Quick-fire Roundup - July 2026
Short reviews for some of our favorite releases of the past month.
Quick-fire Roundup is our chance to highlight a few of the albums we’ve been digging from the past month that we may not have had the time or energy to pump out full essays for.
Tiger Bear Wolf – Tiger Bear Wolf (2026)
40:59 // July 17th, 2026 // Ernest Jenning Record Co.
When Tiger Bear Wolf unceremoniously went their separate ways sometime in the early 2010s, it might have felt emblematic of the times: the act kept one foot in the hearth of traditionalist Southern riffage while the other bore the erratic winds of aughts-by-way-of-nineties DIY indie rock, an eminently listenable combination that was sure to raise eyebrows in the era of localized blogging, but neither raucous nor refined enough to make a push for mass exposure. Following two self-titled releases—the first in ‘03, another in ’05 —the band began recording again in 2009, but in their own words, “the trail went cold.” Other opportunities called. Lives advanced. It happens.
Thankfully, reunions can also happen. Seeds for this one sprouted over a decade ago, realized in spurts of inspiration that eventually accumulated into the LP that appears before us now. True to the retained name, it’s more of the same psychedelic wailing and hunting season heel turns you’d expect from the above description, but even I, a newcomer to the band here, was immediately struck by how live, organic, and together their playing sounds despite the patchworked nature of their homecoming. Tiger Bear Wolf jams, sometimes hard, sometimes with restraint, but the band’s ability to groove never falters. (7.5/10)
- Zack Lorenzen
Eartheater - Heavenly Body: If I’m The Bottle You’re The Message
40:11 // July 14th, 2026 // Chemical X
It was not on my bingo card for this year’s most riveting pop experience to come as a cosmically-scaled ode to the transformative power of motherhood, but Eartheater is just the type to fuck with those kinds of expectations. These eleven songs lay down a dizzyingly creative range of reactions to the before and after of her first-time birth last June, each adding a fresh dimension to the title, literal or figurative. That Heavenly Body can be reduced to one woman’s empowered pregnancy, or blown up to a galaxy-spanning reflection of the sheer wonder of life and love, each more awe-inspiring in the context of the other.
Although the lyrics are nothing if not candid (and no less poetic for it), the album shows just as much in its aesthetics and performance as it tells us verbatim; this music is an appropriately vast index of Eartheater’s experience— is it trip hop? Ambient pop? Electropop? Does it play as liturgical veneration, unvarnished diarism or a straightforward lullaby? Heavenly Body encompasses all this and more, but its best moments come when it sets itself up as a microcosm something much larger: through its portrait of motherhood as urgent subservience on “Favorite”, and when “Crown Jewel” and “Hers Before Hers” frame new life as the timeless, ongoing phenomenon that it is. (8.5/10)
- Hugh Puddle
mary in the junkyard - Role Model Hermit
45:10 // July 3rd, 2026 // AMF
I’ve always been a sucker for bands that imbue their music with a real sense of scale, and I’ll be damned if mary in the junkyard don’t fit the bill. Their widescreen spaciousness is obvious from the distant bass of intro track “Mantra III” to the thunderous climax of closer “Mouse.” Despite that vastness, Role Model Hermit is an earthly indie rock album with full-sounding production that warms every track no matter what instrumental diversions or genre colors they happen to don in a given moment. That adventurousness lets the emo-esque guitar noodling of “Blood” and “Seek and Destroy” give way to the dour, beat-heavy “New Muscles” without missing a step. Clari Freeman-Taylor’s twisty vocal performance (reminiscent of fellow Windmill Scene front woman Asha Lorenz of Sorry, but more on the sweet side) grounds the most freewheeling tracks, and lets the more earth-bound ones soar. On “Thou Shalt Sprout,” she weaves a devastating story of poverty and desperation, her voice providing a folk-like structure beneath the song’s drums-and-strings arrangement. Her off-kilter lyrics are downright captivating, especially when paired with these vast soundscapes and her skittering delivery—the centerpiece “Crash Landing”’s refrain of “You openеd up like a coconut” simply wouldn’t work in anyone else’s hands, let alone prove so damn affecting. Few debut LPs in recent memory feel this confident, each song propelling the next with a perpetual sense of motion. By the time Role Model Hermit reaches its finale, it feels less like a collection of songs than a landscape you’ve crossed. (8.5/10)
- A.R.O.
Eriko Hashimoto - Over Life
35:57 // July 22, 2026 // Sony
Eriko Hashimoto got her start as the founding frontwoman of Japanese pop-rock band Chatmonchy in the early 2000s, and has been pursuing a solo career in the years after Chatmonchy’s disbandment. That’s a lot of solid material on her résumé; I’ve now listened to Chatmonchy’s first three albums, all of which I really like (7.0-7.5s/10), and her previous solo record Machiyo Machiyo, which I love (8.0/10), and plan to listen to most, if not all, of the rest. My incomplete sense, then, of her career’s trajectory is tangible improvement and welcome maturation. This is not the norm for musicians who start on such a radio-friendly path! It’s a shame her western following hasn’t quite kept up.
The album opens softly and pleasantly enough with “EMO”, but “Zone 30” [track 2] is much more representative of the overall sound: a sticky, bouncy riff, a tumbling drum line with a delicious dropped beat before the cymbal hits, and a confident, forceful vocal melody. A lot of the tracks sound a lot like that one, and are similarly great, but probably my favorite song (or at least the one that usually keeps playing in my head after a full album listen) is “Storyteller” [track 6], which omits all bombast and instead provides a slower backdrop to a soaring vocal melody that makes me clutch my chest and go “uuugh” - in a good way. A lot of this album has a bittersweet taste to it, but it’s at its most acute on that track. I have to note, too, how well the title track [track 7] works as a followup to “Storyteller”; it starts with lightly skittering drums and a front-and-center bassline that sounds like it’s going to be a continuation of the preceding song’s mood, but the bright and heavy lead guitar part that Eriko springs on us 37 seconds in dashes those concerns instantly, instead lifting up that sorrow into a song that’s both celebratory and cathartic. And that flourish in her vocal pacing just before the minute mark... [clutches chest] uuugh.
There are two or three forgettable tracks here, and a few rather abrupt endings. I would have liked to see some of these songs developed past the four-minute mark; this album has easily the lowest average track length across any of the Eriko/Chatmochy projects I’ve heard, which cuts against my usual preferences. But don’t let that dissuade you from giving this a try; it’s warm and welcoming, with just the right mix of unashamed fun and thoughtful melancholy for mid-2026. Plus, it made someone who hadn’t heard of Eriko before a few weeks ago (me) into a full-on fan. (7.0/10)
-Caleb Yarbrough
Hesse Kassel – Morir Saltando
44:42 // July 15th, 2026 // Amuleto Discos
Hot off the ambitious, celebrated debut, La Brea, that invited comparisons to Black Midi, Swans, and Black Country, New Road, Chilean collective Hesse Kassel are back one year later with another album that briefly topped 2026’s RYM chart upon release. They’ve made huge waves in their home country—performing half this record at a spectacle of a Lollapalooza gig a few months back surely helped—and the rest of the world is quickly taking notice. It’s not unwarranted—compared to La Brea, which I found too bloated and pensive for its own good, Morir Saltando is half the length and twice as fiery, simultaneously showcasing the band’s shrewdest orchestrations and most explosive peaks. Countless prog rock freakouts and loungey, Latin jazz interstices await. What’s not to love?
Well, if you’re anything like the dumb Yank writing this blurb, you probably don’t speak Spanish and aren’t intricately initiated with the nuances of Chilean politics. I couldn’t tell you why exactly Renatto Olivares and/or Luca Cosignani spend half the songs here ranting about insufficient condom use. Machine translations relay significant provocation, little of it landing with clear intent. If you have a greater grasp on the language, your mileage will likely vary—much like how BC,NR or Sprain (not to mention descendant project Shearling, whew) ride or die on how many layers of self-absorbed pontificating you can withstand, Hesse Kassel share that roughly ranted vocal approach. I dare say the zaniness of the music makes up for it, if not enhances it (see: 14-minute behemoth opener “Pornomiseria,” which immediately landed on my Song of the Year shortlist and didn’t look back) but Morir Saltando is an acquired taste. Which way, Western man? “El único gesto es creer, o no.”
¿Por qué no? ¡Vamos! (8.0/10)
- Zack Lorenzen
Nia Archives - Emotional Junglist
40:13 // July 17th, 2026 // Island
Dehaney Hunt may be an avowed student of jungle, but it’s a sound that she stumbled into through intuition and personal taste, speeding her own music up till it suited her after it became clear she’d have to be her own producer at the beginning of her career. That origin story explains why her music feels so effortless—no matter what flashy stabs of rumbling guitars or swift beat switches come, it’s clear she’s not an artist angling for a particular sound; she’s one guided largely by instinct. Her vocals add a consistently cathartic layer to the best of these tracks, either through gentle crooning (“Lovers Grief”) or bouncy chopped samples (“Feelings Go Numb”, always flirting with the beat, giving it just enough room to breathe. Clocking in at a brisk 40 minutes, and with tracks rarely breaching the 3-minute mark, it’s a refreshing and potent example of the normally brash genre, one that acts as an approachable entry point for any new ears she’s bound to turn her way if she keeps this up. (8.0/10)
- A.R.O.
snag. – All The Cages Holding Us Will One Day Turn to Dust
25:57 // July 10th, 2026 // Deathwish Inc.
Milwaukee trio snag. branch out from their bread and butter screamo on All The Cages Holding Us Will One Day Turn to Dust, incorporating peppy, noodling guitar leads, starry-eyed emo singalongs, and brutal, technical breakdowns into the trusty, angsty framework they established on their previous two LPs. “We wanted to write an album that goes straight to the point and represents Snag as a whole,” explained vocalist/guitarist Samm Szymborski, and mission accomplished! Instead of feeling torn between the pop punk-meets-hardcore immediacy of tracks like “Shelf Life” and the dismal, pummeling fury of “Debilitated,” the band capitalizes on subtle versatility, harnessing glorious, breakneck climaxes back-to-back with dissonant despair. I’d love to see what the band can do in marathon conditions, but until then, All The Cages… is another impressive sprint. (7.5/10)
- Zack Lorenzen
TURQUOISEDEATH – Soundsystem, Breathe!
26:58 // July 31st, 2026 // Phosphilite
The first time I listened to Turquoisedeath’s 2023 breakout album Se Bueno, I had never been more convinced that drum and bass revivalism’s long-awaited-slash-dreaded mainstream moment had finally arrived. Years of growing 90s nostalgia, countless video game soundtracks, and a leading e-scene figurehead mired in tragedy and controversy, all culminating in one fifteen-year-old British producer marrying a hyperkinetic, hyper-online take on atmospheric DnB to the cresting international wave of bitcrushed bedroom shoegaze spearheaded by their Longinus labelmates Parannoul and Asian Glow (who both showed up on “Dive”). If the overall impression skewed a bit towards frothy, lightweight kitsch, well, the homespun charm of the lower-fi production was all the more a natural fit for it.
Se Bueno was enough of a hit for its sequels Kaleidoscope and Guardian to carry the distinct earnest seriousness of a young artist feeling obliged as a standard-bearer for their genre. The cozy grain of tape distortion was smoothed into a mirror sheen as they refined their signature onslaughts of breathlessly ornate breakbeats, and their non-edm influences likewise receded into the background in favor of more cleanly-integrated forays into trance and house. It bears mention that the Bandcamp page for Turquoisedeath’s new EP Soundsystem, Breathe! refers to “years of burnout” leading up to its creation— years during which they released the majority of their most popular and well-liked music.
To any devoted fans getting antsy over the prospect of a radical change in direction, rest easy! These four tracks strip Turquoisedeath down to their bare necessities, the sugary, swooning synths and busy, driving percussion, and follow their bliss from there— if anything, Soundsystem, Breathe! represent the full fruition of the trance dabblings introduced on Kaleidoscope, now fully untethered from breaks and cleansed of any lingering scraps of retro-fetishism. One look at the artwork tells you all you need to know: in a discography overwhelmingly dominated by turquoise hues, the bright splashes of yellow and pink stand out like a psychedelic thumb, and this is indeed the most colorful, and the most downright fun, that Turquoisedeath has ever been.
At time of writing, I’m most enamored by the bongos and new age-y chants of the gloriously maximalist, Latin-tinged title track, but the whole package showcases an invigorating newfound ability to make a mix sound lushly-orchestrated and dense without sacrificing spaciousness or (natch) breathability. I’d be remiss not to also give special mention to “I Love U”, an eight-minute tour de force crammed to bursting with Turq’s most ambitious sampling yet. Between the fragments of Dizzee Rascal and Everything But the Girl, the track is just as indebted to the broader history of dance music as anything they’ve made, if not even more obviously so. But where the pleasures of their recent albums have too often come across as citational, a whiz-kid dropping names to dazzle a growing audience of Real HeadsTM, the palpably joyful plunderphonics splattered all across Soundsystem, Breathe!, by contrast, finds a bracing personal resonance in mixing and matching a full, shining spectrum of soundsystems past, present, and future. (8.0/10)
- Kerry Renshaw
Inferno - The Anthropic Sophisms
40:49 // July 17th, 2026 // Debemur Morti
Czech psych-doom-black metal group Inferno has been at this for about as long as I’ve been alive, and at least on The Anthropic Sophisms they manage to stand out from the pack. This thing is definitely style over substance: the riffs are workmanlike, the rhythm section dialed in, but the atmosphere is immaculate. This is pure, uncut cosmic horror, the soundtrack that inexplicably starts playing in your headphones as you look out your voidship’s window while traveling through the Warp, shortly before Tzeentch’s spawn emerge from the storm clouds. Or perhaps it’s horror of a more mundane and terrible sort, Lovecraftian aesthetics laid over industrial wretchedness, a lament for the apparent inhumanity of the human-made world. Seriously, try reading Ginsberg’s Howl (Part II in particular) while listening to this, or replacing the score of Metropolis’ grimmer sections, see if it doesn’t make you feel the heavy stare of Moloch’s “thousand blind windows” more viscerally.
The atmospheric effects pulling so much of the weight here are indeed generally of an industrial style—all buzzing, piercing, grating, grinding sounds that render ease or comfort impossible. Think Oranssi Pazuzu crossed with Kriegsmaschine: plodding, unrelenting song structures filled with dissonance and dread. Listen to the first 45 seconds and you pretty much have a picture of the whole album. It can be a little too plodding at times (take the mostly riff-less and drumless opening four minutes of “With Raving Mouths They Utter Things Mirthless, Unadorned and Unperfumed”, though when the drums do get going on that track... hot damn) and is generally lacking in surprises or payoffs, but that’s not what you’re here for. You’re here to fall into an inescapable pit and feel (but not see, never see) your most unnameable, intolerable imaginings take shape in the shadows around you. (7.5/10)
-Caleb Yarbrough
O’Flynn – Kairos
44:09 // July 17th, 2026 // self-released
“House Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own” – DJ Sprinkles (2009)
“House music is a passport to a party happening everywhere in the world at once all the time, be there be everywhere.” – O’Flynn (probably, 2026)
O’Flynn is back doing what he does, namely a rush of vitalising dance sounds halfway between the bustle of tribal house and the refracted textures of microhouse. He did it on 2019’s Aletheia and now he’s back on his sophomore solo LP Kairos with a stint with Frazer Ray, ready to dish it out twice as concisely and with double the song-to-song cohesion. Halfway between album and mixtape, Kairos takes a refreshingly un-song-centric approach and feeds everything it has into an ongoing central current of disco-happy cross-cultural curiosity. The upshot gives the impression of someone who loves life, loves travel, and is able to get the best of any vibe without making too much fuss about where he pulls from. Be more like O’Flynn: milk that passport, live that life. (7.5/10)
- Hugh Puddle
Jack White - Frozen Charlotte
42:43 // July 10th, 2026 // Third Man
Jack White returns with another satisfying slate of blues rock. It’s a far more focused affair this time around—aside from his trademark high-wire guitar antics, much of the record is devoid of the weirdness that characterized this latter era of his solo career, angling instead for straightforward bangers. It’s a bit of a letdown that his (admittedly virtuosic) skill as a performer eclipses his intuitions as a producer on this one, as it’s a marked step back from the primal guitar sound of career high No Name. Even lyrically, the righteous anger that dominated that album is largely supplanted by songs that feel comparatively slight—“She’s in a frenzy!!” he screams repeatedly, before on the next track settling for the refrain “feeling content, making content.” Not so inspired, Mr. White. Fortunately, White’s irrepressible sense of urgency remains intact, as do the earth-shaking riffs and playful vocal performances that remind you why he’s one of the essential rock frontmen of our time. Make no mistake, Frozen Charlotte is still a chomping, stomping good time. (7.5/10)
- A.R.O.
Protest the Hero - Within
35:56// July 17th, 2026// Self-Released
Despite the abbreviated runtime and simplified song structures, Within feels like Protest the Hero’s most obtuse offering to date. The sugary hooks and guitar wizardry are still there in ample supply to reward longtime fans, but anyone on the outside looking in might have trouble sharing the same enthusiasm. Much of this can be attributed to Rody Walker’s acrobatic vocals simply doing too damn much, rattling off syllables like a Gatling gun and not giving the instrumentation much room to breathe (the chorus of “Grandfather’s Axe” will be as impressive as it is grating, depending on how much leeway you’re willing to give). In the past, these eccentric performances had the benefit of (mostly) parading about some rather ambitious ideas and concepts to help the medicine go down, but the threadbare lyricism here is much more microscopic in scope while taking offense to any suggestion of brevity.
All that being said, I do happen to be one of those longtime fans and Within does reward me as such. “Fishhook” and “The Orchard” are two of the band’s catchiest songs to date (the latter having some killer features from some familiar faces) and “The Mariner” is a barn-burning epic that would stand as a nice capstone to the band’s storied career. While there’s as much subtlety as a hammer, the emotion does sometime hit as such, “Liberty Spike” being a particular highlight. Not much needs to be said about the instrumentation, which is as brilliant as its ever been and once again straddles the line nicely between dizzying technicality and actually having a tune behind it. If there’s an anchor point that really pushes the band in a more distinct direction than usual, it’s leaning into the band’s punk roots to match the more direct subject matter.
If you like Protest, you’ll like this. If you haven’t hopped on board yet, I’d suggest looking elsewhere. (7.0/10)
-Dakota Foss
Park Jiha - Cyclic Illusion
29:11 // July 16th, 2026 // No Label
Apparently the music on this EP was commissioned by the Japanese clothing company Goldwin, for the opening of and use in their (admittedly pretty nice-looking) Seoul location. That’s an unappealing pitch for me, to say the least, but add Park Jiha’s name to it and my ears perk up. Her avant-jazz-fusion debut Communion is still her best-known release, but her discography has been steadily improving since then, culminating (for now!) in the spacious but melodic post-minimalism of last year’s All Living Things (shoutout to Adam A for putting that album, and hence all of Jiha’s post-Communion work, on my radar recently). Cyclic Illusion is roughly on-trend; while it lacks All Living Things’ melancholic sense of weight, it does offer a more grounded and specific immersion, even an opportunity for a sort of meditation. It is undeniably new-age in style, but it would be much more at home as part of a multimedia art exhibition than as ambiance for the purchase of overpriced outdoor apparel (though I won’t deny that there’s some aesthetic value, even artistic merit, to the presentation of consumer goods that Goldwin has put together here).
The EP comprises four wholly distinct parts, each named for a season, so its title is apt: the tracklist does feel cyclical, with “Winter Illusion” (the closer) leading perfectly into “Spring Illusion”. The former was an early highlight for me after some front-to-back listens; it’s probably the most somber and emotive cut here thanks to the immediate, conventionally-structured lead melodies in the second half. The chilliness of the backing organ tones and windblown dry leaves is palpable, and is a pleasant note to end on/mood to sit with, but my first listen with repeat enabled was a revelation. “Spring Illusion”, which on early listens was more a pleasant intro than a standout, is a gentle swell of warmth and life when listened to in this way. I can close my eyes and appreciate the kiss of morning sunlight on my skin in early March alongside those first few singing birds and bare trees that are just beginning to show green.
So if, like me, your album listening tends to be rigidly linear, you should treat this one a little differently. Start anywhere, end anywhere, just let the cycle run for as long as you’re feeling it. Close attention and repeat exposure are rewarded with beautiful detail throughout all four tracks, but (unsurprisingly, given the context) it works very well in the background. It seems that a lot of Park Jiha fans have missed or skipped this, but now you know better: it’s some of her best work. (8.0/10)
-Caleb Yarbrough
Moa – Trance Landscapes
135:06 // July 13th, 2026 // Mizuha 罔象
Good trance is as cleansing as it is overstimulating, less so in the transcendental New Age scope of its heyday practitioners, and much more in that it asks you to delicately put aside any jaded preconceptions of kitsch or tastefulness, and take its euphoric highs at face value. By extension, it is (alas) not for everyone, but Moa’s gargantuan compilation Trance Landscapes comes closer than anything I’ve heard in a while to capture the wide-eyed joy at the heart of that appeal.
On the one hand, Trance Landscapes epitomises everything one could expect of an underground passion project in the internet age, whether in its inspirations in graphic art to its collaborations with international ‘e-scene’ artists from TURQUOISEDEATH to Kinoteki to Ichiro Tanimoto; on the other, it’s a refreshingly wondrous take on trance at its most maximalist and fantastical, reminiscent of BT in his ESCM-era prime and so vitalised that you could just as easily believe he never left it. You’ll find no irony-poisoned cheap thrills here, nor sour reheats of passe euphoria: the album lays down one banger after another, and takes great joy in affirming everything that has always been a blast in the genre. It’s more than just a memory exercise, but that doesn’t keep highlight track “Trance 7-08 “Opaque Crop”“ from playing just as much as a kaleidoscopic nostalgia spiral as a dancefloor invitation. Take it on either terms, and you’ll be more than satisfied. (8.0/10)
- Hugh Puddle
Want even more? Check out our full-length reviews for these other July releases:
