Music that’s Meeting the Moment
What does meeting the moment even mean? Which moment? Whose moment? There are many, and they keep changing. Now it’s another moment! And another! Still, it does feel like we are inhabiting an inflection point, or several.
Call it polycrisis. Call it cascading collapse. Call it whatever your therapist calls it. No one would deny it’s been a bumpy decade, and things seem to show no signs of settling down. Good thing that when there’s uncertainty, confusion, and the threat of calamity—real or imagined—music is always there.
Music serves many purposes. It can soothe. It can agitate. It can help us realign with our values. It can inspire us to get through challenging circumstances. It can remind us of easier times. It can compel us to dance it out. And it can inspire resilience and solidarity.
So here are ten new(ish) records that I believe are “meeting the moment” in various ways. Whether or not that’s true for you in your particular moment isn’t my call to make, but at the very least, I hope some of this music strikes a chord. (A diminished seventh, maybe?)
Irreversible Entanglements — Future Present Past (Impulse! 2026)
Recorded at Van Gelder Studio—where Coltrane and Mingus laid down the law—Future Present Past opens with “Juntos Vencemos” and closes with “We Overcome,” Ecuadorian-American experimentalist Helado Negro anchoring both ends in Spanish and English. In between, Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) and the band treat free jazz as ancestral memory—transmitting on a subliminally funky frequency that’s urgent, layered, and saturated with calls to colonial reclamation. The tracklist practically reads like a survival manual: “Don’t Lose Your Head.” “Hold On.” “Keep Going.” Dense, sacred, and powerful.
Mandy, Indiana — URGH (4AD, 2026)
Manchester and Berlin-based post-punk delivered in French, engineered for the dancefloor and the void simultaneously. Sonically, it evokes first and second wave industrial, but it’s much more musically honed than their learning-curve predecessors, with a gravitational pull all its own. Valentine Caulfield’s closing track switches to English to indict rape culture without softening. The most viscerally confrontational record on this list, and the least interested in your comfort.
Dälek — Brilliance of a Falling Moon (Ipecac, 2026)
Named after a section of Erik Larson’s study of Nazi Berlin, and cultivated over three decades of studied preparation for our rattled present. Mastermind and mouthpiece Will Brooks invokes the “I AM A MAN” signs from the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike and closes with “By the Time We Arrive in El Salvador.” This record confidently showcases a sonic and lyrical vocabulary built with deadeye consistency and purpose amidst ever churning trends in hip-hop. Dälek still come correct, but when have they not?
Mitski — Nothing’s About to Happen to Me (Dead Oceans, 2026)
The title is the thesis: anticipatory dread meets glacial complacency. Mitski has always written from inside the Big Emotions everyone feels, but struggle to articulate—especially the blended ones. This record arrives as collective dissociation goes mainstream, and puts it to tremulous verse and plushie-ready music with her customary theatrical precision. It’s a bit insular, like sadgirl Tumblr, but if you’ve got some tea and a cozy blanket, it’s a wryly baleful way to pass the apocalypse.
Converge — Love Is Not Enough (Epitaph/Deathwish, 2026)
I came up in the Northeast hardcore scene, playing in a band that was ever-so-slightly ahead of the mathy, post-metal revolution of which Boston’s Converge are paragons. They hit their peak at the millennium, with the hugely influential Jane Doe, a record that the aging, black Carharts crowd continues to worship. Now, I had assumed that metalcore—or whatever you might call it—was well bled out. I was wrong. Nine years since their last proper full-length and Converge have struck fresh ore. The new record sounds exactly like it should: relentlessly focused fury well matched to the current mood of political and social crisis. Vocalist/idea man Jacob Bannon on fraying community bonds: “Sometimes we forget to be kind.”
Anjimile — You’re Free to Go (4AD, 2026)
A Black trans artist making a record about personal, social, and spiritual evolution, released into a political climate actively trying to legislate trans people out of existence. The title evokes both anxiety and relief, as does the music within. It’s reductive to call Anjimile an heir to Tracy Chapman, but something about his sonorous vocals and smartly framed acoustic guitar evokes a similar wounded but unbowed quality. You’re Free to Go is an album that invites and maintains your attention through emotional honesty and sumptuously low-key songcraft.
Joshua Idehen — I Know You’re Hurting, Everyone Is Hurting, Everyone Is Trying, You Have Got To Try (Heavenly, 2026)
British-Nigerian spoken word artist working with Swedish producer Ludvig Parment over house-inflected beats that haven’t evolved much in thirty years. And they don’t need to, because Idehen is both evolution and revolution. The scorchingly on-point “Mum Does the Washing” stretches bullshit like taffy—from political and religious ideologies to mansplaining—within a single extended metaphor, putting Idehen in the lineage of Gil Scott-Heron and Linton Kwesi Johnson without seeming try-hard. A raveside sermon for the spiritually exhausted and terminally cheeky.
Dry Cleaning — Secret Love (4AD, 2026)
Florence Shaw’s deadpan delivery—cool, precise, dryly spiteful, and calibrated to the millimeter—meanders languidly across music that sounds like Tom Tom Club meets The Feelies on half speed. The indie subversives strap several kilos of modern psychosocial angst onto their delightfully spare sonic chassis and drive us over the existential precipice with a tipsy college lit professor cataloguing her fretful Id from the backseat. Produced by Cate Le Bon in the Loire Valley, which sounds like a wine listing but isn’t. Their finest record to date, for reasons best experienced directly.
Ratboys — Singin’ to an Empty Chair (New West, 2026)
Julia Steiner’s first album written after beginning therapy, structured around the Gestalt empty chair technique—talking to an absent person as a way of processing estrangement. She writes from the unsexy middle of the process, long after rupture but well before resolution. Musically, it’s ambitious and inventive Americana, full of surprising musical twists and topped with Steiner’s winsomely unique vocals. In a moment when everyone is performing either breakdown or recovery, this is the rare record willing to inhabit the in-between.
Kim Gordon — PLAY ME (Matador, 2026)
At 72, Gordon is making her most confrontational and now-sounding music—which, given her history, is saying something. PLAY ME doubles down on the noise-rap harangues of her previous record, The Collective, sharpening them into something resembling a wasteland projectile, desperately but deftly assembled from scrap metal, spirit gum, and techbro tears. “Dirty Tech” turns AI anxiety into a jittery chant, “Square Jaw” is a direct threat to Elon Musk, and the whole record operates as a sardonic field guide to toxically masculine predatory capitalism delivered over industrial trap and prickly distortion. Abrasive, dryly funny, and utterly uninterested in your newsletter.