Quick-fire Roundup - May 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. These releases nevertheless deserve a gold star and a spot on the podium.
otay:onii – Love Is in the Shit
32:28 // May 8th, 2026 // Pelagic Records
For all the knees destined to be jerked in response to its confrontational title, Love Is in the Shit is an astounding exploration of loss, longing and hope that speaks with devastating clarity and draws on some of the year’s most bracing aesthetic clashes. In some ways, this all comes as little surprise: Lane Shi Otayonii has never been one to flinch in the face of an emotional onslaught, whether in her solo work, as part of Elizabeth Colour Wheel or in collaboration with Uboa. Possessed of one of the most distinctive voices in today’s landscape, she sings with the force of some uncanny prophecy that howls its way across post-industrial wastelands and slips deftly through the cracks of windows we had thought firmly closed, only to lodge itself deep in the listener’s own dreams. Once there, her clattering beats or eerie keyboard lines say all that remains to be said.
The upshot of this in previous outings has been as spellbinding as it has morbid, but Love Is in the Shit is as much a work of trauma as of growth, life and of course love, both in its inspirations and in the most colourful tracklist otay:onii has furnished to date. The album’s most excoriating purges sit alongside playful cabaret-esque showstoppers; its most authoritative declarations quickly give way to glitchy netherspace. Opener “Have You Ever” dips from blaring synths into a fragile reverie sung in her native Haining dialect, while the rampaging midway highlight “The Plaice” cements the qualities that have made her such a hit with the European metal scene. By the time it all contorts itself into a resolution the abstracted wringer of the closer “Tears Won’t Tell”, we’re listening to an artist at her peak. In her exclusive interview with us, Lane shared how her process follows her emotional impulses outside of songwriting territory into unfamiliar territory, and Love Is in the Shit is nothing if not a testament to the shattering empowerment latent in individual creativity. This is the one to beat this year. (9/10)
- Hugh Puddle
Gyrofield – Your Fight
16:23 // May 6th, 2026 // Field Research
While most IDM locks you into your own headspace, Your Fight feels far less internal. Instead, it evokes traipsing across an alien planet, its rippling drums and pulsing electronics conjuring a constantly shifting landscape. Rather than moving your feet to the beat, it’s as if the surface itself is wriggling out from under you, forcing forward motion. And even at its strangest and most uneasy, it’s at least as calming as it is anxious, a dichotomy that only grows more fascinating with every visit. (8.0/10)
- A.R.O.
Genesis Owusu – Redstar Wu & the Worldwide Scourge
50:26 // May 15th, 2026 // Ourness
If there’s one thing Genesis Owusu has never lacked, it’s confidence, but his latest LP operates on a whole other level. Fusing beat-heavy post-punk with stabs of neo-soul and hip-hop, he backs it all up with warm live instrumentation that evokes the energy of a block party celebration, even at its most lyrically caustic. And as Owusu displays on thrilling rap songs like “THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE” and “LIFE KEEPS GOING,” there’s no shortage of things to be pissed off about in our modern era. But it’s the way he transforms those frustrations into something vibrant and life-affirming that makes the album so compelling. Elsewhere, he evokes the syrupy funk-soul of Yves Tumor on “FALLING BOTH WAYS” and the spiky art-punk energy of TV on the Radio at their most rambunctious on “MOST NORMAL AMERICAN VOTER”. Even when the back half can’t quite capture the catharsis of the front, it maintains an impeccable flow throughout, with songs building off of each other like scaffolding. The result is Owusu’s most expansive and infectious statement yet, a record that invites you to dance through the apocalypse, rather than merely endure it. (8.5/10)
- A.R.O.
Marmozets – Co.War.Dice
41:45 // May 22nd, 2026 // Nettwerk
On their first studio album in 8 years, Marmozets waste no time getting down to business. Despite missing some of the raw angst of their debut, the towering opener “A Kiss from a Mother” quickly silences any fears that they’d mellow out with age. It maintains a furious momentum for the majority of its runtime—only slowing down for the brooding “Swear I’m Alive,” which contains everything that Metric’s latest LP was missing, and the pretty / quaint “Dandy”. The first half is packed with excellent dance-punk offerings, especially “Cut Back” and “Running with the Sun in Your Eyes,” offering a new bag of tricks without skimping on the yowling vocals and snarling guitars, leaving us head-banging and toe-tapping in equal measure. These Marmozets’ claws are still razor-sharp, ready to rip into a new generation desperate for pop-rock with a real bite. (8.0/10)
- A.R.O.
Triángulo de Amor Bizarro - Mi catedral
42:01 // May 15th, 2026 // Sonido Muchacho
This Galician trio has long championed an ambidextrous approach to sunkissed fuzz-rock, setting your blood on fire one moment only to recede into gauzy heartache the next, but it took them until 2020’s oɹɹɐzıqɹoɯɐǝpolnƃuɐıɹʇ to realise all their strengths in one package. That record’s versatility and spellbinding keynote tracks are enduringly awesome, but Mi catedral might be the closest they’ve come to a similar calibre of roof-raiser.
Hollering their way over whatever combination of clamorous, dream-adjacent subgenres take their fancy, vocalists Isabel Cea and Rodrigo Caamaño bring an unmistakably melodious sensibility to one glorious noise pop banger after another. The early run is particularly formidable, but every listen I find myself taking stock around the three-quarter mark (somewhere around “Este contra oeste”’s anthemic shoegaze meltdown) and wondering how on earth this record still has energy to draw from, how its hooks still sound so fresh, how its rush has lasted this long.
How long can it last? The majority of the record, it turns out, although its stretch of earworms is bookended by two centrepiece tracks in “SMT en el palacio real” and “Pat a trenca”. These both aim for a more cinematic sense of gravity that the rest of the album is too zested to bother with. If “SMT en el palacio real” in particular proves a little incongruous to this end, the album as a whole still promises essential summertime listening for months to come. (8.0/10)
- Hugh Puddle
JPEGMAFIA - Experimental Rap
54:58 // May 21st, 2026 // AWAL
The mask that separates JPEGMAFIA from the real human being behind the posturing must either be light-bendingly thick or completely transparent at this stage. Outrage as an attention-stealing schtick isn’t exactly a novelty in the 2020s, and Peggy’s latest Pigeons & Planes interview (check the posse) is exactly the kind of content-generating content that one should expect from him. In the past, though, his media appearances have painted him as a fairly entertaining individual, whether he’s dodging a spin kick from a man that later shoves a fistful of weed in his hand in a New Zealand shopping mall or managing to communicate lightly and lucidly while drunk enough to blow chunks mid-interview, there has, until EXPERIMENTAL RAP, always been a number of interesting lenses to view the real man and his character(s?) through.
Kudos to the lad; whether his mask is slipping, his personality is diminishing in the spotlight, or he feels obliged to ramp up the negativity in order to attract more ears to what is supposed to be a Statement Album, he has a bottomless bag of compelling beats and samples that’s longevity is only threatened by the limited range of flows (heard ya like triplets) and modes of delivery (talk-yell-talk, we Nirvana now) alongside the length of this project. It’s a strange notion to abandon previous experimentation on an album titled for its experimentation (even Pitchfork picked up on this), and stranger still that JPEGMAFIA’s exhausting litany of money-making sexscapades, delivered with so much less humour and self-awareness than previously, still aren’t heavy enough ballasts to sink EXPERIMENTAL RAP (case-in-point, if you press skip when the fairly intolerable “GYBB” hits, “Mask On” rewards your impatience with a beat whose sample is the only stable element in a fairly active sonic journey that sees the surrounding music turn itself on its head in under three minutes).
Barrington Hendricks’ lowest hour may be upon us, and as some of the same people who helped inflate his burgeoning career through hyperbolic praise and parasocial hope begin a public process of cutting all ties and We Should’ve Knowns (it’s okay to be grey, team), and as the hate he actually receives makes steady gains on the hate he claims to receive (at Coachella or whatever), the way he flips a wide array of samples while literally murdering his own beats still has me spinning this repeatedly. (6.5/10)
- Milo Ruggles
Want even more? Check out our full-length reviews for these other May releases:
JPEGMAFIA is a really frustrating individual to me but as a white human I try not to waste too much energy feeling annoyed about him. His music is rarely less than entertaining and there are certainly more culturally poisonous public crashouts happening on a daily basis so let the man cook or posture or whatever the fuck he feels like he needs to do I suppose. I do have to say that the tepid response to ER is making me continue bumping it down my priority queue.
Excited to hear the new Genesis Owusu, grateful to learn about new Gyrofield here (instant top of queue, that one), and yeah Love is in the Shit absolutely rips, being probably the only thing to release so far in 2026 that inspires anything close to awe (although new Tujiko Noriko has that potential but it's so insubstantial that I'll need more time to feel awed I guess).