Music in January 2026

Here’s my January 2026 playlist:

·        I really appreciate this version of How Firm A Foundation, which I encountered on the soundtrack to the excellent 2020 adaptation of Emma, which no one seems to have really talked about because of the pandemic.

·        ROSALIA’s melodramatic 2025 album Lux is kind of impossible to ignore even for someone totally unfamiliar with that oeuvre like me.

·        Anywhere is a new song that feels beamed out of middle school.

·        I don’t actually know what Elderberry Wine tastes like, and I don’t like champagne, but I do like this song.

·        I Want You (Fever) is another ‘90s-nostalgia earworm that suggests that, artistically, the kids are all right.

·        I don’t understand Emperor X’s Freeway in Heaven – as someone who makes money marketing highway engineering, I would hope that we would all be spending as much time as possible on the freeway in heaven. But this is a gorgeous, strange little song.

·        The Beginning is a typically manic and upbeat track that ends Magdalena Bay’s album Mercurial World, which is great fun.

·        Dance The Pain Away is a sort of battle anthem for theater kids.

·        Take Me To Beijing introduced me to Chinese American Bear, a goofy, warm, and syrupy band that slots right into the growing popularity of Mandarin-English bilingual cultural products

·        The Boss turned out a topical protest ballad practically overnight in January, which now serves as a good reminder of the crimes of the current administration, which pile up so fast that it’s easy to forget what they were up to just a few months ago.

·        The All Time High has long been one of my favorite examples of Team Me’s exuberant sound.

·        Mahashmashana is grandiose and stunning even by the standards of Father John Misty, and it earns its nine-minute runtime.

·        How Could I Have Known is an achingly lovely reminiscence from Big Thief.

·        Both Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs achieve a kind of implausibly reedy filigree of sound, each in their own way.

·        The Grey Funnel Line combines two of my favorite things: maritime folk revival & melancholy music.

·        I keep putting The Beths in these playlists, but I just can’t stop. Mosquitoes gets right under my skin, to the point where I start singing along like it’s a cathartic auto-eulogy, a letting go.

·        All the remaining songs are, likewise, just different ways of saying goodbye.