New vinyl reissues: January 30, 2026
Hello, hello, vinyl enthusiasts. We’ve got another action-packed week of new vinyl reissues for you, but there are two upcoming releases that we didn’t include—because we don’t know what they are yet!
Rhino High Fidelity is dropping their next two titles this week, and our friend Steve Westman will have the announcement at 8:30 am Eastern time/5:30 am Pacific time tomorrow morning (January 30). On his Audiophile Roundtable show, Westman will have Rhino’s Jason Jones and Patrick Milligan on as guests, and they’ll discuss the Rhino High Fidelity line, the vinyl scene at large, and—of course—reveal the next two titles in the series. (Our pick? You guessed it.)
Here’s the Audiophile Roundtable YouTube link, which will go live at 8:30 am Eastern/5:30 am Pacific on Friday, January 30. The show is also available on Spotify. Tune in!
And real quick—here’s a little button to click if you’d like to become a paid supporter of The Vinyl Cut. You get perks, like our monthly vinyl giveaways and complete access to our archives, plus the smug satisfaction that you’re contributing to a reader-supported publication—which, quite simply, is priceless.
Thank you! And now let’s look at this week’s starting lineup.
Alice in Chains: Alice in Chains 30th anniversary edition [Columbia/Legacy]
It goes without saying that anticipation is high for this one. The third studio album from Seattle quartet Alice in Chains had its only true vinyl run back when the record was first released in 1995. Since then, a handful of pirated copies have made their way to market, but this is the first time the record has been reissued officially on vinyl. There’s no telling what the holdup was on getting this LP back in print, as the group remains ever in the favor of hard rock fans worldwide, even in spite of the middling reunion records they’ve released since 2009. This final full-length with original vocalist Layne Staley finds AiC at full-strength, slipping from meaty Sabbath-esque dirges into the more reflective sound they played with on the 1992 EP Sap. A mega-deluxe box set is also available. RH
Tower of Power: Back to Oakland [Rhino Reserve]
As part of the final Friday of Rhino’s Start Your Ear Off Right, the fourth album from San Francisco funk outfit Tower of Power is getting the coveted Rhino Reserve treatment. 1974’s Back to Oakland redefines the word tight, with quick-trick drumming and horns aplenty. The 11-piece also knew how to kick out the slow jams for lovers, making Back to Oakland a quintessential funk-soul record of the mid-’70s. Long neglected on vinyl (Direct-Disk did a half-speed in 1979, and at some point Music on Vinyl took a stab, but otherwise it has not been reissued on wax in decades), this Rhino Reserve pressing features an all-analog cut from Matthew Lutthans of the Mastering Lab and is pressed at MoFi’s Fidelity plant. NL
The Style Council: Café Bleu super deluxe [UMe]
[UPDATE: It sounds like Universal screwed up here. They put the wrong versions of “The Whole Point of No Return” and “You’re the Best Thing” on disc two of this set and have recalled the entire run. This release has now been pushed back to May 15. As I type this, the uDiscoverMusic site has not been updated, but I apologize for the error in including it here. NL] Known best here in the States for their lone top-30 hit “My Ever Changing Moods,” the Style Council were huge in their native UK, with their first three albums hitting close to the top of the British charts. The group, led by ex-Jam frontman Paul Weller and keyboardist Mick Talbot, kicked off their impressive run with 1984’s Café Bleu, a smooth collection of blue-eyed soul, light jazz, funk, pop, and even a touch of rap for good measure (the less said about that, the better). Released in the States with some tracklist changes as My Ever Changing Moods, the album is getting its proper due this week as a triple-LP set that includes the US-only release Introducing the Style Council, B-sides, and some never-before-heard demos and alternate versions. RH
Bruce Springsteen: Wrecking Ball [Sony]
Can’t fault the man for good intentions. Bruce Springsteen released a new song this week—a broadside called “Streets of Minneapolis” that wrestles with the federally sponsored violence that has been rearing its head in Minnesota and the new breed of fascism that our country finds itself in the throes of. The Boss’s new song is pretty mid, as the kids say—hey, sometimes with these spontaneous protests songs, we get “Ohio,” and sometimes we get “Peace in L.A.” But it’s not like I see Alex Warren or Taylor Swift or (lol) Morgan Wallen getting their hands dirty by delivering anti-ICE broadsides to a population that very much needs cultural leaders to stop worrying about their follow counts and speak up for human rights. (Zach Bryan tried it, sort of, then immediately backpedaled.) Fortunately, Springsteen is no coward and has a hard work ethic, and even if this hot-off-the-presses song isn’t the match of “My Hometown” or “Atlantic City” or even “Streets of Philadelphia,” we’re damn lucky to have him doing the work. Oh! Also, Bruce’s 2012 album Wrecking Ball is back on vinyl this week for the first time since it originally came out. It, too, is filled with very fine intentions and some pretty decent music. NL
Grupo Um: Nineteen Seventy Seven [Far Out Recordings]
Previously unreleased until now, Nineteen Seventy Seven is a daringly adventurous set from the Brazilian jazz-fusion band Grupo Um. (It was recorded in, you guessed it, 1977.) You can thank the military dictatorship in Brazil for the fact that it was suppressed at the time; the band’s exploratory, avant-garde tendencies went against the cultural homogeneity the country’s leadership was trying to instill. In other words, this rhythmic blend of jazz, samba, experimentalism, modular synth work, and general musical mischief was too subversive and freaky for the oppressive regime—so if ever an unheard recording’s time has come, it certainly is now. The archival release comes from London label Far Out Recordings, who have put time and effort into presenting this music in the best possible light. NL
Girls Against Boys: Cruise Yourself [Touch & Go]
With little fanfare, indie label Touch & Go has been steadily dipping into their back catalog, plucking out some of the best releases from their nearly 30-year run and reissuing them on wax. Their first foray of the new year is a remastered edition of Cruise Yourself, the 1994 album from sexed-up DC quartet Girls Against Boys. Made up of former members of punk band Soulside, GVSB settled into a slinkier sound drawing from the agit-funk sounds of Gang of Four and Wire for inspiration while still holding the line for the scratchy American indie rock sound of the time. This new pressing of the band’s third full-length features remastered audio by the always-reliable Bob Weston. RH
Wolfmother: Wolfmother 20th anniversary edition [UMe]
Two decades ago, Wolfmother seemed like the band that could bring rock music back into the mainstream, and for good reason. The Australian trio had the looks, the swagger, and, most importantly, they had the tunes—muscular, catchy, and heavy rockers heavily indebted to Sabbath, Uriah Heep, and Rainbow. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of their arrival in record store racks, Universal is reissuing the group’s self-titled album in a pair of vinyl formats: a double-LP set that includes a quartet of B-sides or a double 45 RPM picture disc set. RH
The Monkees: The A’s, the B’s & the Monkees [Rhino]
The Monkees have been reissued so many times and in so many configurations that it’s a little wild no one’s ever done this before: a straightforward 2-LP collection that simply gathers up all the A-sides and B-sides of their 12 US singles. That’s it—no muss, no fuss. Since many of the singles featured unique or hard-to-find mixes (like the peerless slice of cathedralesque psychedelia “Porpoise Song,” which features an extended instrumental coda) and several tunes never made their way to albums proper (such as “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You,” which hit number two in 1967, and its excellent B-side, “The Girl I Knew Somewhere”), this is also a good way to get them all on wax. The discs were cut by Bernie Grundman, and we’ll have a longer review in the coming days. This is one of the final releases in Rhino’s Start Your Ear Off Right campaign for January 2026. NL
Prince: HITnRUN Phase One; HITnRUN Phase Two [Sony]
The final two studio albums released during Prince’s lifetime are making their first official vinyl bows this week. I can’t say that either of these albums come anywhere close to the heights of the music that the Purple One was dropping on the regular in the ’80s and early ’90s, but there’s no denying that his batting average is impressively high on both. 2015’s HITnRUN Phase One finds Prince doing an impressive job meeting the cultural moment with some fine trap-adjacent funk-pop and contributions from young guns like Rita Ora and Lianne La Havas. The companion album, released four months after the first phase, is full of limber-limbed soul and R&B that sounds like Prince was mainlining Funkadelic and Graham Central Station records in his off-hours at Paisley Park. RH
Black Milk: Popular Demand [Fat Beats]
Perhaps best known for his work making beats for artists like Danny Brown and Cypress Hill, Black Milk has also amassed a healthy discography as an MC that showcases a slippery lyric style that blends chest-thumping bluster with magical realist flights of fancy. One of his finest front-facing efforts, 2007’s Popular Demand, is getting a fresh vinyl pressing this week with remastered audio that will hopefully bring some additional shine to Black Milk’s soulful production work. RH
Van Morrison: Moondance; Astral Weeks 2-LP 45 RPM [Acoustic Sounds 40 Series]
After a little burble of a false start last November, Acoustic Sounds’ latest series—dubbed the Acoustic Sounds 40 Series to commemorate the Salina, Kansas, mini-empire’s fourth decade—kicks off in earnest this week. The series, done in conjunction with Rhino, offers up double-LP 45 RPM versions of several titles from Warner’s back catalog; early adopters got a taste in November when preview copies of Van Morrison’s Moondance were made available to participants of an audiophile event in New York City. Now the rest of us can get our hands on the edition of not just Morrison’s 1970 album but its 1968 precursor, the gorgeously fluid Astral Weeks. In something of a left turn from a company that sells its records under the banner of Analogue Productions, these new Morrisons are cut from digital, as apparently the analog masters have given up their last gasp and are now unusable. Future installments of the AS40 series will be cut from tape wherever possible. As for these Morrison releases, Matthew Lutthans cut them at the Mastering Lab from a flat 24/192 digital transfer and they were pressed at Quality Record Pressings. NL
Evan Parker & Andrea Centazzo: Bullfighting on Ice! Live in Padova; Alvin Curran/Andrea Centazzo/Evan Parker: Real Time; Real Time Two [Ictus]
Ictus, the label started in Italy in 1976 and now situated in Long Beach, California, is set to release three crucial blasts of free jazz this week, all of them featuring the label’s founder, percussionist Andrea Centazzo, and his frequent collaborator, British saxophonist Evan Parker. Bullfighting on Ice! is a duo session recorded live in Padova in December 1977 that hones a long performance of furious musical entanglements down to two fairly accessible chunks of blurt and thump. The other two LPs, Real Time and Real Time Two, were captured on tape in the subsequent days—in, respectively, Rome and Pistola, where the pair was joined by Alvin Curran, who added some squalls and drones from his synthesizer into an already potent mix. The audio for all three was remastered by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio in Treviso, Italy. RH
Linda Ronstadt: The Early Years [Iconic Artists Group]
(This is a wide release of the compilation that came out on RSD Black Friday back in November. Here’s the preview that we ran then.) This compilation covers the solo albums Linda Ronstadt recorded for Capitol Records between 1969 and 1974, plus the addition of her big hit with the Stone Poneys, 1967’s “Different Drum.” It’s an interesting mixture of hits and deep cuts, relying heavily on her solo debut, 1969’s Hand Sewn…Home Grown, and her first number-one album, 1974’s Heart Like a Wheel. These albums are all easy to find, and in fact the 1977 Capitol Records collection A Retrospective covers a lot of this same ground. But this collection also has two relative rarities in the form of live recordings from the 1970 Celebration album of performances recorded at the Big Sur Folk Festival. However, all told, the tracklist looks suspiciously short for a 2-LP set. NL
Midnight Oil: Diesel and Dust [Legacy]
In 1986, Aussie rockers Midnight Oil joined up with a pair of indigenous music groups to play a series of live events in Aboriginal communities living in the Outback. Seeing firsthand how colonization and racist political policies were continuing to impact the lives of these Native Australians, the band poured their anger into Diesel and Dust, the 1987 album that honed the quintet’s attack into a blunt yet accessible roar and gave the world the massive (and often misunderstood) hit single “Beds Are Burning.” Just shy of its 40th birthday, this monumental record is being reissued this week with remastered audio and a new pressing on black biovinyl. RH
Phil Collins: The Singles (2-LP configuration) [Rhino]
Even for the Collins-averse, a tidy compilation of his greatest hits makes a lot of sense. But scanning the tracklist for this double disc—a shortened version of a longer comp first issued in 2016—it looks to have jettisoned a lot of worthy chart fodder in favor of providing a more comprehensive career overview. For instance, there are only two tracks from 1985’s No Jacket Required, and one of his best songs, “I Don’t Care Anymore” from 1982’s Hello, I Must Be Going!, is nowhere to be found—nor is anything from the Tarzan soundtrack, which will be sure to upset those from a certain age demographic. But there’s a song apiece from each of his later efforts, and to the comp’s credit, this is a good place to swoop up some of the singles that didn’t appear on his LPs, like “Against All Odds,” “Separate Lives” and his duet with Philip Bailey, “Easy Lover,” which has just reentered the zeitgeist thanks to a mega-goofy live clip. NL
Lee Mason: Music by Lee Mason [Wewantsounds]
Library music, that subgenre of instrumental tunes recorded in the late ’60s and early ’70s by for-hire studio musicians for use in TV and film productions, continues to be a rich vein for reissue labels to tap. This week, French imprint Wewantsounds is re-releasing a particularly juicy collection: Music by Lee Mason, a 1971 album credited to Lee Mason and his Orchestra that was actually the work of UK composer Pete Moore. The set features some wild, funky fare full of gusty horns and Booker T-like organ playing that is prime fodder for hip-hop producers (Madlib flipped this record’s “Shady Blues” for a tune he cooked up for Lootpack) and deep-groove DJs. RH
Ghost-Note: Fortified [Mixto]
(This is a wide release of the reissue that first came out on RSD Black Friday back in November. Here’s the preview that we ran then.) The 2015 debut album of percussionist duo Ghost-Note, Fortified, is more than just Robert “Sput” Searight and Nate Werth moonlighting during their off hours away from Texas fusion collective Snarky Puppy. It’s a dissection of tones and rhythms across a huge spectrum of musical styles, driven by funk and hip-hop grooves and contributions from more than a dozen collaborators from across the Dallas music scene. Some parts sound like futuristic second lines, while other sections sound like broken machines learning to synchronize with each other, and yet others are pure dance-floor pulse-movers. NL
Jazz Alley
It wouldn’t be a week without some choice jazz reissues on vinyl, would it? The big cheese this week is Miles Davis’s The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965, a 10-LP whopper that was recorded over two nights at the Chicago club. Excerpts of these fiery sets, featuring the Second Great Quintet with Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, and Herbie Hancock, have been released in different configurations over the years, but this is the first time the complete run has been in a vinyl package since the 1995 box set on Mosaic. The Sony release is cut from high-res digital and comes in a slipcase with a 44-page book. Meanwhile, two more reissues from ’70s jazz label Muse Records hit the racks, courtesy of Time Traveler Recordings: Woody Shaw’s 1976 stirring soul-groove excursion Love Dance, and Joe Chambers’ Double Exposure from 1978, in which the pianist/drummer is joined by organist Larry Young for a wide-ranging set of inventive duets. Those are cut from tape by Matthew Lutthans and pressed at Optimal. Additionally, Speakers Corner has a new pressing of Charles Mingus’s 1964 Atlantic album Tonight at Noon, made up of sessions from 1957 and 1961 with Booker Ervin and Roland Kirk on board; it’s cut from tape by Kevin Gray and pressed at Pallas. And lastly, there’s a new pressing of Hannibal Marvin Peterson’s indescribable 1974 jazz suite, Children of the Fire, which we’re mentioning because it’s such a unique work and near-impossible to score on vinyl. The pressing looks a bit dubious in nature, with an oddly low price and no details of its provenance, leading me to conclude it may be a gray-market issue. But this may be your only chance to get this zany spiritual hard-bop fusion masterwork on your turntable, so do what you must. NL
OTHER REISSUES OF NOTE:
Armageddon: Armageddon [Deko]
Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson: Thick as a Brick 2 [Madfish]
Apocalyptica: Worlds Collide [Odyssey Music]
Captain Beefheart: Mirror Man [Buddah]
Harry Case: In a Mood [Klimt]
Willie Colón: Hecho en Puerto Rico [Sony]
Willie Colón & Ruben Blades: Tras la Tormenta [Sony]
Delta Sleep: Twin Galaxies 10th anniversary edition [Sofa Boy]
Toumani Diabaté: Djelika [Chrysalis]
La Dusseldorf: Viva [Klimt]
Florist: The Birds Outside Sang 10th anniversary edition [Double Double Whammy]
Warren Haynes: Tales of Ordinary Madness [Megaforce]
Alan Howarth: Prince of Darkness soundtrack [Mondo]
Michael Jackson: Number Ones [Sony]
Howard Jones: Live at the Marquee (1983) [Cherry Red]
Herbert von Karajan & Wiener Philharmoniker: Strauss - Die Fledermaus [Decca]
Living Colour: Time’s Up [Music on Vinyl]
The Mars Volta: Noctourniquet [Clouds Hill]
Morbid Angel: Live Suffocation: Grindcrusher Tour 1989 [Suffocate]
The Neighbourhood: Wiped Out! 10th anniversary edition [Sony Legacy]
Ohio Players: Skin Tight [Elemental]
The Revolutionaries: Dutch Man Dub [Burning Sounds]
The Ruts: Shine On Me: The Singles Collection 1979–1980 [Demon/Edsel]
Sophie: Product [Numbers]
Sound Experience: Don’t Fight the Feeling [Reservoir Recordings]
Ringo Starr: Choose Love [Friday]
Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs: Trouble [Proper]
Troubleneck Brothers/Diehard: Rare & Unreleased 1990–1993 [Hip-Hop Enterprise]
The Upsetters: A Fistful of Dub [Culture Factory]
Sonny Boy Williamson & The Yardbirds: Recorded Live at the Craw-Daddy Club, Richmond (London) [Charly]
Various Artists: Highway of Diamonds: Black America Sings Bob Dylan [Ace]
Various Artists: Little Bangers from Richard Hawley’s Jukebox Vol. 2 [Ace]
Various Artists: Music from the Caucasus: The Archive of ORED Recordings 2013–23 [Tal]
