Several of this roundup’s bands took the long way to the record they are releasing now. Finland band Delfoi Road formed in 2001 and has only now put out a debut album, while Brooklyn group Crate pieced theirs together in apartments and a Queens studio. Hamburg , Germany’s NEEVE turns the comment-section pile-on into a song; Cut Worms sends a Christmas single with darker lyrics than the title suggests, and Florida outfit Sandman Sleeps follows a debut that took a decade to write with a second album.
Delfoi Road — Another Way To Feel
Finland · Body Resonance · Debut album and video released October 23, 2026
“Another Way To Feel” opens the eight-song Body Resonance. Its video uses footage from those sessions, so you can see the people behind the credits: Jani Nivala on vocals and guitar, Janne Halla on guitar, Miika Erkkilä on bass and Sampo Oikarinen on drums. The band picked a different song, “Life Begins With You,” as the album’s focus track. It sits next to last, just before “Sunlight,” giving anyone coming in through the video a second place to start.
Crate — Not My Song (Mine to Keep)
Brooklyn, New York · Crate · Debut album due November 13, 2026
For a year, you could hear almost everything Brooklyn band Crate had put out by playing one song. They released “Julia” themselves in February 2024. “Necklace” followed a year later. Behind that sparse public record, Cody Hudgins, Ezra Engler, Henry Smith and Juan Angulo were assembling an eleven-song debut, recording guitars and vocals in Brooklyn apartments and rehearsal rooms and doing much of the work at Ethan Williams’s studio in Queens.
“Not My Song (Mine to Keep)” is the fourth track on Crate, due through Good English Records on November 13. The sequence preserves some of the band’s working history: “Necklace” leads into the new song, and “Julia,” recorded at Red Convertible Recordings in Williamsburg in July 2023, turns up as track seven. Angulo calls the album “a time capsule of our last three years as a band” in the band’s release notes.
NEEVE — television cries
Hamburg, Germany · Independent single released October 16, 2026
NEEVE built “television cries” around a familiar sequence: you see bad news, scroll down to the comments and discover that everyone there has already made up their mind. In their October submission to IRC, the Hamburg band described the song as a response to what happens next.
They wanted to leave room for someone to care about the person on the other side of the argument, even when neither is likely to change their mind.
The three musicians grew up with closer ties than most bandmates. Felix and Axel Seyboth are brothers, and Marius Spohrer is their cousin. They released their debut album, Chaos of My Mind, in 2022. By the time they put out this single independently, they had completed a second tour of China, playing Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. That itinerary gives a sense of how far a band working out of Hamburg has found its audience.
Cut Worms — The Bells of Christmas Eve
Brooklyn, New York · Jagjaguwar · Single released November 3, 2026
The new Cut Worms single has Christmas in its title and an undelivered promise at its center. A traveler crosses snowy fields. People wait for a train that will never come. By the time the lyrics turn to rockets and smoke, the distance between the holiday named in the title and the world outside is hard to miss. The music blog Christmas Underground picked up on the same turn, calling attention to the song’s “seriously dark lyrical content.”
Cut Worms is the recording name of Brooklyn songwriter Max Clarke. The single follows a busy year: Jeff Tweedy produced Clarke’s fourth album, Transmitter, at the Loft in Chicago, and Transmitter Demos followed in September. Jagjaguwar issued “The Bells of Christmas Eve” separately on November 3. The Bandcamp release is available as an individual track for anyone who wants to keep it for December.
Listen or buy on Bandcamp · Other services · Christmas Underground
Sandman Sleeps — If You Could
Florida · Strawberry Moon · Album released October 30, 2026
Sisters Cristina and Alex Peck started Sandman Sleeps as teenagers and reconvened in 2019. Their first album, Crisis Actor, drew on songs written across a decade. In his review for Under the Radar, Hayden Merrick described that debut as “a kinetic art rock painting a decade in the making.” Four years later, the sisters have a second record, and the credits for its third track tell a story of their own.
Guitarist and vocalist Zack Jones sent IRC the video for “If You Could.” On Strawberry Moon, Cristina plays guitar and keyboards and Alex plays bass. Joey Mason handles drums, vocals and percussion, with Tommy Halla adding percussion to this song and two others. Halla also shares the album’s mixing credit with James Wisner. Nick Diiorio recorded and produced the sessions at Thunder House Studio. The band lists October 30 for the digital album and January 2027 for the vinyl preorder.
Watch “If You Could” · Album and credits · Under the Radar on the debut