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2025 was a vintage year for music, with huge tours from the likes of Beyonce and Lady Gaga, the Oasis reunion tour, a vintage Glastonbury with plenty of big names and controversy, plus groundbreaking releases by the likes of Geese and Rosalia.
In fact, so good was it, that you worry for 2026, especially since Glastonbury is having a fallow year.
Never fear though, it actually looks like very, very big things are coming our way:
A new Rolling Stones album
It’s all leaks upon leaks with the less-than-tight ship that is The Rolling Stones, not all of it good news for fans. Everyone knew the band spent the last year recording with producer Andrew Watt on the follow-up to the excellent 2023 album Hackney Diamonds and it was widely expected that they would be touring in 2026. However, the latest news to emerge is that a 2026 tour has been scrapped due to Keith Richards being unwilling to commit. As in 2025, there had been a tour penciled in with venues, but that has now no longer on the cards for next year. While Richards and Mick Jagger are now both 82, there is no suggestion that health issues are behind the decision.
Shame we likely won’t get to see them on stage but we should at least have the album this coming year, which would be their 32nd studio album. And it’s never a bad year when the Stones have a record out.
Charli xcx at Reading and Leeds Festival/Wuthering Heights
Henry Redcliffe
Reading Festival always used to be a place where any pop stars who dared to make an appearance were duly bottled off. How times have changed, with Chappell Roan storming the main stage last summer and now Charli xcx bringing some brat energy to what is actually the brattiest festival around.
It will follow on from Charli’s highly anticipated soundtrack to the new film version of Wuthering Heights which lands on February 14th. Emerald ‘Saltburn’ Fennell’s adaptation is being billed as ‘The greatest love story of all time’ (weird, considering what the plot of the book actually entails) and has already courted controversy for the casting of Margot Robbie at Cathy (Robbie is 35, when in the book she is a dark-haired teen) and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff (who is not the dark-skinned ‘gypsy’ described in the book). It is certain to be a divisive film yet if the first single is anything to go by, Charli’s album should be unifying in its greatness.
House features John Cale in a brilliantly avant-garde track which is very different to her usual brat fare, with a delve into the kind of edgy minimalist orchestration and extremist noise-core which drove Cale’s former band The Velvet Underground to greatness. Second single Chains of Love was a similarly elusive slice of mood music, Kate Bush on ketamine, you might say.
Gorillaz as they kick off their run of four London shows (Phoebe Fox/RMP)
PA Media
While Oasis, Pulp and Suede all toured last year, it was quieter on the Blur front, since they’d already been there, done that in 2024 with their Wembley shows and in fact Albarn was gearing up for a huge 2026 with Gorillaz.
Back in August, they unveiled the House of Kong, an interactive art exhibition at London’s Copper Box, which gave a behind-the-scenes look at the HQ of the virtual band Albarn created with artist Jamie Hewlett back in 1995. At a mystery show accompanying the exhibition, their new album The Mountain was performed in full. The album is now set to land on 27th February.
Their latest single Damascus featured Syrian star Omar Souleyman and Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), an epic anthem which they played at Brian Eno’s Together for Palestine concert last month.
Expect the new album to hit similar heights, and the year of Gorillaz to climax with their biggest show to date at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on 20 June.
The return of Super Furry Animals
One much-loved post-Britpop band who are coming back for a tour are Super Furry Animals. Their first shows for ten years, the Welsh psychedelic superstars are playing Alexandra Palace as part of it, playing the venue on July 12 with The Beta Band as a big name support.
No word on any new music but it’s a must for alt-rock fans as the new wave of cool nostalgia continues to throw up gems.
Dry Cleaning’s new album
Dry Cleaning
Free PR handout
Secret Love, the new record by London avant-indie heroes Dry Cleaning is out on January 9, and as they told us in our recent interview, is one which takes their unclassifiable spoken-word doom rock oddness to new undeniably genius heights.
Strong early shout for the Mercury Prize right here.
Lana Del Rey to finally release hers?
All last year we were waiting for the release of Lana Del Rey’s record, which was first titled Lasso and then The Right Person Will Stay. Now it is officially called Stove and will – should! – land in 2026. Del Rey has called the sound of the record “classic country, American or Southern Gothic production”, and the first signs of it on last year’s singles Bluebird and Henry, come on, suggest something very special indeed. Fingers crossed then…
Sleaford Mods herald the end of the world
Sleaford Mods in Abbey Road Studios with actor Gwendoline Christie June 20. 2025.
Ki Price
The Demise of Planet X is the new album from Sleafords – out Jan 16 – and it’s an epic concept album about the apocalypse, but filtered through their usual splenetic lo-fi electronica. Funny, danceable and deranged, it is everything you want from Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearns, while also careering into new places, as with the psycho soul of single The Good Life, which featured Big Special and Game of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie. One for those just about done with the state of the world and algorithmic lifestyles… all of us then.
No, not the unkillable, zombie-like 90s pop-art music scene but the new album by Robbie Williams which, er, focuses on the 90s pop-art music scene. It’s a fascinating concept, with Williams approaching it as the album he wanted to and should have made after leaving Take That in 1995.
The original edgy sex pop superstar Peaches is returning to show Charli, Sabrina et al how it’s done. Coming out of the Electroclash scene in the 2000s with her landmark Teaches of Peaches album, the artist also known as Merrill Nisker was an underground hero who crossed over into indie-sleaze stardom, scaring the NME boys and bringing queer, feminist sloganeering to the forefront in witty street fashion. It seems apt then, that amid the current wave of young pop sex-positive provocateurs – and throwback authoritarian male rulers – that she is returning with her new album No Lube, So Rude (out Feb 20).
Expect, well, a lot of rudeness, but of a distinctly political bent. Put simply, the world needs Peaches right now.
Mumford & Sons unleash Prizefighter
Mumford & Sons
Conor Cunningham
The new Mumfords record out on Feb 13 comes under a year since their last one RUSHMERE, and is a dazzlingly expansive work which shows a band at the top of their increasingly evolving game. Somehow they have retained the communal joy of their music with new paths into intimate and raw songwriting, and maybe its just the sheer effervescence of being on a creative roll that is infectious.
After recent barn-storming shows at the O2 they’ll be playing BST Hyde Park in July with more dates likely.
Will Nicky Minaj release Pink Friday 3?
A March release was slated for Pink Friday 3, although numerous delays for her previous releases mean nothing is certain, and particularly after she recently made an appearance at a Maga event in America called Turning Point USA where she appeared alongside Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika. She praised Donald Trump in the chat, calling him “handsome, dashing,” and said young men should not behave like “New-scum”, a reference to Governor of California, Gavin Newsom. After the subsequent backlash, she has since deactivated her Instagram account.
Kim Gordon brings the cool
The former Sonic Youth alt-rock icon has become a genuine It-woman of contemporary art-pop cool with her exhilarating solo work. It’s unbelievable that it’s now 10 years since her first solo single Murdered Out, when she began her work with producer Justin Raisen, but not such a surprise that her peerless noise-core post-modern deconstructions of contemporary life have struck a chord in disjointed times. After her single BYE BYE went viral a couple of years ago and bagged a couple of Grammy nominations, there is much excitement around forthcoming album Play Me. With good reason: early listens confirm a cacophony of sound and critique that only she can pull off. The Madonna of the Underground will be speaking again.
Charlie Denis
After releasing probably the most talked-about album of last year, despite it arriving at the end of the year, Lily Allen is bringing West End Girl on tour, including three nights at the London Palladium from March 20-22nd, and then three nights at the O2 in June and July.
No matter what you may think of the album musically – and we think it is vastly underrated in that sense – the hyper-confessional nature of the songwriting feels genuinely groundbreaking, like a Taylor Swift who has stopped burying Easter Eggs to instead crack them open in front of our faces. Sure it’s built on celebrity prurience but there’s more going on too, a kind of unflinching commitment to exposing the everyday horrors of bad relationships which is a sign of true artistry at work.
After the cinematic behemoth of the Wicked films, Grande is now concentrating on her music although her London shows are not exactly low-key. In fact, she has a 10-night residency at the O2 from Aug 15 to Sept 1 as part of her Eternal Sunshine tour, her first set of dates in seven years. She has called these shows her “last hurrah”, meaning she’ll be taking a bit of well-deserved break, and this will make these occasions all the more emotional for her fans. Expect top-tier showmanship from this megastar.
Florence will make Everybody Scream
Florence + The Machine Everybody Scream
Album artwork
Also back onstage are Florence + The Machine, touring off the back of their excellent recent album Everybody Scream. The record sees Florence Welch deal with recent personal battles with visceral fearlessness, being at once mystically ancient in her poeticism and of the moment in her feminism. These days she comes on like the lovechild of PJ Harvey and Nick Cave now grown into a wild woman returning from nature to be let loose on the world… go see her live, and you’ll see what we mean…
The three bright new hopes
As for the new breakthrough acts for next year, well it’s worth just looking at the Brits Critics’ Choice award nominees, which are pretty spot on.
Rose Gray is someone we all know about, a pop star with immense potential who is surely going to break over big time. Then there’s the ultra-cool goth-folk singer-songwriter Jacob Alon who may well be the Scottish Tim Buckley. And finally Sienna Spiro, who has the kind of big soul voice that works a dark glamour to make David Lynch weep. Three great artists to get on now.
Sienna Spiro
Press handout
Geese went from little-known cult New York act to your dad’s favourite new band over just a few months at the end of last year after the release of their fourth album Getting Killed in September. Soon, frontman Cameron Winter, who had released his own solo album earlier in the year, was being hailed as the next Bob Dylan/Tom Waits/Leonard Cohen/Jesus and his show at the Roundhouse caused pandemonium.
As such, Geese’s show at the Kentish Town Forum on March 25 is not so much a hot ticket as a ticking time bomb… their ramshackle shaggy indie brilliance fits the venue but their level of fame suddenly does not. It’s going to be a hell of a show, if you can get in. As for those still mystified why they have gone massive against others of their ilk, well, just give Getting Killed another listen… takes a few spins but once you get it, you really get it. Geese to take the year again? Well, if they drop another album, as this prolific outfit tend to do whenever they feel like it, you wouldn’t be surprised.
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