Welcome to another installment of Today's Release Highlights, where the TND writers room gathers up some brand new projects they want to draw your eyes and ears to.

This week, we have 9 new releases we'd like to key you into as you head into the weekend. Check them all out below.

Ba bam!

Adult DVD – Adult DVD [Fat Possum]

Like its cover art, the self-titled debut album by Adult DVD is a neon collage of pretty much everything. Marrying dance music and punk — a combination that formed in the early 2020s when a punk rock band picked up a keyboard and started making loops — the record breaks every (sound) barrier between the two, offering bouncy and anthemic ragers ("Cowboy on Aisle Three"), acid house benders ("Rolling Face"), and new romantic poems of hedonism ("Jesus Christ Supercar") in the process. Here, boredom is a demon that needs to be exorcised, and as time goes on, everyone spirals into an uncontrollable dance freak out. Especially the Doomsday preppers, bootlickers, gun hoarders, and gamblers can't sit still; the music that accompanies their character studies, fictionalized and dramatized by witty lyricists Harry Hanson and Greg Lonsdale, jitters to hyper beats flavored by techno, dark wave, indietronica, and more. It's a straight up ride. Read our interview with Hanson here. – Victoria Borlando

THE FAMILY BUSINESS LTD - THE FAMILY BUSINESS LTD [Hellcat Records]

Rejoice, sons, daughters, Rudies, and rude boys, there is finally a worthy ska album of 2026. Get your suits pressed and your checkered socks ready to hit the dance floor and skank the night away with THE FAMILY BUSINESS LTD., the debut album from the supergroup of the same name, featuring Jordan Cardy (RAT BOY), Preston (The Ordinary Boys), Antonee First Class (The English Beat), Tim Armstrong, and Jesse Michaels of Operation Ivy. This is a mashup of multiple generations of ska, and the result is surprisingly fresh. Not fresh as in a new sound, but fresh as in the perfect ska salad, loaded with horns, skanking rhythms, walking bass lines, and two-tone revival toppings you secretly love, but probably won’t admit to because ska hasn’t gotten the critical acclaim it deserves (for the most part.) Antonee sums up the project nicely: “the opportunity to bridge the gap between generations, bringing together people who came to ska from different places.” So no shame in your game, rude boy. Blast this shit loud. Ska is back. Pick it up, pick it up! – Ricky Adams

Gilla Band – Pugnello [Rough Trade]

Like a few recent outfits that get tagged “noise-rock,” Gilla Band has considerable interest in dance music; their best trick remains turning Blawan’s floor-filling “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage” into a throbbing nightmare. But Dara Kiely’s free-associating jabber tends to overwhelm any “dance” or “noise” music on this feverishly acclaimed fourth album, and their sound design lacks the imagination of contemporaries like Mandy, Indiana or a dynamite gimmick like the stuttering delay guitar of Model/Actriz’s Jack Wetmore or the rototom-crazy drumming of YHWH Nailgun’s Sam Pickard. Unless you really think Kiely’s that funny when he rants about which potato chip is Blur and which one is Pulp. — Daniel Aaron

Helen Ganya – Long Lost Highway [Self-released]

Intentional or not, it’s hard to disentangle the title of this new EP by Brighton-based Scottish-Thai artist Helen Ganya from David Lynch’s darkly psychological, strangely circular film of almost the same name. And while the four songs here are far from the menacing noir of Lost Highway, they do have their own warped sense of reality. From the whirring “Make It Easy,” which resists its own command, to the tilting blues and “midnight longings” of the “Panic Button,” Ganya takes us on some playful, often dream-like detours that wind up in some lightly unsettling places, deliberately left out of focus. – Alan Pedder

Musica Moralia – Only Salt [Klinik]

If you’re in the market for your timbers to be shivered this New Music Friday, look no further than the spectral voice and “quiet noise” of Budapest-based musician and art curator Éda Meggyesházi, aka Musica Moralia. In the full decade since her debut album, the project has expanded to include drummer/percussionist Márton Király and Péter Jakab (on guitars, synths, and banjo). Only Salt has a “hydrofeminist” concept that touches on “evolutionary inheritance” and “inner seas” of emotions, and manifests most clearly on the experimental, near 11-minute ripple of “Sound Swimmers,” which features Áron Hegyi of Grand Mexican Warlock on piano. Other highlights include “Birdmachine,” with its use of a ringing old cimbalom (a type of dulcimer originating from central and eastern Europe), and “When The Mammals Only Went Out at Night,” which turns the unlikely pairing of paleontology and Virgina Woolf’s romance with Vita Sackville into something of a dream-folk fever dream. – Alan Pedder

Protomartyr - Hotel Usona [Domino]

Joe Casey’s long been hailed for his way with words and his band’s relief-free postpunk, but now that album seven from Protomartyr piles on the orchestral flourishes, the transformation into some timeline’s Nick Cave may be nearing completion. The good news is it’s starting to work: the violent swoop of “Sounds We Cannot Hear” actually goes mano a mano with its dark, laugh-riot video, one of the year’s best. A thrilling glimpse at Chat Pile ten years down the line, perhaps? — Daniel Aaron

Tinashe - Popstar [Nice Life/Atlantic]

Tinashe Kachingwe has more bangers than most careers that straddle pop&B: “2 On,” “Pretend,” “Company,” “X,” “Needs,” “Nasty,” “Too Easy,” “Melatonin.” After instant success at R&B radio and label purgatory bullshit, she clawed her way back to cult fandom in 2021 with 333, her first great album, which also presaged trends like PinkPantheress bringing drum’n’bass back to the fore. She was eventually rewarded when the viral hit “Nasty” dented the Hot 100, and now she’s in full command. So can she crack it as a Popstar? Like 333, her eighth project wouldn’t suffer if you scraped off a couple of the more conventional tracks among its 16. But it has plenty of moments that rival its singles, including the euphoric “Cloud 9,” the almost militant “Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore,” and the broken-beat fantasia “Empty Stadium.” She even tries on different voices for the dreamy “Flashbacks” and the hyperactive “Brainrot.” But for all its sneaky beat energy and hyperpop teases (and the unstoppable “Melatonin”), it might actually peak on an old-fashioned power ballad: “I’d Rather Be Alone,” which might explain her disinterest in guest features. Not to mention the album title she turns into a job title in real time. And with that, she goes out on a solo acoustic jawn. — Daniel Aaron

Various Artists - Songs to Listen to in a Wendy's Parking Lot [Wendy's / Rise Records]

I get that this is clearly a marketing stunt, but damnit, I’m an elder emo and they got me with this shit. Wendy’s – you know, the square burger joint, has made an emo EP appropriately titled Songs to Listen to in a Wendy’s Parking Lot. Although they kind of missed the mark by not using “Cry” instead of “Listen.” I don’t even know where to begin with this project, but the bands that contributed absolutely nailed it. Memphis May Fire kicks things off with a pop-punk anthem about a long-running relationship trope: your partner says they don’t want fries with their order, then proceeds to eat all of yours. “She lied, she lied, she lied, ooooooh.” Chloe Kinned of Winona Fighter, Shane Told of Silverstein, blessthefall, State Champs, and Holy Wars all contribute joints to this greasy six-track marvel. Listening to this thing is like watching Olympic ping pong. It’s just back-and-forth puns about Wendy’s menu items mixed with purposely placed cringey emo lyrics. Despite its goofiness, I can’t stop listening to it, and if anyone tells you it’s whack, well, “you’ve been sold a sundae dream on a broken bed of soft serve lies.” Best paired with an ice-cold Frosty, a blown-out stereo system in a POS 2005 Toyota Corolla, and, of course, parked in the Wendy’s parking lot. – Ricky Adams

300SkullsAndCounting & Jenny Sparks – THIS IS SPA TOWN! [XL Recordings]

Technically, the 9-song collaborative album by 300SkullsAndCounting, the internet cloud rap/screamo project of Hal Hewetson, and breakcore producer Jenny Sparks dropped on the 24th, but in the year where great albums seem to drop on random days of the week, I thought it'd be cool to highlight a slightly (maybe even majorly) more left-field pick. THIS IS SPA TOWN! begins simply and, truth be told, accurately: the UK experimental artist casually mumbles over an 8-bit, early Gorillaz hip-hop beat, "What the f— is this sh–?" As the music gradually speeds up, closing the gaps where the beats are noticeably out-of-sync and locking into a hyper rhythm, the album catapults into chaos. "The Ballad of Saint Nick's Park," the lead single and third track of the record, represents the allure of this record: the music itself is composed in the breakcore style, relying on high BPMs, lo-fi 808s, found object-as-sample, and hardcore vocal performances, often in the screamo territory. Yet, it's a soft, quiet rave, with Hewetson sounding like he's yelling into an unplugged mic 50 feet away; the foreground beats jangle like a whimsical video game, and the dub breakdown plops, rather than plummets. Couple that with spoken word passages segment the album ("Ribeye 1" and "Ribeye 2"), letting the audience rest between passages that evoke the dark magic of Crystal Castles and Machine Girl ("Kill You in the Bace"), and one gets a strange equilibrium of rage and peace. Who knew a guy yelling his throat out of his neck could sound so calming when it's layered over spritely, digital pan flute music. –Victoria Borlando