The autumn after Carla Bley died, Steve Swallow made a record that keeps 1957's hours. 他五歲在留聲機上聽見的三首舞曲，八十年後編進了自己的蕭邦。

Steve Swallow — Winter Songs

Released發行

2026-06-26（iTunes API releaseDate 一手；ECM 官網頁一致）

Steve Swallow is eighty-five, and Winter Songs is the first album to carry his name as leader in thirteen years; the last was Into the Woodworks, in 2013. He cut it at Sear Sound in New York in September 2024, less than a year after the death of Carla Bley, his partner in music and in life for four decades. You brace, a little, for an elegy. What arrives instead is warmth and a peculiar plainness — the nine tunes are titled only by number, "Two," "Four," "Six," "Eight," as if names would say more than he wanted to. Reviewers keep reaching for 1957, for the easy swing of an old Blue Note date, and they are right that the record keeps those hours: a six-piece band, with Chris Cheek's tenor and Gil Goldstein's piano, plays with the unhurried courtesy of people who have nothing left to prove. The effect is not nostalgia but consolation, a man building standards-shaped rooms because the shape itself holds the weight.

Elena Urioste & Tom Poster — Thème Varié

Released發行

2026-07-17（iTunes API releaseDate 一手；Chandos CHAN20380 / Presto 7/17 新刊一致）

This is really an album about teaching. Its center is Guillaume Lekeu's G-major Violin Sonata of 1892, written for Ysaÿe by a young man who studied with César Franck — and Franck, it turns out, is the hinge of the whole program. He taught Lekeu; he taught Mel Bonis; Bonis in turn taught Charlotte Sohy, whose Thème varié lends the record its title. Urioste and Poster follow that line of descent through Messiaen, two Saint-Saëns élégies, and a nocturne by Elsa Barraine, and the pleasure is partly genealogical: you can hear a manner of phrasing passed hand to hand across four decades, mostly through women whose names never made the syllabus.

Peter Donohoe — The Chopin I Love

Released發行

2026-07-17（SOMM label 頁一手：SOMMCD 0726 / EAN 748871072626；iTunes 搜索 id 6769249698 一致）

The title is borrowed — from an Arthur Rubinstein LP that Donohoe wore out as a boy — and there is something disarming about a pianist of seventy-two naming his Chopin after someone else's. The bulk is the complete Op. 28 Préludes played straight through as a single arc, but the tell is the encore: the three Écossaises, Op. 72, which Donohoe says he fell for at the age of five, hearing Alexander Brailowsky on the family's wind-up gramophone. Seven decades of playing, and he ends where he began.

FAUZIA — I Was Here For a Moment (EP)

Released發行

2026-07-17（iTunes API releaseDate 一手 id 6769915838；Bandcamp album 頁 "released 17 July 2026" 一致）

Quicksand — Bring On The Psychics

Released發行

2026-07-17（Bandcamp album 頁 "released 17 July 2026" 一手）

Quicksand's first album in five years, and their third since the New York post-hardcore band reconvened. The news is in the method: where they once labored, they handed the record to Jon Markson — the producer behind Drug Church and Drain — and cut it in something like ten days. For a group famous for overthinking, the speed is the statement.

Swapmeet — Mount Zero

Released發行

2026-07-17（Bandcamp album 頁 "releases 17 July 2026" 一手）

A debut LP from an Adelaide four-piece who trade instruments and split the production between them, layering a song up to dozens of tracks and then quietly taking most of them away. What's left is slowcore with a lot of held breath in it. They have the local trophies to prove the songs land; this is the record that has to travel.

Hawksmoor — Yclept Thorn

Released發行

2026-07-17（Bandcamp album 頁 "released 17 July 2026" 一手）

James McKeown's dungeon-synth project makes its medieval dread out of analog machines breathing in and out of time. The tracklist reads like the index of a grimoire — Ockham, Aquinas, Trismosin, Llull — and the music has the same air of a scholar alone in a cold room with the wrong books. A small thing, on a cult horror-synth label, but it stays with you.

鮮克 (Xiānkè) — 有終時 無終日

Released發行

2026-06-30（網易雲音樂首發獨家；知乎 week-27 華語新專輯 roundup 一手佐證）

A Chinese art-rock project I stumbled onto through a NetEase roundup, released at the end of June and, for now, streaming only there. The hook is simple and strange: they thread Kunqu-opera singing — the six-hundred-year-old vocal art — through synthesizers, across eight tracks built on a single theme. The name comes from an old proverb, roughly "few see things through to the end," which is either modest or nervy from a group finally delivering a debut album some six years after its first single. I can't vouch for more than a couple of listens yet, but the collision alone is worth your afternoon.