Music of the Month: The Best Albums and Tracks of February 2026

In ethos rather than sound, Discombobulated strangely resembles Public Enemy, notably Chuck D’s description of hip-hop as “Black America’s CNN”. It wasn’t only that Chuck D’s candid lyrics were truth bombs; his words were underscored by DJ Hank Shocklee’s sculptured sounds of the street. This same philosophy underpins what Hen Ogledd strive for here: revolutionary lyrical content embedded in irregular musical forms, where freshness carries more weight than perfection. In this, it also feels like the 80 albums Dawson and Pilkington created during lockdown (released under the name Bulbils) were a proving ground for Discombobulated’s urgency.

The music that Shackleton continues to make, on new album Euphoria Bound, is a genre orphan. The bass is turned down or absent, verse/chorus/verse is a memory from another time and there’s a rich absence of programming. Instead, live percussion leads the way, clicks and whirrs feel their way into the sound, and audio textures snake and skirt into the listeners’ ears. The centre is hard to hold and purposefully so. This is an album that exists in dream states, oneiric in its exploration of textures. As soon as there’s something approaching a collage approach, like on ‘Crushing Realities’ or opener ‘Elemental Dream’, it is swept away in favour of something more liquid. On ‘The Dream In Fragments’, glass chimes and tablas fill in where you’d expect a repeating motif or a vocal line.

Where Mandy, Indiana’s 2023 debut, I’ve Seen A Way, had a hazy, cinematic quality; Urgh is heavier and stranger. The four-piece have described it as their first “proper band” record, a slightly worrying phrase that evokes images of endless jam sessions. Instead, it mainly seems to point to a more egalitarian approach to the songwriting credits and Alex MacDougall’s expressive drumming bringing a Lightning Bolt-like intensity to the album. Opener ‘Sevastopol’ wastes no time in deploying an abrasive barrage of noise followed by stuttering down-tempo beats. Valentine Caulfield’s francophone vocals are distorted and cut-up, only semi-comprehensible as she recites verses from the Bible, before an eerily synthetic orchestral melody swells up from nowhere. It’s a startlingly odd moment, one that recalls Dean Blunt’s uncanny use of consciously chintzy strings, and the first of several mid-song vibe-switches across the record. 

The songs on The Apple Tree Under The Sea are baroque, technicolour confections that make up a realm that is entirely Isimeme Udu’s own, like a child let loose with the rosebud cheat code on The Sims. Part fairytale soundscape (there are hooves on cobblestones, and so many princess-like gasps you almost expect to hear Shrek and Donkey join in on backing vocals at some point), part 1980s synth-pop banquet, part 2010s alt-pop renaissance (think Marina & The Diamonds or Rina Sawayama), it’s potently sweet, yes, but with an idiosyncrasy that cuts through: a Disney soundtrack that’s actually bearable.

Five Stagings was created during what the band describe as long-form improvisation, which conjures up an image of loose, free music, but the record is not like that at all. The pieces are ‘stagings’, with tracks built up carefully like, as the band describe it, “a sequence of vivid dream-like tableaux” in “the bare interior of a Mancunian garage”. The sound the group makes is honed and balanced, forming sophisticated and highly atmospheric soundscapes. The three range across instruments and techniques, leaving us unsure how many people are really playing. It is varied, powerful and very impressive. ‘Crystal Radio’ has a bass that bounces like a rubber ball, distant squeaking strings and the sounds of weather building in the distance. ‘Lion To Feel’ sounds more like a chamber orchestra performing on a stormy beach, wind chimes clanging in the breeze. ‘Meudon, 1928’ uses a rumbling cello and sea bird sounds. There are echoes of Jon Hassell and Fourth World music, and of Delia Derbyshire and North Sea Radio Orchestra.

Anata sometimes resembles a purifying noise bath, or a baptism through distortion, if you wish. The distortion has the effect of being submerged in a spring with crystalline glacier water, leaving you recharged. Put most simply though, it’s emotional guitar music with a singular atmosphere and a sincere celebration of indigenous Andean culture through unusual means. While not geared for the club, this is unequivocally festival music. The album title comes from an Andean ceremony celebrating the reawakening of Mother Earth, the victory of light over darkness. A spiritual successor to Los Thuntanaka’s self-titled 2025 album, Anata puts forth seven gorgeous guitar compositions that move swiftly between psychedelic Andean folk motifs, shoegaze-indebted walls of sound and delicate melodic flourishes in the Durutti Column vein. It manages to elevate the electric guitar into something peculiar and otherworldly, as if time-stretched grindcore riffs had been mutated into power ambient soundscapes with occasional passages of folk percussion. Instead of seeking solace in silence, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton finds it in distortion.

Graham Dunning – musician, artist, Great Egg Race-style boffin – is probably best known for his Mechanical Techno setup of multiple locked groove vinyl records (often homemade) spinning on one specially adapted turntable, which also fires off rhythmical triggers to drum machines, percussion and synths. Early doors, about a decade-and-a-half ago, this work felt like a chaotic pushback against the ubiquitous, rigid quantisation of most club DJ sets. However, many, many performances later, Dunning’s mad scientist displays are a lot less likely to fall apart into atemporal chaos and now the excitement can lie in hearing him collaborate with other open-minded DJs. This grab bag of demos, sketches and rehearsals features several back-to-back sessions with the always inventive, often underutilised DJ Food, who displays his own kind of chaotic brinksmanship on a Quadrophon four-arm turntable. To me, this has the same spirit of a chanced across, late-night, anything-goes live-to-air DJ session on (the still pirate) KISS FM, displaying the wild frontier spirit of turntablism before heavy scene codification set in.

Daranijoh Sanni has been going about his business as E The Artist since 2022 and has developed into a pretty singular voice amidst an Irish experimental music scene which, at the same time, offers a useful outlet for this singularity. We can point to his membership of the Bitten Twice Collective, through which his debut EP, EeE, emerged just over two years ago, or last year’s Fáschoill compilation LP, released by the Faoi Thalamh label, which opens with his ‘Lint’: 71 seconds of hideously low-end bass drops and evil doomy voices. Supported by an amusing video in which people dressed as knights cut about suburbia on pushbikes, the track forms part of E’s debut album, Six. It’s a surreal, genre-eclipsing heavy hitter that has parallels with noise, techno and cloud rap but doesn’t really sound like anything but itself, and finishes with the intense, 20 minute-long ‘Drogo’. Sanni has said, “My dad is Nigerian, my mum is English and French; I’ve pretty much spent all of my life between Coolock and Lagos,” and Six is the sound of someone ensuring they’re irreducible to any one place, nation or identity.

At a club night in 2024, I witnessed Kevin Martin playing music in his The Bug incarnation that was so powerful he shook his mixing desk backwards, pinning himself against the venue wall. The set had to be paused for him to be set free. In recent times, the regular releases under his own name have provided a fascinating contest to the industrial dub barrage. Sub Zero first appeared online in the depths of winter 2022, when the world was still wobbling its way back to a reduced sense of normality after the initial terrible waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. It struck a chord, becoming one of his most popular releases, and is now getting a full release on vinyl and streaming services. Why did it connect with so many? Where so much music under the ambient label is just a passive wash, Martin’s work here demands attention. I find in these 12 tracks a similar sense of balance as I do in the music of Richard Skelton, the gently eddying and surging drone used to convey a sense of both the ominous and, curiously, acceptance and calm. It does this through its evocation of physical space – full of hiss and barely audible pattering, this is a very snowy sounding record, for which the cover artwork of a pylon in a whiteout is a perfect partner. On ‘Higher Than The Sky’, for instance, a tone gently moves through a tactile hiss, like watching the looming grey mass of lorries relentlessly passing along a motorway through endless pine forest. ‘The Beast’ has a rhythm that taps woodily and eerily through the thick damp air. There are umpteen producers knocking out lesser versions of this sort of music, but in the fullness and structural depth to what he does, Kevin Martin once again demonstrates his mastery over both music that is cadmium-heavy and feather-light. 

Anchored by the reliable strength of his songwriting, Bill Callahan makes small alterations of his formula to keep things fresh on My Days Of 58. He initially recorded in a duo with the great Jim White (Dirty Three) on drums, working separately on parts with Matt Kinsey (guitar), Dustin Laurenzi (sax) and a host of guest musicians popping in to appear on individual tracks. Prioritising unpredictability in this way has resulted in his loosest, warmest record in years. ‘Stepping Out For Air’ is laid back and warm, with elements dropping out and slipping back together in surprising combinations. ‘And Dream Land’ is collaged together like a dream logic country song. ‘Computer’ is so fragile it’s on the verge of collapse, which is fitting for a song about the fallibility of humanity in contrast to emergent technologies.

For all its sunken atmosphere and knotty texture, there is something carnivalesque about Revelries, the debut album from Miré: an upturning of expectations, a pleasure in sound-making for its own sake. The group, consisting of vocalist Héloise Werner (of The Hermex Experiment), plus organist Kit Downes (a regular collaborator with John Edwards, Lucy Railton and others) and cellist Colin Alexander (Phaedra Ensemble), have been playing together for some years, but this is their first recorded release. It features one composition apiece by the three members, plus interpretations of text scores by Jasmin Kent Rodgman and Jonathan Cole. Tracks sound wild and apoplectic one minute, spectral and atmospheric the next. But what’s surprising, given the diversity of compositional voices, is how cohesive the record comes across. This is a group with their own distinct sound. Revelries is restless and urgent, fractured and playful. If you’re familiar with Erner, Alexander and Downes’ other projects, you’ll recognise their individual voices straightaway, but you’ll also recognise something else. One thing’s for sure: this isn’t your average chamber ensemble.

Queer EDM R&B star in the ascendent Cobrah transforms the clubbing experience into a descent into The Hunger (Scott) meets Nosferatu (Eggers) on ‘Hush’. It judders alarmingly like the latest lot of drugs kicking in just as the other two lots you’d temporarily forgotten taking also forcefully make themselves known.

Almost a year on from the Americana elegance of ‘Henry, Come On’, which had been due to be the lead single for her still unreleased next album, Lana Del Rey pushes into decidedly murkier Gothic territory on new track ‘White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter’. Underpinned by ghostly orchestral strings and Del Rey’s husky vocal tones, it’s perhaps the creepiest song to feature a refrain centred around the words “whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo”.

On ‘Lights’, DJ and producer Catherine Backhouse continues her journey into “gutter kosmische” via imagined alternative histories for drum & bass. On the strength of this lovely early single, new album Blumenfantasie, out next month on Planet Mu, will travel towards programmed breakbeats and the melancholic mitteleuropean sounds of Krautrock as it blends into haunting techno-pop. 

Ana Roxanne is no stranger to achingly beautiful threadbare tracks that stop you in your tracks, but on ‘Keepsake’, the lead single to new album Poem 1, she surpasses herself, unleashing emotional battle wounds over strikingly simple and no-less bewitching piano tones.

A standout cut on Baby Keem’s unfortunately disappointing latest LP Ca$ino, ‘Good Flirts’ builds on a long run of killer link-ups between cousins Keem and Kendrick Lamar. The former’s vocal sparring with Momo Boyd over the track’s soulful downtempo instrumental harks back to the best call-and-response R&B cuts of the early 00s, before Lamar steps up for a nonchalantly delivered knockout guest verse that has him dipping into his playful bag (“I gossip with my bitch like I’m Young Thug too”).