In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on April 17, 2026:
Jessie Ware, Superbloom
Jessie Ware achieved disco nirvana with 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure? and 2023’s That! Feels Good!, and she isn’t abandoning it just yet. The singer’s new album, Superbloom, affirms her confidence has only been blossoming thanks to her adoring fanbase, but also feels torn between lifting her dance music up to the heavens and grounding it in domestic life, assuming the role of a goddess and staying clear of cosplay. Springtime, after all, is as joyful a season as it is transitional, and Superbloom closes a chapter as much as it opens up new lanes. Read the full review.
M.I.A., M.I.7
M.I.A.’s Christian album has arrived. The gospel-tinged M.I.7 is released by her own OHMNIMUSIC label and features seven songs that were “written in seven places” over a period of seven days. It was recorded and conceptualized in Ethiopia, Egypt, India, United Kingdom, Greece, Australia, and the United States at Rick Rubin’s Shangri La Studio. The gospel group Sunday Service, founded by ye, provides backin. “This time,” a press release states, “she leaves politics at the door, and enters with something more intimate, more ancestral, more existential, more transcendent, and more essential than anything she has made before.”
Lucy Liyou, MR COBRA
Lucy Liyou’s revelatory new album, MR COBRA, is adapted from her semi-autobiographical theatrical work Mister Cobra, weaving together free jazz, Korean folk opera, musique concrète, 2000s-era pop, drag-inspired performance, and more. Skirting the line between shame and desire, the artist’s discordant sound poetry is juxtaposed with her reverence for pop, from ambiently interpolating Taylor Swift to going full-on nu disco. “Sometimes trying to adhere to the ‘facts’ of my experiences made other emotional truths feel distorted,” Liyou explained. “For MR COBRA, I wanted to give myself the agency to distort all truths to see what jumped out to me as truthful in a reactive, and sometimes illusionary or misleading, sense–in all of this faulty rawness.”
Kathryn Mohr, Carve
While Kathryn Mohr’s last album, 2025’s Waiting Room, was recorded in a disused fish factory in Iceland, the Bay Area artist retreated to the rural Mojave Desert to record its quick follow-up, Carve. As an experimental musician who works at the intersection of landscape and memory, the album was fundamentally shaped by a difficult tour that ended in Joshua Tree; Mohr drove through dirt roads by herself before returning to record, again alone, with an acoustic guitar, a field recorder, and limited supplies. The LP was mixed by Richard Chowenhill of Flenser label mates Agriculture.
TOMORA, COME CLOSER
As the album title suggests, COME CLOSER – the debut album from the collaborative project of the Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands and Aurora – is both intimate and assertive. Before teaming up, the pair had worked on music together intermittently since 2019; AURORA guested on the Chemical Brothers’ 2019 album No Geography, while Rowlands produced several tracks on AURORA’s 2024 album What Happened To The Heart?. “This is the music that we’ve been waiting to make… the hardness with the soft, the ugly with the beautiful… It’s about connection,” the duo stated. “It is our own world — one that only exists when we meet and create together.”
Yaya Bey, Fidelity
The week she released her last album, do it afraid, Yaya Bey found herself crying in a Miami hotel room, struck by the realization “there was no place for that grief to exist that would not become a spectacle.” In press materials, the Brooklyn artist explained, “I had been holding it in. Maybe, to protect myself. Maybe to prove the onlookers wrong. Whatever the case, it was spilling over now.” On her new album Fidelity, Bey compartmentalizes her grief into the “Three Deaths”: the personal, the communal, and the loss of innocence, while confronting the passing of her father, Juice Crew MC Grand Daddy I.U. Its blend of R&B, jazz, and reggae is often dreamlike, but Bay has no issue nimbly moving through it.
Accessory, Dust
Accessory, the solo project of Dehd’s Jason Balla, has come through with his debut album, Dust. Following his mother’s passing in 2018, Balla laid the album’s foundations on the piano that she gifted him. It wasn’t until six years later – after periods of non-stop touring, a break up, and subsequent couch surfing – that Balla moved the instrument out of storage, composing in the mornings as a means of communing with his mother’s memory. Sticking to his DIY ethos, he tracked the album on equipment mostly built by himself in his home studio.
Teen Suicide, Nude descending staircase headless
Teen Suicide’s studio era commences with Nude descending staircase headless, their new album out via Run for Cover. Long marked by a lo-fi bedroom aesthetic, the duo of Sam and Kitty Ray have been experimenting with more polished sounds on recent effort, but their new album – recorded by Mike Sapone (Taking Back Sunday, Oso Oso, Cymbals Eat Guitars) – marks the start of a new chapter. “On the older records everything was self-recorded, home-recorded, on a laptop or on tape, and always with really limited resources,” Sam commented. “I think we became known for that but it was also very limiting to be seen as a lo-fi band.”
Other albums out today:
Nine Inch Nails & Boys Noize, Nine Inch Noize; Tokischa, Amor & Droga; Honey Dijon, Nightlife; Winston Hightower, 100 Acre Wood; Souled American, Sanctions; Frog, Frog for Sale; Aarp, Kadıköy; Sean Solomon, The World Is Not Good Enough; Yot Club, Simpleton; Tiga, Hotlife; They Might Be Giants, The World Is to Dig; Arkells, Between Us; beaming, horseshoe; Drew Wesely, Silence Is a Sharpened Blade.
