Replay is a monthly music selection: five albums or EPs, chosen for no other reason than that they stayed. No scores, no rankings, just the feeling of listening to something that made you want to listen again.

Jonny’s Day Out – JDO
Indie rock / Art rock · Autoproduction · Portland, OR

JDO does what few Portland rock albums dare to do: be genuinely ridiculous and genuinely heartbreaking, sometimes in the same breath, sometimes in the same chord. There are horns showing up where you didn’t expect them (and you didn’t expect them, which is the point). There are guitars that wail like someone crying while laughing. This is a debut album that sounds like five people remembering what it felt like to play together as kids, and realizing, only now, only here, that that was already it. That was always the music.

If you like Jonny’s Day Out, you might like: Geese, Ratboys, Hovvdy
Bandcamp: https://jonnysdayout.bandcamp.com/album/jdo

Paulie Swan – Swans Today
Chamber pop / Singer-songwriter · AWAL · Edinburgh

This incredible project of Paulie Swan is eighteen minutes long. This matters, not because brevity is a virtue but because Paulie Swan seems to understand, in a way that most people producing music in Edinburgh or anywhere else don’t, that some things are complete precisely because they stop. Four songs. A voice that sounds like it’s been crying for a while and decided, somewhere around the second verse, that this was fine actually. Chamber pop, they call it, which is a genre name that tells you almost nothing and almost everything. You heard this early. That also matters.

If you like Paulie Swan, you might like: Cameron Winter, Cate Le Bon, Arthur Russell
Bandcamp : https://paulieswan.bandcamp.com/album/swans-today

Downtown Boys – Public Luxury
Hardcore punk / punk · Sub Pop · Providence, RI

The album Public Luxury means everything for everyone, which is either the most naïve thing you can say in 2026 or the only thing worth saying, and Downtown Boys have decided, after nine years of silence, that the distinction doesn’t matter. Victoria Marie sings in Spanish and English and sometimes in both at once, which is not a stylistic choice so much as a statement about whose world this actually is. There are saxophones. There is grief. There is fury that sounds, somehow, like joy. This is what punk sounds like when it refuses to be consoled, and also refuses to stop dancing.

If you like Downtown Boys, you might like: Priests, Mannequin Pussy, Fugazi
Bandcamp : https://downtownboys.bandcamp.com/album/public-luxury

Eustress – Exit
Dub techno / Ambient · Kino Disk · Indianapolis, IN

Eustress just released Exit, a six-track project. Those tracks are called Exit 1, Exit 2, Exit 3, Exit 4, Exit 5, and Exit 6. This is either a failure of imagination or the most honest thing a musician can do, name a thing what it is, then let it be what it is. Heath Gillespie makes dub techno in Indianapolis, which already tells you something about the kind of person he is. The bass is low. The edges are blurred. Exit 6 is eight minutes long and ends like a room you didn’t realize you’d been sitting in. You surface slowly. That’s the point.

If you like Eustress, you might like: Vladislav Delay, Echospace, Purelink
Bandcamp : https://kinodisk.bandcamp.com/album/exit

Rhucle – The Water
Ambient / Electronic · Home Normal · Tokyo

The Water is nine tracks by Yuta Kudo, a Tokyo composer who has been making quiet music since 2013, which is a long time to be paying attention to small things. You can hear piano. You can hear field recordings. You can see titles in Japanese that you may not be able to read (as I do), which is fine, the music doesn’t require you to read it. What it requires is that you stop. Not metaphorically stop. Actually stop, and let a melody appear and disappear the way light moves across a surface of water, which is the most patient thing in the world, and the least asked of us.

If you like Rhucle, you might like: Ulla, Stars of the Lid, Hania Rani
Bandcamp : https://homenormal.bandcamp.com/album/the-water