In this segment, we round up the best albums released each month. From Aldous Harding to feeble little horse, here are, in alphabetical order, the best albums of May 2026.
Aldous Harding, Train on the Island
Welcome to Aldous Harding’s island. You’re free to leave anytime you like, but the New Zealand artist is happy to show you around. There are no palm trees here; just the one tree that she used to climb, presumably as a child. Forget about the sensation of floating on the ocean blue; instead, lose yourself in questions like, “When I hit the ocean I was only a spark/ Who brought me up the stem with no love in their heart?” You’ll have to get by eating rocks and plants, but you can dance just to dance. You can get together with friends once in a while, but in the end, of course, it’s just you and your reflection. “I have met my sleeping self/ Things she knows keep me around/ I hope I’m more than I think about,” Harding sings towards the end of her insular yet inviting Warm Chris follow-up. Read the full review.
American Football, LP4
In the decade-plus since American Football’s reunion, Mike Kinsella has reserved some harrowing lyrical specificity for his other project Owen, aware that it’s much less subject to scrutiny. Reeling from a divorce he’s already addressed on the last couple of Owen records, however, he leans into the vulnerability on the band’s first album in seven years, pointing fingers while claiming responsibility for the mess he’s created. “I can’t bathe in your malaise anymore/ I’d rather be profane than chaste and bored,” he sings deep into the storm of the record, which is dramatic and ambitious, yes, but will probably prove less divisive than some of us early listeners assumed. It’s exploratory, unmoored, and self-aware, though never to the point of rupturing the mythos of American Football. Read the full review.
Broken Social Scene, Remember the Humans
Broken Social Scene’s new album, Remember the Humans, urges you to think of music in organic terms. The title of the Canadian collective’s first album in nearly a decade came from Charles Spearin, who initially framed it as a joke: it sounds like the AI version of their seminal 2002 LP You Forgot It in People. The songs get lost in the haze of personal memory, eulogize individual people, and put relationships under the microscope, but the group still has a unique way of reveling in abstraction: finding relief from the burden of identity and emotional truth in every cliche. It’s a joyously universal kind of homecoming. Read our inspirations interview with Broken Social Scene.
feeble little horse, bitknot
Once again recorded across the trio’s homes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the surprise follow-up to feeble little horse’s mesmerizing 2023 LP Girl With Fish isn’t exactly nostalgic for a time when tech and money were only responsible for human suffering in different ways, but it does grapple with the kind of discombobulation of memory and self that’s particular to this cultural moment. Using digital tools as an extension of their knotty group dynamic and Lydia Slocum’s wiry introspection, it interlaces sugary melodies and dizzying left turns that hardly pale in comparison to its predecessor, making it feel far from a tossed-off release.
Greg Mendez, Beauty Land
By the time he released his disarmingly intimate self-titled album in 2023, Greg Mendez had spent a decade and a half as part of Philadelphia’s DIY scene. The singer-songwriter’s full-length debut for Dead Oceans is his most extensive collection to date, Beauty Land, one no less thematically heavy than its predecessor but more unburdened in its expression. The songs swell with unguarded emotion, whether looping a single thought over spare keyboard or slow-burning into miniature symphonies. Still recording almost entirely alone, Mendez finds ways to stir them outside the confines of his own reality; you could say that’s where the beauty comes from.
Iceage, For Love of Grace & the Hereafter
It’s not unusual for Iceage to obscure the narrative details of their songs. But when frontman Elias Rønnenfelt sings about catching “you like an ember falling down” on the opening track of their new album, he might as well be referring to the sparks of a new song that permeate the air when the band is in the studio. The more the Danish punks have pushed their sound forward since their 2011 debut New Brigade, the more days it’s taken them to record, with the last couple requiring – gasp – up to two weeks. Perhaps in reaction to the insularity of Rønnenfelt’s recent solo work, though, they returned to a speedier, raucous approach for For Love of Grace & the Hereafter, as if the ideas themselves were running for dear life. Read the full review.
Ivy Knight, Iron Mountain
Growing up in Oakland, California, Ivy Knight was tapped into different strains of alternative music: her dad brought her into the world of punk and experimental music early on, while her mom put on indie mixtapes in the car. That’s where we find the New York-based artist on the opening track of her debut album, Iron Mountain, where she sings, “You’re painting colors/ A picture for the sky/ The thin blue beads/ On the mirror while you’re speeding.” It becomes clear she’s absorbed those formative influences as deeply as she takes in her surroundings, her oneiric, often escapist imagery mirrored in frequent collaborator Deer park’s organic production. After a couple of blearier, stripped-back EPs, her first full-length homes in on subtly accented folk-rock, harking back to songwriters like Marty Robbins and Kate Wolf. If the vocal filters and synth flourishes position her as part of a new wave of alt-pop, they’re also just tools for her to blend into her own creative landscape, planting dreams into the earth. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Ivy Knight.
Kacey Musgraves, Middle of Nowhere
Kacey Musgraves was wandering around her hometown in Texas when she noticed a small sign that said, “Golden, Texas: Somewhere in the middle of nowhere.” She loved that it was “self-deprecating but also kind of confident,” she explained in an interview, which is the exact tonal balance she strikes on her latest record. Middle of Nowhere, in fact, begins “out there on the edge of the world, way past common sense” before Musgraves proclaims that she lives in “the great state of confusion.” Yet the album is less incoherent than her 2021 pop pivot star-crossed, and even more grounded than 2024’s Deeper Well, which focused less inspiringly on growth and healing. She’s not only more comfortable but more incisive in this transitional lane, leaning into the country classicism of Pageant Material and the radiance, if not the total brilliance, of Golden Hour. Read the full review.
Kevin Morby, Little Wide Open
How do you relate to Kevin Morby’s music if you’ve never even been to the Midwest? So much of the singer-songwriter’s work is beloved for its sense of place; I tend to appreciate it because it never seems entirely tied to a single one. Even as he delivers his most settled and, by all accounts, most Midwestern album to date, Morby’s life is split between Kansas City and Los Angeles, as he and his partner, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, are expecting their first child. Little Wide Open, in its grand simplicity and cautious optimism, doesn’t cling to Middle America as a nostalgic signifier but mines its abundance of imagery, honouring a beautiful region you can drive through but will always ride passenger to time. It’s the same where you are; Morby just makes the truth easier to embrace. Read the full review.
Lip Critic, Theft World
Lip Critic frontman Bret Kaser’s identity was purportedly stolen while the Brooklyn quartet was writing Theft World, the follow-up to their 2024 debut Hex Dealer; the thief turned out to be a devoted fan who believed he’d cracked the code to the band’s loosely conceptual universe. For a record that toes the line between absurdist fantasy and depressing realism, that origin story is almost too good, but the frenetic machinations of the record itself are even better: a melting pot of delirious characters, adrenaline-fuelled propulsion, and ingenious experimentation. Outlandish or not, it drives home the same truth: It’s happening to you right now. Read our inspirations interview with Lip Critic.
MUNA, Dancing on the Wall
Towards the end of MUNA’s new album, Katie Gavin is convinced she’s past her prime – “and everyone knows it.” It’s a natural insecurity, but it’s laced with the understanding that “everyone” now implies a larger group of people who are far from friends or devoted fans. Whenever the band comes up in the lyrics of their latest, Dancing on the Wall – self-produced, like all their records, but with a heightened urgency – it’s to affirm that they’re doing alright, if with a knowing sigh. “Lots of people love me now,” Gavin sings to deal with an unrequited love, “Lots of people.” Whatever personal grievances these often dizzyingly infectious songs latch onto, they point to a band continuing to grow into themselves rather than self-consciously aging out of their peak. Read the full review.
Thomas Dollbaum, Birds of Paradise
Many of the songs on Thomas Dollbaum‘s new album – propulsive, twangy, torch-like – spring from the setting of his childhood, driven to a magically placeless evocation of memory, empathy, and solitude. “What the living do is prowl around on their hands and knees/ Among the bodies we leave behind,” declares one of its characters; another is purely happy to be alive. Aided by guitarist Josh Halperm, bassist Nick Corson, and MJ Lenderman on drums, guitar, and backing vocals, Dollbaum is always somewhere in between, pooling the feelings together like they’re one and the same. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Thomas Dollbaum.
