Hats Off Gentlemen… It’s Adequate – Parallel Lives
The British band’s ninth album stacks spoken-word verses, metre changes and bass flute into a record about mental wear, and closes on nine minutes of consolation.
New Releases Radar
Leila Abdul-Rauf – Andros Insidium
The sixth solo record from Vastum’s guitarist, on Ishtar’s descent: thirty-seven minutes of drone and trumpet, with harsh vocals on two tracks only.
Dave Bass – Trio Nuevo, Vol. 3
Third volume in three years from Dave Bass’s trio with Tyler Miles and Steve Helfand: a Bach toccata, a seldom-played Monk and three contrafacts.
Nite Bjuti – minwi
The second album by Candice Hoyes, Mimi Jones and Val Jeanty, cut live at NUBLU in New York in May 2023 and released three years later.
George Garzone – Themes for Good Friends
Cut at Van Gelder Studios with Randy Brecker, Luis Perdomo, Santi Debriano and Jeff “Tain” Watts, and closed with a tribute to Michael Brecker.
Stephan Thelen – Fractal Guitar 4
The fourth instalment of the series Thelen began in 2015, cut across eight cities from Bucharest to Krefeld, with Eivind Aarset on all eight tracks.
Maika Makovski – Live-Palau!
Twenty-one tracks from the twentieth-anniversary show at the Palau, with the Quartet Brossa, Rosenvinge, Anni B Sweet and Howe Gelb, and eight songs from that night left out.
Epica – Live at The Symphonic Synergy
Twenty tracks and two hours of the 2024 Amsterdam show with orchestra and choir, already issued on Blu-ray inside “Aspiral” and now arriving digitally without the video.
Butcher Babies – Nightbloom
Ten tracks of three and a half minutes and the first album without Carla Harvey: Heidi Shepherd out front alone, Howard Benson producing and half the record already out on video.
Agriculture – The Spiritual Sound, Live in Europe 2026
Seven of the ten tracks come from the Roadburn set and the other three from Glasgow, Milan and Cologne: a live record stitched together from four rooms, and it shows.
Hollie Kenniff & Kazuma Okabayashi – The Last Bright Place
Eight tracks and thirty minutes of four-handed ambient between Tokyo and the United States, six of which had already come out as singles.
Ross Margitza – Discovery
Eight of his own compositions for piano trio, with a string quartet on four tracks and Joel Frahm on the first: forty minutes of held pulse.
Maiah Wynne – Into The Waves
Envy of None’s singer reaches her second solo album: twelve tracks cut on a laptop in hotel rooms, with Alex Lifeson on two of them.
John Holden – Thresholds
Seventh album from the British composer: seven thresholds, four guest voices and, for the first time, every instrument played by him alone.
Hippotraktor – Annihilist
Third album from the Mechelen five-piece, and the third with exactly seven tracks: thirty-eight minutes, the shortest of the three, with Loïc Rossetti guesting.
Amon Amarth – The Allfather Awakens
Thirteenth album from the Swedes, four years on from “The Great Heathen Army”: ten tracks, forty-six minutes and the first acoustic song they have ever released.
TEMIC – Ceiba
Second album from the international quintet built around Tejeida and Gillette: eleven tracks about loss, with the three longest of them stacked into the back half.
Michał Skwierczyński – Consistency
Debut from the Polish guitarist based in Basel: ten of his own compositions in a quartet, produced by Wolfgang Muthspiel, with the prologue parked at track five.
Travo – Wasteland
The Braga four-piece booked the studio with nothing written and came out with seven tracks, cut in Porto with Jaime Gomez Arellano at the desk.
Endspace – First Contact
Debut from the Canadian duo who sign with two strings of digits: nine tracks called transmissions, black metal run through vocoders, and a centrepiece with no guitars at all.
The Spacelords – Uranus Omnibus Sanctus
Ninth album from the Reutlingen trio: four tracks, forty-four minutes, and a guest organ doing most of what is new about their instrumental space rock.
Christian Finger – Zeit Zirkel
The German drummer based in New York cuts a record in a single day, with Alessi and Monder, about the way grief bends time. It ends twice and turns to look back before it stops.
Destruction Of Orion – States Of Horror
Avolition, catalepsy, lethargy, anhedonia: Bulgaria’s Tehina Spasova gives every track a clinical name and Aesthetic Death gives the record a body. Fifty-six minutes of funeral doom with no way out.
Noctule – Extinguish Thy Flame
With Svalbard finished, Serena Cherry is alone with Elden Ring: ten tracks, five bosses and thirty-nine minutes of melodeath and symphonic black metal. The journey it promises is really a list.
Aisles – Irrationally
Twenty-one years and six albums in, the Chileans have a new singer and a forbidden-love story told out of order. The beginning turns up at track eight and lasts half a minute.
Slow Tiger – Slow Tiger
Nine tracks and four composers on a quintet debut built around an organ and two horns. The flow is faultless, and at times you can’t tell whose piece you’re hearing.
Chelsea Wolfe – The Dark
Ten songs that all fit between 3:17 and 4:31, with Robin Finck and Matt Chamberlain in the band. Chelsea Wolfe’s ninth album has the songs in place and the mix against it.
Weave4 – La Gomma Di Dante
Fifteen pieces in forty-nine minutes: Benoît Delbecq’s French-Italian quartet returns with a record that sounds like the soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist.
Daniel Carter / Sabir Mateen / William Parker / Lou Grassi – Keeping It In Context
A session from 20 May 1996 that drummer Lou Grassi forgot about and that resurfaced in 2023. Sixty-seven minutes with William Parker at the top of his game.
Kongh – Dissolved in Time
Three tracks and thirty-nine minutes, thirteen years after “Sole Creation”. Sweden’s David Johansson plays nearly all of it and signs the longest, slowest Kongh record yet.
Slug Comparison – Cold In Cold Out
Fen’s Doug Harrison opens his EP with a declared homage to “Something in the Way”, cut on a twenty-pound guitar. The five tracks that follow don’t get near it.
Chad Fowler / Eri Yamamoto – Polkadots & Moonbeams
An elegy for Fowler’s father, the song played at his wedding, and six improvisations taped in one Brooklyn afternoon with nothing said beforehand. A duo that listens hard.
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats – Shapes of Midnight
Cut at Abbey Road in three days and put out on their own label: Uncle Acid’s seventh heads back to familiar ground, with Rachel Burnett’s saxophone the best thing on it.
Various Artists – We Are The Beautiful: Two Decades Of Shoegaze 1991-2011
Four discs and sixty-seven tracks from Cherry Red tracing shoegaze from 1991 to 2011. The choice of small names is excellent; the hole at the start, less so.
Trevor Watts / Barry Guy / Ramón López – The First Touch
Watts and Guy have been playing together since 1966 and meet again in Lublin with Ramón López. Seventy-six minutes of live music, mixed in Barcelona, with an uneven second half.
Ayumi Tanaka, Thomas Morgan, Thomas Strønen – Windflower
Eight of the nine tracks were improvised in the room and the record never raises its voice. Tanaka, Morgan and Strønen debut as a trio on ECM with a discipline that costs them something.
Dead Sea Apes – Psychic Tension
The Manchester trio’s first studio record in three years builds an immovable base on every one of its five tracks and turns the guitar loose on top. It works — until it repeats.
Jazz Out of Norway – 12th Set 2026
The twelfth instalment of the compilation Norway uses to export its jazz: thirty-six tracks, three hours and a seventy-nine-page booklet. An excellent map with a format problem.
Markus Reuter & Stefano Castagna – Sky On The Ground
Twenty-seven years of Markus Reuter’s archived improvisations, rewritten in Brescia by Stefano Castagna, and the first vocals either has recorded, run through a vocoder: eleven tracks of sonic magical realism.
Also Eden – Holy Books & Credit Cards 1: Promises
Thirteen years after “Redacted”, Also Eden return with four tracks and two of them are the same song: “Scented Candle Corridors” justifies the wait, but the acoustic “Promises” takes up too much room.