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

“The objects outside the head control the mind,” says Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw, less than a minute into Secret Love. “To arrange them is to control people’s thinking.” At first, it’s easy to view this line merely as one of many others. Shaw’s writing has always offered tightly crafted little vignettes that briefly emerge and then disappear to make way for another. And yet, as Secret Love progresses in this way, knotty and complex, it’s that first line that I keep returning to. “The objects outside the head control the mind” emerges gradually as the theme of the record writ large. The mind and the head in question – the one being “hit all day”, as the name of the opening track has it – are Shaw’s own. It’s a mercurial mind, flittering from moments of confidence to self-consciousness, from longing desperately for connection to revelling in it, from piercing observation to meandering half-thoughts. Outside it swirl the things that control it in one way or the other, for better and worse – the devotion of a loved one or the joy of organisation on the one hand; sinister influencers, warmongers, and societal expectation on the other.

With a healthy word-of-mouth buzz, a slew of legendary live shows, and a percussionist who seems to prefer drumming on beer kegs than bongos, MPTL Microplastics’ debut album, Sod In Heaven, seeks to bottle a raucous, unpredictable and beguiling live band into an LP. The result is a satisfying record that runs the tricky gamut between musical freedom and maturity. Tracks capture the capricious mania of a MPTLM live show, with just the right amount to be desired. Noise rock, post punk, outsider music and krautrock crash at the ship’s bough. A series of Windmill scene adjacent soupçons are palpable, like the sprechgesang that clips the mix on the album’s title track, or the Fall adjacent ‘Sex Pol’, which sees crepuscular woodwind scales reach up like rickety treefingers and prod at a grimly repetitive baseline. 

Part of PVA’s consistency comes from ongoing self-sampling that the band have used since the start. Stems crop up from past songs in this new album, including the choral end to ‘Rain’ that’s a stack of all three band members’ voices from a different song they made years ago. Deftly plied out of the stereo file, the only version they had left, the splintered stem has a ghostly texture. Other elements are drawn out of the album demo file they started three years ago, that included mashed up synths from ‘Exhaust / Surroundings’, that I seem to hear everywhere in PVA’s work. No More Like This sees the familiar and unfamiliar shake hands, like a hallucinatory introduction between friends.

Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? evades binary categories. Funkiness sneaks into the ornate, dissonance duels with the genteel, ostentatious sweeps of cinematic pomp deflate into cartoonish tangles. It’s most potent on ‘Phrygian Ganymede’ where angelic flurries lead into keening violins before a downpour of chaotic piano, dissonant strings and Zach Rowden (from the duo Tongue Depressor)’s growling bass. The track exists as peculiar bridge – both avant-garde and possible soundtrack to clownish farce. Even when Drew Daniel steps furthest into abstraction, it never feels like pretensions towards aloof, high art alienation.

What drives an artist to remake another’s work? On reflection it is probably a desire to undergo a multidimensional process: to replicate or learn from techniques and technologies found in the original artefact, a notion that a new time births new perspectives that only the remaker can impart, a desire to scratch an itch that wants to embellish, or destroy, or to remake and remodel the original, and then to display it again. Still: why put so much effort into something that has already been done? From Rubens copying Titian to Xiu Xiu’s new album of cover versions, this question will always remain at some level. In scratching their own itch, Xiu Xiu have made a brave record and one which we, in turn, can employ to our own ends.

13 studio albums and a couple of mixtapes down, New York rap elder Roc Marciano still sounds as sharp and combustible as ever on 656. It’s his first fully self-produced LP since 2013’s Marci Beaucoup, and is littered with the kind of hazy, lo-fi, jazz-inflected loops that have long provided impeccable accompaniment to his uniquely acerbic trash-talking rhymes. Opener ‘Trick Bag’ rolls out with an effortless swagger as fuzzy organ melodies and unfussy drum patterns combine with Marci’s villainous wordplay that references a cast as wide-ranging as US figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi and Looney Tunes character Elmer Fudd. On ‘Yves St. Moron’, mellow horn-aided loops rub up against the rapper’s sneering takedowns of the competition (“Rappers looking like maggot dinner on Fear Factor”) and reminders of his own high-flying standards (“VS Patek, but that’s only if it’s factory set”). As he passes more than two decades in the game, having first emerged in 2005 as a member of Busta Rhymes’ Flipmode Squad, 656 is proof that Marci is still making some of the most thrilling and vital music of his career.

Craven Faults is known for his anonymity, giving rare, select live performances without revealing his identity. He plays with his back, for the most part, to the audience, while manipulating a wall of analogue modular synthesisers. Over the course of several EPs and one other full-length album, he has built a strong following for his deeply atmospheric tracks which express the Yorkshire landscape from which he presumably hails. His new album, Sidings, moves into more stately, sombre territory which suits his simple, yet multi-layered sound down to the stoney Yorkshire ground.

The death of Stepa J. Groggs in 2020, aged just 32, saw the end of Injury Reserve, the breathlessly creative experimental hip hop outfit of which he formed one-third. By Storm is partly a successor project by surviving members Parker Cory and RiTchie, but also feels like something entirely different, both a continuation and a new beginning. Where Injury Reserve were carried by maximalist energy, By Storm’s debut album is more meditative. The same sense of breathless creativity remains – this is a record of extraordinary sonic scope, and meditation doesn’t necessarily mean lack of impact – but it’s channeled through a more experimental haze, flittering from hard-hitting beats and staccato bars to sweeping minimalist sound design, to an explosion of enveloping noise on penultimate track ‘And I Dance’, to a moment of disarmingly tender contemplation on closer ‘GGG’.

The title track on Dialect’s latest LP sounds like an experiment: several tapes played simultaneously, cut-up vocals that are both folk and retro-futuristic. Processed voices, cicadas somewhere in the background – on the edge of civilisation. Sounds like android reflections and experiences of the world in a post-apocalyptic scenario. A delicate bass line, then a rhythmic buzzing in the background, scraps of something between post-opera and autotune, forming a phantasmal song. At the end, the electronics gradually fade away: all that remains is a barely perceptible line in the background, machine reverberations, screams, and a melancholic piano part in the foreground. Antiquity meets futurism here. The tools are thoroughly technoid and electrified but arranged in song forms – perhaps folk – filled with emotion.

When Erik Hall returns to Steve Reich, Solo Three finds its footing. He closes the record with ‘Music For A Large Ensemble’, which showcases his technical skill while finally achieving that flow state. Here, his carefully woven lattices and staccato notes propel the music toward a brilliant climax that foregrounds the grooviness hidden within these clear-cut patterns, leading to a real sense of immediacy. Minimalism is so many things, but it’s at its best when it becomes a place in which to become through the act of listening – a journey worth taking over and over again.

Taking square aim at the misogynoir woven through the nonsense “industry plant” allegations levelled at her since the success of 2024 album Alligator Bites Never Heal, Doechii kicks off 2026 with this intoxicating link-up with SZA.

‘Wor Jackie’ sees Knats take fellow Geordie and legendary footballer Jackie Milburn, who it’s said would divide his time between the coal mine and Newcastle Football Club, as an avatar for the North East everyman, setting urgent, breathless poetry from Cooper Robson to a caterwhaul of sax-driven jazz. It’s also produced by another Geordie (in name at least), former Black Midi man Greep.

The first taste of Denzel Curry’s new collective – comprising himself, A$AP Ferg, Bktherula, TiaCorine and Key Nyata – is an incendiary blend of withering, trash-talking bars and feverish trap beats that build on the sounds Curry explored on his excellent 2024 mixtape King Of The Mischievous South Vol. 2.

Off-kilter, angular crunchiness from one-half of Los Thuthanaka that comes off like an electric guitar dropped in a combine harvester, shedding splinters of harmony here and there. Strangely affecting!

Aided by a majestically employed sample of Burial’s ‘Rival Dealer’ and Fakemink’s sad boy ruminating on the trappings of increased fame, ‘FML.’ is a highlight of new mixtape The Boy Who Cried Terrified.