The Best Albums of 2026, So Far
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
In a shocking turn of events, the year 2026 is half over, with nearly more of it receding into the past than unfolding in the future. This year has surely felt like a decade hasn’t it? I mean, you’re alive, you know what it’s like out there right now.
Despite, well, everything, there’s always new music to serve as a life jacket, a tentpole, a grounding force in a lightning storm. This year has been an interesting one for music; no album has dominated the charts for more than 3 weeks, and not even a Drake triple-drop could hold anyone’s attention for long. That’s meant that a lot of cool music has risen to the top, allowing the spotlight to shine on a lot of deserving albums.
Without further ado, here’s All the Music of All the World’s 15 favorite albums of the year so far. Let us know what we’ve missed!
2026’s most fun music story has been these two delightful French Canadian loonies: They went viral based on their Cirque du Soleil costuming, the insane amount of frets, papier mache masks, and just downright shredding. No band in recent memory has succeeded on a major scale like these guys making music this dense, and that makes you feel like you fell into a wormhole where Frank Zappa is somehow the president and bigger than Elvis.
Read our All the Music of All the World entry on Vol. 2 from when it was released here.
Rocky’s first album in eight years came at the end of a tumultuous period of court cases and public beefs for the Harlem rapper, and it remained to be seen what his music would even be like with such a long hiatus off. It turns out it’s more or less the same as where he left it (complimentary), with a weird mélange of psych rock, Houston rap, acid trips, fashion shows, and a questionable taste in collaborators (also complimentary). When this album really works—particularly its back third—it’s the best that major label rap has offered in 2026.
Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds: Mutiny After Midnight
Wherein Sturgill Simpson wonders if we all could be doing the horizontal tango more often, and what it would do for the greater good of society if we did. He’s probably the first person to wonder that on a country disco record.
Paul Cauthen: The Book of Paul
The well-deep voiced country singer behind the best song about being at the end of your rope on drugs and hitting the saloon to dance to Waylon Jennings—“Cocaine Country Dancing”—grapples with sin, redemption, drinking, drugging, and learning to get over yourself on his super fun fifth album. He’s the reincarnation of everything we all love about ‘70s Outlaw country, but in a guy who knows about TikTok.
The sixth LP from country music’s resident growler doesn’t change his formula much—big, open-hearted songwriting, the best heartland rock since the ‘80s, and songs about beer—but there’s something reassuring in the way you can set your watch to Luke Combs. “My Kinda Saturday Night” establishes him as the true spiritual heir to guests from one of his earlier albums: Brooks & Dunn, another group of country music legends who could spit verses like machine guns before hitting a soaring chorus. Recommended for listening while you have a cold one this summer.
Diljit Dosanjh & Tru-Skool: The Call of Panjab
2026’s most viral musician who doesn’t wear a papier mache head, Dosanjh was all over Instagram and TikTok earlier this spring when he performed on Jimmy Fallon to celebrate the release of this EP, which marries Panjab folk and rhythms with ‘90s hip-hop turntablism. The results are some of the most fun music of 2026, and given his sold out arena tours and Coachella spots, he could become the Panjab Bad Bunny: a magnetic performer who stays true to his culture while crossing over.
This duo met at Bard two years ago, and released their first album nine months ago, and are back already with this assured, unlike-anything-else-out-right-now sophomore release named for the period where every Amish teenager gets to go wild before they decide if they want to stay in their community. That concept of going external before potentially returning to the safety of the known is a good analog for the sound ear make: It’s a sample-heavy, acoustic-forward indie pop that envelops and feels like a warm embrace. But Rumspringa also has profoundly funky moments, like “Ne Plus Ultra,” that jolt out of the normal quiet reserve. It’s a headphone record for a duo who grew up with airpods firmly planted in their aural canals.
The year’s most left-field jazz album, this record pairs stalwarts of New York’s jazz improv scene with Kim, who plays a traditional Korean gayageum, for an album that feels like a collision and implosion of different musical forms.
Read our All the Music of All the World dispatch on the album from the week it came out here.
Morby’s eighth album is like if Tom Petty or John Mellencamp were reborn as an indie rock troubadour. This album is about what it’s like to accept the place you’re from as the most important place in your life, and what it’s like to go home again.
Read our All the Music of All the World dispatch on the album from the week it came out here.
Kacey Musgraves: Middle of Nowhere
To call this album a “return to form” is insulting to Kacey, and insulting to star-crossed, her underrated divorce album that failed because it wasn’t as world-conquering as Golden Hour. No matter, she regrouped for this one, following Deeper Well (which should have come with an endorsement from GOOP, for its devotion to “wellness”) and delivered some of the best songs of her career. “I Believe in Ghosts” and “The Loneliest Girl in the World” are sing-along-in-the-car anthems, and the Miranda Lambert collab is this year’s “Let’s work it out on the remix” moment. She’s been country’s best songwriter since 2013, and it’s great to have her back on top of her craft.
The second full-length LP from the Sudanese-American multi-genre pop experimentalist Dua Saleh is as windswept and expansive as its cover. Featuring clubby jams, airy ballads, and multiple Bon Iver features, it’s this year’s left field pop jammer.
The debut LP from multidisciplinary artist Sparklmami is an updated, funkier version of those late ‘70s Herbie Hancock records (like this one), where jazz melds with other musical forms to make something entirely new. It’s airy, it’s beautiful, it’s a revolution you can dance to.
The seventh album from the Long Beach rapper is agit-prop rap-rock that is an urgent call to arms. Staples has long been one of rap’s funniest and quickest rappers; here he becomes one of its most impassioned, calling for revolution over fuzzy post-punk and blues.
Read our All the Music of All the World review of the album from the week it came out here.
Yahritza y Su Esencia: Metamorfosis
The debut LP from the rising Musica Mexicana trio of a sister and two brothers delivers on all the promise of their EPs: It’s a heart wrenching, beautiful album full of lost love, Mexican rhythms and riffs, and open-hearted songwriting.
Read about this album in our All the Music of All the World dispatch on the albums from 2026 you might have missed so far.
The 10 song, 11 minute sophomore album from these art-rock grenade throwers is like listening to a tip of an iceberg: You always get the sense that you’re hearing the scary, ship destroying part of a much larger whole. It’s an 11-minute nervous breakdown, an 11 minute machine gun blast to the cerebellum.
