New Music for Your Playlist — May 22, 2026

Olivia Osby and Avsha Weinberg met in a high school math class in Atlanta, bonding over the Microphones and Alex G, and started Lowertown before either of them could legally drink. Three albums later they're in New York, on Summer Shade, and they've sanded the folk edges off their sound until something tougher shows through, bits of electronica, the occasional punk snarl. It's the record where the duo stops sounding like kids who love their record collection and starts sounding like a band. Start with "I Like You A Lot," a rare straight-up love song about the sickness of a new crush, then let "Big Thumb" pull you the rest of the way in.

Dollbaum moved to New Orleans for a master's in poetry and works as a carpenter. You can hear both: the song titles read like found objects, "Big Boi," "Scrub Jay," "Pulverize," and the songs themselves are built like things meant to last. He writes about the seedy parts of Florida he grew up around, pill mills and trailer parks and people looking for a warm bed, in a conversational drawl that puts you in the room with them. He recorded the whole thing in four days at a studio in Water Valley, Mississippi, in 2023, with a young MJ Lenderman on drums before anyone outside the scene knew the name. Then it sat on a shelf for three years. The wait did nothing to dull it. "Coyote" is the one, with Lenderman singing harmony underneath; "Dozen Roses" has the guitar solo.

Axel Willner makes music out of repetition, loops that don't so much cycle as accumulate, gathering weight until a track you'd swear hadn't changed has carried you somewhere completely different. His 2007 debut From Here We Go Sublime is a foundational record for that kind of patient, blissed-out electronic music, the sort of thing people file next to Burial. This is his first solo release in eight years, five tracks, only forty-three minutes, and it picks the thread right back up. Less a comeback than proof he never needed to come back. Put on "In Our Dreams" with good headphones and don't do anything else; "333 706" works the same trick.

aja monet calls herself a surrealist blues poet, and the second album from the Grammy-nominated writer is exactly that, fifteen tracks of poetry set against live jazz that speeds up and slows down to match her breath. She wrote "elsewhere" the day Sly Stone died, an homage rather than an elegy, and Meshell Ndegeocello and Georgia Anne Muldrow lift it into something celebratory. Elsewhere she's furious and exact: "hollyweird" wrestles with the LA fires and the absurdity of the city, "for the Congo" asks how many children died for her comfort today and refuses to look away from the answer. Close your eyes and the music draws the pictures. Start with "elsewhere," then sit with "hollyweird."

Dua Saleh writes about the end of the world and refuses to be miserable about it. The Sudanese-American artist, who you may know from Sex Education, threads R&B, indie, and electronic pop through flashes of Sudanese folk and UK dance, all in service of holding onto joy while everything burns. Justin Vernon turns up on three songs, including "Flood," where he freestyled the hook in the room before Saleh wrote the rest. The album shares more than a guest with the record above it: aja monet appears on "ALL IS LOVE," a small thread tying two of this week's best together. Start with "Glow" for the warmth, then "Flood" for the ache underneath it.