Trendwatch 2026
We spill tea just to read the leaves.
Among this week’s music selections: It’s like rainbows of sound when all of these genres show up in one place. We’ve got a rare Italian jewel that sparkles in the light of your attention; an EP of chill but engaging slow-techno from two veteran sound-practitioners; an extremely loud (in a good way) album of hybridized metal-industrial punk that feels like a good fit for the zeitgeist; the emergence of local weirdos bearing old tapes; and a pitch-perfect rendition of Memphis-style grooves served hot, straight from the kitchen. I hope you brought your own bib because we don’t have enough of them for everyone, unfortunately.
Trendwatch 2026
A few items caught my eye this week that speak to the paradigm shift getting underway. Consider these a few tea leaves with which we might interpret nuggets about what the future holds. These are some of the leading indicators we’re watching at Listening Habit headquarters to predict which way the wind is going to blow. [Bob Dylan was correct that it is possible to know that information without a degree in meteorology.]
Your fav band might be a psyop
There was heated online discourse about the band Geese this week following revelations about how tactics used by a digital marketing agency helped them manufacture music-virality. The agency started by seeding placements of songs across thousands of “fake” accounts in order to gain traction with recommendation algorithms on social and streaming platforms. A Wired article expanded on some bold claims the agency made during a presentation at SXSW, and then referred to Geese as a “psyop” in the resulting article, which effectively baited the clicks.
Basically, Geese is really popular, but that popularity was manufactured by manipulating algorithms that control what hundreds of millions of people see while online. The resulting hubbub over the Wired article is a bunch of people who saw how the sausage is made (mass-scale human attention is the sausage in this Upton Sinclair analogy), and then got upset about it.
While there were strong feelings elicited, the situation seems divided into two camps: 1) people who are shocked that social feeds and consumer tastes would be manipulated for corporate benefit, and 2) people who think it’s naive to see the majority of online content as anything more than publicist-schlock/slop. As a guess, I’d suggest some of the division between those camps is the result of how much individuals know about the mechanics of social feeds and recommendation engines. For example, when people understand how algorithms work they become less susceptible to misinformation (rather than simply consuming — being an educated consumer becomes an asset).
There may be some denial in play, too, because no one loves realizing they were the rube/mark. But manipulating TikTok trends is the newest shape of an old practice. Paid promotions and other forms of attention-capture to facilitate popularity of products has existed since the advent of broadcast media (whether we’re talking about old-school payola, concert ticket giveaways, billboards, search engine optimization or countless other tactics). That said, whether the consumer response to that is angry or accepting consistently boils down to whether or not a promotion is disclosed (#ad). What’s in poor taste isn’t that someone figured out how to game the system, it’s that they’re deploying deceptive social accounts to astroturf the adoption of the music as if it’s already popular in order to make it popular. What does an epistemological implosion sound like?
And if the Capital Class is seeding music with that tactic, then there are probably lots of ideas/tastes that are being disseminated as if they’re already popular thanks to money rather than the strength/value of the idea/product being shared. It’s a paradigm shift from the early days of user-generated reviews being positioned as an authentic antidote to pure marketing. Now you can’t trust public opinion online because what appears to be people on the internet isn’t human beings, but rather a small, nationless army of artificial identities deployed by marketing agencies to achieve popularization of some messaging goal. I’m not a linguist, but that sounds like a psyop to me.
Pop music might be shifting back to rock from club music
There’s no denying we’ve been in a music cycle recently dominated by the popularization of music styles developed in (and for) clubs and raves. Dance music! It’s not new, necessarily — Cher and Madonna really pioneered the chart-topping dance-pop hits 20+ years ago, and you could make a case that Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall is the real progenitor, starting from the grooves of disco brought outside of the discotheque and into the light of day by Quincy Jones. But I digress…
Wherever you mark its beginning, this wave of popular music heavily informed by house and techno might have crested with Charli XCX’s Brat last year. Maybe it was the high-water mark of a slow-building cultural tsunami that made dance-club a dominant paradigm rather than an outsider space for the past few years.
Last week, XCX made headlines with the bold proclamation that “dance floor is dead” and she was going to make a rock album next. There’s two ways that can go… everyone now follows suit and teens start loving rock again for a couple years (which kinda makes sense given the pervasiveness of ’90s nostalgia), or her record totally bombs and we remain in pop-cultural stasis, surviving only with our wits and a rusty blade.
Whether you’re an insider or an outsider makes a lot of difference
In what might be described as the least surprising headline of Q2 across most of America, when it comes to AI there’s a widening perception gap between AI-industry insiders and the rest of America as far as its value, risk and potential to irreparably damage the fabric of civilization. It’s like you’ve either drank the Kool-Aid or you haven’t.
That’s the forecast for this week. If you picked up anything cool for Record Store Day send me a note about what you’re jamming. Here are a few recent discoveries worth sharing. #ListeningHabit
Silvia Tarozzi - Lucciole
Speaking as someone who will probably write about 200-300 album reviews this year, and listen to many times more than that in the process, this is a standout record. There are not a lot of things that sound like this, and I mean that in a good way. This record from late last year is like a rare gem in its clarity, creativity and quality. Even if you don’t like it, you kinda have to respect the craft.
The record opens with some brassy orchestral minimalism, but that is merely setting the mood before the curtain pulls back on an epic program that is at times cinematic, orchestral, modern-creative, classical, folk-ish, jazzy and traditional in different measures. “Frutti acerbi” is an acoustic pastoral rolling with Italian musicality like the hills of Tuscany. That beauty is contrasted by the detuned first minute of “L’airone” which then gives way to beauty before resolving into a mix of dissonance and noir-film horns. “Brass on the rocks” has me teary-eyed before glitchiness emerges underneath it all, and then “Sun” punches through with a surprise outburst of kalimbas and effervescent bubbles of percussion. There’s nothing usual about this album, and much of it is a joy of a listen.
Foote/Dickow - High Cube
This EP came out a couple of weeks ago and made a splash among electronic music aficionados, critics and the erstwhile blogerati due to the personnel involved, which includes Brian Foote (operator of the respected Kranky record label and a veteran of many underground music projects) collaborating for the first time with artist and underground peer Paul Dickow (of Strategy and other projects).
What I like about this one is its chill, but it’s not the lo-fi beats for background effect. It’s like finely crafted slow-techno. It feels like you could also play this at 45rpm and it would be a club banger with a completely different quality to the sound. Press play on “Volcano Snail” and get a sense of how this one balances engaging energy with mellow vibes. Also, the languid bass on “Underwater Welder” might make your eyes cross. Aquatic indeed. You could play this one after you get out of the sensory deprivation tank. The sum is a cool six-pack of smart, rhythmic atmospheres.
The Armed - Ultrapop
Fair warning if you’ve been lulled into a false sense of security by the selections so far, this is one of the loudest records I’ve heard in a decade. Like after I saw Sleigh Bells in concert around 2012-13, it was the loudest show I’d ever been to and I don’t know if I ever fully recovered. This feels like it might be on that level. It is an all-out sonic assault of metal, industrial, noise and punk.
From the opening feedback squeal of “An Iteration”, which is smashed to pieces by rapid-fire drums and a full sheet of guitar noise, there’s never a moment to catch one’s breath. But this isn’t just a monolithic smashing of everything in sight. There is a dynamism to the arrangements that balances the heaviness with other types of heaviness. Then “Big Shell” drops and it’s suuuupppeerrrr heavy. They found more heaviness somehow. Let-it-all-out-by-screaming-into-the-void-type situations abound. I think this record supports our earlier assertion that the zeitgeist is going to switch to a rock idiom. The energy outside is a little smashy right now.
Edibles - Other Minds Meet Inner Space
Ok, we’ll bring it down a notch or two. This is a recent re-issue of an album originally released in 2011 by the Ohio-based, underground cassette label DNT Records, which recently re-established itself online after a hiatus of more than a decade. What were once limited release tapes, CDRs and a smattering of vinyl is now being re-released online with a new drop each month.
While I would call out “Tranced Encounter” if you want a quick taste, this whole album from Edibles is an adventure. If you’re looking for a jammy, psych-garage-meets-dub thing, let your freak flag fly with a funky outer-space trip from kosmische synth jams to psych-rock rippers, among other tangents.
When the going gets weird, the weird get going.
Parlor Greens - Emeralds
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been finding myself listening to more soul recently, so it was only a matter of time before we ended up blasting this new record from Parlor Greens. This trio on Colemine Records is channeling pure Memphis grooves in the vein of Booker T. and the M.G.s, the Mar-Keys and similar folks.
If you don’t find yourself bopping your head or tapping your toe when “Eat Your Greens” drops in and that organ starts riffing, you need to ask yourself some hard questions about what’s important in this world. Anytime a soul album has a bunch of songs named after food, you know it’s gotta cook.
That’s all for this week. Thanks for spending some time listening with us. We’ll be back next week with something completely different. Until then, keep it timeless rather than timely.