In this segment, we round up the best albums released each month. From Phoebe Bridgers to L’Rain, here are, in alphabetical order, the best albums of August 2026.
Brennan Wedl, Brennan Wedl
Brennan Wedl has been putting out solo music since 2012, releasing two strikingly confessional records, Jersey Devil and Holy Water Branch, after relocating to Nashville. It was Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan who introduced the Minnesota-raised singer-songwriter music to Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, who would go on to produce Brennan Wedl with Brad Cook. Retaining the earnestness of her early outings, Wedl’s ANTI- debut is bolstered by sharp humour, dynamic instrumentation (including Jordan’s guitar playing on a couple of tracks), and no-holds-barred storytelling that make for a definitive musical statement. “This burning turns me into someone else,” she sings on ‘High Priestess’, yet firing up the record paints a picture of an artist who couldn’t sound more like herself. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Brennan Wedl.
Hana Stretton, tiarn
tiarn eels like waking up to the unsurety of dusk and treating its porous boundaries like a fresh start, not a natural conclusion: bountiful in its subtlety, ambient folk with an emphasis on folk, open to reinterpretation. Weaving in field recordings alongside contributions from an opera singer, a string quartet, and Forest Creek Folk, a local 60-person choir Stretton has since joined, it threads the needle between Hana Stretton’s nature-bound lonerism and a more community-oriented existence. Or maybe it simply blurs the line between the human and the non-human, careful with it all. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Hana Stretton.
Julia Holter, Materia
On her latest LP, Julia Holter lingers in the fluid, wondrous space of her previous record, Something in the Room She Moves, taking its bones and making something new out of them. In finding its way to the final recordings, the improvisational quality of these songs, some of which date back to lockdown, makes day-to-day survival feel like a daydream, suspended between domestic bliss and nationwide horror, homebound experiments and full-band production, a life at once sequestered, well-travelled, and twinned in that of your neighbour. Rearranging melodies, stretching out ideas, and conceiving fresh ones out of the well that produced Something in the Room She Moves, the new album is not only Holter’s most obvious but subtly illuminating effort in weaving magic out of the familiar, visions of abundance through minimalism. Read our inspirations interview with Julia Holter.
L’Rain, fata morgana
The Rose of Jericho, also known as the resurrection plant, is a spike moss that grows in dry deserts, surviving through adaptations that protect its cells during long spells of dehydration. Taja Cheek doesn’t often rely on physiological language in her music, which tends to be elliptical in its introspection, but she is palpably inspired by such natural phenomena, metaphors of resilience in an increasingly dreary world. Working once again with longtime collaborators Ben Chapoteau-Katz and Andrew Lappin, her new album feels like an extension of the shapeshifting musical world the singer-songwriter has built over the past decade while also prodding at its extremes. Between songs that dissolve in or rise from the ether, that assault or delight the senses, Cheek achieves a strange kind of equilibrium, thriving in an environment that should be hostile to any kind of creative endeavour, let alone such brilliance. Read the full review.
Lambchop, Punching the Clown
A couple of years ago, Kurt Wagner heard a simple song on the radio – a banjo playing a single chord, accompanied by a few voices – that would calibrate his next album, Punching the Clown. In a way, it sounds like a radical reconfiguration of the band, the kind of record that seems to wipe the slate clean. Yet Wagner’s approach, his tendency to vanish into the ether, hasn’t changed, nor has his close circle of collaborators. And if the AutoTune of previous years scanned as little more than a buddy of his, you could say the same about the choirs accompanying him on the new record. Yet for all its apparent naturalism, Wagner and company still find subtle ways to lend the songs a touch of the surreal, disrupting the embrace of sincerity, and offsetting its obvious reverence with a bit of humour at an age where it seems reserved for other forms of entertainment rather than people. In the mundane yet magical process of stringing it all together, Lambchop make the struggle feel a little more than personal. Read our inspirations interview with Lambchop.
Phoebe Bridgers, Lost Weekend
One of the most gut-wrenching moments on Phoebe Bridgers’ first album in six years arrives when she finds herself walking early in the morning, awake before her significant other. “I don’t know why I’m crying/ Until we’re dead or die trying,” she sings. We know why we get into and out of bed; we have to. Why tears well up in our eyes is harder to rationalize, but there’s a reason “crying” is the first word on the album, and Bridgers keeps stirring us to the edge of it, just as she’s forced to reckon with our proximity to death. With Ethan Gruska, Jack Antonoff, Tony Berg, and Alex G splitting production duties alongside her, Lost Weekend is by far her dreamiest album, a miracle of sound design and imaginative world-building. In a way, these are songs she wrote while hiding off from the world, sleeping in, with “too much money and nothing to lose.” But they are also the mark of a great songwriter who, in grief and in love, wakes to the double-edged sword of existing unalone, and can’t help but brave through the thought of oblivion: forthrightly, ambitiously, and right before our eyes. Read the full review.
Squirrel Flower, Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going
Ella Williams is not the only artist for whom songwriting feels like divine intervention. The way she infuses it in her work as Squirrel Flower, though, is singular, and no album in her discography is more striking in its reverence than her latest, Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going. Instead of amplifying the muscular sound of 2023’s Tomorrow’s Fire, her previous record with producer Alex Farrar, the new album draws ethereal textures out of both its heavier and acoustic moments. After all, the spiritual worldview she outlines on the title track is not exactly dualistic: there are the gods of getting going and the gods of standing still, and growth requires sacrifices to both. The record speeds up and slows down with no cohesive logic, yet it bleeds together into a dynamic, heavenly portrait of a wandering heart. Read the full review.
Wild Pink, Still Coming Down
There’s at least one song on Still Coming Down that allows us to infer that John Ross has become a father, and it gives his latest Wild Pink album its title. “I used to be pure/ I just try to be good,” he sings, hinting at a quiet collapse of ego. There’s a natural weightiness marking the follow-up to 2024’s Dulling the Horns, whose embrace of baritone guitars steered the band’s sound in a gnarlier direction, but not an ounce of self-importance. Ross is keeping things simple: promoting the engineer who mixed the last LP, Alex Farrar, to the production role, and collaborating with a cast of friends he’s mostly met on the road. Fatherhood did end up having an impact on his process, if not much of the record’s lyrics: he’d stay up an hour or two after his wife and son went to bed and settle into a songwriting routine, putting on a beloved movie in the background. On Still Coming Down, he lets his weary mind drift off yet sounds more grounded and determined than ever. Read the full review.