Rambling Fox

June 2026 Music Round-Up

Art by Sancoon

The June 2026 music round-up comes to you fashionably late because I've been too busy Anthroconning.

New Music Immediate Impressions

A fair bit of new music this month!

Death Cab for Cutie - I Built You a Tower

The 2nd indie rock divorce epic of 2026 (after the latest American Football album). Doing my Death Cab discog review-through last year really reinvigorated my love for the band and I've been greatly enjoying this new album. While generally speaking this is perhaps what you'd expect from DCfC in 2026 and though it's not an explicitly backwards-looking release, there is a hint of "classic" Death Cab being brought back here; there's something in the way the guitars sound and in some of the riffs of the melodies that reminds me of the turn-of-millennium albums. But overall, it's something very much of its own and continues on from the last album's more guitar-centric approach without sounding like a reprise - and above all, it's a beautiful album. Now, Gibbard has very clearly mentioned that he went through a dreadful divorce and the pain from that runs across the album's lyrics, but this is never made abundantly obvious in the lyrical material. Instead, a lot of his processing of his past couple of years is worded in a way that could just as well apply to other personal burdens, with several passages being very relatable to anyone who's gone through severe grief. So what I'm saying is that this took no time at all to imprint on me and I've been nodding along to some of these lyrics with a sense of relating to the sentiments, and that's further pulled me into the album. An excellent slice of autumn years indie rocking from a classic band, that's surely only going to increase in impact as I continue to spend time with it.

Modest Mouse - An Eraser and a Maze

This was released on the same day as the Death Cab album, so us millennial indie fans really were feasting on that day. A new Modest Mouse album is always an intriguing prospect in this day and age: Isaac Brock's crew disappears for years at a time and during those breaks both the band line-ups and the initial music intentions can change radically, meaning that each new album these days sounds like a reset one way or another. During the most recent interim there was also the sad loss of drummer Jeremiah Green, which has undoubtedly altered both the sound and Brock's mental state. An Eraser and a Maze sounds unmistakably like a Modest Mouse album and for its first half it sounds like a return to a more recognisable sound overall after the surrealist rambles of The Golden Casket (2021): lots of big rock-outs with twisted and curling melodies with Brock yelping away bluntly confessional and conversational lyrics in the manner that he does. On the second half the album suddenly gets weird again, with off-kilter stylistic experiments, one-and-done ideas tossed out in short songs and general chaos. I am generally speaking liking this - it sounds re-energised and overall more engaged than the last album. I'm just not entirely sure whether its two halves really reconcile with one another, and maybe there could've been a more equal distribution of its two approaches across the album. But as ever, a new Modest Mouse album is always not just intriguing but also undoubtedly a slow burner that takes a while to properly root in - so let's find out in the 2026 tallies where this ultimately ends up...

Sonic the Hedgehog - Forever Fast: 35th Anniversary of Sonic the Hedgehog

So Sonic celebrated his big 35 years in June, and that made it a very hedgehog-heavy month for me. I attended Sonic FanFest in Cardiff which was a lovely, very small convention - the kind of event where you can easily bump into one of the performing stars in an elevator and have a quick chat with them in a casual manner - and it was a charming day of nerding out with fellow fans, rounded off by very good small-room live sets from hedgehog-associated musicians TJ Davis and Bentley Jones playing fan favourites. The official big birthday stream may not have brought any grand announcements that some people were waiting for but watching and live commenting on it with a group of other fans was a fun way to spend an evening, and it had loads of excellent mascot content (the Werehog mascot returned for the first time since 2009!!!). The big cap-off for the birthday month was this, a brand new compilation of vocal themes from the games from 1998 to now. As it's always the case with compilations you could always spend time nitpicking over the selection, but I think the tracks here are a good run-through of some of the big "hits" from this period and it's a lot of fun to have them all in one place - they've even managed to include "Endless Possibility", one of my favourite Sonic songs which has been in rights limbo for years, and the fact that they've bothered to resolve the issues around it for this makes me hopeful it'll become a recurring appearance in every future retrospective after being so oddly absent for so long. The only real complaints I've got is that instead of being a proper 2-CD compilation (they definitely would've had enough material for one), the second disc is a short EP mainly featuring alternative versions of "Speed Is My Life", the brand new song written specifically for the 35th birthday; the other remark I've got is that "Speed Is My Life" is generally a bit of a hot mess of a song that's more focused on awkwardly cramming things in rather than actually working as a standalone song. Still, I can't help but get some Big Feels when those lyrics about how "you have been right there with me since the very first day" and similar sentiments come along...

The Veils - Fragile World

So here's the album that's undoubtedly going to get buried under all the big names this June, but it really ought not to. I've been falling in love with The Veils' discography quite late to the game but have spent the past couple of years unveiling it bit by bit, and becoming charmed by Finn Andrews' sense of melody and drama with each record. Last year's quiet and piano-focused Asphodels fell a little short for me, and from the onset Fragile World sounds like a direct continuation: it's again a relatively short set of stripped down songs mainly centered around piano and Andrews' voice. Except, to be blunt, this time it's just better. I think the songwriting is overall stronger and there's a few pleasant surprises to keep the whole thing more vivid - I particularly love the title track's barebones, loop-like groove which takes no time at all to practically hypnotise you. There's also a gorgeous Sinéad O'Connor cover which closes the album ("In This Heart"), which is not only beautiful in itself but it's great to hear someone take on a lesser known Sinéad song. The heatwave summer has perhaps been the wrong time to release a lowkey, moody album like this (though to be fair to Andrews, it's the middle of winter in his native New Zealand), but it's become a captivating late-night listen. Absolutely worth checking out.

Hoard Updates

CD

Not much to comment here this month. The big attention grab is going to be that surge of Baths releases. This all started from just wanting to grab a copy of Gut - my partner is a huge fan of Baths and has been playing Gut non-stop for a few months now, and it's gotten to the point that I want to keep listening to it on my own time. While doing research on Baths' discography I noticed that the Bee and Puppycat OST he had written and released under his actual name had been issued on CD this year finally, so that went into the shopping cart as well. The purchase of his debut album Cerulean was directly driven by the fact that there was a Discogs seller in the UK selling it for a couple of ££ so it just made it a very easy to pick. A really exciting, intriguing discography - and the stylistic gaps between these three releases are already so wide that it's going to make picking up the rest a really intriguing prospect (when I get around to it...).

Turns out Gut was only issued on CD in Japan so off to CD Japan I went, and at the same time I grabbed a copy of longtime favourite Kyuusai no Gishou. It's such a fascinating, incredible album - 90s electronica production, operatic vocals, grand drama, all rolled into one very auteur-like experience. Absolutely worth checking out.

Music reviews

June was a quiet month for reviews so there's not that many. I continued cracking down on the first steps of my ongoing Red Hot Chili Peppers discography review-through, and then took a break during Sonic's birthday celebrations to resume my dive through my Sonic music collection.

Most played song of the month according to Last.FM

The BoC summer continues with Inferno taking up most of the spots in my most listened scrobbles list, but the song that has risen above all the others is - appropriately - my favourite song from the album, "Blood in the Labyrinth".

Want to comment or get in touch? You can send any thoughts through this link!

#music