New year, new music. There’s a whole lot of killer noise coming your way over the next 12 months. From punk, to metal, to weird noise and pop-rock, here’s our pick of 26 for ’26.
Happy New Year! Here comes another 12 months of madness, with a stacked calendar of festivals, tours and albums already. And if you're looking at anniversaries, 2026 marks 40 years since Metallica put out Master Of Puppets, Slayer unleashed Reign In Blood, Megadeth released Peace Sells… But Who's Buying?, and Iron Maiden did Somewhere In Time. Hell, The Black Parade turns 20 as well.
But don't let that get in the way of how much killer new music there is just getting warmed up right now. From metal mania to punk, post-hardcore and shoegaze to art-rock, street-level hooliganism and dreamy stuff for darkness and headphones, there's going to be a hell of a lot to get your teeth into, not to mention your ears around.
Here, we rack up 26 of the bands who are going to be making a very big noise in ’26…
Amira Elfeky had a hell of a 2025. There was her brilliant Surrender EP, a duet with Architects on Judgement Day on their The Sky, The Earth & All Between album, a run of rammed festival shows at Download and across Europe, and a sold-out gig at Camden Underworld. Oh, and hitting the road in the U.S. with Bring Me The Horizon. She starts 2026 in Australia, while also working on her eagerly-anticipated full-length debut. The UK won’t see her again until she returns with I Prevail in September, but you’ll be hearing her name all year long.
Last month, Blush Puppy released the cinematic video for their dreamy Under The Water, perfectly showcasing their fusion of emo, post-hardcore, shoegaze-y elements and grunge. It was the ideal appetite-whetter for the Coventry quartet’s Here You Dream EP, which arrives on March 27. “Each of us were struggling in different ways but with the same questions. These songs became a dream-space for us, a place to let go and breathe,” says drummer Harry Rogers. “For us, music became the way out, the only way to take off the mask and breathe for a second. We’ve all been through difficult stuff, family fallouts, loss. We’re just trying to turn all the messy, complicated and overwhelming feelings into something positive.”
Matt Heafy likes fellow Florida metallers Cold Steel so much that after they won a poll to open for Trivium at a hometown show (only their fourth-ever gig), he became something of a mentor. “He changed the game,” guitarist Rafi Carbonell recalled to K! at the end of last year. “He showed us how to get the best from our writing and even gave us some riffs. We stepped it up massively, while still retaining our sound. I think of Matt, and I know that we owe him everything. He’s become like our big brother.” If you wanna hear what the Trivium boss did, check out their killer, just-released Discipline & Punish debut. A U.S. tour with German thrash legends Kreator beckons for early summer, where presumably they’ll do both bits of that album title nightly.
Last year’s video for Die Spitz’ chunky Throw Yourself To The Sword found Eleanor Livingston thrusting around in a laundrette with a massive blade. Why? Why not? Coolness firmly established, following the release of their fantastic Something To Consume album – a spiky but alluring mix of big, metallic riffs, punk swag and gobby lyrics – the Texas terrors spent the rest of 2025 going up and up, opening for Amyl And The Sniffers, and selling out their own show at The Dome in London. Their return in February at The Underworld has no tickets left, either. So, if you’re too late there, they’re doing Download. Foo Fighters like ’em so much they’ve added them to their Anfield mega-show as well. Probably best not to try to take a sword, though…
As seen in the winter print issue of Kerrang!, London gang False Reality are one of the UK’s finest rising hardcore acts, evidenced on November’s scorching FADED INTENTIONS full-length. And it’s not just the music – an agreeably aggressive noise that takes in classic hardcore and chucks in bits of thrash and Sepultura heaviness – False Reality are about building their scene bigger and stronger. “We’ve all grown up in hardcore, and we love seeing new people come in and experience it for the first time,” says singer Rachel Rigby. “We all remember our first show and that feeling that it gave us, just the dream and the love of that moment and that memory, and the beauty of hardcore. One of the best things about going out and playing live is getting to meet people, and having that interaction.”
County Wicklow alt.rock quartet Florence Road have already had a lot of praise, including a thumbs-up from Olivia Rodrigo. The Guts singer gave her seal of approval to their dreamy, grungy single Heavy last spring, and things have only got rosier from there. Summer’s Fall Back mixtape saw them joining her at her Hyde Park show, while the start of 2026 will be spent bouncing around America with Wolf Alice, before they hit Camden’s 1,500-capacity KOKO in May for their biggest headline show to date. Here’s what else you need to know: as heard on recent single Storm Warnings, they do this kind of thing so well you’d think they’d formed in 1990. Definitely a road worth taking.
We were blown away when we caught Boston hard-nuts Haywire at Furnace Fest in Alabama last summer. Distilling hardcore down to its rawest elements, they’re a polished update on the reliable old form, and they hit like a tank to the jaw. Just check out their live footage on YouTube to see how, ahem, haywire their shows are – including a nuts appearance at Hellphyra 2025 where bins and a traffic cone made it into the pit, which is always funny. Prepare for total madness when they hit Outbreak Fest in June.
For artistic post-hardcore with plenty of creativity, ambition and poetic sense of emotion (as well as a trumpet), Oxford’s LASTELLE are the answer to your question. For the video to last year’s Tired Eyes single, they went big on the idea of being totally honest with yourself, and offered fans the chance to leave them messages anonymously to be included. “We wanted to explore the idea of people leaving us anonymous messages as a way of confessing totally honest feelings. Being truly honest is unbelievably tough. So by enabling our community to anonymously leave us voicemail messages, which we’ve included at the end of this music video and then will disappear forever in a few days’ time, we hope people will feel the weight of those emotions lifted off their shoulders.” To kick off 2026, they’ll be playing all of Tired Eyes’ two-part parent EP Exist in full for the first and only time. God knows how they’ll think bigger for their debut album, but they will.
Viewers of Celebrity Traitors will have, perhaps unwittingly, heard Mallavora singer Jessica Douek in action. When the producers needed eerie banshee shrieks for the contestants – including a thoroughly perplexed Alan Carr – to puzzle over, they gave her a call to lend her incredible, otherworldly, slightly scary pipes. They only get more astonishing on the Brit metallers’ forthcoming What If Better Never Comes? debut album, coming in March via Church Road Records. “This record is a conceptual exploration of sickness – personal and societal – and it’s given us the space to express our experiences of difference in new and expansive ways,” the band explain. “We hope its vulnerability, and the message it carries, brings comfort and catharsis to anyone who’s ever lived inside emotions too complex to name.”
Bold, challenging, gobby, lairy, intelligent, fearless – Mancunian jazz-punks Maruja’s mix of brains and fists has made them one of the hottest bands in the UK. You have singer/guitarist Harry Wilkinson coming on as the most intense and intimidating street poets since IDLES’ Joe Talbot. You have saxophonist Joe Carroll by turns wilding out and adding a layer of something sinister to proceedings. And you have it all making for a twitchy, brawling, emotional rollercoaster of music, as heard on last year’s 5/5-rated Pain To Power debut. If 2025 saw Maruja loudly announcing themselves, 2026 will see them demanding that you all listen to what they have to say. You’d be wise to pay attention.
Melrose Avenue’s London show in November had to be upgraded due to the massive scramble for tickets. The Melbourne alt.rock quartet are already racking up millions of streams as well, while singer Vlado Saric is fast becoming something of a star, if an enigmatic one, saying that their recent single This Is The End, dealing with a break-up, was “probably as open as you’ll ever get with me.” Open or not, their upcoming U.S. headline tour is selling fast, and expectations for their return to these shores are sky high.
We’re not sure what our favourite thing is about sibling duo The Molotovs, but a definite contender is how partial they are to turning up and doing guerrilla gigs in the street. While, we might add, looking slicker than a greased-up Roger Moore. Despite being still in their teens, Issey and Mathew Cartlidge have already managed to rack up more than 500 performances together, from busking, to supporting the Sex Pistols, to their own sold-out bonanza at Camden’s Electric Ballroom last year. Proving that youth isn’t always wasted on the young, they’re tearing into 2026 early by hitting the road for an almost entirely sold-out headline tour and releasing their Wasted On Youth debut on January 30. Then they’re off supporting YUNGBLUD on his arena tour. One occasion where Dom won’t be the most sharply-dressed star in the room…
So then, it’s January, party season is over, it’s cold, it’s shit, and it’s nine years ’til payday. Break up the New Year misery by catching Bristol’s My First Time at their London headliner at The Lexington, and immediately (and possibly involuntarily) shake it off dancing to their irresistible post-punk stomp. If you can get a ticket, anyway, as they sold it out ages ago. Fans of the sort of grimy, street-level stuff Kid Kapichi deal in will have much to fall in love with with this lot, and they’re already lining up festival appearances, including Madrid’s Mad Cool in July. Check out their recent single Sippy Cup, and then wish you could have this lot by the gallon.
Sassy, grungy, poppy and always looking to reject normal and embrace the oddness of the self, Nxdia is fast becoming a star. As if tearing it up at Bludfest, headlining the BBC Introducing Stage at Reading & Leeds, heading to Lollapalooza and doing their own Euro headlining tour wasn’t enough, the Cairo-via-Manchester shapeshifter ended 2025 having notched up over 100 million streams of their I Promise No-One’s Watching mixtape. This year, they’re all about continuing to grow their space, “where anyone looking for a place to belong is welcomed with open arms and encouraged to reject the idea of ‘fitting in.” They’re already off to a flying start.
Atlanta pop-punks The Paradox, though relatively new, already have friends in high places. Travis Barker played drums on their super-sunny anthem Bender, while Billie Joe Armstrong enjoyed their covers of Basket Case and 2,000 Light Years Away so much he invited them to open for his band when they came through town. It’s not hard to see what the blink-182 and Green Day men heard in the cheery foursome. “There’s a lot of bands out there that try to capture that 2000s nostalgic sound, but they don’t have that recipe, if that makes sense,” guitarist Christopher ‘Xelan’ Bernard told K! recently. “I always had that in me, I just needed to find the people that understood.” Get on it to see why their heroes love them so much.
The Pretty Wild sister duo Jyl and Jules Wylde are ambitious, to say the least. As well as making the appropriately wild, energetic, metallic noise heard on last year’s gloriously creative zero.point.genesis album, Jules has been working with legendary soundtrack composer Danny Elfman, while Jyl puts her background in acrobatics to use in their shows. “We’ve even been thinking we want to choreograph a K-Pop style ‘pit dance’ for one of our most intense breakdowns,” she told us. They’ll have plenty of opportunity to put that to the test when they hit the UK with Sleep Theory in February, and when they come back for Download in June.
Rocket’s 2025 debut album R Is For Rocket announced them as one of the most exciting new alt.rock bands on the planet. The ’90s-flecked grungy sounds within may have set off plenty of nostalgia at first, but their real strength was in just how brilliant the songs were in and of themselves. As heard on banging album highlights One Million and Number One Fan, the youthful LA quartet’s woozy fuzz and big, shiny melodies are both fun and like a warm blanket of music. They’ll be here in February for a UK tour, including a stop at London’s Scala – proof, were you looking for it, that Rocket are already heading for the skies.
London’s Rifle have spent the past couple of years sprouting up among punk peers like The Chats and The Chisel, and appearing at Rebellion Festival, alongside Reading & Leeds. The gritty sound and no-nonsense street attitude that’s won them praise so far is all over their highly anticipated self-titled debut, out on January 16. A record that “centres on the working-class experience; some of the choruses and vocal hooks were inspired by the chants you’d hear on football terraces,” it finds them recalling older punks in both sound and casual look. “A lot of the music we listened to while recording has a strong London identity,” they explain. “Groups like Cockney Rejects and Cock Sparrer may not have a big overlap in sound, but their lyrical focus and overall ethos definitely define them as London bands.” Wherever you catch them, Rifle are coming into 2026 with a bang.
Cathartic, high-minded, raw, classically-trained and brimming with an urgent sense of emotion, SOFIA ISELLA is an artist equally indebted to Courtney Love and PJ Harvey as she is authors Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. QOTSA-ish recent single Above The Neck built on the already formidable reputation she’s earned in a few short years, its slinky-but-acidic poetry (‘You think your penis is so important…’) and slithering groove arriving like a charming but deadly snake. Florence Welch has taken SOFIA under her wing, bringing her out on The Machine’s upcoming U.S. mega tour, before she heads to the UK in June, including a headline show at The Roundhouse. It won’t be long before this one’s a big, big star.
When K! caught up with South Arcade at the end of last year, they were on the road in America, on a headline tour that included not one but two shows in LA. When they got back, there was the small matter of a victory lap where they sold out London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town without appearing to break a sweat. All this before the Oxford quartet have released a full-length. “You only get to do your debut album once, so it’s got to be right,” explained singer Harmony Cavelle of the wait. “That’s why we’re doing EPs at the moment. We’re finding people who like all these different areas of music and show them our different sides – the pop side, the nu-metal side, the rock side, the dance side.” As they continue to find their feet, they’ve yet to put one wrong. Download beckons, and when that debut finally comes, it’ll make South Arcade something very special indeed. Even more so.
As with PRESIDENT last year, Spitting Glass are an unknown outfit with no music out as yet, who are already going to be playing at Download 2026. All that’s on their Instagram is the festival poster, a picture, and follows for band members Joe Bad, Reuben Bescoby, Danny Yates, Chris Keepin and David Ball. Joe sings in Fit For An Autopsy, while Chris and Danny are in Sunderland heavyists Osiah which, if the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, will mean something very heavy indeed. There’s absolutely no tunes out to put our cunning detective work to the test, so all signs point to having to wait ’til June to finally get glassed. We’re very, very intrigued, though.
Split Chain had a hell of a 2025. Somewhere in between heading to America with Thursday, going there again under their own steam, playing a barnstorming set at Download for the second year in a row, and keeping their near-constant on-the-road status going by playing with A Day To Remember, Amira Elfeky and Underoath among others, the Bristol post-hardcore crew found time to put out one of the year’s best albums, motionblur. And unless you live in Australia, where they’re touring with Better Lovers this month, or America, where they’re out with The Devil Wears Prada, you’ll have to wait ’til 2000trees to catch them again. “motionblur basically sums up how we feel about everything that’s happening to us,” singer Bert Martínez-Cowles told us as the album dropped last summer. It's not slowing down. Good for them.
It was more than just the freezing winter cold that had arenas filling up early doors on Ice Nine Kills’ recent UK run. Evan Thomas – aka TX2 – was proving his star power at dinner time every night, building on years of online promise and collabs with the likes of Caleb Shomo and INK frontman Spencer Charnas. Already, he’s built a massive online fanbase, notably through his X Movement community, where fans who feel alone and lost can connect. Meanwhile, he’s been busy gearing up for his 2026 debut album End Of Us, dropping on February 13, featuring recent anthem The End Of Us, where he’s teamed up with Andy Biersack for “the darkest song I’ve ever written. It captures that feeling of spiralling that happens shortly after betrayal, when everything you've built slips away.” Honestly, that doesn’t look like it’s happening anytime soon, mate…
VILLANELLE’s debut single Hinge announced the UK trio as the perfect find for anyone searching for fuzzy, Nirvana-y alt.rock. They’ve got a swagger to them as well, a classic British charm, possibly in the genes of frontman Gene Gallaher, son of Oasis singer Liam. Their most recent single, Masley Means, repeated the trick, and following a headline tour in December, they’re currently beavering away on their debut EP. Whether they'll live up to their name and write the whole thing as 19-line poems is yet to be seen. What we do know is, they know their way around a cocky riff very well.
It’s almost three years since computer science student Natalie Lu uploaded a song, Your face, to TikTok. The next day, it had racked up 100,000 views, turning her into a viral sensation, and beginning her journey as Wisp, a trip that’s so far seen her play stadiums with System Of A Down, and get announced for Deftones’ Victoria Park show this summer. Last year’s sublime If not winter debut proved that her glimmering sound is a particularly expert area for the 21-year-old. “It feels very surreal and emotional,” she pondered to K!. “When I listen to my favourite shoegaze or alt.rock bands, the entire soundscape that they create with all of these layers feels so raw and emotional. I really feel it in my chest. It’s a very physical feeling for me, and I hope that my music translates in that exact way.”
Feeling angry at… just about everything? YAKKIE have got your back. Led by K! Award-winning activist Janey Starling, alongside Personal Best/Petrol Girls guitarist Robin Gatt, Colour Me Wednesday bassist Laura Ankles and Itoldyouiwouldeatyou drummer Maeve Westall, they’re a righteous mix of punk noise and feminine fury that promises to “punch you in the face and kiss you on the cheek after”. Their debut album, dropping on February 13, boasts the unambiguous title Kill The Cop Inside Your Head. “The cop in your head will talk you out of your own power before you’ve had a chance to taste it,” says Janey. “He wants your despair to calcify into defeat so you roll over for fascism and tell yourself there’s nothing anyone could have done to stop it. He tells you that there’s no practical alternative to this soul-sucking meat grinder that is late capitalism. If you don’t kill the cop inside your head, you will become him.”
