11 Great Experimental Albums from Winter 2026
Welcome to the first edition of the new year of Without A Net, our quarterly-ish column where we cover a bunch of awesome experimental (and experimental-adjacent) records that have tickled our ears. Although the calendar says 2026, I’ve rewound to late 2025 to cover releases dropped in primarily November and December, albums deserving of your attention that unfortunately got buried by the year-end best-of lists season. We’re here to make sure they get highlighted.
Read on for a stack of must-hear records that stretch from psych-rock, percussive music, post-bop, hip-hop to avant-rock and more. And stay tuned for the next Without A Net for the best of January, February and March releases.
Alta Vista – Won’t Believe In Dust
Alta Vista has the forward-pushing spirit of its hometown Chicago roots all over its guitar-bending explorations. On Won’t Believe In Dust, their second long-player, the guitar/bass/drums outfit operates from a cosmic realm with a chill and occasionally noisy hodgepodge of avant-jazz, post-rock, Spaghetti Western twang, film-noir and improvisatory psych stylings. The element of surprise is embedded in one tune to the next but one thing you can count on to send your mind bending: the glorious array of bucolic riffs found up the sleeve of Chet Zenor, Alta Vista’s axe slinger, now based in L.A. Despite the west coast relocation (double bassist Jacob Heinemann and drummer/keyboardist Andy Danstrom remain Chicagoans), the threesome’s riffscapes invoke the midwestern vistas like the ones Brokeback, Jeff Parker, Tortoise and David Grubbs paint so ‘out’-guitar heads take note.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Church Car – Church Of
The burgeoning Island House Recordings has fast become the go-to for the best of guitar-centric fare and Church Car is the one of the label’s resident pickers of fretboard sorcery and drone field sculptors. On Church Of, the duo of multi-instrumentalists and vocalists Ian Douglas-Moore and Big Daddy Mugglestone are brothers in sonically weird arms in shelling out dusty and homespun zoners, freakouts and jams that could be heard by a crackling campfire, at LaMonte Young’s Dream House or your local DIY watering hole in the wall. Douglas-Moore lets loose with scads of seriously dizzying guitar grit and majesty while Mugglestone holds the fort with driving beats that chug, stomp and groove. It’s as if Sir Richard Bishop had Can as his backing band and grooved on some heavenly jams. Church Car leave no stylistic stone unturned with their mind-meld of psychedelia, field recordings, freak-folk, wonky art-rock, raga missives and Krautrock. Trippy, interlocking and dueling riffscapes and even some groovy ’70s funk vibes (check out “Love Theme”).
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
EarthBall – Outside Over There
If melt-your-face free-psych sludge-rock avant-noise ecstasy is your bag, then holy crap, do I have a killer record for you. Hailing from Vancouver, British Columbia, EarthBall is a fully improvisational collective whose off-the-cuff marathon-length sax-squealing and honking anthems and dirges sound like alien transmissions from some other galaxy piped in from a 1970s-era transistor radio. That’s the scorched-earth vibe of Outside Over There, its eight atonal and spaced-out epics always on the verge of falling apart in a noisy blaze of stoner glory but somehow they keep it together, locking onto a muddy, monster groove and don’t let go. It’s psycho jazz for these apocalyptic times. Liner notes were penned by John Olson of Wolf Eyes and it makes perfect sense these cats are pals.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Forming Division – “Bring Them Down” / “Move”; Rational Cut – She Walks Alone; Repossession Time – “Cages” / “Bury Our History”; Subterranean Clocks – “We Won’t Be Ruined” / “Unlock Control”
For roughly the past two decades, Ohio’s Matthew Wascovich has carried the torch of Cleveland punk, taking cues from 1970s-era legends like Rocket From The Tombs, Pere Ubu, Peter Laughner and Electric Eels, and the SoCal hardcore and punk of SST Records. The mightily prolific “Wasco” (as his nickname goes) first made an indelible mark as the singer/writer/frontman of underground heroes Scarcity of Tanks then Vicious Fence and more recently Flowers Destroy. His rotating cast of collaborators in his countless bands has been star-studded: various Clevo punk icons, Minutemen, Dinosaur Jr., Mudhoney and Oneida members, Weasel Walter and more fellow lifers.
Now Wasco has debuted four(!) new bands on four separate 7-inches and all of ’em are topnotch slabs of wax full of rippin’ and tight-knit econo rock. Subterranean Clocks features Wasco, alongside a sick group including, The Ex/Dog Faced Hermans guitarist Andy Moor, bass god Mike Watt and Fugazi/Messthetics drummer Brendan Canty, making a scratchy Wire-esque, bottom end-booming din. Both the A and B sides rule. Moving on to the even better single by Forming Division, which finds Wasco captaining an all-star ship with Watt, J Mascis, Sunburned Hand of the Man drummer John Moloney and guitarist Jonny Bell. “Bring Them Down” (the kickass A side) conjures raging and trebly Minutemen/fIREHOSE vibes, complete with Mascis unloading mind-blowing shred and solos that’s gotta be heard to be believed. Rounding out the incredible batch are singles from Rational Cut and Repossession Time. You won’t find the fiercely independent Wascovich on Bandcamp or any streaming service so check out all his bands on the websites below.
Listen/Buy: Here, Here, Here and Here
HAYWARDxDÄLEK – HAYWARDxDÄLEK
An improbable New Jersey-South East London connection, it turns out drummer Charles Hayward of seminal English avant-punk act This Heat and ace rapper/producer Will Brooks, AKA MC dälek, of experimental hip-hop duo dälek make an organic match. HAYWARDxDÄLEK was birthed from a residency presented by the artist-led team From the Other in Salford, UK, and pairing these two boundary pushers proved a stroke of improvisatory and noisemaking genius. With Brooks on sampler (and vocals on three tracks) and Hayward on drums and synthesizer, the two construct richly textured drones, tones and timbres that hover, float and haunt as if jolting you awake from a hellish dystopian nightmare. Their gnarly noise-Hop confluence is not unlike dälek’s sound-deconstructing explorations but Hayward’s freewheeling beats and oh-so-heavy bludgeon brings their rhythmic and hot-wired noisescapes to hair-raising levels.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
NOMON – Echoes of Breakage
Shayna and Nava Dunkelman are not only sisters but kindred souls in the art of percussion. They are also experimental and improvised music and art-rock forces; Shayna a former member of Xiu Xiu and Nava has played and collaborated with the likes of John Zorn, amongst many other avant-garde luminaries. As NOMON, the Dunkelman sisters use their dizzying percussive prowess and saccharine electronics melodies as the foundation to instrumental art-pop-titled universes of sound that is off-the-charts blissful. The bright mellifluous colors and polyrhythmic dynamics that exude from the compositions on Echoes of Breakage sublimely blend experimental pop and contemporary percussive music with traditional sounds from their native Japan. A heady and ritualistic listening experience.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Sam Ospovat Expressive Olympics – Blight Music
The endeavors of multi-limbed powerhouse drummer and composer Sam Ospovat spans the spectrum from brutal-prog to no wave to free jazz to math-rock-inspired improvised music. Ospovat did a stint in Weasel Walter’s The Flying Luttenbachers, backed no wave queen Lydia Lunch and has led his own groups. His newest band, called Expressive Olympics and their debut, Blight Music, is a thrilling culmination (so far) of his musical journey but one also now guided by newly-explored directions into hard-charging post-bop swing that adds an infectiously melodic dose to his broadly-layered repertoire. Ospovat and his incredible core ensemble, featuring Lydia Lunch Retrovirus bassist Tim Dahl, pianist Matt Mitchell and saxophonists Nick Lyons and Matt Nelson, bust of the gate on Blight Music with, dare I say, somewhat accessible hard bopping, rhythmically thrusting tunes that capture a flavor that harkens back to the 1970s NYC loft-jazz scene. Loaded with the rich textures and intricate patterns that are Ospavat’s hallmarks, it also gushes with contagious and loose vibes that gallop. Don’t fret, though, these dudes haven’t shed their noisemaking roots. On heavy dirges like “Salvador Dahl,” Dahl and guest guitarist Olli Hirvonen make a caterwauling racket that invokes the no wave skronk assault of DNA. Another giant leap forward in Ospovat’s creative evolution and in his growing canon of compositional virtuosity and improvisational intensity.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Terry Riley and Thollem McDonas – The Light Is Real (Voices)
If ever there was a record that’s beyond far-out, this one is it. And one would expect nothing less from these two titans of spectral sound. Terry Riley, one of the founding fathers of minimalist movement, and shamanistic pianist, improviser and composer wizard Thollem McDonas are longtime friends and musical cohorts whose unconventional probings have mesmerized, confounded and baked minds and ears. The Light Is Real (Voices) does just that—without a single instrument with the exception of voice, as the album title suggests. Recorded long-distance and in real-time with Riley at his home in Japan and Thollem on a break from tour somewhere in New Mexico, their singularly secret modes of vocal inflections, accents, articulations and dialect, known only to them, are laid out like a kaleidoscopic splatter on a canvas. The Light Is Real (Voices) is a ceremonial type of soothing experiment to immerse oneself in, an interlocking and labyrinthine maelstrom of Riley and Thollem deep in meditation together remotely from opposite ends of the world, speaking in otherworldly tongues and breaths. A stunner.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Trinary System – The Hard Machine
Many are familiar with Roger Miller as the guitar visionary and co-singer of Mission of Burma, the post-punk OGs who helped stamp the Boston music scene on the underground map and who were aptly feted with a chapter in the indie rock bible, Our Band Could Be Your Life. Outside of the now-defunct Burma, Miller’s long been an intrepid six-stringer of loops-driven solo guitar abstractions with tons of records, most recently dropped by the avant Cuneiform label. Miller’s trio Trinary System brings back the take-no-prisoners anthemic experimental-minded rock attack that made Burma such a beloved and influential force on the aptly titled The Hard Machine. Miller—propelled by the dialed-in and malleable beast of a rhythm section made up of bassist/synth player P. Andrew Willis and drummer Larry Dersch—puts on a master class in guitar sonics and Mellotron fury, unleashing a torrent of fuzz-drenched strings stabs, bends and scrapes. Meanwhile, the jagged and jittery rhythms of clenched-fist salvos like “Monkeys (on Your Back),” “The Green Wall” and “Sometimes the Rain Falls in Your Favor” will snap necks sideways. Miller calls Trinary System “…my third, and last, really good rock band” (his high school band Sproton Layer and Burma being the first two). The Hard Machine is hard proof of that. With Miller’s Trinary System and Burma drummer Peter Prescott’s amazing Minibeast, who needs Mission of Burma to reunite?
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Chris Williams – Odu: Vibration II
As a vital cornerstone of the Brooklyn avant underground, you’ll find trumpeter, composer and improviser Chris Williams out and about, playing in History Dog or as sideman for Sonya Belaya, amongst many other projects. On Odu: Vibration II, Williams masters the solo role, wielding his vast skillset as an adventurous and deep thinking soundscapist armed with trumpet and synthesizers. The sweeping sci-fi-esque landscapes, sound transmittals and vibrations he shapes and manipulates seemingly drift in from interstellar heights. As drones rumble and oceanic dissonance swirls around, Williams gently blows meditative trumpet lines and phrases that soothe the soul, as heard on “Moon” and “Visage,” the latter featuring trombonist Kalia Vandever (speaking of Vandever, check out their 2025 album, Another View featuring Mary Halvorson, it’s an avant-jazz must-hear). The 14-minute-plus “Stemmed outwards” with saxophonist and The Armed member Patrick Shiroishi, is the record’s centerpiece, an ecstatic free jazz-meets-electronics epic teeming with shrieks and clatter. Odu: Vibration II is a sonic mind-melt.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Gabriel Zucker – Confession
Gabriel Zucker, an ingeniously oddball avant-everything composer and songwriter, dubs himself a “musical maximalist” and is he ever spot-on with that description. The sprawling, jaw-dropping freakout magnum opus that is Confession is evidence of that. Running an hour long and split in four continuous acts, the conceptual Confession ostensibly plays out on a massive creative scale akin to a cinematic production with Zucker assuming the lead role, wielding his polymathic talents as he sings and croons and hops from piano, synths, electronics and keyboards with histrionic abandon. Zucker’s art-pop and avant-fucked tunesmithery is a downright brain-scramble with eye-twitching, glitched-out melodies and rhythms of epically herky-jerk magnitude; it’s no wonder Confession took six years to complete. With a stellar group of avant-gardists culled from the NYC scene including, Grey Mcmurray, Laura Cocks, Matt Nelson, Adam O’Farrill, Alfredo Colón and more, Zucker has fully realized his mangled and purely original vision. Listening on headphones is highly recommended for this one.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
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