11 New Albums You Should Listen to Now: Fontaines D.C., the Avalanches, and More

Fontaines D.C. continue their evolution from underground rock insurgents to arena-baiting anthem merchants on their Romance follow-up. Lead single “ Marianne ” infuses sleazy synth-pop with the air of a haunted lullaby, while, in a pairing that makes more sense than it should, the Irish band unites with fellow crossover sensation Rosalía on “Where Is Gone?” The psychedelic blurring of genre boundaries plays off the titular concept, which, says Grian Chatten in press materials, describes the environment of the album itself. “You step inside and we test these different mind- or mood-altering pieces of music on you.”

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Titled after a Twitter meme , Autosmile by @ plays out like a series of private jokes told between friends. Those friends, Filipczak and Victoria Rose, got their start as folk-pop pranksters, but on their 4AD debut, they’ve leveled up into a brain-rotted Rawlings and Welch . Before Autosmile , you’d never hear Rose sing a lyric as nakedly sincere as “ I don’t know how I belong to you, but I do somehow .” For the first time, the band with the most un-Googleable name in showbiz sounds marginally legible.

Those of us over a certain age all have that one jingle, a corporate ditty imprinted in our memory like a painting at Lascaux. (Mine? Education Connection . My Gen X mom’s? The original Big Mac theme .) Leave it to the Avalanches, masters of making up for lost time, to run with this phenomenon. The duo’s first proper LP since the pandemic draws inspiration from lost jingles and now-defunct technology like the floppy disk and iPod. The features across the 31-song project bring a similar “old becomes new again” spirit to the group’s signature anhedonia-flecked electronica, uniting legends such as Yellow Magic Orchestra cofounder Haruomi Hosono with fresher-faced experimentalists Portraits of Tracy. Who knew hauntology could be so fun?

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On the follow-up to her 2024 debut What a Devastating Turn of Events , Rachel Chinouriri makes a home in the mirror-polished smear between Y2K pop and the slick UK indie that surfaced in its wake. She previewed the LP with the synth-pop sugar rush “One Song Away From Crying” and its darker counterpart “Make Believe,” which is about “allowing someone who clearly hates me to have access to me at any moment,” she wrote in a statement. Recent tour support slots with Gracie Abrams and Florence + The Machine hint at where the Londoner has her compass set.

Sophia Stel’s first proper album for A24’s nascent label, The Greatest Album of All Time , is an appropriately cinematic survey of life during an ascendant career moment: bigger crowds, new hangers-on, and long stretches on the road far from home. To hold on to some semblance of consistency, the Canadian singer-songwriter-producer kept her production set-up similar to the DIY home studio where she made her 2025 EP How to Win at Solitaire . Still, these moody and reflective dance pop cuts constitute a big level up: a reminder that great pop gets down to a science, and properly wielded Autotune is an art form in and of itself.

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In my mind, Montreal producer Jacques Greene has always been an after-hours producer, someone whose reflective, R&B-inflected dance music befits a cozy living room at 5 a.m. more than an actual dancefloor. After the first bass drop of JG , listeners will immediately sense this album is different. On his first solo LP in seven years, Greene’s crystalline melodies and poppy vocals find a perfect marriage with 2-step, dubstep, and deep, deep basslines.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water ’s Doug Dulgarian still has fond memories of the jewel-cased mixtapes he’d pick up on the cheap as a kid, and the expansive yet hyper-regional feel of a genre-spanning track list spliced together by a local radio DJ. TAGABOW’s new mixtape gives the Philly band their very own DJ moment, compiling cuts with an array of Julia’s War labelmates and friends-of including Spirit of the Beehive, Greg Mendez, Hotline TNT, DJ Manny, Lucy (Cooper B. Handy), RXKNephew, and more. “The word mixtape initially meant a homespun tape that you typically listened to yourself or gave to somebody else,” Dulgarian explained in press materials. “For me who was born later, it meant mashups of all my favorite artists by local DJs. And so that’s what I did with this one, mashups of all my favorite artists.”

Although Dummy joke that “making music shouldn’t be fun” in press materials for their new album, the Los Angeles quintet suffuses easy jubilance into Do You Love the Color of the Sky ? Newly incorporating breakbeats into their bread and butter of ambient shoegaze and chamber-leaning electronic pop, the band tackles thorny social topics like the surveillance state and government overreach, carefully guided by vocalist Emma Maatman’s unmistakeable lilt.

In a flush year for the nascent field of “laptop twee,” Britain’s Worldpeace DMT have stood out within the gold rush for their sharp but sincere bricolage of mid-2000s indie, 1960s jangle pop, and appropriately tongue-in-cheek New York downtown worship . Leo Fincham and Rowan Miles (who splits time between this band and her more post-hyperpop-minded duo the Femcels ) keep the momentum up on the charming Stick Around for Tea. Following in the ersatz footsteps of Belle & Sebastian and their Pacific Northwest brethren at K Records, they’ve filled out their sound with more layers and lusher production without sanding down the peculiarities that make them great.

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The origin story behind The Sirens sounds like the wishful thinking of a sci-fi obsessive-turned-conspiracist. Animal Collective’s Geologist conceived the album at the Joshua Tree observatory of visual artist Kyle Simon, harnessing the power of the moon to record music. Simon rotated a telescope towards the night sky while photodiodes detected light from planets and stars, which was then converted into an electrical signal with an analog amplifier. Geologist ran it through his modular synth rig as control voltage; by shifting pitch, filter, and rhythm, he listened to nature in real time as if he was actively among the stars. Eat your heart out, Muse .

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Heavens to Betsy, the pre-Sleater-Kinney duo of Corin Tucker and the Husbands’ Tracy Sawyer, haven’t released a new album since 1994, but their comeback record Baby’s Gone has been even longer in the making. The record brings together 16 tracks from multiple releases: a long-lost cassette demo the pair recorded in 1992, the following year’s These Monsters Are Real, and 1994’s Direction 7” recordings. Older and wiser but as full of conviction as they were all those decades ago, Heavens to Betsy ’s return is a reminder that righteous feminist fury never loses its relevance or power.