When it comes to music, the concept of "best" might be a lie, but our love stays true. The 24 albums and songs on you'll find on this page are our most fervent answers to the question we probably get asked most often, by friends and family and new acquaintances alike: What should I listen to?
In celebration of the mid-point of the year and in an effort to spread the love, a dozen members of NPR Music's team — podcast hosts, critics and editors — each distilled their affections down to one song and one album from the first half of 2026. These are our highest recommendations.
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No. 1 Albums of 2026 (So Far)
Nate Chinen recommends:
Kacey Musgraves, Middle of Nowhere
Everybody knows this is Kacey Musgraves' return to country form, after seasons of surveying the skies and searching within. Thing is, she never stopped being a Texas troubadour at heart, and now sees no reason to check her therapeutic, psychedelic or cosmic insights at the swinging saloon door. Singing with feeling while determined not to make a fuss about it, Musgraves sounds more compass-centered than she has since Golden Hour. And she sounds like she's having fun again — flirting with norteño and Western swing, sparking collaborations that can feel benedictory (patron saint Willie Nelson), conciliatory (former rival Miranda Lambert), crafty (longtime songwriting partners Luke Laird and Shane McAnally) or just plain smart (pedal steel ace Paul Franklin). In songs like "Dry Spell" and "Everybody Wants to Be a Cowboy," Kacey pulls off a familiar yet still impressive feat: finding wisdom in the wisecracks, giving the heartbreak plenty of heart.
Hazel Cills recommends:
underscores, U
"It's everything to me," is how underscores, the moniker of artist April Harper Grey, describes her relationship to music. Listening to what she's created, you can absolutely tell. The 26-year-old electronic artist grew up making songs, posting her tracks online as a tween, and she has carried that DIY spirit into adulthood as a sort of one-woman studio, writing, playing and producing all her music herself. For her third album, U, she harnesses her talent for making earworm hyperpop and levels up, releasing a proper pop album that filters the sound of early 2000s bubblegum and freaky R&B through glitchy dubstep. Recorded in transit while on tour in hotels and malls, U is a dizzyingly catchy and ambitious album about being in a state of constant transit, traveling at hyper-speed to the next stage of underscores' immensely promising stardom.
Sheldon Pearce recommends:
Aldous Harding, Train on the Island
As someone growing exhausted by "narrative" as a precursor to and creative constraint for event albums, there has been no greater tonic than Train on the Island, which feels like a network of doors leading to rich, unexplainable, interconnected worlds. Harding is one of music's finest method actors, with not just a knack for scene work and character immersion but a rare insight into the surreality of performance itself. The figures in her models are as sharply defined as they are completely confounding. She toys with voice and meaning, her songs adventurous but not sprawling — indie-pop as a one-woman vaudeville routine. The album can be dry and lush; funny and haunting; strange and stunning. As Harding shuffles from one milieu to the next, she tests the divide between the self-conscious, the subconscious and the hallucinatory.
Robin Hilton recommends:
Balming Tiger, Gongbu
You don't need to speak a word of Korean to get lost in the wild world of sounds and rhythms on Gongbu, the latest concept album from the Seoul-based creative collective Balming Tiger. At turns playful and gritty, it swings from delicate, childlike wonder to deep global grooves, ramshackle singalongs and moody atmospherics. The shifts are stylish, unpredictable and always rewarding. As Gongbu unfolds, it tells the story of a fictional research lab where scientists record and conduct experiments on human dreams. You don't really need to know any of that, but it's part of the Kafkaesque undercurrent that helps make Gongbu one of the year's most arresting listens.
Anamaria Sayre recommends:
Broke Carrey, Hijo Del País
Son of the country. This aptly named record is the Argentine artist's sonic commitment to his patria. As homages to home and ancestry are rising in popularity across Latin America, some attempts to pull on the past feel less authentic. Broke Carrey's spin on Argentine sound, starting personal and contemporary and then leaning a bit backwards, makes it clear that his sonic landscape is painted in equal parts choice, upbringing and destiny. Between rugged, tango-nodding piano and carefully laid opposing beats, the most Argentine thing about Hijo Del País is its certainty in what it is and its insistence on moving toward a sound and space we haven't heard yet.
Ann Powers recommends:
Cécile McLorin Salvant, With Every Breath I Take
Working with arranger Darcy James Argue and the Netherlands' Metropole Orkest, Cécile McLorin Salvant — jazz's most brilliant living vocalist — rebuilds the genre's repertoire from the inside out. Go deeper, and you'll find the thread. Each song animates a soul in transition: falling in or out of love, leaving or being left, giving up something crucial, finding what makes life bearable in pain's aftermath. Salvant's soliloquies travel across time; her "Sophisticated Lady" considers both Ella and Billie while drawing its own conclusions about the costs of the good life. Yet even as she displays deep insight into Ellington, Brecht, Legrand and Coward, Salvant always keeps the listener in the present, deep within the changes the selves in these songs express. Her mission is to reveal new ways to think about what Sondheim distilled in one song she owns here: being alive.
Rodney Carmichael recommends:
GENA, The Pleasure is Yours
The Pleasure Is Yours isn't an album. It's alchemy. As the unexpected duo GENA, singer-songwriter Liv.e and drummer-producer Karriem Riggins make fuzzy textures and slippery tempos their time signature with the studied but improvised approach they bring to their respective instruments. To call it soulful somehow ain't redux, or futurist, enough. These are the sounds of blackity-Blackness refracted through the kaleidoscope of collective memory. Must be what the grown folk were bumping on the lit side of our bedroom door while we laid in bed wide-awake listening to glasses clinking, records spinning and midnight trippin' away.
Daoud Tyler-Ameen recommends:
Imani Imani, Papercut
Even as the curtain rises on her debut, the elusive R&B newcomer Imani Ram refuses to unmask, lurking behind a flurry of rage kicks before gently dropping the line that could be a motto for her nascent career: "I don't even know your name / But I can feel all the things you say." The first pgLang signee who doesn't run into Kendrick Lamar at family reunions, Imani wields her anonymity like a 00-agent, making every revelatory stunt — the 20-syllable pile-ups in "Come Together," the repurposed Biggie hook in "On Demand" — feel all the more dazzling for what is withheld.
Stephen Thompson recommends:
Noah Kahan, The Great Divide
His music synthesizes enough hyper-specific 21st-century subgenres — the banjo-forward fervency of stomp-and-clap folk-rock, the gauzy emotionalism of Bon Iver — that it can be hard to pinpoint just how and where Noah Kahan fits into the pop landscape of 2026. But he sells out arenas and tops the charts anyway, thanks to an irresistible cocktail of anthemic songwriting, emotional openness and rare poignancy. Kahan is this moment's foremost Northern Man of Feelings. Overstuffed but immensely rewarding, The Great Divide reflects on family, friendship and good old-fashioned trauma, with insights that could only come from clear-eyed, self-lacerating reflection.
Tom Huizenga recommends:
Canto Ostinato by Simeon ten Holt, performed by Sandbox Percussion, Metropolis Ensemble and Erik Hall
Every time I hear it, this 50-year-old piece of Dutch minimalism, composed by Simeon ten Holt, sweeps me off my feet with its meditative, swirling eddies of sound. As in the clock-like cycles of our lives, its rhythms and melodic cells intertwine and recycle. But there's also freedom in the music, as the composer imagined it dressed in various arrangements. This new version, for mallet instruments, winds, strings and piano, undulates with delicate ripples of sound that crest in large waves only to recede and rise again. It's music to get lost in.
Lars Gotrich recommends:
Neurosis, An Undying Love for a Burning World
From its hardcore punk beginnings to practically defining the post-metal movement, the natural state of Neurosis has always been one of evolution — not just musically, but as individuals who make art as a form of catharsis. And, yet, when Steve Von Till opens the first Neurosis album in a decade by screaming, "The separation that burns our hearts is the root of all our disease," there's a palpable shift in urgency. The band, shaken by the shocking revelations about a former member, enters a new era with guitarist and vocalist Aaron Turner (Sumac, Isis). Neurosis is still emotionally and sonically aggressive, but more willing to sit in a thick atmosphere of ambient dissonance when a lyrical revelation hits. That duality permeates An Undying Love for a Burning World with hopeful desperation — what it truly means to live as the world falls apart around you.
Felix Contreras recommends:
X Alfonso, AIRE
AIRE is the sound of a country's soul in crisis. In a series of dramatic interpretations, X Alfonso brings Cuban songs written over the last 60 years into the current moment, when his island is (once again) caught in a geopolitical standoff with the U.S. The originals stemmed from a movement (Nueva Trova) that aimed to capture the hope and enthusiasm of a society striving for social justice and anti-imperialism. In an email, Alfonso told me that these songs, (written by Cuba's most skilled storytellers, including Silvio Rodriguez and Santiago Feliú), "speak of doubt, loneliness, love, memory, disillusionment and also hope." AIRE is his attempt to understand why they still resonate for his generation.
But the album's emotional centerpiece is one of a few songs Alfonso himself wrote, a retake of the title track to the 2005 film Habana Blues. Originally written to echo the emotional farewell between two musicians in the film, in 2026, it sounds like a farewell to a memory of Cuba that could be on the verge of vanishing forever.
No. 1 Songs Of 2026 (So Far)
Lars Gotrich recommends:
Amy Grant, "The 6th of January (Yasgur's Farm)"
Behind every Amy Grant song, there's a heartfelt story that complicates a question ... usually one about how we treat one another while we still breathe on this Earth. In a warm arrangement that foregrounds Grant's quietly resilient voice, she nods lyrically to Joni Mitchell, John Lennon and Marvin Gaye, at first seeming to contrast the lost idealism of '60s with the violence of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Grant, here treating Sandy Emory Lawrence's songwriting with the tenderness needed, doesn't merely sing a protest song, but asks us to participate. Plainspoken but deeply researched, each line is loaded with the history of a people who have "lost [their] way." A masterclass in what it means to be — and how we can be — American.
Rodney Carmichael recommends:
earthsignchels, "Daddy Died"
From the first death knell, earthsignchels had me stuck off the realness. It's hard to explain the paradox of "Daddy Died," a grief-journal rap riddled with vulnerability yet highly combustible in its delivery. "Pull the plug up out my kidneys / I been pissed about s***," she spits with a technical precision so visceral it inspires more awe than aww. Somehow, through mourning the loss of her father, earthsignchels dares to reanimate a genre.
Tom Huizenga recommends:
Jakub Józef Orliński, "Non t'amo per il ciel" by Johann Joseph Fox
New discoveries like this unknown gem keep my longstanding love affair with the human voice alive and lusty. This is astonishing and gorgeous singing from the Polish countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński. He, along with his sympathetic pianist Michał Biel, have unearthed a deep cut from the mostly forgotten Baroque composer Johann Fux. Never mind that the lyrics, disguised in religious fervor, essentially suck up to the Viennese Holy Roman Emperor. Just listen to what Orliński does with them. His pacing is steady and calm, and he takes time to wring every delicious drop of bittersweetness out of those beautiful long melodic lines, especially the repeat of the opening verse, where he ornaments the music with his most opulent vocal brocade.
Robin Hilton recommends:
Lana Del Rey, "White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter"
You never know what you're going to get with a new Lana Del Rey song. Since dropping "Henry, come on" and the country-coded "Bluebird" within a week of each other in 2025, she's released only the bold (and very James Bond-y) theme for the video game 007 First Light, and the strangely alluring "White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter" this year. Lynchian, out-of-time and unnerving, "White Feather" plays like a haunted Broadway soliloquy to a daydream love. She extols a trad-wife devotion, but even as she sings, "Do you know how magical you are?" there's a creeping unease. She's "got a nicotine patch" to get through the summer, she feels like she's living as "a ghost" and, at one point, when she says, "Take my hand off the stove, hon," seems to hint at abuse. Or does she? "White Feather" is so sly and subversive, it's impossible to know exactly what she means, or where innocence becomes perversion.
Stephen Thompson recommends:
MUNA, "So What"
Loads of pop songs process the aftermath of breakups, but only a handful — Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me," Ariana Grande's "thank u, next" — dish out useful and applicable doses of perspective. One of the best pop bands in existence, MUNA joins that group with "So What," which prioritizes those who love us over those who've opted out.
After a victory warm-up lap — "There's a lot of people here tonight / And most of them would want to go home with me" — singer Katie Gavin unleashes a note of self-affirmation worth reciting as a mantra: "It's all right, it all worked out / Lots of people love me now." There's pettiness in that sentiment, but also a useful reminder to focus on what matters. And "So What" itself is awash in sleek, propulsive vibes, culminating in an electro-pop freakout too vibrant to resist.
Daoud Tyler-Ameen recommends:
Ratboys, "Penny in the Lake"
It's all about that third verse, when the phrase "Peace and love to drive my car" lands just as you're catching on to the Beatle-born drum part rumbling beneath it, only to have Ringo himself serve as the rhyme's punchline. On an album that gorgeously refines heartland rock top to bottom, those six seconds are the deal-closer.
Hazel Cills recommends:
Robyn, "Talk to Me"
The Swedish pop iconoclast has swerved many times in her career. She pivoted from being a mainstream teen idol in the '90s to an indie "fembot" at the turn of the 2010s and her 2018 album Honey found her making surprisingly laid-back, minimalist club music. But with this year's Sexistential, Robyn returned fully to what she does best: making seriously great pop songs filled with real heart and vulnerability. Case in point, "Talk to Me," which reunites the artist with hitmaker Max Martin for a supercharged, synth pop banger about taking charge in her relationship and reaching out for connection.
Felix Contreras recommends:
Minyo Crusaders, "Hanagasa Ondo"
Describing Minyo Crusaders as 10-piece group from Japan that mashes up min'yō, a traditional Japanese folk music and vocal style, with music and rhythms from Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa might be accurate, but it does not come close to doing justice to the group's unique sound. The band's members are steeped in jazz, but following the devastating 2011 Fukushima earthquake and nuclear disaster, bandleader Katsumi Tanaka experienced a cultural crisis and shifted his focus back toward Japanese traditions. The results have been joyous and irresistibly danceable, especially since the beginning of a partnership with the Colombian cumbia revivalists Frente Cumbiero. That group also features on a high point of Minyo Crusaders' latest album and the best realization of their concept yet, From Japan With Love. "Hanagasa Ondo" features a frenetic saxophone melody that alternates with high-pitched singing, backed by a groove that has the power of a runaway train.
Anamaria Sayre recommends:
Mon Laferte, "No Le Regales Tu Corazón"
Mon Laferte's art is transformation. Across her albums she manipulates energy, origin and time through sound, to present a unique image of love and pain — equal participants in every story she tells. "No Le Regales Tu Corazón" (Don't give your heart away) off her latest, Femme Fatale Vol. 2, supersizes the element of change — increasingly distorted and disastrously beautiful vocals meet gritty guitar in an extended, metamorphing profession of love. Nine minutes of sweet expression of care — I love when you this, I love how you that. Against that softness a ruptured guitar persists, pulling the song into a state of classic Mon Laferte tension. Should she trust? Give her heart away for good? Waiting for her typical plunge into despair, the song instead bursts: "Creo que es lo más hermoso que puedo experimentar en la vida / El amarte como te amo." Laferte and her radical guitar are deeply, relentlessly, rebelliously, simply in love.
Nate Chinen recommends:
Tomeka Reid Quartet, "dance! skip! hop!"
Who says the avant-garde has to feel self-serious? Not cellist Tomeka Reid, who devoted her latest quartet album, dance! skip! hop!, to a proudly frolicsome ideal. Her brilliant musical partners — guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Tomas Fujiwara — share her gift for going deep while keeping it light, and they show us how it's done on the album's irresistible title track. Listen for how they bounce off and against Reid's agile pizzicato, and how her ditty-like melody springs right back into place after a freeform excursion.
Sheldon Pearce recommends:
Yebba, "Yellow Eyes"
For secular singers in the gospel tradition, a big voice is a holy object — a gift from God demonstrating a reciprocal relationship between divine favor and glory given in return. From Etta to Aretha to Whitney, its soul-stirring power can feel so transcendental as to require a performer to sacrifice one's self to it. The Arkansas singer-songwriter Yebba, a student of The Clark Sisters, has abided by this responsibility for much of her career, her big voice deployed to maximum effect, as if putting such rare potency on display is part of a sacred covenant. But "Yellow Eyes," the single from her album Jean, does a more complicated thing: It strips Yebba's singing bare, makes it small and translucent, leaves it unguarded on a rustic folk altar. Her voice is raw and exposed but loses none of its grandeur, and in peeling back she reveals more of herself as an artist than ever before.
Ann Powers recommends:
Wendy Eisenberg, "Old Myth Dying"
Can a song do more than simply describe a profound transformation, actually conveying its intensity? In this modern-day air from her uniformly delightful and profound self-titled solo album, the guitarist and singer-songwriter Wendy Eisenberg answers with a joyful YES. The lyrics confront the vertiginous feeling that comes with self-realization — Eisenberg made this album while falling in love with collaborator Mari Rubio, fully embracing their queerness, and confronting serious childhood trauma — while Eisenberg's scattering vocals and polyrhythmic guitar make the experience utterly tangible. It's amazing how difficult and easy this song sounds at the same time.
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