9 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Cameron Winter, Deafheaven, Dawn Richard, and More

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone , Cameron Winter said that of the few people he’s shown his new solo music to, “I don’t think anyone’s really liked it.” I struggle to believe he’s including the few thousand who heard unreleased material echo through Carnegie Hall’s main auditorium last December. On a new live album from that night, which arrives alongside a Paul Thomas Anderson-directed concert film, Winter cements himself among America’s greatest living songwriters, with tracks from his prodigious debut Heavy Metal stripped down to nothing but Steinway and tessitura. Once the ultimate “you had to be there” flex, Live at Carnegie Hall can now earn the people’s stamp of approval.

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Marina Herlop ’s first self-released album propels the Catalan composer, producer, and singer into the uppermost echelons of outré pop. Dja Dja comprises 14 songs of polyphonic glitz, MIDI fugues, and Balinese gamelan to form an epic suite spanning ancient timbres and hectic sound design, pure pop and a beguiling avant-garde. Released three years after the similarly freewheeling Nekkuja , the album bubbles over with interdimensional ambition and zigzagging ideas, anchored by her ability to command bewildering expanses of melody and form.

Dawn Richard consistently positions herself as an artist capable of moving fluidly from high-energy R&B inspired by her Creole background to avant-garde albums like 2017’s deconstructed, club-led Infrared , to 2022’s suite of delicate electro-classical compositions with Spencer Zahn. Her latest, Creole Culture , takes the singer back to her New Orleans roots once again, as she invites a host of lively musicians, including Big Freedia and Durand Bernarr, along with her.

Last we heard from California post-metal stalwarts Deafheaven , they had their eyes on new horizons. The band’s 2025 album Lonely People With Power saw them stick to their guns while still exploring slightly poppier arrangements through some of their quickest, most clearly structured songs to date. A new surprise EP, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb, continues to split that difference across three songs. (Don’t worry, there's still a 12-minute scorcher for the old heads.)

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If Troye Sivan’s last house-pop album, Something to Give Each Other , captured post-pandemic euphoria and post-breakup mania, She’s the Best is the comedown after. Written in the solitude of endless tour nights following the release of Something , his fourth album exists in the liminal space between pop stardom and the quiet solitude of a hotel room on tour. To transport us to this emotionally sticky place, the Melbourne singer transitions into a syrupy, mature sound, entangling some of his most reflective lyrics to date with ’90s house, trip-hop, shoegaze, and touches of drum 'n' bass.

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You don’t have to be a synesthete to hear the rich earth tones coloring Mud . Remi Wolf ’s third album trades the warm funk and disco of predecessors Big Ideas and Juno for full-fledged folk rock, scaling back tongue-in-cheek gimmickry without losing the oddball candor she does best. Wolf elected to track the album live with a close-knit group of musicians she gathered across Big Bear Lake, Joshua Tree, and New York to creatively coexist as a “family band.” The result is a string of loose and lived-in arrangements. Wolf has never sounded more grounded than with 10 toes down in the muck.

Sometimes you encounter a certain song title and you know it’s about to make you cry. Such was the case when I spied “The Gem and Mineral Show” at the bottom of the tracklist for Jess Williamson ’s new album. Williamson knows how to pen a bona fide country tearjerker. Nearly the whole of A Mile South of Heaven takes place in the rearview mirror; it opens with a song called “Goodbye to All That” and closes with the line “I am a tourist here/I come and I go.” In between, Williamson grapples with the question laid out on “Country Mile”: “Can you stay soft in a hard world?” Her answer, at least for now, is to keep driving as fast and as far as she can.

Carly Rae Jepsen fans know not to skimp on the B-sides. From “For Sure” to "Cut to the Feeling,” some of her finest work has arrived courtesy of a sister album that, for another artist, might have permanently ended up on the cutting-room floor. When the singer’s latest record, Day and Night , arrived as a double LP, there was uncertainty whether a companion piece would materialize at all, but true devotees knew she’d come through. The eight-track Day and Night (Continued) builds on the twinned impulses of its predecessor, sunny and playful romance for day, shimmering disco and house-inflected pop for night, without overpowering it.

Claire Rousay ’s new album came together largely in transit, recordings captured during a 2026 tour across Europe and the UK, piano runs dashed off after sound check, Ableton files built and saved in hotel rooms she might never see again. The material comes together in five exploratory tracks that manage to find a certain stillness in between clear phases of upheaval. On Holding marks the first release on Rousay’s new label, Quality Sounds Ltd, the name of which she explains as: “I am thinking of quality not as a measurement of excellence but more of an intangible, personalized trait.”

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