The last few years have been a whirlwind for Glasgow’s corto.alto, aka Liam Shortall. From jamming with friends in his flat to a Mercury Prize nomination and worldwide tours, his rise as an artist in the UK jazz scene has been mesmeric.
Alongside long-term bandmates Graham Costello and Fergus McCreadie, corto.alto peaked with a few of these aforementioned accolades after releasing 2023’s Bad with Names. Now signed to the revered indie label Ninja Tune, their follow-up, SOME SMALL FORTUNE, faces more pressure than ever to meet expectations. Thankfully, Shortall lets the music do the talking.
Leading visually with its artwork collated from images from Shortall’s childhood, this collage-like approach is what binds together…
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…Recorded between 1988 and 1989 in a small 8-track home studio in Amman, Jordan, Pieces of a Dream captures a side of the Arab music scene rarely documented: a group of musicians deeply inspired by jazz, soul, yacht rock and city pop, creating music that sounds closer to late-night LA or London than what most would associate with Jordan at the time.
Like clockwork, Dinner Party’s third brief studio project arrived three years after Enigmatic Society, which followed the self-titled debut by the same time span. The core quartet, consisting of facilitator/producer 
Few artists treat genre with the same radical disregard for boundaries as Willow Smith, who has steadily emerged as a singular architect of modern sound by blending disparate styles with striking vocal agility. The sheer momentum of her recent output reveals an artist relentlessly chasing new sonic horizons. Arriving just five months after February’s petal rock black, her eighth solo studio album, The Thread, marks her second full-length project of 2026. This tireless work ethic has fueled a stunningly compressed evolutionary arc. She transitions from the distorted pop-punk rhythms of 2021’s 
Corey King brings a spellbinding, cross-genre fluidity to his third album, 2026’s Change the Wind. A trained jazz trombonist, King is also a singer/songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who has worked with a diverse array of artists including José James, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, and Iggy Pop. He also took home a Grammy for his co-writing and production work on singer/bassist Esperanza Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab. He brings all of this experience to bear on his solo work, crafting a holistic blend of alt-R&B, indie rock, and electronica. The follow-up to 2019’s A Loveless Sunken Sun, Change the Wind is a deeply personal production that finds King once again revealing his many-textured sound. The album was also written and…
New Orleans funk and R&B legend Cyril Neville has released Don’t Wait Til I’m Gone, his first solo album in several years. Produced by trumpeter/ vocalist Shamarr Allen, the album features a wide-ranging cast of New Orleans musicians, including members of the 
When Steve Lacy released “Nice Shoes” last summer — a teaser for his new album Oh Yeah? that dropped alongside his Rolling Stone cover story — the song took fans by surprise. Its frenetic breakbeat signaled a looming sonic departure for Lacy, whose Grammy-winning output includes virtuosic instrumentation for everyone from The Internet (their long-awaited new album is on the way) to Kendrick Lamar.
Like another of the year’s biggest pop records, Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the second full-length from the self-proclaimed “emotional junglist” Nia Archives is an album of two halves. The first documents its protagonist falling in love at breakneck speed; the second, the whiplash of sudden heartbreak. Unlike Rodrigo, Archives didn’t grow up starring on Disney Channel, a predestined route to success, but in Bradford, cutting her teeth on early 00s pirate radio, dancehall and landfill indie.
Przemysław Jankowiak, aka 2k88 (and fka 1988), is one of Poland’s most singular producers. Long associated with alternative rap and experimental electronics, he gained a cult following as a member of duo Syny and later lent his hand to some of the adventurous figures in the Polish mainstream. His music is, like his concerts, full of smoke: airy, cloudy, inscrutable, dreamy, and unreal.
New Avatar marks a full-circle moment for 
Having ceded creative control to numerous collaborators on 2022’s 
Jacklyn records is famed among soul record collectors as the home of three great Darrow Fletcher 45s issued on the label in the mid-60s. The imprint was owned and run by his father, Johnny Haygood, and though it served as a stepping stone in Fletcher’s extensive career, it was launched for a different artist and provided Chicago soul fans with several great discs over its seven-year existence.
Adam Kyriakou’s