11 Great Experimental Albums from Spring 2026
It’s been a minute since the last edition of Without A Net, Treble’s quarterly survey of notable experimental albums released over the last several months or so. With this column, there are few rules to adhere to. We aren’t beholden to release dates, the demands of music PR firms and record labels (well, sort of). It’s anything goes as the wide net that is the experimental music pantheon is shed light upon so dig in and trip out on noise, psych, ambient, post-glitch and more.
Bentley Anderson – Valence
It’s safe to say that New York City guitar young’un Bentley Anderson spun the ear-ringing noise bacchanals that marked Sonic Youth’s “The Diamond Sea” and “Mote,” Lee Ranaldo’s 1980s-era solo records on SST and Bill Nace joints until the dang needle fell off. Anderson’s Valence captures the sort of tone and drone utopias those luminaries have explored to similar towering heights of pure rapture. Anderson is a more-than-worthy disciple of the aforementioned master noisescapists, a guitarrorist (relax, that’s a reference to an incredible guitar comp from 1991) whose scribbling blown-out sonics fall somewhere between claustrophobia and catharsis. On the seven pieces that make up Valence, Anderson–employing looping and distortion effects–makes his lone six-string sound more like a free jazz saxophone ensemble. The expansive realms Anderson achieves, sitting on a chair with his ax face-up on his lap, approaches a spiritual, ceremonial music that is truly hypnotic. You’ll be hearing more from this dude soon enough.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Rachel Beetz – Tone Keepers
You might know Rachel Beetz as a member of the acclaimed ensemble Wild Up, whose forays into the ingenious work of Julius Eastman has helped forge the pioneering composer fresh ears and new audiences. On her own as composer, flautist and sound designer, Beetz is an envelope-pushing shapeshifter, forming mind-bending solar systems made up of tones and pitches that seemingly cascade from above and through the ether. That dynamic is the gist of Tone Keepers, an apt title if there ever was one; Beetz is a next-level keeper of tones who then spreads its wealth by raining down luxuriant resonances like a painter crafting a dazzling canvas. Each of the four pieces on Tone Keepers, propelled by flute, piccolo and electronic processing, convey disparate moods and are defined by human emotion and meditative reflection. Escapist, thought-inducing explorations from one of the best experimental labels out there, Outside Time.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Drum Major Instinct x Kramer – Drum Major Instinct x Kramer
In the 1980s and ‘90s-era underground scene, producer and musician Kramer was a major player, helping define a distinctive sound and movement, as evidenced by seminal records by Galaxie 500 and all the records he released via his own label, Shimmy-Disc. After an extended dormant period, Kramer has resurfaced with a creative vengeance. He rebooted Shimmy-Disc, which has yielded much fruit thus far, plus he’s collaborated with the likes of Thurston Moore. On this 34-minute epic, Kramer enters the explorative spaced-out universe of Drum Major Instinct, the duo of percussionist Jeff Arnal and modular synthesizer musician Curt Cloninger and the result is dizzyingly cathartic. The recording’s single composition runs the gamut of gloriously locked-in and meandering grooves, courtesy of Kramer’s slinky basslines and cosmic synth drones and elongated tones and rumbling sound waves that seemingly streak across the starry night sky. The key to their astral wizardry is Arnal’s omnipresent beats, an effortless spraying of clinks, clacks and crashes, that is relentless, meticulous and relaxed in its approach. A mesmerizing listening experience that’s not to be missed.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin – ITERAE
Any perceptions you have of the Fender Rhodes electric piano, just throw it all out the window when putting on this epic post-glitch mind-blow. ITERAE features the first-rate tandem of electronic music visionaries, Greyfade recording label chief Joseph Branciforte and Belgian keys authority Jozef Dumoulin, on Fender Rhodes and the pulsing sound worlds they create during its hour-plus length drift and hover with such an airy, daydream-like sensibility that falling into its trance is inevitable. A first-time collaboration, ITERAE reveals an otherworldly rapport in which the twosome’s layered, dueling sonic language ultimately cross paths resulting in a singular organism. Theirs is psychic-grade interplay on the set’s conversational, glitch-dominated, blipping and beeping alien transmissions. A monumental achievement of live editing (courtesy of Branciforte’s knob-twiddling expertise) and Fender Rhodes majesty. Released by the incredibly adventurous Greyfade label which just put out the debut from musician and sound artist wizard Josh Mason, also a must-hear.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Colin Hinton – Three Suites
Like his mentor and pal, the MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner Tyshawn Sorey, drummer Colin Hinton shatters any and all forms of conventional compositional technique. Genre need not apply when it comes to Hinton’s vast palette for going against the traditional grain. Three Suites defines that nonconformist approach–even as it employs the “classic” piano trio format that’s long been a hallmark in the jazz idiom. Three Suites, featuring Hinton, pianist Santiago Leibson and bassist Eivind Opsvik and fittingly produced by Sorey, is worlds away from that template; instead, its marathon-long abstractions an exercise in deep listening, unfurling landscapes and tension-building timbres. There’s so much probing detail to dissect and escape into in Hinton’s pieces here as they teem with chaotic phrases yet its oh-so-spacious, a cascading architecture that is arrhythmic but flowing freely and unsettling sensibility that inflects a strange warmth. A mind bender.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
DoYeon Kim – Wellspring
When the votes are counted for the best album lists of 2026, Wellspring, the bandleader debut by wildly inventive New York-based creative music rising star DoYeon Kim, should be high up there. The Seoul, South Korea-born, New York City-based Kim, who’s made her presence felt in the avant underground over the last few years alongside luminaries like Brandon Lopez, Joe Morris and Sonia Belaya, is a virtuoso of the Korean gayageum (a silk-string zither) and on Wellspring, her rapid-fire fingerpicking and plucking of the instrument and her intense shrieks could peel the paint off the walls. Augmented by a next-level group featuring Tyshawn Sorey (drums), Mat Maneri (viola) and Henry Fraser (bass), Kim is the towering, dominant figure on the set’s seven pieces, commanding your ears, lifting spirits and melting faces as the quartet hurdle from furious and prickly improvisational maelstroms to navigating gorgeous textures and nuances. A singular debut.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Max Kutner – Rogue Lash
With his unpredictable, multi-layered and eclectic avant-jazz, as heard on recent records like Partial Custody and High Flavors, New York City experimental stalwart Max Kutner has carved out a singular niche for himself as a leading light in operating from outside the box. Rogue Lash, Kutner’s newest magnum opus, occupies another distinct realm entirely, a genre-smashing, post-modern slab of unfettered weirdness. Composed, arranged and produced by Kutner himself at home with contributions from avant cohorts like Ben Stapp, Marc Edwards, Jessica Lurie, Matt Darriau, Curtis Hasselbring and others, Rogue Lash embarks on a sonic journey of extreme fuckery. With Kutner showcasing his multi-instrumental virtuosity on guitars, basses, banjo, synthesizer, sequencing, vocals, drum machine, kanjira and samples, Rogue Lash runs the outre gamut as it chops up and spits out epic slabs of prog-rock, noise, post-rock, hip-hop, industrial music and techno into something that sounds as if it touched down from another galaxy.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Janel Leppin – Slowly Melting
The sonic heft that Janel Leppin bows from her cello is fit to be blasted from a stack of Marshall amps. That’s how potent and loud it is, the emotive magnitude and sheer physicality will knock you off your feet. Slowly Melting, the Washington, D.C.-based composer’s latest effort is billed as “solo cello” but the unique technique in which Leppin bathes her explorations in feedback, effects and other assorted gizmos makes it sound more like a guitarist stomping on noise pedals and ripping solo heroics. On par with likeminded cellist Helen Money, Slowly Melting draws from classical music, metal and ambient music rather than pulled from the jazz idiom. For Leppin’s surveys into the chamber-jazz aesthetic, do check out Pluto In Aquarius by her terrific group Ensemble Volcanic Ash, which was released on the same day as Slowly Melting. Both albums demonstrate Leppin’s prolific range.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Neptune – “Play Some Music”
Fifteen long years have passed since the last record scrap heap experimentalists Neptune dropped (2011’s Silent Partner) and in that subsequent time of inactivity, I’m happy to report these noisy outsiders have gotten way weirder, more mysterioso and metallically clinkier with age. On “Play Some Music,” the trio, notorious for homemade instruments and melding a hodgepodge of found sounds using contraptions collected from an abandoned tool shed (or so it seems), bang, hammer, thwack and scrape on their percussive stockpile, electronics and wire-framed steel guitars with such abandon, it’ll cause necks to snap. At moments, Neptune conjure Confusion is Sex-era Sonic Youth with its ritualistic chimes, bells and dirges but in the end “Play Some Music” is quintessential Neptune in all its junkyard glory. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another fifteen years for the next one.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Point Line Plane – Point Line Plane
Synth-punk duo Point Line Plane made a screaming and skronking din during the early-to-mid-2000s underground rock explosion over a couple of records then fell off the radar. Thankfully, the authority on all things noise-rock and beyond, Skin Graft Records, has blessed the masses with the long-overdue reissue of the 2003 debut from the Portland-based twosome. Point Line Plane’s eponymous debut is as grating, incendiary and interstellar a quarter-century later. In a just DIY world, these forward-thinking noisemakers should have made a similar dent as hair-raising duos like Lightning Bolt. With their heady collision of no wave, psych and electronics splatter from the schools of Suicide and Child Abuse, Point Line’s Plane’s long-anticipated reissue was worth the wait. When Treble runs its best reissues of 2026, it’s a surefire candidate for a top spot.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Kristina Warren – Tusk
The throbbing, unfolding drones and ever-shifting noisescapes that composer and sound artist Kristina Warren sculpted using modular analog synthesizers on 2024’s Three Rivulets proved nothing short of mind altering but it didn’t prepare the listener for the profound ecstasy that lie at the heart of Tusk. Warren captures a remarkable and bracing spectrum of sound and aura using concertina, a portable acoustic instrument in the accordion family. The glazed and richly colored arc of tones Warren oozes from the concertina with an explosive, cataclysmic din as its backdrop is as harrowing as it is something to behold in awe as heard on the opening “Downbeat.” It’s akin to a sonic funhouse where you peer into a distorted mirror and the myriad shapes, contours and lines that develop are both mesmerizing and unnerving.
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Treble is supported by its patrons. Become a member of our Patreon, get access to subscriber benefits, and help an independent media outlet continue delivering articles like these.
