All My Life, I Thought I’d Change: March 2026

Written By Stephen Bands

Know that this wild road will go on forever

I’ll forgo my usual political blatherings (planet’s burning, fascism, world war 3, etc.) to discuss something more pressing to the longevity of this website: lack of musical interest.

I’m late with this update and I know it, but 2026 has not been particularly gripping thus far. By this point last year we already had Decius Vol 2, EUSEXUA and SALVATION (numbers 10, 2, and 3 of the year, respectively), as well as super-fun and/or kick-ass teasers from MARINA, Sleigh Bells, Geese, Sudan Archives, Lady Gaga, and Wet Leg.

This year we have… the new punk band I mentioned last time, whose record is awesome, but is generally a little too punishing for repeat listens; this month’s recommendation, which, same; and…I guess new Robyn is coming out soon? There’s a lot of stuff I liked a lot on first pass, but nothing with real sticking power, no oomph.

So that’s why this article is late, because the 2026 music scene is in the doldrums. But maybe you’ll find something amongst this month’s Listen List that you love so much it becomes your album of the year. You never know.

The Listen List

An update about what’s out now and what people around the internet are talking about

February

** must-listen

The Rewind

A look back at a favorite from (at least five) years past

Continuing from my lack of inspiration from the intro, I’ve decided to switch up the Rewind this month to a slightly different format.

Normally I would go through the album, song by song, analyzing lyrics and music and telling you why each is great, and therefore why the whole record is great. But listening to this month’s selection again reignited a fire in me for one of my great musical obsessions: album construction.

There are many ways to get it right, but infinitely more way to get it wrong (looking at you, Pearl Jam). The order and pacing of an album can take a collection of great songs and turn them into the coveted Perfect album, where each song is not only great on its own, but also plays perfectly alongside and in between the others around it.

That said, there’s no salvaging terrible songwriting so, this …advice? (would any effectual person actually read this?) doesn’t apply to, oh, let’s say, Sublime.

MY WOMAN

Angel Olsen

Indie Rock | 2016

Angel Olsen already had plenty of indie cred coming into the release of MY WOMAN, with 2014’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness, racking up the year-end plaudits and think pieces. But what that album did to prove Olsen’s songwriting credentials, MY WOMAN would cement into undeniable musical genius.

As stated in the introduction, there are many ways in which to construct an album so each song sits perfectly in its place. There’s the classic “concept album,” where each song centers on a theme or set of themes that reaches across the whole work, like paragraphs in a pulitzer-winning editorial, often including musical motifs that pop up in several songs. Think: Dark Side of the Moon, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, The Downward Spiral, Songs for the Deaf, or Ta13oo.

A more explicitly thematic version of the concept album is the opera, generally thought of as rock opera (though hip hoperas do exist…Hamilton, and more importantly, clipping.’s Splendor & Misery), where the work is meant to tell a specific—and obvious—story in one linear progression. Think: Tommy, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, or The Wall. Bat Out of Hell is one of the best selling albums of all time, god knows why, and is a rock opera.

But the albums that I think are the most dazzling, and most difficult to make, are those whose songs are totally unrelated, but just a group of great songs. No themes, no plots, just writing songs so intentionally they all fit only in this one order, or writing so many songs that you can pick and choose later exactly where each goes.

I don’t know all the details of how MY WOMAN was written, but it’s certainly from that last group, an album that is masterfully crafted and pieced together regardless of each song’s theme or subtext. It feels like they should be in this order, and so they are.

And when each track is more beautiful and brilliantly performed than the last, how do you organize them? Well, while Olsen used the songwriting and production of MY WOMAN to prove her chops and sonic diversity, she pulled her album consctruction out an old, old, old standby: the 40’s A-side, B-side single. Front half: pop-and-indie-rock-influenced and upbeat, full of real radio-friendly stuff. Back half: country-western-influenced and sorrowful, the deep cuts that keep depressed critics like me coming back for more. They are all sounds and paces at which Olsen excels, so why not make the contrast as extreme as possible?

“Intern” adds synths where there shouldn’t be any, kicking the album off in the weirdest way possible. Then “Never Be Mine” mixes Portuguese guitar folk with 60’s jangle pop for a truly delicious combination that’s simultaneously throwback and fresh hit.

The big single, “Shut Up Kiss Me” is a real stunner, with it’s slow-burn opening before kicking the door down with its 90’s riot grrrl delivery of a 60’s wall-of-sound song. But here we see that each track is building the intensity of the last, so when “Give It Up”s grunge and/or surf rock guitars come in (seriously this woman is a genius at mixing her influences together), it feels like this is the exact sound you were expecting, while still being a new and interesting song.

The front half ends with “Not Gonna Kill You,” which steps down the tempo but ups the intensity and emotion, making it both an fantastic last song for this side of the record, but also a perfect transition point to the next one.

Intermission: I wrote my first essay about the topic of album construction on the old site (this one, reorganizing Pearl Jam’s Yield) eight years ago. In the time since, I started an entire Spotify series of albums that could be tweaked and improved purely by moving the songs around, including Led Zeppelin’s final two records. But Spotfy is a shithouse organization that promotes domestic terrorism and funds weapons companies so fuck them, those playlists are gone.

The new era of digital releases, where artists can just put whatever they want out like it’s a random grab bag of whatever came out of their mind, has totally destroyed the artistry of the album, especially when songs are remixed and “fixed” after they’re released with no link to the original; or the oversaturation of “deluxe” editions that come out the same day as the original.

Additionally, as far back as the first wide-release of the CD, artists (and, more likely, their labels) have pushed to fill the maximum space possible, by adding mediocre filler tracks to pad the time/tracklist, or, the most grievous sin, the last song having 20 minutes of silence tacked on before a disappointing, insipid “bonus” track plays. I believe it was Mic the Snare that said a perfect album is eight to twelve songs, thirty minutes to an hour.

Well, guess what…MY WOMAN is 10 songs, 47 minutes. Damn if this album isn’t just the absolute best at proving my exact point about album construction and artistry.

The second half starts with “Heart Shaped Face,” a gorgeous country ballad about how men project their emotional baggage interchangeably among women, that only Angel Olsen could pull off. It’s followed by the devastating “Sister,” a long, slow burn of a track that delves into those first confusing moments of non-heteronormative attraction, and the life-changing, and often heartbreaking path it will set those who experience it on. “All my life, I thought I’d change,” Olsen sings over and over, the words so many of us in the community thought—and many times cursed—upon ourselves during our formative years, before the song explodes into one of the most life-affirming guitar solos in recent history.

The rest of the album follows similarly: “Those Were the Days” is a brilliant combination of lounge, yacht-rock, and 70’s glam country, perfectly produced into a come-hither whisper of a track. Title-ish track, “Woman” uses a 60’s R&B electric organ to back a Carole King-inspired, chorus-less ode to womanhood (bonus points for an additional Neil Young-esque guitar solo).

It finally ends with “Pops,” which totally strips all the artifice away, and leaves just Olsen and a piano, the intensity and musical trappings of the first half left totally in the rearview. This is just an artist and her raw emotion, poured out for us to hear, like a lo-fi Edith Piaf.

The contrast between the dark, throbbing indie-electro-rock of “Intern” and the high energy pop rock of “Shut Up Kiss Me” and this final track is stark, almost unbelievable. But because the journey we took to get from beginning to end was so well constructed, so beautifully performed, and so perfectly orchestrated, the conclusion only feels natural and right for the album.

And that’s why album construction is so important to me. That emotional journey didn’t rely on the contrivance of plot, like an opera, or every song with a theme on its sleeve. It just occurred because of how each song was placed, and how that placement formed the larger decisions of how to produce, mix, and master the album. You don’t get to go on that journey when every release is just “here’s the 35 most recent “songs” I sang into my iPhone during private flights that some Swedish guy lazily added beats to later.”

Making art like this is hard work, and a heavy lift for a lot of people—people who care about what they show to the world and how it reflects on them as artists and human beings. Which is exactly why bullshit corpo fucks like Spotify want you to listen to procedurally generated slop that has no credited songwriters instead. And exactly why you should never, ever do that.

MY WOMAN makes me feel human because it is, because Angel Olsen is, and because she conveys that experience so perfectly over the full runtime. If AI slop is the tech-bro doom scroll of music, this album is telling stories around a campfire with everyone you love.

Now Playing

A quick look at my personal favorite recent release

URGH

Mandy, Indiana

Electro-Industrial

In complete sonic contrast to our Rewind, Mandy, Indiana’s URGH is a harsh wall of noise that occasionally allows you to breathe. The perfect album for our dismal, death knell of a timeline, this feels less like a conventional album and more like a transmission from the Event Horizon. Powered by Alex Macdougall’s astonishing rhythmic versatility on the drums, and Valentine Caulfield’s clipped, staccato vocal delivery, the record moves with an addictively physical momentum. Songs lurch forward before collapsing into squalls of thrashing noise. That constant sense of interruption, of forward motion stalked by menace, gives the album its emotional center: there is a threat lurking around every corner.

URGH isn’t body music or brain music; it’s spine music, striking at the raw junction where intellect meets instinct. The songs feel claustrophobic and urgent, like alarms sounding in every direction at once. The album’s relentless discordance—Caulfield shouting over martial drums one moment, whispering through smoky synths the next, then rapping against razorwire guitars—mirrors the emotional climate of the present moment. In an era defined by political dread and the grinding pressure of life under increasingly authoritarian systems, URGH captures the psychic atmosphere with startling clarity.

Ethereally heady and viscerally gory, URGH is less catharsis, more exorcism.

Up Next

What’s coming out in the next few weeks (yes, I know, we’re already well into March, so this is kind of cheating)?

  • Creature of Habit by Courtney Barnett

  • A Pound of Feathers by The Black Crows

  • Trying Times by James Blake

  • We Are Together Again by Bonnie “Prince” Billy

  • Arirang by BTS

  • Written into Changes by Avalon Emerson

  • Play Me by Kim Gordon

  • Mutiny After Midnight by Johnnie Blue Skies (Sturgill Simpson) & The Dark Clouds

  • Paradises by Ladytron

  • Whatever’s Clever! by Charlie Puth

  • Sexistential by Robyn

  • Of the Earth by Shabaka

  • Ricochet by Snail Mail

  • It’s the Long Goodbye by The Twilight Sad

Well, what releases did I miss? What’s coming out soon that you can’t wait for?

And as always, fuck ICE, release the Epstein files, and happy listening!

Stephen Bands
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We Are the Ones Who Seem to Travel Through Time: April 2026
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Look Up Here, I’m in Heaven: February 2026