These reviews are from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
Best Album of the Issue: Oneohtrix Point Never
Worst Album of the Issue: Jacob Collier
Best Sleeve of the Issue: Bronzeage
Worst Sleeve of the Issue: Men Without Hats
Animal Collective
Jetty (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
(Domino Soundtracks)
We’ve already got a foot in the Criterion Closet here, so let’s talk about Danny Boyle’s Yesterday, which is entirely forgettable except for one brief scene which seems to suggest that in a world without the Beatles, 9/11 would never have happened. No one without a Letterboxd has ever heard of Sam Fleischner, but his documentary Jetty, about the reconstruction of Rockaway Beach after Hurricane Sandy, provokes a similar counterfactual: In a timeline where Animal Collective only ever made beautiful, yearning soundtracks, rather than recording some of most insufferable “experimental pop” known to man, which world-historical disasters might we have been spared, and would have it included Danny Boyle’s Yesterday? As John Lennon once so famously said, “Time is a flat circle, bitch.”
6/10
WILL.I.WAS
Frank Turner
The Next Ten Years
(Xtra Mile Recordings / Polydor)
While the world works hard to overcome every barrier standing between it and total annihilation, Frank Turner plays on, relentlessly touring and releasing records while the good ship humanity continues to sink. Who knows how long we’ve got until we reach The Final Ten Years, or what we’ll do to differentiate “geriatric millennials” when all surviving millennials are, in fact, geriatric.
5/10
BARBARA ROSS-LONGYN
White Lies
Night Light
(Play It Again Sam)
Is it ever OK to lie? Most begin as harmless attempts to be polite—“this is a remotely enjoyable listening experience”; “I’d definitely recommend this to someone beside my enemies”; “I absolutely don’t hope to go deaf before I hear it again”—but taking liberties with the truth leads to the hard work of maintaining ever-more elaborate falsehoods—“I wish the Olympics would return to London, these guys would be perfect for the opening ceremony”; “when our beloved king dies, they should perform the state funeral.” That said, more pernicious still is our capacity for self-deception: “This ritualistic savaging is a higher form of honesty and serves an artistic purpose beyond providing, at most, one minute of vulgar entertainment.”
4/10
CALEÇON ENFEU
Wata Igarashi
My Supernova
(Dekmantel)
You gotta hand it to mental illness: If it weren’t for the “ADHD Techno Focus” playlist, I’d be living in an apartment that forever looked like I was about to bell them birds again, lad. The same kind of go-getting mindset is produced by this record; put it on and soon you’re simultaneously gooning and doing the dishes, while the dog prepares a four-course meal and the vacuum cleaner traces infinity symbols across the ceiling. Although some of this might be down to my XX Strong Icy Blackcurrant ZYN. Or the Monster Ultra White I used to wash down these eight Vyvanse. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get on with doing this 600-puff Lost Mary in one fell drag.
6/10
XILBO XAGGITIN
DON WEST
Give Me All Your Love
(Mandatory Music)
Turns out the real-life Gigachad went east, had a shave, grew his hair out, got a little sun, and now he looks better than ever. He’s even changed his passport so it no longer reads “Ernest Khalimov” but “DON WEST.” fr, I’m not capping. He styles it all uppercase like he’s been jelqing his own name. He’s the Sydney sigma with a mewing streak longer than a dingo’s dangler, though sadly too busy looksmaxxing to bother rizzing up these songs. It sounds like brain rot, even if he’d mog me for saying so. You’ve no business making music with a jawline like that.
3/10
MANLY WARRINGAH
Men Without Hats
On the Moon
(Shocore Music)
When I saw the artwork, I put on my hard hat and braced for a hoax. Those responsible for “The Safety Dance” don’t exactly need help smearing their reputations, but AI seems to have leapt to their aid here anyway, suggesting that it may have evolved to the point where it’s trolling one-hit wonders as a statement about the limits of human creativity, purely for its own amusement. Musically, all of the songs here sound precision-engineered to soundtrack those videos the White House keeps posting of the president fist pumping over the top of ICE execution footage and suicidal penguin clips. And sadly, AI can’t be blamed for that.
1/10
SLOP ROCKIN’ BEATS
Bronzeage
C_W_RDS
(110 yrds)
If you pull out your album and it’s only six tracks long, my first reaction will tend to be “Is that it?”—especially when I’ve been made to wait for it. This statement could be read as a dick joke, the kind I spent the 2000s telling on the forum where I first discovered Public Relations Exercise, an obscure MySpace-era math-rock act that has basically returned now rebranded as Bronzeage. Positive spin: even a reduced runtime has got my heart beating in ⅞ time. Speaking of things which are short and back, I can neither confirm nor deny that my gray, shriveled pee-pee has started firing again.
7/10
BRONZEAGE HERBERT
Insecure Men
A Man for All Seasons
(Fat Possum)
Saul Adamczewski, the adult-child genius best known for his work with Fat White Family, is releasing this album after the lowest point of his life: living in a cupboard while working as a tea boy for a Rastafarian meth dealer. On the plus side, this is the kind of origin story that does all the heavy lifting necessary for me to get you to listen to it, even before we talk about songs that swing between triumphant glam (“Cleaning Bricks”) and suicidal gloom (“Tulse Hill Station”) and cartoon cover art based on a photo of Serbian war criminal Željko “Arkan” Ražnatović holding a baby tiger and a submachine gun.
8/10
MAMDANI DYER
Hayley Williams
Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party
(Post Atlantic)
When Hayley Williams does her eerie incantation of “The Bad Touch” by the Bloodhound Gang, it’s as if she’s possessed by a lustful demon: the true face of pop punk, only visible now two decades have passed and those of us who gorged so lustfully on American Pie have been warned by the doctor to start avoiding McDonald’s. For 20 years, the Paramore singer was working her way out of a 360 record deal signed when she was 15. I discovered that dreams always come at a cost at the same age, when I [REDACTED] a [REDACTED] at a [REDACTED REDACTED]. Now that’s the kind of ego death that doesn’t get you invited to any parties.
7/10
DICKHEAD TOLLE
011668
burial-sade
(Self-released)
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, yet I have always been ashamed to admit how much I love the “mashup.” Just using the term feels depraved, but I am someone who was born with an insatiable lust for novelty who’s come of age in a world designed to make sure I always feel this way. I am the weak man the good times created, making me the perfect mark for this sad boy blubberfest.
7/10
THERE’S A KID SOMEWHERE
Jacob Collier
The Light for Days
(Hajanga)
Jacob Collier believes in a language beyond words: fart noises made with the mouth. He’s devoted his life to it, writing songs in keys that don’t exist (shart keys, fart keys), crashing studio computers layering track upon track of the wettest, most succulently fetid fart sounds imaginable, directing packed stadiums to make fart sounds with their mouths so voluminous as to register on those secret underwater listening devices that picked up the Titan submersible implosion. His goal: to bring human beings on every continent together in one simultaneous sonic fart, knocking the Earth off its gravitational axis, sending it tooting into the sun.
0/10
GUFFIN N. HUFFIN
Olan Monk
Songs for Nothing
(AD 93)
The latest album from Irish experimental musician Olan Monk is layered with atmospheric field recordings. There’s seagulls crying as footsteps fall on a windswept beach, just like in the allegorical Christian poem. Close your eyes, listen carefully, and you’ll surely be transported to that one night when me and boys got together for “Monk Time,” getting loaded up on Buckfast, giving out kitchen-scissor tonsures, playing Swans on full blast until the abbey walls started to shake and collapse, devotedly jacking one another off beneath our matching robes. Fortunately, my vow of silence prohibits me from going any further with this bit.
8/10
FRIED TUCK
Oneohtrix Point Never
Tranquilizer
(Warp)
If we’re living on a dead internet populated by bots, then Dan Lopatin is conducting the NPC orchestra in funereal requiem. A choir of artificial angels sings the contents of every DM sent to the Legacy Contact you somehow outlived. The pearly gates open with a million tabs saved for the quiet moment that’s finally come. Step into the light: We’ve got every old MySpace recording you never thought you’d hear again. As the last server goes down, the gonetoosoon.org house band plays on. It looks like we were right to believe the promise that nothing is ever truly lost.
9/10
WIDOW TRANQY
TEN BAND NAMES INSPIRED BY THE MAKING OF THIS ISSUE
Polymarket Parlay
Hagfish Ceviche
Pauline Quirke Chungus
Eternal Sunshine of the Botless Mind
Bored of Peace
DeepSikh AI and Thee Chopped Wagecucks
My Blind Camgirl
Autism
Hangin’ With Mr Groyper
Jestermaxxine Carr
These reviews are from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
The post Album Reviews From VICE Magazine, Spring 2026 appeared first on VICE.
