Ghost Albums Rule The World

Eleven of these albums do not exist yet

20 entries. 11 of them are pre-orders for albums that arrive somewhere between tomorrow and the second Friday of October. The shortest wait is 24 hours: the indie video game soundtrack at 13 ships on May 15. The longest is just over 5 months: the Italian crime funk score for a James Ellroy documentary at 12 lands in October. Between them, on the same August Friday, 2 unrelated records will arrive in the world - a Welsh electronic duo’s second album at 2, and a North Carolina indie folk band’s 24th at 4. Neither knows about the other.

What sits between the pre-orders is the range. A 1981 Hamburg demo tape recorded behind a record shop counter. Dub techno from a photographer who has spent more than a decade being nobody. A Greek Orthodox priest on his third pass at the chart. 2 unrelated bands recording at the same Welsh studio one month apart, with 2 different producers, in 2 entirely different genres. And at the top, an album that has not yet been released, by a band that has not played a live show this century, has climbed back from 5 to take 1 for a second time.

We start at 20.

A festival the album was timed to coincide with

In February, in the high Andes, the rainy season opens with a ceremony. Aymara and Quechua families lay offerings to Pachamama for the first harvest; the percussion is provided by drums whose lineage runs back into the Inca; the festival is called Anata. On February 4 of this year, while the actual ritual was being performed in the mountains of Bolivia and southern Peru, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton released a 7-track album called Anata. The timing was the point. The album exists to be played during the festival it is named after, by an artist whose other half - his sibling Chuquimamani-Condori, with whom he records as Los Thuthanaka - is the more famous one. Crampton lives in California; the music has not left home.

The record is built on 3 traditional instruments alongside electric guitar and bass. The charango - a small Andean lute, historically made from the curved shell of an armadillo - handles the upper voice. The ronroco, a larger and deeper cousin of the charango, handles the middle. The bombo italaque, a ceremonial drum from the region of Italaque, handles the floor. The opening track is “Chakana Head-Bang!”, named for the Andean stepped cross. The longest is “Ch’uwanchaña 〜El Golpe Final〜”, 7 minutes of shredded noise captured in trance-y loops, ceremonial and anti-colonial in equal measure. Anata charts at 20 three months after release, which is not the way the algorithm usually works. Something else brought it here.

A 25-year-old compilation, on vinyl for the first time

In 2001, the Pixies were almost a decade into their hiatus and not yet on a reunion tour. 4AD released a CD called Complete B-Sides: 1988-97, gathering 19 non-album tracks from the band’s classic 4AD years - the years that produced Surfer Rosa, Doolittle, Bossanova, and Trompe le Monde. Pitchfork gave the compilation a 9.6 and called the band the blinding visionaries of the 1980s, capable of comparison only to Dylan in the 1960s and Eno in the 1970s. It has never been on vinyl. Until now.

The 40th anniversary remaster arrives June 26: 19 tracks newly mastered by Kevin Vanbergen from the original analogue tapes, plus a fourth vinyl side carrying 6 live bonus tracks pulled from later singles. New cover art by Chris Bigg uses photographs from Simon Larbalestier’s archive that were shelved 30 years ago; the reissue is dedicated to the band’s late visual director Vaughan Oliver, who died in 2019, and who designed every Pixies sleeve from Come On Pilgrim onward. One vinyl variant is called Seaweed Green and runs to 1,000 copies. The set includes the Pixies’ cover of “In Heaven”, the song the Lady in the Radiator sings in Eraserhead, alongside their take on Neil Young’s “Winterlong”. 25 years on, finally on a record you can drop a needle into. Number 19.

Hope, written specifically because hope was needed

The project name belongs to a piece of dead protocol. Sync24 - or DIN sync - was the standard Roland used to make their early machines speak to each other: the TB-303, the TR-808, the TR-909, instruments whose names function as liturgy in certain branches of dance music. Sync24 is Daniel Vadestrid in Gothenburg, one half of Carbon Based Lifeforms, and Hope is his fifth solo album, released July 2025 on Leftfield Records.

The liner notes do not hide what the record is about. I wrote ‘Hope’ because I felt that’s exactly what I needed: hope. Our world is wonderfully beautiful and, as far as we know, unique. The technology that was supposed to unite us instead seems to be dividing us. Media only reports bad news. Social media is overflowing with bots programmed to create anxiety and hate. The track list translates the argument into different language: “Obsidian Night”, “Bioluminescent Creatures”, “The Frog and the Bubble”, “Skogsrået” (a Swedish forest spirit who lures travellers off the path), “Disconnected”, “Breathe”, “Skin to Skin”, “Transcend Back to Nature”. 9 tracks, psybient in shape, plain in intent. Number 18.

A decade gone, and a fourth album finally

If These Trees Could Talk make albums slowly. A self-titled EP in 2006. Above the Earth, Below the Sky in 2009. Red Forest in 2012. The Bones of a Dying World in 2016. Then nothing for 8 years, then a 2024 single, then nothing again. The Akron, Ohio instrumental post-rock outfit, co-founded in 2005 by the brothers Zack and Cody Kelly, has finally announced its fourth full-length, The Hidden Hand, due July 10 on Metal Blade. 10 years between proper records.

Zack Kelly describes the band’s three-guitar architecture as if explaining an orchestra: bass plays cello, the 2 rhythm guitars play woodwinds, the lead plays the strings section. The new album includes a cover of Aphex Twin’s “Flim”, a track from the 1997 Come To Daddy EP that even casual electronic listeners can hum. The title comes from a fascination with “the unexplained and unknowable, especially in the areas of influence, control and guidance. Symbols and signs hidden in plain sight only available to those who are looking.” A 2024 trip to play the PORTALS Festival in Hackney was, by the band’s account, the thing that finally got them to finish the record. 10 years, in the end, was just the number of years it took. Number 17.

The priest, a third time

Father Dionysios Tabakis is back at 16, on his third pass at the chart. Originally 13, four weeks ago. Off the chart entirely. Back at 17 last week. Up to 16 this week. A 52-year-old Greek Orthodox priest serving at the Church of Panagitsa in Nafplio, Paradise Metal is fretless electric guitar through amplifier worship, Byzantine modes bent through shoegaze drone, 150 copies pressed on Athens’ Heat Crimes label. The persistence of a 150-copy sacred metal record at the boundary of a worldwide chart is the kind of phenomenon for which no chart-software vendor has written a genre tag. The chart simply has to deal with him.

Trained in jazz, recorded in a childhood bedroom

The room was 4 walls. They took down the timelines and the metrics and the pressure to stay visible; they pulled the plug on the feed; they spent 2 years inside the walls. The room belonged to her collaborator Richie Buxton, in his parents’ house in bayside Melbourne; the album that came out the other end is called LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW, and it has 17 tracks.

Ecca Vandal was born in Louis Trichardt, South Africa, to Sri Lankan Tamil refugee parents. The family left for Australia when she was small. She trained in jazz, then found punk and never went looking elsewhere. Her self-titled debut in 2017 brought support tours with Incubus and slots at Reading and Leeds. Then 9 years of relative quiet - a guest spot here, a feature there - until last year, when she opened for Deftones, Limp Bizkit, and Pierce the Veil and decided it was time again. She made her Coachella debut last month. “I find empowerment in being loud and noisy especially as a woman in this global moment who grew up in a culture that told me I could not be those things.” The pre-order arrives May 22. Number 15.

Doom metal at Rockfield, after Ozzy

GREEN LUNG make the particular kind of doom that requires you to know your Hammer Horror, your Black Sabbath bloodline, and your British folklore in roughly equal measure. Necropolitan is their fourth album. They recorded it at Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, Wales, in January 2026 - the studio where Sabbath, Queen, Rush, Motörhead, and Judas Priest all worked during the period the band positions as the inheritance they are claiming.

The month matters more than the place. Recording happened in the weeks after Ozzy Osbourne’s death and Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning farewell, the brief window in which the question of who carries traditional British metal forward was an open question rather than a settled one. Tom Dalgety, who produces Opeth and Ghost, handled the desk. The band stripped back the dense multilayered arrangements of This Heathen Land and tracked much of the new record live, chasing what they describe with full Sabbathian seriousness as “Sabbathian heaviness.” Song titles: “Open the Hellmouth”, “Black Magick Radio”, “Alostrael (Be My Babalon)”, “To the Gallows Born”. The lead single, “Evil in this House”, is in their own words “what it would sound like if a stoner metal band carried out a paranormal investigation.” The video is inspired by 1970s haunted house films, and the band, on record, mean it. Necropolitan releases September 11. Number 14.

A blue-haired girl with a chainsaw, on orange vinyl

Motorslice is a Brazilian indie game from a studio called Regular Studio. The protagonist is named Slicer P. She has blue hair and a chainsaw and is required to parkour through the ruins of a brutalist megastructure, dismantling rogue construction equipment as she goes. The pitch deck reportedly cited Mirror’s Edge, Prince of Persia, and Shadow of the Colossus as reference points. The soundtrack belongs to Pizza Hotline, and it is the kind of soundtrack the game was waiting for.

The British producer behind the name has, in the past few years, become one of the more interesting figures in the jungle-and-vaporwave underground. 2022’s Level Select mined the late-90s game-soundtrack aesthetic for actual emotional content. A forthcoming RuneScape remix album is out on Laced Records; he has scored for Fortnite and C-Smash VRS. The 9-track Motorslice OST reads on paper like the level select screen of a game you wish existed: “Brutal Rush”, “Automata”, “Endless Corridors”, “Heavy Machine (Boss Theme)”. Orange vinyl, custom sleeve by Equip Studio, stamped on the back in capitals: 100% HUMAN MADE ARTWORK AND MUSIC. The album drops May 15. By the time you read next week’s chart story, it will exist. Number 13.

Milan, James Ellroy, and the city’s voice

Calibro 35 started in Milan in 2007 as a one-off studio project. The plan was modest: re-record obscure Italian poliziottesco soundtracks from the 1970s - the Ennio Morricone / Armando Trovajoli / Luis Bacalov tradition that scored a particular kind of violent film about Italian cops. Massimo Martellotta, Enrico Gabrielli, Luca Cavina, Fabio Rondanini, and Tommaso Colliva intended one record. They have since made 12, opened for Muse at San Siro, watched Dr. Dre sample them on Compton and Jay-Z sample them on “Picasso Baby”, and collaborated with PJ Harvey, Mike Patton, and Stewart Copeland. They have become, in other words, exactly the figures they began by paying tribute to.

ELLROY vs L.A. (OST) is their score for Francesco Zippel’s documentary on James Ellroy - the noir novelist whose Los Angeles was assembled from The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz, the Underworld USA Trilogy, and the unsolved 1958 murder of his own mother. Zippel described the documentary as “an imaginary conversation between Ellroy and Los Angeles, a dialogue in which the city responds, retorts, sometimes contradicts, sometimes amplifies the writer’s words.” Calibro 35’s brief, in that frame, was to be the city’s voice. 12 tracks of crime funk, library music, and jazz-funk: “Black Dahlia”, “L.A. Confidential”, “Riots”, “Moonlight Sonative”. The pre-order releases October 9, the longest wait on the chart. Number 12.

Brooklyn, 2012, returning for reasons unknown

A 14-year-old debut album charts on a worldwide list, and no public reason explains why. Black Marble released A Different Arrangement in 2012 as a duo: Chris Stewart and Ty Kube, the latter formerly of the electropop band Team Robespierre. It was the New York cold wave revival’s most-discussed debut of the year. 11 tracks of warm Peter Hook basslines, vintage synthesizer arrangements, and a reverb-smeared baritone that has spent the last decade earning, fairly, the Ian Curtis comparisons.

The opening track, “Cruel Summer”, carries what Turntable Lab once called the band’s “finest ever bassline.” It is hard to argue against. Stewart has since gone solo, moved to Los Angeles, released 4 more albums, signed to Sacred Bones, and built one of the most consistent dark-synth catalogues of the era. Why the 2012 debut returns to a worldwide chart in May 2026 is unclear from outside the data - possibly a vinyl repress, possibly a sync placement, possibly just a TikTok someone made. The bassline is still the bassline. It does not need a reason. Number 11.

KNEECAP, settling

KNEECAP’s FENIAN drops 8 places, from last week’s 2 down to 10. The Belfast trio’s second album on Heavenly Recordings, produced by Dan Carey, has now been on the chart 3 weeks. The arc is the standard one for a launch hit: peak hard, climb once, settle slowly. The album was mid-week frontrunner for the UK Albums Chart at the time of release. An Irish-language drill record holding the lower half of a worldwide chart 3 weeks in is its own kind of vindication. The rest of the story we told last week.

The Reeperbahn demos and the producer who took the name

In 1981, in a record shop in Hamburg, a clerk named Holger Wobker - who went by Bryllyant Berger - was playing demo tapes from his side project during shifts. The side project was 2 people: Wobker and Peter Sawatzki. The music had begun life as soundtrack for sex shows on the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s Mile of Sin. A Mercury Records representative walked into the shop, heard a few bars over the counter, and signed the band on the spot. The band was called Boytronic. Their 1983 debut single, “You”, became a Top 10 club hit across European charts. It was, as Wobker has always confirmed without hesitation, an openly gay love song, and not approximately so.

This Ain’t No Hi-Fi - Demos 1981-1994 collects what was made before and after the formal Mercury years. The earliest tapes date to 1981, before “Boytronic” was the name on anything; the latest extend through 1994, into Hayo Lewerentz’s second incarnation of the band after the record label took the name in 1986 and gave it to a different lineup. There is a footnote here that is the actual reason this entry deserves more than a paragraph. In a 1986 NME interview, Curtis Mantronik - the New York producer whose Mantronix singles redrew the boundaries of electro and early hip-hop - confirmed that his stage name, and the name Mantronix itself, came from an imported Boytronic record. The Hamburg demos at 9 contain at least some of the music a future hip-hop pioneer was listening to closely enough to take a name from. Number 9.

Synthwave from Glasgow, by way of a burning car

In the Wikipedia entry for Michael Oakley, one detail does not belong in a synthwave biography. In 2012, driving home from a wedding gig near Glasgow, he rescued two men from a burning car. 5 years later he was releasing California on NewRetroWave Records, a debut that became one of the genre’s defining records of the late 2010s. He was born in Glasgow in 1982, taught himself music after a brief period of piano lessons, and spent years on the city’s cover band circuit before deciding what to do next.

Prologue is his fourth album, his first in 5 years since 2021’s Odyssey. He has been based in Canada since 2018, but Glasgow remains the architecture: the 2021 track “Glasgow Song” featured what was probably the first bagpipe solo in synthwave, plus a duet with Toronto’s Dana Jean Phoenix. NewRetroWave have pressed Prologue on 100 copies of red 180g vinyl with signed photocards, and described it, in label voice, as “an ambitious masterpiece” - the kind of phrase a label uses about a record it expects to move units. Number 8.

I cut my hair, nobody loved it

Aldous Harding’s fifth album is her fourth recorded at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, Wales, with the same producer she has worked with since 2017: John Parish, the long-time PJ Harvey collaborator whose discography also runs through Dry Cleaning and Sparklehorse. The cast on Train on the Island is precise. Joe Harvey-Whyte on pedal steel. Mali Llywelyn on harp. Thomas Poli on synth. Sebastian Rochford, of Polar Bear, on drums. And Huw Evans, who records as H. Hawkline, on bass, vocals, acoustic and electric guitar, organ - and the cover art, which shows Harding face-painted blue, looking down the lens of a lecture hall.

10 tracks. The pre-release single “Venus in the Zinnia” contains the lyric the rollout has built itself around: I cut my hair, nobody loved it. Reviewers have called the record her most autobiographical, threaded with themes of neurodivergence and her relationship with her mother. Harding’s own warning, transmitted via press notes, is that her lyrics should not be read as gospel - they are “a gospel known to be full of obtuse beauty.” Released May 8 on 4AD. Number 7.

The studio that recorded Train on the Island last year is the same studio that recorded the doom metal record at 14 in January 2026. Rockfield Studios is having a busy and ecumenical month on this chart.

Harp, theremin, and the rain in question

Backstage in Chelmsford in 2022, a 2-piece called Masal opened for Andy Bell of Ride, and afterwards the 3 of them stood around talking about Promises - the 2021 collaboration between Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra that quietly redefined what an ambient record could attempt. Bell had been looking for a project in that direction. Masal had been doing it in private for years.

The result was Tidal Love Numbers, released on Sonic Cathedral in 2023: 4 long tracks of what one British paper called “ambient, astral jazz.” Masal, on its own, is Al Johnson (who records solo psychedelic electronic music as Alien) and Ozlem Simsek, a Turkish multi-instrumentalist whose harp carries her conservatoire training and her Middle Eastern background in equal measure. Their solo follow-up The Galloping Cat arrived in 2024 on a label called Up In Her Room, whose own description of the duo is “neurodiverse nature lovers.” Pause The Rain is the new Masal record without Bell. The trajectory is consistent: harp music for a future that has not yet arrived, the theremin doing what only a theremin can. Number 6.

The photographer reveals himself, after 13 years

In 2013, somebody started releasing cassettes on Chicago’s Tailings label under the name Topdown Dialectic. The cassettes appeared, then disappeared. The same name surfaced on Aught, an anonymous cassette collective whose other aliases - De Leon, Elizabethan Collar, Xth Réflexion, Aci_Edits - were equally faceless. In 2018, an LP appeared on the LA imprint Peak Oil, the first in what became a celebrated trilogy of dub techno records. 8 identical-length tracks per album. No titles beyond catalog numbers - A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, B2, B3, B4. No biography. No photographs. No interviews. The label’s founder, Brian Foote, explained it plainly in 2018: In the instance of the Topdown Dialectic material, the artist didn’t want to be involved. This was an insanely common thing in the '90s where the press even coined the term ‘faceless techno bollocks.’ No one put their name on the release and it wasn’t just because of contractual reasons or mystique. It was more like that doesn’t matter, or that’s not what’s important.

False LP A is the moment, after 13 years, the name gets a face. Topdown Dialectic is Izaak Schlossmann, a photographer and producer whose other work has been in plain sight all along - he simply never connected it to this one. The new 2LP collects over 80 minutes of material spanning a decade, including unreleased tracks from 2013-2016, the same window that produced the Peak Oil trilogy. It was assembled around an open-air set Schlossmann performed at an In Sheeps Clothing event in August 2025 - his first live appearance under the name. The label notes call his music a scrying stone: a device for personal revelation aimed not at the artist but at the listener. A first week at 5, for a record whose maker spent 13 years not wanting to be looked at.

24 albums in, and one of them named Days

John Darnielle posted a joke on social media about writing a song called “Contemplating Pearl Jam in the Carolina Dawn.” A few months later, his wife left town for a 2-week residency in Virginia. Darnielle has noted, in the press for Days, that this is the same domestic shape that produced All Hail West Texas in 2002, when his wife went to Banff to play hockey. The Mountain Goats are not the music he makes when his wife is in the room.

the Mountain Goats - Darnielle, Matt Douglas, Jon Wurster - recorded their 24th studio album at Sear Sound in Manhattan with producer John Congleton. Days was conceived as a sequel to 2017’s Goths. The track list reads like the table of contents of a music writer’s draft memoir: “Song for Layne Staley”, “Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds”, “Candlebox”, “Annie Haslam Imperial Phase” (Renaissance’s lead singer, in the years she could not be touched), “Hidden Majesty of Later Venom Albums”, “Best Hard Rock Albums 2013”. Bass and French horn by Rob Jost. Harp by Mikaela Davis. Backing vocals from Janis Siegel of the Manhattan Transfer, who is 73 and still rendering vocal lines as cleanly as she did in 1980. Pre-order, releases August 7 - the same Friday as the Welsh electronic record two places above. Number 4 on its first week.

A 4-track EP named after a Simpsons gag

In a 1993 Simpsons episode called “Rosebud”, Mr. Burns commandeers all 78 channels of Springfield television in his hunt for the lost teddy bear Bobo. One of the shows on the air is a parody of Soul Train called The Soul Mass Transit System, hosted by a Don Cornelius parody. The studio audience dances. A song called “El Yoyó Es Grande” plays in the background. It is one of the most beloved sight gags in one of the most beloved Simpsons episodes. 33 years later, it is the name printed on a 4-track UK garage EP that just entered the worldwide chart at 3.

Soul Mass Transit System is a Leeds producer who has spent the last 18 months becoming a fixture of the British underground: a Boiler Room set at Beaver Works, residencies on the bigger end of the UK festival circuit, summer dates booked at Gottwood, Progress in Manchester, The Cause in London, and Finsbury Park. HAUSDOGS02 is the second in his HAUSDOGS series, 4 tracks of speed garage, 2-step, breakbeat, and jungle, self-released on May 8. There is also a parallel Bandcamp series called WÜRST, recorded under the alias Fritz Schnackenpfefferhausen, which is somehow also funny. Number 3 on its first week.

The crash cymbal they baked in the oven

The studio notes describe the sessions like a list of things you should not do to expensive equipment, performed deliberately. The brothers brought in analogue synthesizers from the 1970s and 1980s. They recorded a vocal through an antiquated train announcement speaker because it was the right amount of wrong. They tracked another vocal through an old tannoy in the basement. And, in a sentence that has now appeared in nearly every preview of the record, they baked a crash cymbal in the oven to find out what it would sound like afterward.

Overmono is the brothers Tom and Ed Russell, from south Wales, the producers who in 2023 released Good Lies on XL Recordings and watched it become the British electronic album of the decade so far. The follow-up has been nearly 3 years in the making. The lead single, “Lockup”, was written after the brothers read Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again - the canonical history of post-punk’s relationship to studio rules - and ratified the point by sampling the Birmingham cult band Fast Relief’s “What A Waste”. 11 tracks. Pre-order. Releases August 7, the same Friday as the Mountain Goats record above. Number 2 on its first week.

13 years of silence, and the climb back

Boards of Canada have taken back 1. Last week they were at 5. The week before that, at 1. The week before that, at 1 again. The week before that, at 1 for the first time. Inferno is, on this chart, in its fourth week. It is also, in the world outside this chart, still 2 weeks from existing.

The story of the record - the 13 years since Tomorrow’s Harvest, the bunker in the Pentland Hills called Hexagon Sun, the Redmoon nights at the ruined 16th-century monastery with bonfires burning down from 100 people to 50 as the night deepened, the cryptic VHS tapes mailed to fans, the “Tape 05” upload on April 16, the posters that appeared in London, New York, California, and Tokyo - has been told on this blog before, when the record first claimed the top of the chart in week 16. What is new this week is the way the pre-order has refused to behave like a pre-order. Most launch hits peak hard and slip. This one peaked, slipped, and climbed back. The longest silence in the duo’s career has stopped being a story about absence and started being a story about persistence.

The catalog number is still WARP496, skipping ahead at the duo’s own request from Warp’s actual numbering. The album runs exactly 70 minutes, and 70 has carried meaning in their work since the beginning: their own label is called Music70, “Sixtyten” reads out as 70, “The Smallest Weird Number” directly references it. 18 tracks. The world has heard 1.

Inferno releases May 29. The pre-order is at 1 for the third time.

The week in full

11 pre-orders. A photographer who has spent 13 years not wanting to be looked at. A 1981 Hamburg demo collection. The first vinyl pressing of a 25-year-old Pixies compilation. A Greek priest on his third pass. 2 unrelated bands recording at the same Welsh studio. A Brazilian indie game soundtrack on orange vinyl. A doom metal record made in the wake of Ozzy’s death. A Simpsons gag printed on a UK garage EP. A pair of Welsh brothers who baked a cymbal in the oven. A Bolivian noise record dedicated to a February ceremony.

The full chart is here. It resets next week. The Pizza Hotline OST becomes a real album on Friday. The Ecca Vandal becomes real on May 22. The Boards of Canada becomes real on May 29. Two thirds of the records on this chart will, by the end of summer, have stopped being pre-orders.

What we will be looking at then is which of them survive the transition.