4 Albums Out Today to Listen To: Ariana Grande, Arca, Shearwater, and More – Our Culture
In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on July 31, 2026:
Ariana Grande, petal
Ariana Grande’s eighth studio album, petal, has arrived. Though made with the same two collaborators who worked on 2024’s Eternal Sunshine, Ilya Salmanzadeh and Max Martin, the record is moodier and more intimate, as evidenced by the lead single ‘Hate That I Made You Love Me’. It’s one of Grande’s starkest musical shifts – tonally, too, her anger is palpable. “I think [fans] will feel familiarity and comfort in it,” she said in an interview with Apple Music. “Yet at the same time it’s very experimental and different for me, and also I wrote from a place that I don’t usually, which is unfiltered rage. I usually am too shy to tap into that, and I think this time I didn’t filter as much as I usually do.”
Arca, XXXXX
Arca has returned with a new album, XXXXX, her first since the KICK pentalogy. While sticking to a more vaporous structure, it’s still relentless in its barrage of experimental ideas, dense and frenetic. The producer is guided by the spirit of her mixtapes @@@@@ (2020) and &&&&& (2013), seeking to upend expectations after remixing tracks for the likes of Addison Rae and Robyn as well as contributing production to Madonna’s CONFESSIONS II. “It seems playful, also mischievous, to interrupt that autopilot,” Arca remarked. “It is a record born from uncertainty, contradiction, instinct, and surrender,” according to a press release, a becoming-machine that continues Arca’s lifelong project of redefining what it means to be human both in and against the machine.”
Shearwater, The New World
After six albums with Sub Pop and Matador Records, Shearwater have self-released their latest LP, The New World. Jonathan Meiburg, Emily Lee, and Dan Duszynski recorded the follow-up to 2022’s The Great Awakening in London, Berlin, New York, and their Texas headquarters. “If there’s one thing I would like to do in my life, I would like to have the world in my mind reflect more of the world that there actually is, as much as I can,” Meiburg said in our interview about the inspirations behind the record. “The feeling that I had at Yuquot, the things that I saw deep below the sea, on the ice shelves. The things I see every day – coyotes in Central Park – that are parallel to this human world that we’re so preoccupied with, are the things that make reality clearer to me. And if there’s something that I would like my work to do ultimately, it would be to offer that.”
Mallory Hawk, Chinook
Mallory Hawk’s debut album, Chinook, takes its title from the helicopters that became the music of her childhood in the military hub of Fayetteville, North Carolina. “It’s the only helicopter in the world that can collide with itself,” her dad once told her of the Chinook CH-47, which Hawk took as the perfect analogy for her own life. The singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist worked on the production of the album with musician Sam Acchione (Alex G, Jessica Lea Mayfield), whom she’d befriended during her tenure in the band Customer. It also features contributions from Craig Hendrix (Japanese Breakfast), Ava Mirzadegan, and Will Butera (Joy Again), while the cover artwork was painted by Margo Schultz, formerly of Wednesday.
Other albums out today:
The Durutti Column, Renascent; Shaboozey, The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales; ggwendolyn, Superstar Syndrome; talker, Runaway Jane; Opus Kink, The Sweet Goodbye; Loren Connors & David Grubbs, Somewhere in the Wind; Dice, I Thought the Altitude Would Make It Worth the View; Bob Holroyd & Simon Painter, Close Up and Far Away.