10 new albums to listen to in October

October will usher in new releases from Taylor Swift, Florence + The Machine, Brandi Carlile, and more.

By A.V. Club Staff | October 2, 2025 | 7:00am

Written by Drew Gillis, Emma Keats. Images: Fire Records, Republic Records, Transgressive Records

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There’s nothing scary about October’s new releases. Taylor Swift narrowly missed out on snagging another song of the summer, but she’s sure to climb the charts anyway with The Life Of A Showgirl. Artists like Brandi Carlile, Jay Som, Tame Impala, The Antlers, and The Lemonheads also return with their first solo music in years (or decades, in the latter’s case). Here are the albums we’re looking forward to this month.

Sparks, MADDER! (October 3)

Sparks’ upcoming release is a first for the duo, which is quite a mighty accomplishment for a band that’s already released over two dozen separate records. Of course, the Mael brothers, who founded their eclectic outfit over half-a-century ago, have never been inclined to go with the grain. Madder!, a companion to this May’s Mad!, is the band’s first-ever EP. The four-song release is “for everyone who isn’t yet Mad! enough,” the band said in a statement. “We hope these new songs will take you to an even Madder! place.” No one is hurting for reasons to get mad these days, but if lead single “Porcupine” is anything to go by, few will be as fun as this. [Emma Keates]

Taylor Swift, The Life Of A Showgirl (October 3)

In 2025, the major pop campaigns have felt slightly more subdued than last summer’s Chappell Roan-“Espresso”-Brat triple whammy. That may soon be over, as Taylor Swift returns with The Life Of A Showgirl. The album will see Swift reteam with songwriters Max Martin and Shellback, the pure-pop heavy hitters who she hasn’t tapped since 2017’s Reputation debuted to a pretty mixed reception. Even if Swift’s own reputation couldn’t be further from where it was in 2017, she still seems to be presenting herself as something of an underdog, with Hamlet‘s Ophelia as a reference point across the album’s artwork and lead single. [Drew Gillis]

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Amber Mark, Pretty Idea (October 10)

Amber Mark’s last album, Three Dimensions Deep, arrived like a balm in early 2022, and boy, do we need to be soothed again. But don’t be fooled; this music is not just for sitting still, Pretty Idea‘s prerelease singles are fairly dancey, with “Let Me Love You” in particular employing some 80s-era synths and drum hits. But the most interesting instrument is certainly Mark’s voice, a smooth, deep anchor for whatever sonic milieu the singer chooses to inhabit. [DG]

Brian Eno & Beatie Wolfe, Liminal (October 10)

Liminal closes out a trilogy that Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe began with this past June’s Luminal and Lateral. When the duo announced the project in August, they described it as the “point of convergence” between their other two 2025 projects and “a strange new land with a human living and feeling its way through its mysterious spaces.” The three tracks released so far—”Part Of Us,” “The Last To Know,” and “Ringing Ocean”—certainly support this, placing gentle melodies over soundscapes that nearly blur together between tracks. [DG]

Jay Som, Belong (October 10)

The Jay Som name has been quiet for over half a decade now, but Melina Duterte, the singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist behind the bedroom pop-adjacent project, has been incredibly busy. Since releasing the excellent Anak Ko in 2019, Duterte has produced, mixed, and engineered for a vast swath of the indie scene (Lucy Dacus, Fenne Lily, Illuminati Hotties, you name it), recorded with Troye Sivan and beabadoobee, toured with boygenius, and even won a Grammy for her production work on the latter’s The Record. All that experience widens Jay Som’s sound on Belong, which flits effortlessly between poppy power ballads and hazy electronica, and that’s just in its lead singles. It also features a range of famous collaborators, from Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins to Paramore’s Hayley Williams. [EK]

The Antlers, Blight October 10

If you want to feel utterly hopeless for approximately 45 minutes, Blight, The Antlers’ first LP in four years, arrives this October. Singer-songwriter Peter Silberman says this album retreats from the “extended metaphors” that defined his past work in favor of a more “direct approach.” That means the multitude of dead animals in lead single “Carnage” aren’t a stand-in for a failing relationship like in Burst Apart‘s “Putting The Dog To Sleep”; they’re just dead animals. Blight is about “all the ways that nature is under threat,” Silberman continued. “The smell of wildfire smoke on a sunny afternoon, the sound of chainsaws on a hike through the woods—these contradictions became impossible to ignore.” [EK]

Tame Impala, Deadbeat (October 17)

Since Kevin Parker’s last Tame Impala album, 2020’s The Slow Rush, we’ve only heard from him a few times, and most of them have involved Dua Lipa (including the Barbie soundtrack). But don’t take this as a sign that Parker has completely gone pop or that the impala has been tamed; Deadbeat, so far, sounds a lot like the psychedelia we’ve come to expect from the project. Even if the seven-minute “End Of Summer,” the lead single from the album, has something resembling a dance breakdown in the middle, it feels like a new layer beneath Parker’s murky vocal than a wholesale pivot. [DG]

Brandi Carlile, Returning To Myself (October 24)

Brandi Carlile is the story on her new LP, Returning To Myself. It’s her first solo album in four years (she’s worked with Elton John, Joni Mitchell, and more in the meantime), and it sounds like she could have gone four more if she had her druthers. “I’m not my favorite person to spend my time with,” the singer-songwriter said in a statement, per Rolling Stone. “Returning to myself is not just a lonely, but a painfully boring thing to do.” Still, she leans into all that unwanted solitude on the album’s powerful title track, which features her undeniable vocals over a sparse, folky melody. It’s a little painful (and cathartic in equal measure), but it’s far from boring. [EK]

The Lemonheads, Love Chant (October 24)

Evan Dando, The Lemonheads’ only permanent member, has been on a very long hiatus. The group hasn’t released original music in almost two decades (since 2006’s self-titled LP), but that changes with October’s Love Chant. Singles like “In The Margin,” “Deep End,” and “The Key Of Victory” deliver all sorts of fuzzy pop-rock goodness. Dando has also recruited an army of friends and collaborators for this record, including Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis, Juliana Hatfield, the Moldy Peaches’ Adam Green, and more. [EK]

Florence + the Machine, Everybody Scream (October 31)

Florence Welch has a voice that could launch a thousand ships, and she knows it. The tracks from Everybody Scream—an appropriate title for a Halloween release— shared so far haven’t been shy about singing Welch’s own praises, with second single “One Of The Greats” lyrically placing her in conversation with “the hundred greatest records of all time.” The title track imagines a rock show—perhaps even her own—as a place to transcend the confines we accept in the rest of our lives and a place that brings her so much fulfillment she could never leave. Hopefully it’ll be a long time before she does. [DG]