Albums I'm Interested in This Year

I have never particularly liked the idea of scoring music. Giving an album seven out of ten, four stars or placing it at number eight on a list suggests there is some objective way of measuring something that is incredibly personal.

So the albums in this article appear in no particular order and with no ranking or scores. They are simply albums that have caught my attention this year and that, for one reason or another, I am interested in hearing.

There are obviously many more albums being released this year than the ones I've included here, and there is no right or wrong selection. This isn't intended to be a definitive list of the most important releases of 2026. It's simply the music that has caught my attention and made me curious enough to want to listen.

Someone else's list could look completely different, and that's exactly the point. Music is personal. What grabs one person may leave another completely cold.

This is simply what gets my interest.

Music also has a strange habit of changing with us. An album you aren't particularly fond of today might become one you fall in love with years from now. Sometimes the music hasn't changed at all. You have.

Our tastes evolve. Our circumstances change. We discover different genres, artists and influences. A song that meant very little at one point in our lives can suddenly connect with us because of something we're experiencing years later. Equally, an album we once played constantly might become connected to a particular time and place and feel completely different when we return to it.

That is why I've never really believed music needs a score.

I'm far more interested in whether an album makes me curious enough to listen, whether I return to it, and whether somewhere along the way it becomes part of the soundtrack to a period of my life.

So this isn't my list of the best albums of 2026.

It's simply the albums I'm interested in this year.

And at the end of the year, I'll come back to the idea from a different direction. Not with a ranking of the year's best albums, but with the albums I actually enjoyed, including perhaps a few I never expected to.