse to write somewhere more nostalgically familiar. Working with Aron Kobayashi Ritch, the bassist and producer of New York’s Momma, it finds her transposing a period of self-imposed yet heavenly isolation into her most comfortably subdued songs to date. There’s still a delicate tension gnawing beneath the surface, as solitude’s gorgeous quiet borders on obsessive dissocation. Jordan, though, will go a long way to dance around it. Read the full review.
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.
Various Artists, HELP(2)
HELP(2) has the return of Arctic Monkeys and Cameron Winter’s first song since the explosion of Geese. More than thirty years after the first benefit compilation from War Child UK brought together Stone Roses, Suede, Blur, and Oasis, the James Ford-produced sequel features Pulp and members of Blur alongside a string of younger bands who have outgrown their post-punk origins, from Black Country, New Road to Wet Leg. It has every reason to exist but no business weaving all these voices together so effectively. HELP(2) would be a good album just by virtue of supporting the organization’s mission of delivering aid, education, mental health support, and protection to children in conflict zones. But there’s something all the more poignant about everyone involved caring enough to make it a great one. Read the full review.
waterbaby, Memory Be a Blade
Working with her primary collaborator Marcus White – who also arranged the lush contributions from violinist Oliva Lundberg, cellists Filip Lundberg and Kristina Winiarski, saxophonist Sebastian Mattebo, trombonist Hannes Falk Junestav, and flutist Pelle Westlin – waterbaby retains a preciously intimate and intuitive approach on her debut album, Memory Be a Blade, even going as far as to improvise a lot of the lyrics on the record. “Steady waters asking me to leave again” are the first words that come out of her mouth as she embraces this flow, illustrating that steadiness is an illusion, a trick of lonely shadows and lights. Still, we’re left with no choice but to paddle on.
