The wait is over! Another batch of picks has arrived on your digital doorstep.
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6 upcoming albums worth the wait
Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore - Tragic Magic
January 14
I’m cheating a little with this one because I’ve been anticipating it since I heard it was on its way late last year. Both of these artists cover their own unique corners in contemporary music—Barwick with her vocal soundscapes, Lattimore with her compositions for harp—but their similar beauty has me excited to hear what they come up with together.
Apple Music | Qobuz | Spotify | Tidal
Bennett Mitchell - Rearranging
January 23
Beloved Alberta radio station CKUA has successfully hooked me on Bennett’s latest singles. For all the attention alt-country’s been getting these last few years, we haven’t heard nearly enough of it from Canada, so I was glad to discover a new compatriot venturing into that territory.
Apple Music | Qobuz | Spotify | Tidal
Daphni - Butterfly
February 6
Dan Snaith hasn’t released a full-length album through his lesser known,1 dancefloor-focused project Daphni since 2022, but singles for the forthcoming Butterfly have been dropping since last June. Tighten your shoelaces and get ready to sweat along with this one.
Apple Music | Qobuz | Spotify | Tidal
Bill Callahan - My Days of 58
February 27
You don’t have to hear anything from Maryland-born troubadour Bill Callahan to help build anticipation for an upcoming release. You just have to know it’s coming. Anyone craving some baritone-led folk music will should mark their calendars for this album.
Apple Music | Qobuz | Spotify | Tidal
Buck Meek - The Mirror
February 27
We’ve only heard the first track of the album from Big Thief’s Buck Meek arriving at the end of February, but for any fans of the man or the band, it’s more than enough to get excited for what’s in store.
Apple Music | Qobuz | Spotify | Tidal
Robyn - Sexistential
March 27
Robyn takes her time to release full-length albums, but the three singles released from Sexistential have prepped fans of 2018’s Honey and 2010’s Body Talk perfectly. Expect this one to be on year-end lists come December.
Apple Music | Qobuz | Spotify | Tidal
-AK
Know of anything good we can expect to hear in 2026?
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The weight of the wait
Women Talking (2022)
No quick, impulsive actions to be found here—these women take the time to wait and wade through the murky waters of decision making together with hands on shoulders, songs in the air, and everyone from young to old with a voice.
Private Life (2018)
This is an aching wait, a painful one, marked by equal parts cautious optimism, frustrating desperation, and crushing disappointment. It’s nine months and then some more.
The Breakfast Club (1985)
High school detention—waiting within waiting. Waiting to just get outta there and see the world. From punching the academic clock to punching the sky. What will happen when all this angst and yearning, expressed in five very different teens, is all bottled up and shaken one Saturday afternoon?
The Thing (1982)
Great ambiguous ending.
“Why don’t we just wait here for a little while, see what happens?”
Anomalisa (2015)
The beauty of the mundane moments of waiting—a cab ride, a trip up the elevator, a walk to the ice machine—in a movie where the main character wants nothing more than to get away from it.
-JB
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Love waits in Murakami’s Norwegian Wood
Waiting is another recurring theme in Murakami’s work. In the adventure novels like A Wild Sheep Chase and End of the World & Hard-Boiled Wonderland, the protagonists are left in the dark, forced to wait for instructions from their superiors, a literary move that helps to establish the power dynamic at play.
But in Norwegian Wood, the challenge to wait comes from inside. Toru struggles to know how to move forward because of the bonds made by friendship and romance. Murakami goes out of his way to surround his main character with friends and lovers that are happy to give him whatever level of freedom he wants.
And yet, Toru’s decisions don’t steer the story’s outcome nearly as much as you’d expect. The more it moves along, the more his decisions—and the decisions of others—subtley begin to feel inevitable. The resulting undertone is one you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in contemporary literature.
-AK
The waiters are giving us the evil eye. In 2 weeks, the 2 of us will be back to account for our culture’s depictions of
four.
He also helms the critically acclaimed electronic project Caribou.