The Most Disappointing Albums of 2026 (Part I)

The world was once enchanted by a numb little bug.

While adorable and unassuming, the bug was surgical in her self-reflection. She plainly picked apart her psyche, parsing through her unrelenting cycle of depression, disassociation, and quick repairs to cope. She mused over her existence with the upbeat nihilism of a makeshift millennial.

Her ruminations were inviting without being presumptuous, candid without being cloying, kindred without corporate dread. This little bug touched the hearts of millions, creating a community of solidarity with her little percussive piano. She has ample opportunity to turn into the Sara Bareilles of the 2020's.

That bug has shapeshifted into a demon.

Tales of a Failed Shapeshifter by Em Beihold

The second major release from Em Beihold is a startling swerve into the lamest tropes of Gen-Z: chronically online, self-aggrandizing, and aimlessly eccentric.

To be clear, eccentricity is not a flaw. Embracing healthy forms of nonconformity is encouraged, especially on an album of soul-searching. For Beihold, shapeshifting between historical figures and mythological beasts as a metaphor for self-discovery is a unique and intriguing concept.

However, for an artist obsessed with exploring identity, Beihold is oddly resistant to transformation. Throughout this record, her exhaustive laundry list of insecurities never culminate into a breakthrough or a moment of clarity. Instead, her pity party is an odyssey of trauma-dumping and deflection.

Take the lead single, "Brutus". Beihold descends into an intrusive revenge fantasy, seething in jealousy towards someone with a seemingly impeccable life. Yet, her bland and impersonal portrayal of Caesar causes her inner conflict to feel forced, especially when she does nothing to resolve her jealousy.

Beihold is similarly unreceptive on "Hot Goblin", insisting indifference towards her polarizing public persona while adopting a tone that suggests the opposite. "Shiny New Things" is a surface-level observation of materialism that feels needlessly bitter. "Strong Medicine" desperately craves medication, rejecting all personal and long-term solutions without deeper introspection.

So many of these songs feature Beihold bitching about her problems and then expecting the audience to accept her unreceptive bitching.

It's almost as if shapeshifting only changes your outward appearance and does nothing to change what's inside...

Now, this album could work without metamorphosis. Many records successfully wallow in dormancy, unwilling to change yet provocative in exploring their melodrama. Something akin to "Numb Little Bug".

Em Beihold compensates her inability to change with quirkiness and memes.

But you're Caesar and I'm Brutus minus that part with the knife

Brutus - Em Beihold

And I get so obsessed
Don't you treat me like the rest
I'm your unicorn

Unicorn - Em Beihold

Sometimes I feel like I'm a hot goblin, little bit of perfect, little bit of problem

Hot Golbin - Em Beihold

No frou-frou, nothin' there to chew-chew
You're not worth the stew-stew
You're no better than soup!

Soup! - Em Beihold

This fantasy-shapeshifting gimmick is lame. I feel no connection when Beihold portrays these characters and themes as child-drawn caricatures. When she goes to a club on "Unicorn" or complains about toxic friends on "Soup!", Beihold writes like a kindergartener. These naïve eccentricities, designed to be oh so cutesy, undermine her themes of mental health and codependency.

Every vignette is a parody of the source material. Every chorus is reduced into stomach-prodding punchlines.

These poor imitations do not only extend thematically. The production style also struggles at capturing the same magic of its influences.

Beihold clearly draws from Marina and the Diamonds: propulsive synth-driven production, ethereal vocals with a nasal edge, and a mood board of melodramatic slapdash opulence. Beihold even recruited the lead producer of MARINA's 2021 album, Jake Flannigan, for four songs on the record.

Inexplicably, the album adopts a cleaner and stiffer sound. "Shiny New Things" and "Strong Medicine" are bogged down by bass-leaden mixes that lack groove and momentum. The strained vocal delivery and vocal dubs on "Unicorn" are overly processed and clumsy. "Hot Goblin" features passionless synths that build to one of the most unsatisfying key changes this decade.

This album's biggest crime is de-emphasizing the piano. Throughout her music, the piano is not only Beihold's best feature, but Beihold's best friend. The piano is her artistic identity; its percussive rhythms and chromatic flourishes are the foundation of her emotional resonance.

Beihold feels emptier without a good piano. Gauzy synths and strings often drown the piano further into the mix, such as on "Strong Medicine" and "Won't Let Go". When the piano receives a larger role on "Scared of the Dark" and "Lottery", the piano feels synthetic and stilted.

"Van Gogh" is easily the best song as its spiral into madness (with some decent quips) is matched with a mischievous, momentum-building piano line. I wish Beihold channeled her quirkiness more towards this style of dynamic playfulness.

The most confounding song is "Lottery" where Beihold imagines how terrible she would act if she won the lottery. In this fantasy, Beihold would buy frivolous luxuries, isolate herself from her loved ones, and fund charities for self-gratification. On the chorus, she asserts the following:

I am lucky I don't play the lottery

Lottery - Em Beihold

Em... if the offer of life-altering money causes you to be a terrible person, that says far more about your character that it does about the damn lottery!

Tales of a Failed Shapeshifter mutated the authentic girl-next-door charm of Em Beihold into the quirky Spirit Halloween cosplay of a Tumblr purist. Beihold is whimsy-maxxing and window-dressing to cover up for her lack of substance – best articulated by the album's most excruciatingly revealing line:

Did I use the time right, or did I not have enough to say?

Won't Let Go - Em Beihold

If you have an appetite for well-crafted TikTok fantasy, check out Rose Betts. Betts has the worldbuilding, theatrics, and mystique necessary for phenomenal folk pop. And despite her current output, I highly recommend listening to Em Beihold's Egg in the Backseat for a richer and realer version of her sound.

I hope you are in a healthy headspace, Em. I am still rooting for you. You have proven your girly-pop prowess in making truly transcendent music.

...just please stay off the Internet for a while.

Middle of Nowhere by Kacey Musgraves

2026 is a banner year for women in country music.

With the sustained mainstream breakthrough of "Choosin' Texas", female country music has received more critical and global attention. Young hotshots like Ella Langley, Megan Moroney, and Lainey Wilson are becoming households names alongside established veterans like Miranda Lambert and Taylor Swift. Combined with the collective emergence of country music, this female country phenomenon has resulted in country music infiltrating every song in the top five of the Billboard Hot 100 as of August 2026.

This accomplishment feels... hollow.

While their success has produced quality songs, the rise of female-led country music is primarily driven by a lack of competition. Pop is struggling to properly produce and promote universally resonant music. Hip-hop is cannibalizing its artists and sub-genres. Rock and R&B are novelties.

Country music has capitalized on a stagnating music industry. So, while the rise of female-led country music is worth celebrating, I fear female country artists have shattered a glass ceiling only after years of impending fracture.

Even then, the world is sluggishly inept at adapting to a female country-led mainstream. Music Row, besotted by Morgan Wallen and Jelly Roll, has yet to give Ella Langley's "Be Her" a proper radio push for an obvious pop-crossover. Music discourse routinely pigeonholes all country music as MAGA Republican, pledging ignorance to the entire genre in spite of its popularity and quality. And the untrained ears of the mainstream are more eager to share their uninformed and volatile opinions on country releases.

Enter Kacey Musgraves. Similar to Beihold, her sixth studio album revels in stagnation, navigating the directionless wasteland between breakups and rebounds. Critics have praised Middle of Nowhere for its transitional and wistful melancholy set in a Texas tumbleweed town.

The title track is a great introduction into her melancholy. Musgraves wanders off the grid in search for inner peace, deliberately distancing herself from romantic entanglements. The album meanders through this state of confusion, weighing contentment and resentment in her chosen solitude. Based on the first few songs, this record gives the expectation of Musgraves sifting through the desert of her past relationships, searching for an oasis of catharsis.

...except the oasis is never discovered.

Middle of Nowhere is torturously barren. Although this record settles for a spacious and spare mood, too many mixes are devoid of personality. This dull sound leaves the listener stranded on a gravel road beneath the merciless sun.

The guitars are brittle and understated. The drum machines are clunky and sputtering. Musgraves' southern drawl is smothered in compression and reverb. These production elements are designed to create distance and expanse, reflecting the pervasive loneliness of the record. However, without much variety or organic texture, these songs suffocate in negative space.

"I Believe In Ghosts" and "Loneliest Girl" are among the most suffocating. Both songs ride on breezy, locomotive beats that grow increasingly sterile as the guitar repeats the laziest of strumming patterns. "I Believe In Ghosts" is particularly draining with suspicious similarities to "We Are The People" by Empire of the Sun.

Unfortunately, these painfully repetitive guitar loops overshadow Musgraves' evocative vocals and songwriting.

"I Believe In Ghosts" wittingly recounts men who can't take commitment and disappear; its extended metaphor about ghosts is excellent. "Loneliest Girl" expands on her journey through solitude, emphasizing newfound freedoms, reasserting relationship boundaries, and reprimanding physical temptations.

Both "Middle of Nowhere" and "Loneliest Girl" preach contentment within loneliness, framing solitude as a source of self-determined independence. Although these declarations are coping mechanisms, Musgraves does find stability, however fleeting, in her independence. "Loneliest Girl" would be one of my favorite songs on the record if the production was fuller and richer.

I gotta be careful of who I let in
I'm not sure I could stand my heart getting broken again
No more anything that's taking my energy
If I'm only doing it for company
I'd rather be the loneliest girl in the world

Loneliest Girl - Kacey Musgraves

The trend of flimsy production undercutting well-written lyrics permeates throughout the record. On the fifth track, Musgraves envies a woman who fled the unforgiving town of "Abilene", wishing she could also escape her misery. Musgraves realizing her own solitary confinement is heartbreaking, yet the plodding, plastic percussion pulls me out of the immersion.

"Horses and Divorces" squashes genuine beef between Musgraves and Miranda Lambert through a cheesy drinking song. While the concept is corny and their chemistry is quite clumsy – their vocals sound like they were recorded and mixed across county lines – the goofiness of the accordion is annoyingly twee. The same accordion plays on "Uncertain, TX", only with lamer lyrics, an uninspired Willie Nelson, and a cowbell that clanks like a woodpecker.

The record is most effective when its dryness is enhanced by a welcome breath of levity. With just the right framing, Musgraves strikes comedy gold.

Her label certainly agrees, given her two lead singles are the most hysterical. Musgraves is exasperatingly lonely with a capital H on "Dry Spell", yearning for any molecule of relief. Instead of the monotony of other tracks, the burnt-out production on "Dry Spell" accentuates the joke of no release. The track is delightfully tense, teasing the audience onto a bone-dry edge.

Given the bulging innuendos, the washing machine quip, and the hilarious music video, I can imagine Musgraves had a good time in the booth.

The second single, "Mexico Honey," finally offers a touch of intimacy. Musgraves performs an at-home striptease for a recent fling, playing Daft Punk and shaking her ass in her hot-pink shorts. While Musgraves embraces this fleeting intimacy, the track maintains the down-tempo pulse of the album without reaching for greater release.

"Rhinestoned" is similarly sultry, finding brokenhearted solidarity in faded psychedelia and pedal-steel. This newfound closeness is enough for tonight. The endless expanse can wait for tomorrow.

And sometimes most times, tomorrow bleeds over into a romantic relapse. Musgraves offers another undeserved chance to her toxic partner on "Back On The Wagon". Although she knows this relationship is hopeless, Musgraves is willingly naïve and desperate to hold onto her delusion.

"Back On The Wagon" is excellent because its stubbornly optimistic songwriting contrasts its somber and vacuous production. This contrast is tragically heartbreaking and unintentionally hilarious; I wish the album employed more of its emptier production to emphasize emotional dissonance.

I want to close this review by examining the most provocative track, "Everybody Wants To Be A Cowgirl". Musgraves criticizes the buckle bunnies and the cosplaying cowboys who romanticize ranching culture without putting in the hard work. Her commentary seems to target those pop starlets who borrow country aesthetics without ever getting dirt on their boots.

However, in the second verse, Musgraves sings the following:

Everybody wants the freedom, miles and miles of space
Moving on to the next thing when thе wind ain't blowing their way
But you know that ain't gonna cut it, it's gonna take a lot of heart
You'rе gonna have to duct tape it back together when it falls apart

Everybody Wants To Be A Cowgirl - Kacey Musgraves

I wonder if Musgraves includes herself when she says everybody.

As much as I praise Musgraves' songwriting, the overall storyline meanders, distant and directionless. Her constant deflection, as on "Middle of Nowhere", "Loneliest Girl", and "Back On The Wagon" prevents Musgraves from fully confronting her past relationships.

Even when she does turn inward, her reflections often feel incidental, triggered by a wandering coyote in "Coyote" or newspaper article in "Abilene". Musgraves also often universalizes her problems to shift the blame away from herself, as on "Uncertain, TX" and "Everybody Wants To Be A Cowgirl".

Her deflection is reasonable; a record about running away from your problems is likely reticent. The detachment on the album is a feature, not a flaw.

And yet, an album so steeped in detachment, without ever arriving at catharsis, is ultimately difficult for me to enjoy.

Compare Musgraves' deflection with the approach taken by her ex-husband, Ruston Kelly. On his 2023 record, The Weakness, Kelly fights tooth-and-nail to find inner peace, clawing through his insecurities, vices, and faults. When Kelly does deflect or self-destruct, his avoidance often ends in a bitter confrontation or a glorious faceplant. His agonizing struggle toward recovery is relatable and rewarding because he wrestles with the man in the mirror.

I would never begrudge Musgraves if she is currently unable to confront her heartbreak. We all recover from past experiences at our own pace. Unfortunately, her current state of deflection and distance limits the depth of her self-reflection, weakening the album's introspection and emotional release.

Many people will overrate this record, resonating with its shift back towards a nostalgic neotraditional sound or simply recognizing the name on the tin. And I admit that I can appreciate this album for its realistic portrayal of depression and burnout.

However, while the production and lyrics are purposefully distant, Middle of Nowhere should not feel as painfully absent as to prevent enjoyment. For this album to emerge from its emptiness, it's gonna take a lot of heart.

Kacey, please take the time to sort it all out.

Recalibrate your compass. Rediscover your joy.

I can't wait to hear about your new direction.

Middle of Nowhere feels emblematic of the female country wave: a movement where breakthroughs are incidental and successes are fleeting. Furthermore, many mainstream listeners engage with country music from a distance, deflecting any desire to treat the genre seriously.

If you have come this far, I hope you will put in the hard work to deeply engage with female country music, exploring the richness and diversity of the genre.

If you want to listen to Kacey Musgraves, please check out Same Trailer Different Park. I promise that you will not regret it.

For mainstream artists, I highly recommend Ella Langley, Carly Pearce, and Lainey Wilson. For more underground selections, I fervently suggest listening to Katie Pruitt, Caroline Spence, Emily Scott Robinson, and Caitlyn Smith.

These women are gonna ride this wave 'til it breaks, so I sincerely hope you open your mind, settle your biases, and educate yourself.

There's plenty of room on the wagon.