10 Great New Songs to Start Your 2026 With

If you’ve already played out all the best albums of 2025 and you’re ready to put your music listening habits in 2026 mode, you’re in luck because this year is already musically off to a good start. We’ve got nearly 100 albums we’re anticipating at the moment, a lot of album announcements and new singles dropped this week, and a handful of new albums are already out as well. As we near the end of the first full week of 2026, here’s 10 new songs (technically more than 10 songs) that we’re already loving.

Robyn – “Talk To Me” & “Sexistential”

We knew Robyn’s next album would be one of our most anticipated albums of 2026 once we heard “Dopamine” last year. It’s a feel-good banger that instantly felt like it was ushering in an exciting new era for Robyn, and this week Robyn officially announced the album and already proved it has more where “Dopamine” came from. It’s titled Sexistential, and new single “Talk To Me” is another immediate dancefloor-mover that’s cut from the same cloth as “Dopamine.” But euphoric dance-pop isn’t all Sexistential will have in store. Robyn also just released the title track, a spoken word/rap song that deals with subject matter that pop music rarely broaches, like IVF and single motherhood. It’s a welcome dose of realness to balance out all the euphoric escapism. [A.S.]

Doechii – “Girl, Get Up” (ft. SZA)

Doechii has been talking about the “debut studio album” that would follow her breakthrough 2024 “mixtape” Alligator Bites Never Heal since late 2024, and on December 30, 2025 she threw a whole lot of fuel on the fire. She teamed up with her TDE labelmate SZA for “Girl, Get Up,” a song that proves the chemistry they had on “Persuasive” over three years ago is still very strong. The SZA hook is one for the books, and Doechii goes in with her verses, rapping her ass off, talking her shit, and majorly foreshadowing the anticipated LP: “These n****s misogynistic, I’ll address it on the album.” If the album has this same energy, it’s gonna be a great one. [A.S.]

Jill Scott – “Beautiful People”

Jill Scott is a master of neo-soul and the first taste of her first album in 11 years is a great example of why. “Beautiful People” sounds like a lost gem of early ’70s soul, transported to 2026 and polished off with a modern finish. Jill’s powerhouse vocals are in amazing form, and the song has all those soulful finishing touches that hit just right. The new album is called To Whom This May Concern, it comes out on February 13, and it features contributions from Ab-Soul, J.I.D., Tierra Whack, Too $hort, DJ Premier, and others. [A.S.]

Feels Like Heaven – Within Dreams

We got our first great hardcore album of 2026 on the very first day of 2026. Just a few months after Swedish melodic hardcore band Speedway released their excellent debut album A Life’s Refrain, three Speedway members released the debut LP by another band they’re in, Feels Like Heaven. This is also “melodic hardcore,” but Speedway’s melodic hardcore is the Revolution Summer kind and this is more emo-leaning. For some classic comparisons, I’d say it falls somewhere between Lifetime and Samiam, and for something more current, I’d say it fits nicely next to Anxious and Fiddlehead. [A.S.]

Buck Meek – “Gasoline”

Just months after Big Thief released one of our favorite albums of 2025 with Double Infinity, Big Thief guitarist Buck Meek announced his next solo album, The Mirror, due 2/27 via 4AD. It was made with his Big Thief bandmate James Krivchenia and Big Thief vocalist Adrianne Lenker contributes to it too, so it shouldn’t be a big surprise that you can hear a lot of Big Thief’s magic coming through on lead single “Gasoline.” It’s the kind of strummy folk rock that Buck Meek does so well, but it’s also got some of those art rock tendencies that came through on Double Infinity, making it just a little more far-out than what we usually get from Buck’s solo career. [A.S.]

Dry Cleaning – “Joy”

When Dry Cleaning enlisted Cate Le Bon to produce their third album, one of her suggestions was that Florence Shaw — she of the dry, droll sprechgesang delivery — try singing more. “Joy,” which is the final track on Secret Love, is a great example of that. Shaw’s spoken word delivery is still there, sounding like an inner monologue as she goes throughout her day — mixing worries about the world with text from a book on the History of Food and Drink — but now it’s almost as if she’s humming to herself along the way as the rest of the band lays down a slashing, melodic post-punk backing. And are those harmonies we hear? Joy indeed. [B.P.]

MEMORIALS – “Cut Glass Hammer”

A wave of undulating synth arpeggiations sounds like cars revving their engines waiting for the Go signal, and then duo MEMORIALS are off to the races in a blast of motorik drumming, heavy acid-rock organs, and the ethereal twin vocals of Verity Susman (Electrelane) and Matthew Simms (Wire, It Hugs Back). “Nothing is exactly as it seems” they sing on “Cut Glass Hammer” which was inspired partially by a Yoko Ono exhibit at London’s Tate Modern, and this precision machine is both powerful and fragile. [B.P.]

Winged Wheel – “I See Poseurs Every Day”

This “experimental super-band” featuring members of Tyvek, Spray Paint, Matchess, plus Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley and more were born out of the pandemic with songs made remotely with members adding parts almost Exquisite Corpse style to becoming a formidable live band. Desert So Green is their third album and you can feel their sonic symbiosis on “I See Poseurs Every Day,” a smoldering, drony jam with komische bones and gothy vocals from Johnson. As for the title, Fred Thomas says it came from an inside joke on tour but notes, “It’s not without a shred of truth. We do see poseurs every day, and we need to let them know we’re watching.” [B.P.]

Haute & Freddy – “Dance the Pain Away”

The theatrical alt-pop duo Haute & Freddy, aka Los Angeles-based songwriters and musicians Lance Shipp and Michelle Buzz, are releasing their debut full length for Atlantic, which they recently signed to, Big Disgrace, and they paired the announcement with an addictive new single. “Dance the Pain Away” is a blast of ’80s-inspired synth pop in its most immediate and feel good form, and they say the song “is a feeling we’ve been dreaming of capturing in a song,” adding, “It was everything we were feeling, all the overwhelmed emotions, the chaos of how life can feel, and at the same time, the ease of how it can all go away for a little while when you’re dancing.” [A.H.]

Zach Bryan – “Bad News”

The new year begins with 25 new Zach Bryan songs, which arrive in the form of his new album With Heaven On Top. Zach remains an increasingly famous country superstar who seems far more interested in the indie world than in Top 40 Nashville, and this album is another example of that, with 78 minutes of music that are rooted in a mix of alt-country, Neil Young/Bob Dylan-style folk rock, and Bon Iver-style indie folk. One of those songs is the final version of “Bad News,” which went viral this past fall after Zach shared a snippet that included the lyric “ICE is gonna come bust down your door/Try to build a house no one builds no more” and referred to cops as “cocky motherfuckers.” It also references Bruce Springsteen and “This Land Is Your Land” and those are both fitting reference points for a song like this one, which criticizes America with patriotic imagery (“the fading of the rеd, white and blue”). It’s also delivered in Zach’s trademark melancholic style, with the same raw, somber emotion as his more personal material. [A.S.]

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For even more new songs, listen to our first weekly playlist of 2026:

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Looking for even more new songs? Browse the New Songs archive.