If The Cap Fits, Wear It. (Unless It's Not Yours, In Which Case It's Theft!)

Dead Dads Club, Dexys Midnight Runners, Formal Sppeedwear, Kirk Barley, Lambchop, This Band Is Lorelei

Country music, electronic ambience, classic pop and alternative spelling

Love : Dexys Midnight Runners

Best for : Sweet, string driven love songs filled with warmth

Kevin Rowland is one of pop's great mavericks, changing persona as radically and as often as Bowie. Here, for the most part, he's showing us a gentler, warmer, loving side than we've seen before. It makes for one of the most unexpectedly gratifying albums of 2026.

He knows how to get your attention. His vocals on the opening track 'My Life In England Pt.1' are stretched and twisted, full of mannerisms and mangled as far as they can go, as if they're being dragged out of him. They're the product of a voice only a mother could love but, fortunately, they settle down midway through the song into something eminently listenble. It's as if he's setting out that this is Kevin Rowland as we haven't heard him before, emotionally as well as audibly. The album lives up to that introduction.

If Dexy's debut 'Searching For The Young Soul Rebels' brought brass into new wave, and 'Too Rye Ay' returned the fiddle to the mainstream, 'Love's' defining characteristic is the kind of lush and swooning Philly strings that replicate the rush of dopamine through your veins and the contented feel of late night Drambuie fuelled reflections. The young soul rebel now demonstrates a yearning for the beauty of clouds rendered pink at sunset.

If you've cherished Dexys as a single unit, you may be a little disappointed that this is more a case of Kevin Rowlnd and a first class backing band making an excellent solo album.

'My Life In England Pt 1' is the earworm song on the album. It's a glorious slice of classic pop and the football chant pronunciation of "ENG-ER-LAND" will lodge in your head all day, a little irritatingly after a while! 'Once a Man, Twice a Child' is the eye opener, a sign that something has changed. This is about the loss of his father and it reveals a sincerity, simplicity and seriousness of intent that triggers a reassessment of Rowland the man rather than the gobbier Rowland the performer. Even the break up song 'It's Over Now' avoids the kind of bitterness we might have heard from him in the past. Fitting right in with the tone is a Dexy's Christmas song 'I Want To Be Holding You Next Christmas'. 'I'll Always Love You' darkens the strings as it edges towards Marc Almond's style and takes the passionate emotion of Latin America with it. 'Strange Feelin'' is the stuff of contented dreams you don't want to wake up from.

What's missing is one of Rowland's sermons. On this album he's letting the music do the talking but just as you think he is a changed man, he throws a little rebellion into the mix with a brief state of the nation address, culminating in an exhortation to rise up against the ills around us today.

This feels like Kevin Rowland's most autobiographical album. An autobiography often marks the drawing of a line and the end of something. If that's the case here, it's a lovely way to bow out.

Taster Track : Once a Man, Twice a Child

The Singer In My Band : This Is Lorelei

Best for : Oppressive country.

The two genres that dominate American music are rap and country. To an outsider it seems as if music is split into two completely different worlds depending on whether you're from the North or the South.

The big problem with having a clear musical identity thrust upon you and based on where you're from is that you'll always have those who want to shrug it off and make their own path. That's the unvoiced issue at the heart of This Is Lorelei's album.

This Is Lorelei have a few good time songs here. 'The Singer In My Band' and 'Billy Came Back' show a love for playing and the stories you can tell. The first has a solid country twang, complete with banjo picking. The second warms up with a decent chorus and an inexplicable love for the music shines through.

Elsewhere it's a different story. 'Oh No Now My' contains a panicky confusion reflected in urgent music. It's the kind of nightmare song about relationships that Springsteen used to make his own before he cut the chains that bound him to them. It contains bleak echoes of another Texas boy, but one who moved away, Elliott Smith. There's an uncomfortable authenticity in the sound, and it feels as if this is where his heart is at the moment. Elliott Smith returns as an influence in the vocals of 'The Kid With The Crown'.

One thing's clear. For all his ability with the country twang, This Is Lorelei is a great guitarist. He shows this on 'Nitro' and 'Hey Sarah Is It Gonna Rain Forever'. If he weren't, the sense of being trapped in the wrong musical clothes would be less. He doesn't want to belong. He can't move away. Unfortunately, he doesn't entice me to stay in the empty, sparse and unfriendly world of 'Don't You Cry In Lonesomeness' that he paints so successfully. I'd like a little tenderness to sweeten and lighten the angry hopelessness that becomes the album's overarching tone.

And there you have it. This Is Lorelei is torn into two halves that don't want to be together. Do you choose one to follow, or do you just walk away?

Taster Track : Nitro

Punch Card : Formal Sppeedwear

Best for : Art music that favours the brave and leave them smiling

The only irritating thing about Formal Sppeedwear is the way they spell their name. Everything else about them is challenging in a good way that takes you back, convincingly, to the days of late 70s / early 80s John Peel.

These songs are full of fat bass lines, staccato guitars, impeccably varied percussion and manic vocals that pause just the right side of overbearing anguish. They're a band that wrench everything from their instruments and vocals to make a form of anti pop that seems to avoid anything that might seem tuneful and yet still delivers earworm after hook after earworm in every song. You have to love the skill of a band that can keep it all together while hovering on the brink of chaos. The clean and sharp production plays a key role in this.

Formal Sppeedwear make whole songs out of the fractured patterns used by others to introduce or bridge a song. What you feel from this music is movement. This is limb music for when you need to lose yourself in mindless dancing. It's music that demands flailing arms, jerking legs and plenty of room on the indie disco dancefloor. The band are from Staffordshire, and if this is Potteries pop it's the kind to keep you sweatily warm on a cold, damp Wednesday evening in Stoke.

Like monkeys furiously trying to type a version of Shakespeare and succeeding with half of a line, Formal Sppeedwear's approach means that there are a few seconds in 'Aardvark X2' that cross over into a line of synthpop, like a hedgehog successfully navigating a dual carriageway. It's almost a jolt to hear it and, perhaps something to add into the mix on future recordings.

'Punch Card' is not new, but it is fresh. Inspired by Brian Eno, you'll hear tones of early Talking Heads and, particularly David Byrne vocals. You'll always find with experimental art rock that Bowie got there first, this time with his 'Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)' album. This is what XTC might have sounded like if they hadn't had Colin Moulding on hand to craft some glorious pop songs.

If I had known what to expect beforehand I might have let this go. I'm very glad I stayed for the ride. It's exhilarating.

Taster Track : Fleas

Arc : Kirk Barley

Best for : Ambient trance and tranquility

When the Beatles sang on 'Tomorrow Never Knows' "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream", Kirk Barley was listening. More than that, it seems that he has spent a lot of time making the kind of music that allows you to do exactly that.

Aided by percussionist Matt Davies on four tracks, Barley has made an album that is truly hypnotic and trance inducing. This is music for sending you into that mental state conducive to deep, restorative sleep, capturing the moment when your ears begin to sense and detect the less obvious sounds. You'll know what I mean when you hear the first electronic whoosh of 'Billow'.

This is the music headphones were made for. It's not the sound of the future any more. It's music to draw you into the world around you and listen to it deeply. It incorporates sound as much as notes. Every note, every beat and every sonic effect makes its mark. Think of clouds scudding across blue skies while, at ground level, your field of vision is filled by technicoloured flowers. Or, recall that feeling of drifting away on the rise and fall of waves far out to sea without the fear of stormy weather ahead. 'Knead' gives you more calming whooshes. You'll catch the sense of pealing bells and centuries of idyllic sentiment from 'Fret (Haar)'.

Barley keeps each piece short. You'll wander through nine tracks in just 32 minutes. That's long enough to explore the repeating patterns in each piece that evolve slowly to reveal gradual variations and depths and it's short enough to keep concentration sharp.

'Arc' is ambient electronica at its best, but it also includes human collaboration at its finest. Barley and Davies are in complete sympathy with each other's musical vision.

This is, by some margin, the best ambient electronica record I've heard in 2026.

Taster Track : Fret (Haar)

Dead Dads Club : Dead Dads Club

Best for : A return to 2010's indie rock to channel cathartic grief

There was a time, around 15 years ago, when everything had to be loud. It was something to do with compression of CD data. The problem was that a listener could only listen to so much compressed music - 15 to 20 minutes - before it became too much and they switched off. In addition, you had bands such as The Chemical Brothers creating overwhelming tsunamis of sound through bigger sound systems to create pressure waves that you literally felt in every part of your body. Musically, Dead Dads Club are rooted in that time, and it shows.

There's another thing you need to know about this album. Chilli Jesson recently became a father for the first time, an emotional event that also unlocked grief for the loss of his own father when he was fourteen. There's a powerful sense of cathartic release across the songs here. If you don't know that you may feel that their presence comes out of their speakers, not their personality.

Sometimes, it's necessary to know the context of what you're hearing. I've completely rewritten this review in the light of what I've found online. Music that I first felt was the equivalent of an explosion in a fireworks factory - too loud and overwhelmingly bright - makes a lot more sense. This now stands as a record that is both extremely personal and meaningful. It's the damn burst that allows you to move on.

The downside is that these can feel like songs that want to bludgeon you into submission with their musical gluttony, their constant need to pile more and more into their songs until you are unable to process any more. They're not ashamed of that. Rather, they exult in its release.

There are songs here that turn it down just anotch. 'It's Only Just Begun' is a surprisingly melodic opener, with a more reflective approach. 'Volatile Child' has the air of Arcade Fire. It's a big song and full of surprises that you want to explore again and again. For songs such as 'Don't Blame the Son for the Sins of the Father' that feel forced into a pre-determined sound, there's a song such as 'That's Life' that feels more natural and is all the better for it.

On first hearing this was an album that impressed with its size and power, but didn't win me over. With greater understanding it left me wanting to revisit the band in the future in anticipation of finding a way through the noise to more accessible feeling.

Taster Track : Volatile Child

Punching The Clown : Lambchop

Best for : Country music as you've never heard it before

I saw Lambchop live a few years ago. They're Kurt Wagner's band, yet he performed the whole show from the edge of the stage with a baseball cap pulled low down over his face so that we never saw his face. You couldn't take your eyes off him. Now, take a look at the album cover for 'Punching The Clown'. It's a spectacular scene of rocks and waterfalls, so impressive that it could only exist once in the world. Look closer and you may notice faint splashes of colour around the centre of the scene. Finally, as you drag your eyes from the bigger picture, you may notice something in the bottom right hand corner. It's Lambchop, still on the edge of the world he's part of, retaining a quiet presence but completely commanding the scene once you know he's there. THat's how he is on this album.

Lambchop is a country act, just as Radiohead is a rock act. It's a label of convenience, because no genre can truly contain the ambition and risk taking of his music. There are times here, as on 'Andrew Jackson Asshat' and others, when he flies closer to Mozart than Willie Nelson. You could describe it as ectopic music, rooted in country but dislocated to an abnormal place

This is music for a tumbled down and partially broken world. It's recognisable and simultaneously completely different. It's country music at heart but with full blooded choirs. Listening to this is like stumbling into a mountain community that has an awareness of the wider world but no real connection to it.

One way that Lambchop commands attention is that his vocals have moved on from their earlier mumbled growl. On this album he includes everything from earthy tones to falsetto, and never in an expected way. In 'Stella' his voice is almost referencing hillbilly. It's 'Stella' too that perhaps provides the key to the album when he sings "Let the games begin."

And what games they are. On the gorgeous reverie 'Just West of Nicollet' he refuses to conform to whatever expectations you bring to the record. He progresses from a sparse opening, to introduce surging backing and choral embellishments whilst including a random interruption as if recorded live on a street corner. Quiet is the new loud here. On songs such as 'A Doctor In The House' he sings with restraint but you listen from first to last. 'The New World Wave' allows glimpses of a more conventional melody, or maybe you're hearing it clearly as your ears have been opened by what you've heard so far. 'To Do' is a rare, tender and reflective moment.

This album may be challenging and demanding, but it's also difficult to ignore.

Taster Track : The New World Wave