In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on September 4, 2026.
Lily Seabird, Lightspheres on Their Way
Lily Seabird has returned with a new album called Lightspheres on Their Way. The follow-up to 2025’s Trash Mountain was previewed by ‘Election Day’ and the title track. “A lightsphere can be so many things,” Seabird explained in press materials. “An actual light like a star, the sun, a UFO; headlights, a flashlight in the night; but also life, living things, people, relationships.” She tracked and co-produced the record with collaborator Garrett Linck at his home in rural Maine over the first few days of 2026. “Sometimes life gets so dark, it starts to feel like a bad trip,” she remarked of the seasons that led to its creation.
Chat Pile, Who Loves the Sun
Chat Pile are back with another visceral, uncompromising album, Who Loves the Sun, one that also softens some of the band’s rougher edges. “This record focuses on my grievances with the modern world,” vocalist Ray B explained. “AI, genocide, climate change, the power elite, $$$$ hoarding pigs – all that shit fucks up your life and mine. The band is definitely stretching out their abilities on the album and I too felt inspired to go further- as a huge fan of Boston, I like to think Brad Delp is somewhere up there, smiling down, as I take the layering to new heights, but who can say? We have fun with it.” Bassist Stin added: “This album contains a healthy dose of the usual Chat Pile airing of grievances against the state of the world, but deeper at it’s heart I feel Who Loves the Sun is grappling with the challenges of trying to keep one’s humanity in a time of extreme anti-humanity.”
Told Slant, What’s Up
What’s Up is Felix Walworth’s first Told Slant album in six years. Out now via Mtn. Laurel Recording Co., the album was recorded with with Hannah Pruzinsky and Jonnie Baker, their bandmates in the groups Sister. and Florist, respectively. Ceci Sturman, Hellen Ballentine, Emily Sprague, Mari Rubio, and Elijah Wolf also contributed to the LP, which follows 2020’s Point the Flashlight and Walk. Billed as their “New York record,” it’s a delicately sprawling collection about what happens when you invest “somewhat maniacally to the project of self expression and subculture in one of the most hostile environments on earth,” according to Walworth.
Hannah Cole, Switchbacks
Following a series of EPs, Hannah Cole has come through with her mesmerizing debut LP, Switchbacks. The Nashville-based artist and her longtime collaborator and partner Josef Kuhn laid down the album in their home studio between 2024 and 2025, performing nearly every instrument themselves, with Sonny Diperri handling the mixing. On highlight ‘Mosquito Hawk’, Cole recalls a trip the pair once took to Asheville to record in a cabin. “It was just so sweet and pure,” she reflected. “We were falling in love, and I was falling in love with music again. I came to realize that in the same way a romantic relationship changes and develops challenges over time, so does my relationship to music. Neither is perfect, but love is at the core. That’s the point of the whole thing.”
Arab Strap, Half-Told Tales
Arab Strap’s new album may be called Half-Told Tales, but it’s full of detailed, ambitious storytelling. “This time we put everything on it,” the band’s Aidan Moffat remarked in press materials. “We normally have three or four songs left over from a session but with this one, it was like, fuck it.” Groovy and often surprising, it marks their third effort since reforming in 2016. “The album title sounds like a fairy tale book, until you get to the end of the record and you realise that I’m talking about lives that have ended too early,” Moffat added. “That’s something that just seems to be part of your life when you get to your fifties. You become acutely aware that you’re in that final third of your life. I think every single song has some element of time or some discussion of its passing and how to use it as best you can while you have it.”
Other albums out today:
Ellie Goulding, I Know Too Much; Rebecca Black, Age of the Exhibitionist; Diary, Spiral Bound; Carmen Villain, Memoria; Hollow Hand, Wish Road South; Sofie Royer, before/after; Sibille Attar, Sibille Attar; Medium Build, King of Having Fun; Sleep, Hemispheres; Mykki Blanco, Little Feet; Noah Hill, Ok ok now; Personal Trainer, Human Assholes; Klara Lewis, Opening; Gilroy Mere, Furlongs; Black Bananas, Bad Bunch; Behemoth, I, Scvlptor; Lille & rsn, The diversity of nature.
