Editor’s Note: Anyone who says there isn’t good music coming out these days — and quite literally, every day — simply isn’t paying attention. Vanyaland’s compilation feature The V List highlights the best in new music, both homegrown and national, over the past month, pulling together the sounds that have soundtracked the website in recent weeks. It’s all the stuff we’re bumping here at Vanyaland HQ, one new bop at a time.
Nite Sports, ‘Seventeen’
Just a sweet 16 days into this un-blessed New Year, the Best Song of 2026 discussion arrives with a kiss n’ a fist straight out of New York City. It comes fast n’ heavy from Nite Sports, a new supergroup featuring members of The Movielife, American Nightmare, and Incendiary, not to mention the Good Luck NYC tattoo shop, and the most “super” thing about them right now is new single “Seventeen,” an electric banger that feels iconic right out of the oven, from first listen to 100th, and instantly positions the boys rock and roll’s great new hope (whether they want that distinction or not). Once “Seventeen” hits cruising altitude, it takes hold and never lets go, offering a lethal dose of hardcore power-pop and melodic garage punk that has us in a damn chokehold. Allow us to live in this anthemic sing-along chorus while the world crashes and burns around us, because it’s gonna be real hard for anyone in the year ahead to top “Seventeen” and all its majestic, unhinged, modern-love-song glory. SOTY? The decade? The 21st century? Of all-god-damn-time?!? Fuck it, see you in December.
Final Gasp, ‘The Apparition’
Dark times call for darker music, and Final Gasp thrust our battered souls into 2026’s instant madness with a pummeling new song that’s “a story of reality being much more horrifying than fiction,” according to vocalist Jake Murphy. Feels about right. The two-time nominee for Metal Artist of the Year at the Boston Music Awards (’24, ’25) harness a melodic cauldron stirred with strains of death rock, hardcore, and post-punk, all summoned under a metallic and melodic shadow through new single “The Apparition.” The nocturnal track hits on Relapse Records, and serves as the first sonic offering from February’s sophomore record New Day Symptoms. “It’s about a captain and his crew on a small boat,” Murphy elaborates. “A storm came and capsized it and he and his two crew members were forced to swim to some sort of safety. Ultimately only he survived, having to watch his two friends be taken away by something that could have been avoided. He knew a storm was coming but thought they could make it. It’s all about bad timing and facing the consequences.” We’re all in that storm.
Erin LeCount, ‘I BELIEVE’
We’re not even a month into an already difficult and overwhelming new year, and we can use all the peace and tranquility we can get, especially through the meditation of music. English alt-pop songwriter Erin LeCount has offered a soothing soundtrack via new single “I BELIEVE,” an exquisite synth- and baroque-pop floater out on Atlantic Records. Like last fall’s “MACHINE GHOST”, it both haunts and comforts, and lures us deep into our own headspace as we close out the first week of 2026. “‘I BELIEVE’ is a cynical, existential song about apathy, passiveness in your own life, disillusionment with the state of the world, what it feels like to turning to every possible external source to tell you how to feel and exist — religion, self help books, magazines, astrology, lovers, antidepressants,” LeCount says. “I wrote it about a pursuit of perfection, faith, and meaning soundtracked to relentless synth-pop production.” Find your own peace and flow with “I BELIEVE” both inward and outward below.
MRCH, ‘Escape The Dark’
Never has that old saying “Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about” been more precise and prevalent than right now. We’re all going through it, weaving a shared fight on the surface and a personal one away from the light, and our own break from the bleak is a solitary fight unique to our respective situation. Which makes MRCH’s new single “Escape The Dark” all the more appropriate for the modern day, applying not only out own definition of the darkness that surrounds us, but how we choose to emerge from it. The cinematic Phoenix duo and longtime V faves dropped the new tune mid-month with a mysterious air pf provenance to it, augmented by a strobe-flicked visual, and it’s the lead offering a new EP titled Ashes arriving in March. “This video explores a surreal neon-lit world inspired by dream logic and analog nostalgia,” MRCH declare, “drawing from the cinematic atmosphere of David Lynch and the moody synth-pop lineage of artists like Ladytron and Cannons.” May it illuminate the path.
Cardinals, ‘I Like You’
From St. Louis to the Vatican, the world is littered with famous Cardinals. But Ireland’s rising sons may end up being the most notable of them all. The Cork collective, who soundtracked our Irish banger playlist last March, line up debut album Masquerade for a February 13 release, and to get us worked up nicely have released “I Like You,” a romantic, accordion-led romp of sonic grandeur and theatrical melodrama, continuing a run of haunting indie rock and expansive post-punk where every time we hear a Cardinals song on satellite radio we ask aloud “Who the fuck is this?” before casting brightened eyes on the player. “After a very long period of not working on anything, we started and finished this some bright morning last February in our practice studio,” says frontman Euan Manning. “It felt cathartic, a completely grounding moment after feeling slightly lost for months.” Cardinals are set to kick off a North American tour here in the Boston area, going underground for the very intimate Rockwell Theatre in Somerville on March 7. That’s going to be quite a spectacle.