Under the release radar – February 2026

I’m going to start wishing you best of luck trying to pin this one down genre-wise. I have long stopped trying. The second album from Reading’s Andrew Vickers is lush, curious, and genuinely puzzling.  Jazz, post-rock, R&B, flutes, violins, brass, the whole lot, cinematic in a way that conjured Caravan in my brain without sounding a bit like Caravan. It must be that 60’s flavour. Vocals doing a quiet Radiohead number, loose and tender, songs melting into one another and getting curiouser and curiouser the more you sit with it, which you’ll want to do, preferably with a cup of tea. The fact that Vickers wrote this while working three jobs is either impressive or annoying, depending on what you tend to do with your evenings.

What came first, the album or the story? Rafael Xavier handed them both to you, the listener, and said: your call. Read while you listen. Listen first. Read after. Don’t read at all. Prensado is the rare release that makes you aware of your own attention: death, São Paulo, feelings of shame and anxiety, all of it sitting in two registers at once. You choose what to do with your ears and eyes. The invitation is part of the art.

A three years in the making dream/noise pop/indietronica one person bedroom project that pretty much arrived out of nowhere for me. The whole album carries the rare quality of something made entirely on its own terms with no audience in mind—hazy, layered, and full of variety—which is probably the reason why it connects. There’s also vocals with a strange Billy Corgan quality to them that I couldn’t quite shake. One of those records that sounds really personal and magical in a way that’s hard to articulate without just telling you to go and listen to it.

Dream pop at the intersection of ambient, classical and electronic, and genuinely as rich as that description sounds. Ciro Vitiello‘s second album is built around the seagull as a central image, which sounds odd until you hear it. Recorded in Naples at Auditorium Novecento with a small ensemble who clearly present atmosphere as a scaffold. The instrument list gives you the idea: Rhodes, dulcimer, spinetta, celesta, viola da gamba, accordion, crotali, bowls and objects, field recordings, voices. notes from the air hovers and doesn’t resolve. The clue is in the title.

Criminally under-discussed, this one. Barcelona’s Sacralvna have arrived with a debut that sits at the intersection of skramz, shoegaze, post-hardcore and post-rock, where the slow build hits as hard as the screams it’s building toward. Two songs, one of them nearing twenty-two minutes, and not a second of it feels like filler. Beautifully balanced, not too much of any one genre, dynamically composed in a way that occasionally its roads lead somewhere close to Deafheaven. Yes, I have a soft spot for Spanish acts, but this would be making my end of year list regardless of where it came from. Genuinely goosebump-inducing stuff.

Slowcore, post-rock, and a third album that needs judging in isolation. Probably their most accessible record, which I’m sure ruffled a few indie art-rock feathers. It conjures something different with every listen though, always in that quintessentially British bittersweet register: rain knocking on the window, church bells somewhere off in the distance, that specific kind of ache that just quietly settles in. “Songs are supposed to be sad”, Tiernan Banks sings, and he’s not wrong. Same emotional territory as (very) old Arab Strap. You know what you’re getting into.

I first came across Altın Gün by accidentally stumbling into their set at Roadburn last year, where stumbling means they were headlining and I’d somehow never even heard of them, which is exactly the kind of festival sorcery I live for. I’ve been enchanted ever since.

Turkish psychedelia is something I need to make far more time to explore, and Garip has been a perfect doorway into it. There’s something in their sound that feels instantly familiar to my Romanian heritage: beneath the Anatolian psych grooves, I hear that same winding, Balkan-adjacent rhythmic pull and melodic circularity that makes me feel close to home. Whatever shared southeastern European and Anatolian pulse is in there, it hits somewhere both nostalgic and bodily. This album is pure joy, all hypnotic groove, swirling melody and movement. It puts a huge smile on my face and makes my whole body move. Groovy as hell.

I promise you I do know what genres are, although evidence at this point is looking inconclusive. Ultimately, what is genre if not another figure of perspectivism? I digress. New Jersey’s Our Wits play post-screamo, which to my ears sits somewhere between screamo’s cathartic fury and the spoken word intensity of post-punk. It’s direct, raw, and obviously uncomfortable. Eight tracks are structured loosely around the five stages of grief, which may sound quite intense but the band carry it without it ever feeling like a try-hard concept album. Midwest emo revival energy meets Birds in Row. Let’s have it.