In this segment, we round up the best albums released each month. From @ to Jess Williamson, here, in alphabetical order, are the best albums of October 2026.
@, Autosmile
Both separately and in unison, Stone Filipczak and Victoria Rose seem to inhabit parallel planes of feeling. “Embrace the heat, submit to the cold,” goes a line on ‘Love in the Dark’, from Autosmile, their spell-binding sophomore album and first for 4AD under the moniker @ (pronounced “at”). Trained to the classics, the Mind Palace Music follow-up opens with a “to be or not to be” conundrum before melting the boundaries between dreams and reality, punishment and comfort, infatuation and heartbreak. In one of those dreams, the world even turns to Rose and says, “Whether you are winning or losing it’s all the same/ The music and the joy are both tied to the pain.” Listen to their music at any fidelity and their voices are as inextricably (and inexplicably) linked as their songs, aching but never not lovely. Read the full review.
Cameron Winter, Live at Carnegie Hall
By the time Geese released their rapturously received fourth album, Cameron Winter’s debut solo album already had the air of an instant classic. As I did in my introduction to the Getting Killed review, I’m prompted to bring up a quote by Leonard Cohen, who once warned Jarvis Cocker against dissecting the “sacred mechanics” of songs. Winter has always been at least somewhat deceitful in that crucial way, especially around the promotion of Heavy Metal. But the old mechanics are thrown out the window here, and stripping these songs – including three unreleased tracks – down to their core has a strange way of sanctifying them. Read the full review.
Caroline Rose, Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall
It’s kind of fitting that the first song on Caroline Rose’s last album, 2025’s year of the slug, serves as the closer on their latest, Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall. While the previous record was a collection of Garageband recordings exclusive to Bandcamp, the new album – Rose’s first independent release on their new label, SUCK – was recorded with indie super-producer John Congleton, amplifying the raw immediacy of some of those older songs and rounding it out with new ones. On their rowdiest effort to date, Rose barrels through “alien decisions,” weird pockets of American culture, and strange alleys of memory others would rather abandon. Like the title of their new album suggests, though, Rose uncovers in them an absurd fusion of tender optimism and unvarnished nostalgia. Read our inspirations interview with Caroline Rose.
Fine, Jazz dreams
“Once whatever was between the lines/ Somehow paints the picture out loud,” Fine sings on ‘Much to say’, a highlight from her sophomore album Jazz dreams. That’s one way of keying into the Copenhagen artist’s liminal songwriting, which remains as beguiling as it was on her solo debut, Rocky Top Ballads, if a little more flexible. In bending the album’s arrangements to the logic – though not any particular tropes – of its titular elements, she draws a mercurial portrait of desire out of the hollow ends of days, the emptiness of words, and an endless stream of reference points. Read the full review.
Fontaines D.C., Dopamine Chamber
Expanding on the aesthetics of 2024’s Romance, Fontaines D.C.‘s fifth album is similarly luminous, uncanny, and elegantly produced. But further polishing the band’s sound hardly offsets its darkly alluring tendencies; dressing up reality in the throes of the apocalypse, it embraces a widescreen, corrupted intimacy that’s mostly served as a metaphor for frontman Grian Chatten in the past. “There’s no ending to the deco-dance/ The type of step that takes you far away from true romance,” he sings on the final track, and with that album firmly in the rearview, Fontaines D.C. keep venturing deeper. Read the full review.
Greg Freeman, All Set the Bone
Released barely a year after his breakout record, All Set the Bone took shape in New Mexico, Vermont, Los Angeles, and various tour stops before being tracked with producer John Congleton. Wrestling with a world that seems to bleaken alongside waves of personal turmoil, All Set the Bone is a document of compounding anxiety that overrides its introverted tendencies with tirelessly ambitious, complex, and anthemic songs. “The memory of last year’s loss/ Gets pulled far away from us/ Like-waves-sucked-out-to-the-sea-and-thrust/ Into the perfect tsunami,” he sings on the breathless ‘Hail Mary’, not interested in taming the tides so much as feeling them. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Greg Freeman.
Jess Williamson, A Mile South of Heaven
In practical terms, Jess Williamson splits her time between LA and Marfa, Texas, about five hundred miles away from Dallas, where she grew up. But listen to a song like the closing ‘The Gem and Mineral Show’ and you’ll realize she’s rarely writing about one city without feeling the hum of the other. The easy thing would be to say that she’s caught in the middle, as she puts it on the opening track; later, on ‘Country Mile, she sings, “Just step to the middle and you won’t have to fight.” And while she might be referring to an argument between lovers, there’s a similar benefit to living in between places, committing to loneliness as opposed to community, and chasing the phantom of fame. A Mile South of Heaven clearly isn’t a record born from that frictionless dream, though. Williamson is a poet, after all, a mystical songwriter amassing battle scars from fighting the wind and playing with fire in order to calm down. Read our inspirations interview with Jess Williamson.
June McDoom, Follow the Light
After incorporating luscious harp and string arrangements on 2024’s With Strings EP, June McDoom continues to flesh out her otherworldly songwriting on her debut album, Follow the Light. Conjuring a dreamworld with technical precision, the record is meticulously layered, a seamless blend – or rather, careful diffusion – of reggae, dub, and folk elements that manages to be both spacey and tactile in its intimacy. “Be my human angel,” she pleads on its latest single, finding ways to sound grounded and ethereal in the same breath. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with June Mcdoom.
Ryan Hemsworth, Numbskull
It’s been eight years since Ryan Hemsworth’s last album under his own name, Elsewhere, but he’s kept busy in the interim with heavily collaborative projects as Quarter-Life Crisis and Bodysync. The latter’s sophomore album, Nutty, was self-described as “dance music by fans of DIY punk and Y2K pop.” Hemsworth’s new album Numbskull, which deftly balances his collaborative tendencies with ambient introspection, wears that fandom on its sleeves, compressing his most formative influences in emo, punk, and straight-up pop. It’s simultaneously some of his most hard-hitting and quietly affecting work to date. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Ryan Hemsworth.
Sadurn, The Underworld
Arduous as the process was behind Sadurn’s sophomore album, The Underworld, it positively sounds like a group settling into songs they’ve lived with for a while, from the pedal steel that accentuates Jon Cox’s guitar playing to the fiddle that draws the record to a close. In moving through a perpetual cycle of pain and yearning, it doesn’t wear the listener out so much as foster a space where they can warmly coexist, both intimately weighty and free-wheeling in nature. “I’m afraid that the way down is a long one,” G DeGroot sings, a fear that never prevents The Underworld from coaxing itself upward. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Sadurn.
Wishy, Nature’s Pill
It’s no wonder the first song on Wishy’s debut album was called ‘Sick Sweet’. That’s the dichotomy at the core of the Indianapolis quintet’s music: always infectious, but never without a trace of sickliness. Equally infatuated, jangly, and sublime, their sophomore album, Nature’s Pill, goes out in search of some kind of cure for love’s ailments while venturing out into new territory. In the band’s picture-perfect party world, “Life’s a game where nothing’s out of bounds/ And love’s a circus/ Everyone’s a clown.” This philosophy extends to their songs, which beam out of the speakers like the first thing you’ll want to hear every morning: a little sun-dazed, perhaps dreamstruck, yet eager to get up and running. Read the full review.
