Best New Ambient (June 2026)
These records will take you places
Just a few weeks ago, we were still firing up the oven every night. Now we’re experiencing the most serious June heatwave ever. Luckily there are over 2,000 natural lakes in the state where I live. It also borders the Baltic Sea, and it’s the least densely populated state in all of Germany.
I’ve spent the last few weeks holing up out here, doing research for my next book and even started writing a couple of chapters. My desk hours are interrupted only by meals and walks. At night, we’re finally watching Stranger Things from the beginning. As expected, it’s exactly my kind of thing.
This slow lifestyle does me a world of good. A good decade ago, I finally accepted that I’m just not a very sociable person. In the last few years, I also noticed that I don’t enjoy traveling much anymore. These days, I’d rather spend my days roaming the woods with my dog, making little art projects with my wife, cooking a whole meal from rescued food, or reading a used book on the bench between the house and the woodshed, where the morning sun shines.
During my desk hours, I’m always listening to tons of atmospheric jungle and balearic house, barber beats, and of course, ambient albums. Below you will find the usual roundup of my favorite new releases that came out over the last few weeks, each one designed for your background and foreground listening pleasure.
By the way, I haven’t written about the new Boards of Canada album Inferno here for the same reasons I'm just now watching Stranger Things and haven’t joined in the excited chatter years ago. I have this natural aversion to hype, and I didn’t feel like adding to the noise. But I’ve been listening to Inferno quite constantly, and everything that’s been written by smart people like Philip Sherburne or Sereptie is true.
Check it out if you haven’t yet – not because of, but despite the hype.
Embri – Cascade Memory (Stereoscape)
I don’t know much about Embri, and that’s by design. The ambient electronic musician, who released their debut EP in May, wishes to stay anonymous for now. What I do know from the label info is that they came to music production through discovering lo-fi beats and synthwave on YouTube. Their own tracks loosely fit the chillsynth genre; it’s all original music, and besides playing keyboards and programming drums they’re also playing flute and weaving in their own field recordings, mostly of birdsong, because apparently they really like birds.
Cascade Memory is the perfect album for listeners who crave some calm and introspective textures, but aren’t looking for beatless ambient. On most of the tracks, Embri provides a rhythmic structure of slow, syncopated drums and synth basslines. The analog, gritty sound isn’t totally unlike that of popular Bandcamp chart toppers like Hotel Pools, and I’m hearing quite a strong BoC influence too, while the occasional beatless track like “Sunvault” gives me classic Tangerine Dream vibes.
In spite of all these influences shaping their sound, Embri’s approach – especially the inclusion of their live flute recordings – feels so unique to me that it really stands out. Definitely one to watch.
Patricia Wolf – Yarrow (Music To Watch Seeds Grow By)
Most of zensounds favorite Patricia Wolf’s recent works were thematically exploring nature, and humanity’s role in its destruction as well as its preservation. The synthesist and field recordist created a whole release dedicated to her favorite pastime of birdwatching in her native Pacific Northwest (The Secret Lives of Birds) and wrote a soundtrack to a documentary about the ravens of Iceland, Hrafnamynd. After two albums focusing on animal life, Yarrow is named after a well-known medicinal plant that grows mainly in North America and Europe.
Yarrow was conceived at a 2024 artist residency in Colorado, where she spent time engaging with a group of ecologists doing long-term research on the interaction of plants and pollinators and their reaction to climate change. The A-side of the tape features six short, shimmering, beatless synth jams; I want to point out the closer “Adapted for Extreme Conditions” (see video below) here, just because it’s so breathtakingly beautiful. The B-side is entirely taken up by a guided meditation by one of the researchers at the residency, Dr Paul CaraDonna, over a collage of Patricia’s field recordings from the area of Gothic, Colorado.
“With this music, I hope to inspire others to slow down, appreciate plants and admire their remarkable fortitude and resilience. With such appreciation, I hope this further inspires us to protect and conserve these photosynthesizing wonders and their ecosystems for as long as the earth will hold them.” (Patricia Wolf)
James Bernard – In A Small Room, Decades Ago (Past Inside The Present)
I strongly dislike all that military jargon that has become standard vocabulary in music writing, but James Bernard started making ambient music over 30 years ago, so it’s hard not to call him a ‘veteran’ at this point. On his new solo work, he turns to the inspirational chill-out rooms he once encountered at those mythical 1990s New York raves. “For this album I wanted to journey back and create a love letter to those magical times, and the energy that was felt in those small rooms decades ago”, he’s quoted in the liner notes.
To channel this energy, James restricted himself to a sound palette of analog synthesizers and vintage drum machines that would have been available at the time. The result is a pleasurable, psychedelic collection of acid bleeps, downtempo beats and synth washes. I’ve never been to legendary London squat party Telepathic Fish, but this music sounds like it should have been played there – it evokes a strong urge in me to sit down cross-legged on a damp mattress to share a cheese roll with a friend and listen to a dude in a batik shirt mixing Klaus Schulze, The Orb and Lee Perry records. In other words, it triggers those wistful, romantic aspects of afterhour nostalgia. Nothing wrong with that, is it?
Poppy Ackroyd – Liminal (One Little Independent)
There was a time when I ate that very specific style of ‘neoclassical’ solo piano music up, but I’ve long since grown tired and wary of it, possibly in my years as a streaming playlist curator. I realized that generative AI doesn’t have a claim of exclusivity to the slop genre – human musicians have been experts at creating slop much longer.
Liminal is the antithesis to that playlist slop – a cycle of plain beautiful minimalist piano and violin pieces which feel authentic in their emotional expression. No sentimental kitsch phrases, no praying for a soundtrack sync. The title refers to in-between states and transitory conditions; the album was written over a three-month period when composer and musician Poppy Ackroyd’s life got turned upside down.
“In the last three years everyone I loved most in the world needed me, all at once. There has been new life and death, heartbreak and many other things that are not my stories to tell. I have also moved across the country to a part of the world I have never lived in before. I had such a chaotic few years, but the only way to cope was to allow things to be messy. Embracing the messy and imperfect but still getting things done. I decided to apply this approach to my music making and I found that I still maintain the same attention to detail but without the pressure, and I fell in love with making music again in a whole new way.” (Poppy Ackroyd)
Bonus Beats
Martyn – Music For Existing (3024)
This isn’t ambient by any standards, but I’ve in fact been listening to it the same way. It’s probably my Friday morning pick of the week if we’re applying a Flow State logic (“It’s Friday so we’re listening to something slightly more upbeat”).
In his 25-year career as a DJ and producer, the U.S. based Dutchman has moved from drum’n’bass to post-dubstep to dub techno to jazzy electronica. This new direction doesn’t surprise me as an occasional listener of his NTS radio show, which has focused on old jazz records for quite some time.
There’s a dusty, analog cratediggin’ quality to this album that reminds me of the underground hip-hop from the mid-Aughts era: Madlib and Dilla, early Brainfeeder and some L.A. beat scene stuff. Most of all, I’ve been thinking Tadd Mullinix alias Dabrye, who’d specialized in an off-kilter production style that sounded like the missing link between ‘indie’ rap, ‘spiritual’ jazz and Detroit techno. Martyn has that same syncopated swing in his drums, and that accent on the ride cymbals as well.
Music For Existing has that perfect classic vinyl album length, with a narrative arc unfolding over two clearly defined sides. One of my favorites is the A-side closer “Hypnotoxic Laser”, which sounds like a leftover from Photek’s Modus Operandi, with a mysterious acoustic double-bassline and a proto-jungle drumbreak shuffling along. The B-side intro features a spoken word poem by the writer Musa Okwonga over loose, improvised-sounding Rhodes chords. One song on each side features pianist Duval Timothy doing his gorgeous Duval Timothy thing. How all of this holds and works together is magic to me – but it does.
Top 3 album of the first half of 2026 for me, the other two being Inferno and Elucid & Sebb Bash’s I Guess U Had To Be There.