This is it: the final run-in to the end of 2026. who’s making a play to squeeze onto those coveted Songs Of The Year lists? Turns out a whole lot of people. It’s a million-horse race for the nth year running. Here are our tips to upset the apple cart.
Below is the track list and some notes from our team about why they’ve selected them for this month’s playlist.
Andy Stott – “Songbird”
Title be damned, this sounds more like that poor canary in the coalmine. Stott leaning so heavily into guest vocalists across Late Loop is interesting, and it perhaps works no better than here: across his crashing, cold, metallic soundscape, Elaine Howley desperately seeks a reprieve (“you’re just tryin’ to protect your heart,” she wearily intones), one which Stott seems to be saying quite plainly is not coming. Existential distress across four-and-a-half minutes. – Chase McMullen
Atlas Sound – “Octoberland”
Guess when every day feels like ghouls are rampaging through a decaying wasteland, the season loses its touch: I didn’t feel like Halloween this year. But there’s one sudden flash of magic that did permeat the momentary stillness: the greatest, the legend is back! Bradford Cox released his first new song in seven years! His first work since the lockdown.
Sensationally sweet, “Octoberland” extends the idea of Halloween out onto a landscape. Over a minimalist tune, Cox sings of mythical imagery, rich in cosmic sublimity: “Women and children / The vanilla smoke / All is orange flash / From the brown oaks / Rub your lesions with this ointment / Made of crushed cicadas / From two months ago / The air is hollow”.
Yes, the lyrics suggest horror and desparation, yet – as he’s done before many times – Cox manages to use the idea of disaster to conjure a strange sense of comfort. Nostalgia for the apocalyptic, which comes quietly, with grace and peace. He’s back, Cox, draped in amber. – John Wohlmacher
The Avalanches – “Can’t Get Over Losing You” (feat. Portraits of Tracy)
This album is pure nostalgia. It happens to double as a blast of pure joy. You mean to say I can feel my age, shamelessly explore the past for a bit, and feel absolutely content and warm doing so? Let’s. – Chase McMullen
Cameron Winter – “Love Takes Miles (Live at Carnegie Hall)”
By now, the studio version of “Love Takes Miles” is widely known and played, with tens of millions of streams and recognition as one of the finest songs of recent times. So it would take something special for it to be heard entirely new again, but that’s what Cameron Winter does in this piano-and-voice rendition from his spellbinding live album. Where the original floats and bobs, this one is sheer guts and gusto; the central thesis of love being something you have to work at tirelessly is wrought even more vividly in this setting, where his indefatigable cascade of keys and vocals just keeps pushing that boulder up the hill to reach an indefinable beauty and meaning. It’s breathless, it’s brave, it’s inspiring. – Rob Hakimian
CARI – “Baaad!”
Facedown in a pillow, CARI laments a crush who’s turned her into a “stone cold killer”. The West London-based R&B singer takes cues from Miguel and the thoughts of a burgeoning stalker, having left the border dividing sex and love in the rearview, masochistically engaged in degradation if it means she can stay near. Her faster-harder pleas are undermined by the track’s dragging pace, as if the song itself is sentient and pulling her back from the precipice. – Steve Forstneger
Cordelia Gartside – “laura palmer”
Using the titular Twin Peaks character as an avenue to explore a feeling of being wanted but not being understood, Cordelia Gartside’s first track from her forthcoming pattern repeating EP aims for that same space and feeling you might experience at The Roadhouse. Careful and quiet to begin with, it swells to a crescendo of scraping violins, crashing drums, and shimmering guitars. A call to “annihilate her” becomes “illuminate her” by the end of the track, showing Cartside’s affiliation with Palmer. For a brief three minutes, Gartside seeks to become her icon. – Ray Finlayson
Deafheaven – “Sorry Laid The Hearth”
Even at their most vicious-sounding, Deafheaven have often centred on beauty and tenderness as their central emotion and lyrical thrust. That is not the case here. The new EP At Work In The Fields of the Bomb is preoccupied with the manufacture of nuclear weapons, and 12-minute closer “Sorry Laid The Hearth” is the aural emodiment of the destruction – physical, emotional, biological – that they yield. Appropriately, it’s one of the band’s most unforgiving tracks sonically, with thunderous double time drumming rippling the earth throughout and avalanches of guitar ceaselessly cascading down atop it. A moment of respite half way through just leaves a pit in your stomach as time momentarily stops and you see the hellscape clearly. Then the noise comes back, sidewinding harder from all angles. George Clarke’s dagger vocals cut from all sides, driving home the point (whether you can make out the words or not): this is the end of all. Welcome to the apocalypse. – Rob Hakimian
The Flaming Lips – “God Will Control The Werewolves”
With their new song, “God Will Control the Werewolves” (from their upcoming album, The Teardrop Throbs), The Flaming Lips revisit the stylistics of their 1999 LP, The Soft Bulletin. Using sparse yet weighty instrumentation, and carried by Wayne Coyne’s expressive, tremulous voice, the band run traditional werewolf lore through a kid-friendly filter. The song is melancholy yet somehow whimsical, as Coyne sidesteps the realities of danger and disappointment in order to affirm and sustain his son’s innocence. The piece ends with a sudden and somewhat jarring truncation, which perhaps points to … the end of innocence and, metaphorically speaking, the inevitable loss of paradise? – John Amen
Gloria de Oliveira – “Leda Saw Eyes”
On “Leda Saw Eyes” (from her new fourth album, The Lying Swans), Gloria de Oliveira again navigates mythic terrain, her crystalline voice occasionally recalling a cross between Kate Bush, Ane Brun, and Tori Amos. Buoyed by synthesizers, guitars, piano, and drums, as well as an assortment of flourishes and accents, de Oliveira relates a tale of self-inquiry, removal from the world, and transformation – blending the Leda story with a contemporary, pro-feminist angle. In this way, she hints at the horrors of the original tale while invoking the power of intention and the autonomy of the individual. – John Amen
Goldie Boutillier – “The Alligator”
Like a Fleetwood Mac-obsessed Lana Del Rey, Goldie Boutillier’s flair for fashion magazine-grade, pouty aesthetics can be as stylish as it is predictable. Less inevitable are the many connected parts of “Alligator”. While the namesake reptile is known for reaching terrifyingly high speeds on the ground, it can only do so in a straight line. Boutillier’s track twists at pace like a snake, and is strangely reminiscent — once you get past the rockabilly-like slapback echo and Leslie’d guitars — of Franz Ferdinand’s post-punk-cum-acid-house deep cut, “Lucid Dreams”. – Steve Forstneger
Gwenifer Raymond – “Bird Songs For Atomic Skies”
Freshly signed to the Fat Possum record label, Gwenifer Raymond’s first release from her new home is a vigorous and exciting slice of stunning dexterity. Her guitar playing is almost carnal, swelling to peaks where is is impossible to process that one person is playing all these notes. What sounds like a drum kit behind her provides momentum and splashes of cymbals during the most excitable frenzies, but the guitar is doing all the heavy lifting. It’s bluesy at its core and its folk-like during its gentle moments; it’s music that won’t be mistaken for anyone else’s. – Ray Finlayson
Lisa – “Tarantino”
A Thai K-pop star doing a bizarro Country Western-adjacent banger, and calling it “Tarantino”? With the most obvious nod to the director being framed around his fondness of feet? Is it ridiculous? Absolutely. Is it brazen, shameless, compulsively listenable fun? Also yes. – Chase McMullen
MC Eiht – “N the Mixx”
DJ Muggs lacing MC Eiht in 2026? Sometimes you really shouldn’t need to say more. It doesn’t go out of its way, and it doesn’t need to; a laidback slice of Cali perfection. From Compton’s Most Wanted to his Good Kid, m.A.A.d City turn and on, Eiht has always, always held it down. Flowers, please. (PSA: His new album also hosts a Pete Rock cut.) – Chase McMullen
Sophia Stel – “Bitches Talk Shit”
This song ain’t for most of us, and that’s a good thing. This is for the kids out there actively engaging with the sort of rapture that it so successfully captures. A world in which every night is a possibility, every wayward glance a chance, every club the potential for life-altering connection. Indeed, it so perfectly bottles that feeling that even 30-something me can nearly remember just how it all felt. Use sparingly, perhaps? This damn album takes you there. – Chase McMullen
Listen to our BPM Curates: October 2026 playlist here.
