The phantom listening booth

Spring/summer 2026 playlists
Buy Music Club
Deezer
Spotify

Right now I’m listening to the new Fire-Toolz album inside a CD listening booth at a record store that no longer exists.

The booth is a small room, five or so feet square, carpeted on the floor and all sides, and closed off from the rest of the store by a glass-paneled door. Two speakers are mounted at the top of one wall, and opposite that are a pair of chairs. It’s a tight fit, ideal for one or two people, but you can accommodate a third if they stand in the corner.

I’m in the old Waterloo Records location in Austin, circa 1994. You could take any CD up to the counter, they’d put the disc into a player behind the register, and then hand you the jewel case and a remote control. Inside the listening booth, closed off from the rest of the store, you point the remote at the front counter and hit play. Then it’s just you and the music. If the store wasn’t busy, you might take a stack of CDs to the counter and spend a couple of hours in the booth.

The physical location is long gone, but often when I listen to new or unfamiliar music at home I’ll close my eyes and recall that tiny room. Other times I might lay on the floor of my college apartment with headphones, or take a road trip with a now-departed friend. All of these are mementos that usher me into a headspace where I can better discern what I like—or not—about what I’m hearing.

Now, here’s the best of what I heard from the past quarter-year, all of it booth-tested.

The albums, spring-summer 2026

Listen to a playlist of album tracks + some others: Buy Music Club / Deezer / Spotify

The new Boards of Canada album, Inferno, is best experienced while driving in the high desert, but it’s probably perfect at any altitude. The same is true of Paradessence by Visible Cloaks. I didn’t drive anywhere while listening to K Wata’s Give U Space or Hoavi’s Architectonics because the car will rattle when confronted with that much bass. I have in fact blown a speaker while listening to Seefeel, but not to their new one—Sol.Hz—yet. Lavender Networks from Fire-Toolz is a sweeping epic and so far the most beautifully produced album I’ve heard this year, a huge leap forward from an artist who’s already far out ahead of what most anyone else is doing. Ibrahim Alfa Jnr.’s Infinite Black Inside is one of my absolute favorite albums of the year.

Bach Artillerie’s “absurdist” takes on the Goldberg Variations and Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 are unaissably joyful. In an adjacent concert hall, Squarepusher goes orchestral jazz without an orchestra on the unpredictable Kammerkonzert. Sound artist Heather Stebbins and pianist Ning Yu slice up their compositions with shards of distortion on Spirals. Additional classical (kind of) influences abound on upsammy and Valentina Magaletti’s Seismo, an album it seems like I’ve been waiting months to finally hear, but maybe it hasn’t been that long and time is weird. Hazy cosmic jazz abounds on Société Étrange’s wonderful HEAT, and Bitches Blues from Hedvig Mollestad Weejuns is jazzy and sparse with a restrained chaos so beautiful that more than once I’ve neglected to breathe while listening to it. Bot1500’s The Black Sea is crisp and lovely and subtle in all the right ways. Jorge Elbrecht continues his synthpop par excellence Galán project from last year, may it never end.

Artefakt’s third Collaborations installment, this time with KMRU, is an ambient album that grabbed my attention, which could mean it fails as ambient but succeeds as something else that is very gorgeous. Almost Waking from Mabe Fratti and the impossibly prolific Bill Orcutt is an emotional ride, equal parts manic and tender. The new Cancer House EP, The Moth, is 100 percent tender. There’s nothing tender about Magazine, the new YWWH Nailgun album, which everyone mentions is only 11 minutes long, except it might have been four times that with choruses, which is just smart editing. Yu Su’s Foundry is a new opinion of what music should be. Loraine James continues to reinvent time and rhythm on Detached From the Rest of You.

Chanel Beads have released another album called Your Day Will Come, and it’s honestly majestic. Labake Sabbath delivers an essential perspective in Metal Madness, a surprise gem of an album produced at the Gate, a London creative center for adults with learning disabilities, autism, and mental health needs. For High Cube, their debut as Foote/Dickow, longtime collaborators Brian Foote and Paul Dickow worked within a strict set of parameters—”five machines, a one-hour timer, and a total ban on overthinking”—and produced what’s become the soundtrack of the summer around here. Giant Claw and Galen Tipton’s wonderful Mobile Suit Gym Rat is Jock Jams (complimentary) for the rest of us. gyrofield yet again remaps the future of drum and bass on the anything-goes Your Fight EP.

Moor Mother’s Irreversible Entanglements are back with tumultuous, spoken-word free jazz that reckons with a history of oppression on Future Present Past. Joined by Charlotte Jolly’s clarinet (the most haunted of all woodwinds), Loula Yorke trades modular synths for a vintage reed organ on Salix, a trio of soft, contemplative works. Cate Kennan’s Shadows could be an estate sale cassette of deranged chamber pop. An instant favorite, Sergeant’s Symbols is folk horror Clinic, while Picastro’s powerful Double on Time EP erects a wicker man in a nearby village. Desert goths can unite in a reserved sort of joy over SUSS’s Counting Sunsets. Iceage is having a great deal of unhinged fun on For Love of Grace & the Hereafter.

Kristen Gallerneaux’s soaring Life Day is her five-year recognition of the day she suffered a pulmonary embolism and cardiac arrest, and it is a profound listen. Trombonist Kalia Vandever is building fifth-world aesthetics on their latest, Mana. I thought Bobby Ingham’s Angel of the North was Burial-adjacent the first time I listened, but now I think it’s doing its own thing. Clocking in just under 90 minutes, Speedy J’s Walkman is a generous helping of ingenious ambient techno. Discovery Zone’s latest, Library Copy Do Not Remove, is artisanal ambient bliss. I lost myself over and over in techno god Carl Craig’s astounding Meditations. The self-titled debut from Spirit Level is sorcery from a saxophone. I will spend many years wading through the organic, textured worlds within Juckport, the new electronic masterpiece from Mukqs.

A better way to follow artists

As a streaming platform, Spotify is terrible for reasons you already know: dismal payouts for artists, funding autonomous warfare, replacing real music with store brands. But as a streaming app it’s difficult to replace because of its broad set of genuinely useful features, at least one of which will probably lock listeners into the platform. For me, that’s been the Release Radar playlist, which does a more reliable job than any of the other apps of alerting me to when artists I follow put out something new.

A new thing I’ve been testing out for the past six months or so has been MusicButler, which connects with Spotify, Apple Music, etc., to pull your following feed, and then emails you with a batch of releases whenever they’re out. This plus Bandcamp alerts plus artist mailing lists plus Bluesky (because no algorithm) does a better job for me than Spotify ever did. Also, a few years ago the MusicButler developer was going to close up shop until members came to the rescue, which is just about the best sign of something being enshittification-proof as I’ve ever seen.

A thing I neglected to mention

I had this Twitter project in 2022 and early 2023 that I called “From Ziggy to Aladdin.” The whole thing was centered around the 50th anniversary of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust era, which started in 1972 during the run-up to the release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, continued through the following year’s Aladdin Sane, and ended in dramatic fashion with his July 3, 1973, onstage announcement that it would be their final show. My idea was that I would tweet news, reviews, and other media (think: bootleg concert audio) 50 years to the day after it happened. It was a lot of work and ran pretty much solely on my enthusiasm, which, along with my active followers, fell off pretty sharply after Elon Musk acquired and ruined Twitter in the middle of my project. Anyway, I ended it four months early, downloaded my Twitter archive, and never did anything else with it. But again, it was a lot of work, and I thought it could use a home, so it’s now here, and maybe someday I’ll fill in the rest of it.

A mix that revives

I love how this mix by sleepdial travels from the gauzy and heady to the pulsing and sort-of-but-exactly buoyant, like waking from a dream with intention for what’s ahead. Also, there’s a lot of great finds waiting to be discovered in the accompanying interview and tracklist.