In this segment, we round up the best albums released each month. From Charli XCX to Kelela, here are, in alphabetical order, the best albums of July 2026.
Arca, XXXXX
It’s been five whole years since Arca burned through the Kick pentalogy, but XXXXX turns the clock back further, ushering us into the speculative world of Diva Experimental FM. If a five-album project has the inevitable effect of demarcating styles, the Barcelona-based producer’s latest, though technically an album, embraces the lawless spirit of her earlier mixtapes, scabbing at the rougher edges of sounds she might have previously teased just briefly; of course her goal remains to deconstruct club music, but here those fraught rhythms are overlaid with classical instrumentation, hovering in the ether for longer periods of time. On the spoken-word interlude ‘Cinch’, she puts words to her unclassifiable endeavour: a plunge into the unknown, open-hearted and “evermorphing.” Then, for another half hour, she demonstrates precisely what the hell that means.
Charli XCX, Music, Fashion, Film
One of the first things Charli XCX revealed about Music, Fashion, Film was that it’s “about process.” In the wake of the album’s release, the pop star utilized several marketing tactics to support her framing, from “begrudgingly” releasing B-sides that scan as off-the-cuff experiments exclusively on iTunes to sharing a short film about the songs’ evolution that’s actually longer than the (original) album itself. But the more I let the songs on the BRAT follow-up sink in, the less interested I am in the circumstances of their creation; the record plants a chip in my head that tells me to make more things rather than breeding curiosity about how Charli XCX makes anything. In furthering the singer’s continuously, punishingly self-referential journey, Music, Fashion, Film captures something precious and elemental about inspiration, companionship, and laughter in the face of mortality, and you want it – and life – to stay exactly the way it is in the moment you are experiencing it. Read the full review.
Finn Wolfhard, Fire From the Hip
In the span of a year that has included wrapping up his decade-long run in Stranger Things, Wolfhard has put out two solo albums, Happy Birthday and the recently-unveiled Fire From the Hip, whose title alludes to the spontaneous energy with which it sprung following a fall 2025 tour. Though still very much active in the film industry, he’s taken on a couple of music-related projects in recent years, from starring in and contributing original folk-rock songs to Jesse Eisenberg’s 2022 feature directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World, to currently working on a Replacements biopic with his father Eric. The new album’s cover may be framed as a duel between Wolfhard’s conflicting impulses, but as creative fuel – and with a little help from his friends – they’ve produced his most confident and vibrant collection yet. Read our interview with Finn Wolfhard.
IAN SWEET, Shiverstruck
“Looking at my life in its final form/ The shape it took, I’d never seen before,” Jilian Medford sings on ‘Silver Screen’, a highlight from her new album Shiverstruck. She might as well be describing the ever-shifting trajectory of IAN SWEET, the moniker that serves as less and less of a vehicle to separate herself from her music. When AI-generated soundalikes start releasing fake music under your pseudonym, what choice do you have but to put your rawest self out there? There’s a wildness to the SUCKER follow-up, which wraps your heart in a knot from the breathtakingly vulnerable opener ‘987’ to the self-reflexive ‘Jilian’. Working with producer Ben Allen, Medford had never pored over her own lyrics this much, never spent so much time focusing on the vocals. But it’s the opposite of any sense of perfectionism that renders this a never-before-seen version of IAN SWEET; not final, but probably unrecognizable to the one that came before or the one that might follow. We’re lucky her songs send shivers down your spine just the same. Read our inspirations interview with IAN SWEET.
Jack White, Frozen Charlotte
It’s a fact that there are few guitar wizards like Jack White. Most musicians would die for that kind of reputation, less concerned with the quality and consistency of their recorded output, let alone how it makes its way into the world. But White’s solo discography has been more illustrious and discourse-churning than any White Stripes fan could expect: from his identity-defining first couple of records to the experimental trilogy that began with 2018’s truly bonkers Boarding House Reach. “I feel like a magician/ But the trick’s on me,” White, whose overflow of ideas sometimes gets the best of him, sings on ‘All Alone Again’ from the just-released Frozen Charlotte, in fact his seventh album (son?). With a title referencing a traditional folk ballad about a girl who froze to death because she refused to cover her dress, the new album contains any impulse to show off but still manages to impress, stripping things down in the vein of 2023’s No Name. Read the full review.
Kelela, new avatar
As soon as PinkPantheress joins Kelela on ‘the bridge’, the penultimate track and final single of new avatar, she helps sum up the entire project: “Spare my eyes, I fear I get no sleep.” For the Washington, D.C.-born singer-songwriter, sleeplessness turns out to be both a blessing and a curse. The night is where negativity festers, curdling uncertainty, regret, and desire into pure nerves; it’s also what gets her gears turning, harnessing a formlessness eventually reclaimed by the morning light. For over a decade, Kelela has proven herself a master of liminal spaces, and the follow-up to 2023’s Raven, for all its rough edges and unpredictable twists, is her most illuminating. Read the full review.
Mallory Hawk, Chinook
After moving to New York City in 2017, Mallory Hawk cut her teeth in a range of indie rock bands, contributing bass and vocals to Customer, joining Trace Mountains, and touring as the bassist for Dublin’s M(h)aol. If you’ve listened to more than one of these groups, you won’t be surprised by the stylistic versatility of her debut album, Chinook, which soars through everything from post-punk to dance-punk, post-grunge to indie-folk, in a casual way that affirms it’s all just rock music to Hawk. Recorded with producer Sam Acchione at Philadelphia’s Headroom Studios, Chinook naturally finds common ground not only between the masculine and feminine-coded alt-rock of Hawk’s youth, but the different strains of underground music she would go on to discover; at the same, it wrestles with the loneliness of the big city while reexamining her relationship with her military hometown. You can feel the places that have left their mark on the record, tangled like its rage and melancholy, a double-negative collision that makes space for extreme joy. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Mallory Hawk.
https://malloryhawk.bandcamp.com/album/chinook
Shearwater, The New World
“Hey buddy,” Laurie Anderson begins on the final track of The New World, “It’s sure been a long time.” It has, indeed, been quite some time since Shearwater – currently a trio comprising Jonathan Meiburg, his Loma bandmate Dan Duszynski, and Emily Lee – put out a new record. In the four years since The Great Awakening, Meiburg has been traveling, researching his next book, and participating in collaborative projects, making space for his musical and scientific work to intersect and seep into the next Shearwater record. Despite being the band’s first crowdfunded release after six albums with Sub Pop and Matador Records, the result is their most ambitious and rich-sounding effort to date, brimming with curious instrumentation as alive to their environment as the sounds of ravens, blackbirds, and coyotes that are folded into the mix. Read our inspirations interview with Shearwater.
