Rambling Fox

January 2026 Music Round-Up

Art by Sancoon

Well we've not had a monthly music round-up for a little bit. December was quite dead in many ways in that sense and I never quite felt like I had enough there to post about. However, it's time to greet the new year and see how 2026's started in my life of hapless musical consumption.

New Music Immediate Impressions

GUV - Warmer Than Gold (BC)

The man formerly known as Young Guv is out with a new album and a new name (and thus ruining the organisation in my CD shelf forever with this change), but the general bearing remains the same: utterly infectious, brightly sunny, deliberately lo-fi-fuzzy melodies in quick three-minute bursts. The key difference this time is GUV going deeper into the 1990s with it: hints of early 90s shoegaze and dream pop, mid-90s slacker breakbeats and other era-reminiscing musical tropes rear their heads throughout the 12 songs of the new album. It's comfortably, consistently good. GUV - or Young Guv - has never been an artist I'd scream passionately about to anyone who can hear me but put his music on a sunny day and there are few things that sound more perfect (and they make for great mixtape material). Which is why the release date of Warmer Than Gold being in the cold, dark January seems rightfully bonkers but it brings with it a little piece of light into this miserably gray UK winter. It only came out under a week ago and I'm already finding myself in the habit of easily putting this on throughout the day - good start to 2026's musical offerings.

Litku Klemetti - Ankeuttaja EP

The quixotic Finnish pop project returns with a small EP of songs composed on the piano which Klemetti didn't think would work in her traditional band context, and then leaned right into the chamber pop vibes with a whole bunch of string sections thrown over it. I use a very loose definition of "chamber pop" here, we're still in the whimsical world of Litku Klemetti - so you get moments like Klemetti suddenly starting to maniacally rap all over the second half of "Aivomätä", or the theatrical piano ballad "Kovan onnen ankka" underlining its emotions by Klemetti's decition to namecheck as many Disney characters as she can in the chorus. The Litku Klemetti band's discography is so full of personality and fun, and this short four-track (+ intro) dose is just as packed with it. I just really wish there was more of it!

Hoard Updates

January CDs!

CD

Digital

There's a few trends here. The Sonic soundtrack collect-a-thon continues with two big Holy Grails, the Sonic World Adventure/Unleashed OST (so happy I have this) and the Sonic the Hedgehog Boom which features re-arranged versions of the excellent and underrated US soundtrack for Sonic CD. The Mountain Goats appear courtesy of John Darnielle's This Year book which came out towards the end of 2025 and which I wolfed down - what an excellent biography-of-sorts - and which got me in the mood of listening to a lot more early Mountain Goats (hence that EP) and general curios (hence that CD single). The lone Bowie album represents my current dedication to complete my physical Bowie collection, an album a month.

Some other things of note as well. The WoW soundtrack has been difficult to track with affordable postage given everyone who sells it seems to be in the US, but a UK-based copy finally appeared on sale and I seized the opportunity. You've also got Lauri Porra's wonderful Seasons in Moominvalley, a set of piano-lead compositions inspired by the Moomin series. It came out last year but it sort of passed me by despite really enjoying Porra's 2024 project Aineen ja ajan messu (put it in my top 15 at the time). Ended up visiting it during late December/early January and just fell in love with it, so getting a physical copy was a must.

Music reviews

January was a slight struggle with reviews given it's my day job's deadline month, and there wasn't much activity in December either given the whole Listmas season. But I did advance on the couple of discography runs I'm doing at the moment!

Most played song of the month according to Last.FM

My January most played list is basically a whole bunch of that Moomin album so why not, let's pick something from that.

#music