Notable Releases of the Week (1/9)

Happy new year! Welcome to the first Notable Releases of 2026! Hopefully you’re all caught up on reading our multiple year-end lists from 2025, and be sure to check out our list of nearly 100 albums we’re anticipating in 2026 if you haven’t already. Some of those are out this week.

I highlight six new records below (including things released between late December and now), and Bill talks about more in Indie Basement, including Winged Wheel (members of Sonic Youth, Saturday Looks Good To Me, Spray Paint, etc), Dry Cleaning, The Cribs, Prins Thomas, and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Marty Supreme soundtrack. On top of those, this week’s honorable mentions include the surprise SAULT album, Ulver, Tha God Fahim & Nicholas Craven, Pullman (Tortoise, Come, etc), French Montana & Max B, Will Epstein, Zu, The Kid LAROI, GLOM, Devon Allman, Mon Rovîa, The Protomen, Robert Stillman, Beyond the Black, Lionheart, Lasse Lokøy, Sis and the Lower Wisdom, Euphoria Again & Dogwood Tales, the Sally Shapiro remix album, Woe’s Legacies of Human Frailty (a re-recorded version of 2023’s Legacies of Frailty), and Mau5trap’s We Are Friends Vol. 12 comp.

We also talk about some new albums and new songs on this week’s episode of BV Weekly, on which we also discuss the Governors Ball lineup and more. Stream that wherever you listen to podcasts.

Read on for my picks for this week’s Notable Releases. What’s your favorite release of the (past couple) week(s)?

Zach Bryan – With Heaven On Top (Warner)
Country music’s most unlikely superstar is back with 25 new songs of his trademark melancholy.

Even as Zach Bryan becomes one of country music’s biggest stars, he seems more interested in the indie world than in Top 40 Nashville. He’s bringing out MJ Lenderman, Dijon, and Alabama Shakes as support acts on his upcoming stadium tour, and his new album With Heaven On Top sounds as anti-mainstream as we’ve come to expect from Zach. These 25 songs are rooted in a mix of alt-country, Neil Young/Bob Dylan-style folk rock, and Bon Iver-style indie folk, and they all also sound distinctly like Zach Bryan, who at this point has developed a style that you can spot from a mile away. The whole album is somber, bare-bones, and melancholic; these are songs that could silence a room with just a voice and acoustic guitar, and sometimes that’s literally all they have, though Zach’s got some nice strings, horns, harmonica, and other embellishments on there too. If one thing is clear from Zach’s extremely prolific run of very long albums, it’s that this guy really does know his way around a song and he just can’t seem to stop churning them out.

Jenny On Holiday – Quicksand Heart (Transgressive)
One half of Let’s Eat Grandma steps out on her own for a solo debut of bright, sticky, idiosyncratic pop.

After making three albums of chaotic art pop as Let’s Eat Grandma, Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton wanted to see what they could do as solo artists. LEG isn’t breaking up, and Jenny and Rosa haven’t even stopped collaborating–Jenny’s first album as Jenny On Holiday arrives today, and Rosa appears on several songs. With Quicksand Heart, Jenny turns down the chaos and dives deeper into the pop. “I wanted to let go of any mad song structures and ideas that weren’t succinct,” she said. “I wanted to push at the edge of the universe of pop and make these big, bold songs about my fear of dying and things going wrong in my life and finding my feet again on the ground. That’s my pop.”

Jenny’s “pop” is influenced by a cast as diverse as Prefab Sprout, The Beach Boys, Kate Bush, Teenage Fanclub, Cyndi Lauper and Tina Turner, and fittingly it sort of exists in a world of its own, not tied to any specific era or definition of “pop.” It’s bright, sticky, ear-catching pop music that’s more subdued than Let’s Eat Grandma but just as idiosyncratic. It doesn’t sound like Jenny is necessarily aiming for mass appeal, but I wouldn’t be surprised if songs as catchy as these achieve it anyway.

Feels Like Heaven – Within Dreams (Scheme)
Instantly-satisfying, emo-leaning melodic hardcore from three members of Speedway.

One of 2025’s best punk albums was the debut LP by Stockholm band Speedway, and now three members of Speedway have kicked off 2026 with the debut album by another band they all play in, Feels Like Heaven. Speedway make “melodic hardcore” in a Dag Nasty/Rites of Spring/Embrace kinda way, while Feels Like Heaven make “melodic hardcore” that leans more emo and falls somewhere between Lifetime and Samiam. (For something more contemporary, it would sit nicely next to Anxious and Fiddlehead.) Just like the Speedway LP, the playing is tight, the recording is sharp, and this is immediate, instantly-satisfying stuff. It’s 10 songs in under 24 minutes, and it left me hooked and wanting more on first listen.

Home Star – A Binding Life (Born Losers)
Evan Lescallette of the recently-reunited emo revival band Marietta embraces power-poppy ’90s alt-rock with his new project Home Star.

One of the biggest stories in emo of 2025 was the comeback of Marietta, the early 2010s emo revival band who came back for a truly explosive reunion tour, including a much-talked-about set at the Best Friends Forever festival, where they stood out alongside the ’90s emo bands who influenced them in the first place. No new music from Marietta at the moment, but singer/guitarist Evan Lescallette just released the first album by his new project Home Star. He’s still navigating the ’90s with this project, but instead of emo he’s looking to crunchy, power-poppy alt-rock stuff like Weezer, Superdrag, and The Rentals. This stuff suits him well too; he’s got the big chunky riffs, he’s got the voice for it, and he’s got some very memorable, sugar-sweet melodies.

The Ruins of Beverast – Tempelschlaf (Ván Records)
The long-running German metal band are as hard to pin down and sonically intense as ever on their seventh LP.

On the followup to 2021’s great The Thule Grimoires and seventh album overall, the long-running German metal band are as hard to pin down and sonically intense as ever. On the album’s two singles alone, they touched on lumbering death doom, high-speed black metal, brooding goth rock, and more, and Tempelschlaf moves in even more clashing directions from there.

Bad Beat – EP 2025 (Triple B)
Good things come in small packages, like the EP that Detroit hardcore band Bad Beat dropped on Christmas Day.

Detroit’s Bad Beat have been on a roll with their fast, snotty, no-bullshit hardcore punk that so far has revealed itself across two LPs in two years (titled LP 2024 and LP 2025), plus a split EP with fellow Detroit hardcore band D Bloc last year. And Bad Beat capped off their thrilling 2025 with a five-song, seven-minute EP on Christmas Day (titled EP 2025) that kept the fury coming.

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Read Indie Basement for more new album reviews, including Winged Wheel, Dry Cleaning, The Cribs, Prins Thomas, and Oneohtrix Point Never‘s Marty Supreme soundtrack.

Looking for more recent releases? Browse the Notable Releases archive.

Looking for a podcast to listen to? Check out the latest episodes of our weekly music news podcast BV Weekly and BV interviews.

Pick up the BrooklynVegan x Alexisonfire special edition 80-page magazine, which tells the career-spanning story of Alexisonfire and comes on its own or paired with our new exclusive AOF box set and/or individual reissues, in the BV shop. Also pick up the new Glassjaw box set & book, created in part with BrooklynVegan, and browse the BrooklynVegan shop for more exclusive vinyl.