New Music for Your Playlist — May 15, 2026

Kevin Morby has spent his career making albums about places. New York on his debut. Los Angeles on Singing Saw. Memphis on This Is a Photograph. Little Wide Open is about Kansas City, about the Midwest, about the particular sky you see from the plains when a tornado is forming on the horizon and the light turns green. Aaron Dessner produced it, and Justin Vernon, Lucinda Williams, Amelia Meath, and Katie Gavin all show up, but none of them overwhelm what is fundamentally a quiet, unhurried record about mortality and roots and the feeling of standing still while time accelerates. The critic consensus is calling it his best. It might be. Morby has never sounded more comfortable being exactly who he is.

Start with "Javelin," then "Natural Disaster."

Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworthy played together in Ought, the Montreal post-punk band that made two excellent records and then quietly dissolved. Cola is what came next, and Cost of Living Adjustment is their third album and the one where everything sharpens into focus. The title is also the acronym: C.O.L.A. The subject is the grinding machinery of late capitalism, hedge fund brokers, wellness influencers, the gap between what people say and what they do. The music is twitchy and precise, all jerky rhythms and discordant guitars. But "Conflagration Mindset," the album's centerpiece, opens into something unexpectedly moving. Darcy lost his home in the LA fires last year. "Is there some way to save the records," he asks, and the question is carrying more weight than it looks like it is.

Start with "Conflagration Mindset," then "Hedgesitting."

The band took their name from a line in a Beat Happening song. Then they got signed to K Records, the label Beat Happening's Calvin Johnson started in his kitchen in Olympia in the 1980s. That kind of full-circle moment either means something or it doesn't, and on Graceful, it means something. The Austin quartet makes jangly, tape-recorded indie pop that sits in the lineage of Sarah Records, Flying Nun, and Tiger Trap. Power pop harmonies, fuzzy guitars, songs that feel like they were written and recorded in the same afternoon by people who genuinely like each other. Stereogum named it their Album of the Week. Lead singer Olivia Garner asks "Where does the heart go when the heart's not in it?" on "Heart-Go" and the band answers with a drumroll and a riff that doesn't resolve so much as it keeps going.

Start with "Heart-Go," then "The Springtime Reminds Me Of…"

Genesis Owusu is a Ghanaian-Australian rapper who has spent two albums working in metaphor. Smiling With No Teeth used the black dog of depression. STRUGGLER used a Kafkaesque roach. Both won him ARIA Album of the Year. On this third record he drops the disguise entirely. "Elon's a fuckin' weirdo," he announces in the first minute, and the album never really slows down from there. It tears through Andrew Tate, corporate pillaging, the LA fires, Gaza, manosphere influencers, all of it, in a form that refuses to settle into any one genre. Punk, soul, drum and bass, funk, jazz. It is genuinely difficult to keep up with on first listen, and genuinely rewarding by the third. The highest-reviewed album of the past two weeks by a distance.

Start with "Stampede," then "Most Normal American Voter."

Four guys from Oakland who met in a Berkeley group house during the pandemic, bonding over Silver Jews records and impromptu jams in the kitchen. That is exactly what Fenceline sounds like. David Berman relocated to Northern California and started listening to The Band and CSNY is how Steven Hyden described it on Indiecast, and that's close. Folk-rock that sounds like it was played live in a room by people who weren't trying to impress anyone, just trying to get the song right. The four members share vocal duties and songwriting credits equally, and the lack of a center of gravity turns out to be a feature. Nobody's ego is driving. The result is something that feels unusually generous and unhurried. "Fish Sticks" is the lead single, a song about workplace mediocrity and riding home with your friends, and it's the best argument the record makes for itself.

Start with "Fish Sticks," then "Cobwebs."