6 Great Vinyl Reissues from Winter 2026

It’s widely believed that vinyl purchases began increasing worldwide around 2007, and during and after the pandemic, those numbers soared exponentially. Heavyweight is a column that helps you sort through the worthy and eliminate the meh. Each edition will feature a “Dusty Fingers” pick—something so incredible, or in this edition’s case, so commonly heard, that sometimes it’s just perceived as pedestrian. You won’t believe it until you pull back and consider the legacy. Then, you’ll hear it. Differently. Join us as we indulge in your favorite vinyl addiction.

This is Heavyweight.

Note: When you buy something through our affiliate links, Treble receives a commission. All albums we cover are chosen by our editors and contributors.

The Emotions – Untouched

Your sample lizard brain will direct you to “Blind Alley,” one of the most sampled tracks in R&B, including Big Daddy Kane’s “Ain’t No Half-Steppin’” and Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover,” but the real treasure is how deeply talented these Chicago-based Hutchinson Sisters were. Church trained in gospel but moved to the money-making R&B and eventually disco; it’s always the voices that travel, not the genre.

Produced by Isaac Hayes, David Porter, and Ronnie Williams, and recorded at Muscle Shoals and Stax studios, Untouched provides numerous reasons why this release is their initial north star. With Hayes on the organ, striking horn arrangements, and a touch of Memphis grit, their second album—originally released on the Volt imprint—serves as a flowchart illustrating how the right voices, sassy but never saccharine, can be beautifully integrated with some of the best arrangers of their time. The Emotions would later achieve great success in disco with Earth, Wind & Fire in the late 1970s, but this album represents the blueprint for all the worlds they could color.

Listen/Buy: YouTube | Rough Trade (vinyl)

The Style Council – Cafe Bleu (Special Edition)

A diversity of musical styles is the cool kid way of saying that Paul Weller and Mick Talbot wanted to venture in more, how you say “rhythmic waters.” The Style Council told fans of The Jam. Put away the guitar rock mystique. Get some smooth clothing, proper cologne, and open your ears a bit. Following that later Clash move of incorporating pop, hip hop and soul, opting for a jazzier flair, The Style Council set a precedent, a certain sophistication, that radiated through the entire 12-inch version of “Long Hot Summer” that was slow, shimmering with those “Risin’ to the Top” keyboard ripples, it made women swan about and convinced dudes it was cool to drink a bone-dry crisp Rosé on a hotter than hell eve.

“My Ever Changing Moods” alone inspired Oasis, Blur, The Stone Roses; that merging of ’60s pop and ’80s soul laid the blueprint for ’90s Britpop. Café Bleu (Special Edition) has a plethora of tones and plenty of entryways for Weller fans to get hip like their “Modfather,” catch a groove and avoid the blockhead path to pint night.

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Rough Trade (vinyl)

The Pharcyde – Labcabincalifornia (30th Anniversary Edition)

Fatlip, Slimkid3, Bootie Brown, and Imani confidently sing/rap, “You need to get on up off of that bullshit, stop fighting that feeling,” on the opening track of Labcabincalifornia, “Bullshit,” knowing as a crew they were blessed, once again. With help from JD, later to be known as J Dilla, they were about to join Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, De La Soul’s De La Soul Is Dead, A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, and Digable Planets’ Blowout Comb. The rare, two classic albums club in hip-hop. Rough terrain to scale.

“If it wasn’t for Q-Tip, we would have never met JD or had those beats” stated Slimkid3 in a 2013 interview with The Urban Daily. “We were kind of like the first ones… we branded that shit.”

It’s in the vibes, the ease with which this LA crew just floats with their flows, this time over an album produced by the one who would and did change hip-hop and eventually popular music in the 21st Century. These South Central dudes called out the false narratives being perpetrated in hip hop at that time with inventive smoothness in the production, that sounded decades away from g-funk, and all the other topical hip-hop microclimates. “Runnin’,” the monster hit aimed at the hip-hop nation so hard that, like all really talented golden-era hip hop, put the group back on pop radio, and “Drop” made them Spike Jonze adjacent with the breakthrough video. This no-skips bouillabaisse consortium, complete with skits, interludes, and weeded-out type of constructs, made Labcabincalifornia sound like a five mic record (shout out to The Source). But this, their creative masterpiece, would be the final collaborative project from the group’s golden era.

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Amazon (vinyl)

The Necessaries – Completely Necessary (Anthology 1978-1982)

Arthur Russell, a pioneer of dance music, joined the short-lived post-punk quartet The Necessaries as a keyboardist, vocalist, and songwriter. Their 1982 album Event Horizon, built with infectious sway and searing power-pop/new wave arrangements, was a hazy foreshadowing of what was to come in the future via The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Rapture, and LCD Soundsystem—repping that NYC dance-pop confection.

Completely Necessary (Anthology 1978-1982) is the first authorized collection of recordings by The Necessaries and includes 37 tracks, 28 of which are previously unissued. Completely Necessary represents the most accurate musical history of the band laid out across three albums. Unfortunately for Russell, Seymour Stein, co-founder of Sire Records and a vice president at Warner Bros. Records, was preoccupied with positioning Talking Heads, Blondie, The Pretenders, Soft Cell, The Cure, and all those Madonna 12-inch records at the time, so The Necessaries went overlooked. The record man’s embarrassment of riches blinded him to Arthur Russell’s genius. The similarities between the singles “More Real” and “When You Were Mine” by Prince, a Warner Bros. artist at the time, are even more bizarre, yet both succeed at foreshadowing the oncoming tone of alt/college rock. Russell quit the band by jumping out of the van at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel in New York, while on the way to an important gig. He went on to score massive underground hits under the aliases of Dinosaur L and Loose Joints. He passed away in 1992 from AIDS-related illnesses, still in relative obscurity and poverty.

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Rough Trade (vinyl)

Crown Heights Affair – Dream World

My parents actually attended a boat party in the early 1970s that featured the electrifying sounds of both Kool & The Gang and Crown Heights Affair, named after the vibrant Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Renowned for their identifiable Brooklyn funk, intertwined with sophisticated soul and an infectious brass-laden strut, Crown Heights Affair tweaked their formula as disco’s influence waned in the latter part of the decade. 

Their track “Dream World” moves with that polished sheen, blending irresistible grooves that keep you moving. “Galaxy of Love” opens with an airplane takeoff scenario, while horns burst forth with a high-energy syncopation. But the breakdown surprises with a quirky, squished duck bass line—a true stomper—followed by charging horn arrangements and a quizzical keyboard moment blasts across the night sky. 

Later, “Things Are Going To Get Better” points toward an emerging “boogie” phase just on the horizon. It’s an uplifting jam that punches in the pockets with quick-hitting chart intensity and that hustle mentality, all while holding onto the fading brilliance of disco in carefully reserved sections. Dream World is a testament to the changing times of 4/4 music. 

Listen: Spotify

Dusty Fingers Pick

The Power Station 40th Anniversary releases

Decades after my guilty pleasure fascination with the eponymous debut album by The Power Station, I’d find out by a master music producer how, pardon the pun, heavyweight this recording was from behind the scenes. In an interview with Bill Laswell, discussing the production behind Sonny Sharrock’s career-defining swan song of an album Ask The Ages, Laswell gave me a nugget, an unsolicited gem, that explained so many things.

“Jason Corsaro engineered and mixed that record. He’s a beast of an engineer and really famous for mixing drums. He pretty much defined the ’80s with bands like The Power Station and Robert Palmer. He created that sound. He came out of the Bob Clearmountain school. He was Bob’s assistant. But he was more of an animal and still is.”

I always was of the mind setthat the Chic influence gave that station that big thundering funky power with rock accents. Understandable—singer Robert Palmer and Duran Duran members John Taylor (bass) and Andy Taylor (guitar) are not scrubs. But former Chic drummer Tony Thompson was driving this bus with force, making stops, while Bernard Edwards, also of Chic, was involved on the studio side as recording producer and for a short time also functioned as the Power Station’s manager.

The radio hits, “Get It On (Bang A Gong) ” and “Some Like It Hot,” yeah they are cute. But the jawns lie in the album cuts. The sleek nighttime groove of “Lonely Tonite,” with just the right amount of Robert Palmer velveeta, makes this track a sleeper, moody type rock-funker. (Be careful how you say that) “Go To Zero,” the bassline versus horn line interplay, with sketching guitars, and that dangerously cosmopolitan bridge; this construction feels mysteriously like an arrangement Mark King, the renowned lead singer and bassist for the English jazz-funk band Level 42, might have passed on. Even the synth-so-good meets bass and rhythm lock-step figure “Communication” had those big drum energy type vibes, that makes you wanna peer beyond the curtain of this peculiar outfit and find out “who’s really running thangs.” But it’s that added info from Mr Laswell about Jason Corsaro, that was the mysterious piece. The Power Station production? Striking, then and now. Known in their heyday as only radio performance one-trick ponies, there were a bunch of ideas about rock, funk and post-disco that warrants this album reconsideration by a new generation. There is a 2LP anniversary reissue out now, but I’d still recommend just picking up a used copy anywhere. Those drum sounds, the bass-groove ideas from Chic, with that dollop of Duran Duran in the mixing bowl too? Power Station is a guaranteed good time.

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Rough Trade (vinyl)

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