New vinyl reissues: July 31, 2026
I’m back with another rundown of this week’s vinyl releases. Things have been a little quiet around here while I was traveling to visit family, but it’s been a very busy week in terms of announcements for upcoming reissues, so let’s start there.
The big (hey bull)dogs this week are the just-announced deluxe editions of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, the 1965 album that is considered by many to be a turning point from their earlier beat-pop material into more sophisticated songcraft and studio proficiency. For our vinyl-related purposes, it’s coming out as a 5-LP set including the UK album newly remixed in stereo by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, two LPs of outtakes and demos (including the never-before-heard John Lennon song “Little Girl”), the original mono LP, and a stereo LP with the US tracklist—which removed four songs and added two from the UK version of Help!—plus a 7-inch including 2023 remixes of “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out.” There’s also a 2-LP version with the 2026 album remix and a selection of demos and outtakes, or a single LP with just the remix, which is also available as a zoetrope picture disc from the Beatles’ online store. All of these are half-speed mastered, with the exception of the mono and US-tracklist LPs in the big box (those might be half-speeds as well, but the press release does not specify). The big box also comes as a 4-CD set and there’s a stand-alone Blu-ray, too, with Dolby Atmos mixes of the album.
Also announced: Genesis’s 1969 debut From Genesis to Revelation—a sweet, youthful pop album recorded by the band when they were teenagers, with only brief hints of the group’s art-rock future—is getting a band-approved remix on Cherry Red’s Esoteric imprint. The 2-LP set (on clear or black vinyl) features the newly remixed album (done by Stephen W. Tayler) with a 12-inch EP including remixes of their 1968 single “A Winter’s Tale”/“One Eyed Hound” and two album outtakes, “Image Blown Out” and “Visions of Angels.” There’s also a 4-CD/1-Blu-ray edition that includes the original 1969 mono and stereo mixes plus a disc of demos and outtakes (some previously unreleased), as well as a Dolby Atmos remix.
Elsewhere: Mobile Fidelity is offering a 45 RPM 2-LP version of Devo’s 1978 debut album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, hot on the heels of Rhino High Fidelity’s 33 RPM all-analog cut. MoFi is also doing a massive 1987 album by a huge, dead pop star who, despite his continued omnipresence in our culture, I prefer not to write about, for reasons that should be painfully obvious. Also, UMe’s Vinylphyle line just announced that they’re doing Sublime’s 1996 self-titled album, sourced from the 2016 digital master and cut as a 2-LP set by Joe Nino-Hernes at Sterling Sound. And Sony is reissuing Alice in Chains’s MTV Unplugged set from 1996 on yellow or black vinyl, its first time officially available on wax since Music on Vinyl’s 2010 pressing (although pirate copies abound).
And? In addition to the Definitive Sound Series edition of Hole’s Live Through This that’s due out September 25, that album is receiving a standard pressing, due out on September 18, alongside two other Hole albums, Pretty on the Inside and Celebrity Skin. Blue Note announced their next Tone Poet, which will be a 2-LP Sonny Clark compilation called The Art of the Trio, based around his 1958 album Sonny Clark Trio and subsequent sessions. Craft and Acoustic Sounds have launched a new line of reissues from Prestige’s Moodsville imprint, with three titles coming on September 18. Nirvana’s 1992 B-sides compilation Incesticide is back in print, coming August 4. And Aphex Twin’s 2001 double album Drukqs is once again seeing a vinyl release as a 4-LP box (in deluxe and standard formats) from Warp Records, coming October 29.
Before we get going on new reissues this week, I wanted to make sure all of you saw my good friend Robert Ham’s terrific article about a pair of listening rooms that have recently popped up in our hometown of Portland, Oregon. You can read it over at Robert’s new venture, Is This Real?, a publication focused on the local music scene in Portland.
I know we have readers from around the world, but I think anyone interested in vinyl and high-end audio will find his piece a great read. Robert co-founded The Vinyl Cut with me last year but departed in May, and I imagine a lot of you have been sorely missing his writing. Well, it can now be found at Is This Real?, so head over there and be sure to subscribe.
Robert Ham
Also, here is this week’s playlist for our paid-tier subscribers. It’s a real hoot this time. Sometimes I have trouble making all of these disparate musical styles hang together into a cohesive listen, but for whatever reason I think the flow in this week’s playlist works especially well—the sonic whiplash is all part of the fun. Plus, it’s packed to the gills with great tunes from albums that I didn’t manage to cover in today’s newsletter, so without it, you’re really not getting the entire story. Want to upgrade and get in on the action? Click here, m’dear.
Last thing—just a quick reminder that July’s vinyl giveaway for our paid-tier subscribers is now live! Go here for all the fixin’s:
Ned Lannamann
Camel: The Snow Goose & Leaf Hound: Growers of Mushroom [Thousand Club/Fontana]
I’ve been following with great interest the launch of Fontana’s Thousand Club line of reissues. The name comes from its ultra-limited pressing runs—1000 copies of each title, and since the name is baked in, I have to believe they’ll stick to it. But I hope this series is a raging success and that high demand forces Fontana to rethink the name, and here’s why: Fontana are using Decca’s UK master tapes to cut analog versions of amazing 1960s and 1970s albums from psych, prog, and heavy rock bands that come from that second tier of wonderful British bands whose work may not have had the same commercial impact as Zeppelin or Floyd but whose music is some of the very finest in the rock canon. Thousand Club’s launch this week includes Camel’s beautiful The Snow Goose, a 1975 concept album that retells Paul Gallico’s novella entirely through instrumental music. It’s a prog-rock gem, heavy on the prog and less so on the rock—in fact, at times it’s closer to classical program music than anything else. And it’s absolutely exquisite.
The other selection is Leaf Hound’s 1971 debut Growers of Mushroom, a searing, stoney slice of heavy riffage that picks up the gauntlet thrown down by bands like Zeppelin, Sabbath, and Deep Purple. While obscure to the masses, Growers of Mushroom is one of the most coveted albums of all time, with original pressings selling for more than $4000—and now, for the first time, there’s a new pressing from the original analog master tapes. And Fontana have announced the next two Thousand Club albums, too, due out at the end of September: Small Faces’ 1967 self-titled debut, a bona fide mod classic, and Caravan’s For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night, the 1973 album from the Canterbury prog band. Most premium reissues of British albums are sourced from digital transfers these days—with the occasional half-speed mastering job to inflate the sticker price—so the fact that Thousand Club has employed Abbey Road’s Alex Wharton to cut this series from tape could maybe, just maybe, be the first wave in a sea change that upends UK vinyl mastering philosophy. By now you can probably see why I’m so excited about the Thousand Club. Just remember that these pressings are mega-limited, and the line forms behind me.
Neo Boys: Neo Boys [Mississippi]
Portland all-female punk group Neo Boys were revolutionary in their day, and their music hasn’t lost one drop of potency in the intervening decades. With only a 7-inch and a 12-inch EP to their name alongside a smattering of compilation tracks, their recorded legacy is not voluminous—although it was expertly compiled on a 2-CD release called Sooner of Later, released jointly by K Records and Mississippi Records. Now Mississippi Records has pressed up an “art” edition of the two official Neo Boys releases, combining the 1980 7-inch and the 1982 Crumbling Myths 12-inch EP into a full-length LP, with new mastering and a full-color 32-page book, making this the definitive vinyl edition of Neo Boys’ taut, powerful music.
The Spirit of ’76 [Rhino]
We’ve reached the final week of Rhino’s special summer series, the Spirit of ’76, which consists of reissues of albums originally released 50 years ago. The flavor this week is greatest-hits albums, as you’ll see. Jethro Tull’s M.U. - The Best of Jethro Tull is a half-speed master cut from a digital transfer by Miles Showell at Abbey Road. War’s Greatest Hits appears to be a repress of the much-vaunted cut by Kevin Gray, cut from tape on his all-tube system and released on Record Store Day Black Friday in 2020 (it was also repressed two summers ago as part of Rhino’s Sounds of the Summer series). ZZ Top’s World Wide Texas Tour was originally released as a promo LP for radio stations, compiling tracks from the band’s first four albums to promote their 1976 tour; per the hype sticker, this features an all-analog cut by Matthew Lutthans. And John Prine’s Prime Prine collects material from John Prine’s four Atlantic albums, recorded between 1971 and 1975, making for an effective summation of the first patch of the singer/songwriter’s career. The Prine collection is part of the Rhino Reserve line, with all-analog mastering by Lutthans at the Mastering Lab and pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing.
The one non-hits Spirit of ’76 release this week just might be the niftiest: On August 11 and 12, 1976, the Ramones made their West Coast debut, opening for Sire Records labelmates the Flamin’ Groovies at the Roxy in West Hollywood, playing four sets across two nights. Live at the Roxy, August 12, 1976 is a double LP that includes both of the second night’s sets, capturing the Forest Hills, Queens, punk band in the exciting wake of their explosive first album. The setlist was identical for both shows, meaning that every song is here twice. In 2016, these shows were combined and pared down for inclusion on the expanded CD release of the Ramones’ 1976 self-titled album, and a single LP was released later that year on Record Store Day Black Friday. But now both sets are available in all their blitzkrieg-y, boppy glory.
Whiskeytown: Faithless Street [Interscope]
The North Carolina alt-country band Whiskeytown burned hot and fast, releasing three albums before frontman Ryan Adams kicked off a solo career that burned similarly hot and fast. Adams’s metamorphosis from enfant terrible to quinquagénaire even-more-terrible is one of the more depressing spirals in contemporary music, but it remains true in this writer’s opinion that, once upon a time, he was a bona fide songwriting genius. Whiskeytown’s 1995 debut album Faithless Street was the world’s first exposure to Adams’s brilliance, and it’s a great band album to boot, with the group offering a particularly raw, rusty, and heartfelt interpretation of the shit-kicking alt-country sound. Never before released on vinyl, Faithless Street is now a double LP, following the 1998 reissue’s expanded tracklist and mastered by Levi Seitz at Black Belt Mastering, so it oughta sound great.
Curtis Mayfield: Curtis [Rhino]
Well, this is interesting. As part of Record Store Day Black Friday 2025, Rhino reissued Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 solo debut Curtis as a Rhino Reserve pressing. Featuring a terrific analog cut by Matthew Lutthans at the Mastering Lab and pressed at Fidelity, it was a top-notch AAA version of an album that should be part of any serious R&B vinyl collection. The trouble was that they decided to make it a limited release, only pressing 2700 copies of it, which assured its almost-instant disappearance and making it the only Rhino Reserve title that is officially out of print. Now here comes a new pressing that’s not part of the Rhino Reserve line and features a list price that’s a few bucks cheaper than the $32 that’s standard for Reserves. But the hype sticker says it was cut by Lutthans (who has only cut the album once), so I think we can assume it’s the Black Friday edition back in print. I’m guessing this was not pressed at Fidelity, but rather Memphis or somewhere similar, which might account for the price differential. Still, if you missed out on the Rhino Reserve and have been regretting it, this is surely worth tracking down.
Sun City Girls: Cloaven Theatre/That Old Western Sieve; The Palm Leaves of Victory/Audio Letter to Mitch Myers [Three Lobed]
Alongside their prolific catalog of official albums and 7-inches, Arizona freeform psychedelic/experimental band Sun City Girls also released a string of cassette-only works, often hand-dubbed on commercial-brand tapes and available only at their shows or in very limited quantities at super-cool underground record stores. Four of those cassettes dating from the late ’80s are now being given vinyl releases in a pair of 2-LP sets, and while I wish I could tell you what’s on them, exactly, I can’t—simply because I haven’t heard them, as the music has been vanishingly rare up ’til now. But you can expect fearlessly exploratory music that pays no heed to genre boundaries or conventional style demarcations, with sonic experiments, confusing jokes, audio collages, and other indescribable phenomena all part of the mix. The two pairings are Cloaven Theatre/That Old Western Sieve and The Palm Leaves of Victory/Audio Letter to Mitch Myers, now available in pressings of 1000 from Three Lobed Records.
Van Morrison: Astral Weeks [Rhino High Fidelity]
This one technically came out last week, but it wasn’t announced until the day it became available, so I missed it in my usual Thursday roundup. It’s a Rhino High Fidelity edition of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, the 1968 album that marked a sharp pivot away from the R&B-derived pop of Morrison’s work for Bang Records and the hard-charging blue-eyed soul he’d performed with Belfast band Them. With stream-of-consciousness lyrics and free-floating arrangements, Morrison reinvented himself as a folk-jazz troubadour who was part hippie-beatnik wastrel, part stormy-minded Irish poet, part classical art-song interpreter, part jazz-scatter extraordinaire, and all mystic-soulman-prophet who somehow was able to dredge up the unconsciousness of the earth in flutteringly gorgeous impressionistic songs. Earlier this year, Astral Weeks was licensed from Rhino for a 2-LP 45 RPM edition by Analogue Productions, who had to go against their very brand name and cut it from digital, as the analog master was too damaged to use, or so they were told. Now Rhino has cut it from tape themselves, with mastering by Kevin Gray. Is it from the tape that Analogue Productions was told they couldn’t use? Or is it perhaps from a copy tape that was in better shape? I don’t know, but I want to hear it.
John David Souther: Black Rose & Gram Parsons: Grievous Angel [Analogue Productions]
Acoustic Sounds’ 40th-anniversary series continues with two more selections from the Warner catalog, recut and reissued on 45 RPM 2-LPs. The first is J.D. Souther’s Black Rose, his 1976 album on Asylum, produced by Peter Asher and featuring an absurdly long list of LA session players, including members of the Eagles, Little Feat, Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne’s backing bands, plus guests like David Crosby, Ned Doheny, and Stanley Clarke. It’s all in the service of Souther’s middling soft-rock Californiana, which ranges on the excitement scale from tepid to beige. The other choice is Gram Parson’s second solo album, Grievous Angel, recorded weeks before his death in 1973 and released posthumously in 1974. A duet album with Emmylou Harris in all but name—Parsons’s widow jealously removed Harris’s name and photo from the front cover—it contains some of Parsons’s best-known songs, with the songwriter’s final rally before his demons consumed him. Both albums were cut from tape by Matthew Lutthans and pressed at QRP, so if either of them are your speed, they should sound mighty fine.
Jazz Alley
Verve’s Acoustic Sounds series continues its plunder of the Verve and Impulse back catalogs, and its three new entries mark the highlights of this week’s Jazz Alley. Stan Getz’s Big Band Bossa Nova, released on Verve in 1962, translates the bossa nova craze—which Getz spearheaded—to (as you probably could’ve guessed) big-band arrangements courtesy of Gary McFarland, with McFarland contributing four tunes and the other four coming from Brazilian songwriters. Laughin’ to Keep from Cryin’ finds saxophonist Lester Young joined by trumpeters Harry Edison and Roy Eldridge for a 1958 session, recorded just over a year before Young’s premature death at age 49. And Shelly Manne’s 2-3-4, released in 1962 on Impulse, finds Manne joined by Coleman Hawkins, Hank Jones, Eddie Costa, and George Duvivier, in an unusual New York session for the LA-based drummer and club owner. These were all cut from analog tape by Matthew Lutthans and pressed at QRP. Also this week, Rhino is releasing The Very Best of the Warner Bros. Sessions 1985–1991, a double-LP compilation of Miles Davis’s recordings for the label, which will serve as a taster for the upcoming Rhino Reserve pressings of the Amandla, Siesta, and Dingo albums. Lastly, I wanted to mention Charly’s reissue of Sunny Murray’s Hommage to Africa, a spiritual-tinged avant-garde effort recorded in Paris in 1969 and originally released on BYG, with Murray incorporating African elements into his work, newly inspired by the Pan-African Festival of Algiers that had just taken place earlier that year. If you haven’t heard it, it’s really something.
OTHER REISSUES OF NOTE:
(*star denotes inclusion in this week’s paid-subscriber playlist)
Acda en de Munnik: Adem [Music on Vinyl]
AJR: The Click; Neotheater; OK Orchestra [BMG]
Alien Ant Farm: ANThology [Universal]
Articles of Faith: Give Thanks [Futurismo]
Amiri Baraka, David Murray & Steve McCall: New Music - New Poetry [Modern Harmonic]
Black Box Recorder: England Made Me [Chrysalis]
*The Body: Master, We Perish [Thrill Jockey]
Leon Bridges: Coming Home; Good Thing [Columbia/Sony]
Bring Me the Horizon: Count Your Blessings; Suicide Season; There Is a Hell Believe Me I’ve Seen It. There Is a Heaven Let’s Keep It a Secret [BMG]
*Britny Fox: Long Way to Live [Friday]
*Susan Cadogan: Susan Cadogan [Music on Vinyl]
John Carpenter & Jim Lang: In the Mouth of Madness [Terror Vision]
*Chicken Shack: 100 Ton Chicken [Music on Vinyl]
Eric Clapton & B.B. King: Riding with the King [Surfdog]
*Clannad: Legend [BMG]
*George Clinton: Computer Games [BGP/Ace]
Convulse: From Resuscitation to Reincarnation: The Early Years; World Without God; Reflections [Relapse]
*Alice Cooper: The Studio Albums 1975–1978 [Rhino]
Counting Crows: Recovering the Satellites (red vinyl repress) [Geffen/RSD Essentials]
*Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables [Cherry Red]
De Dijk: Nooit Meer Tarzan [Music on Vinyl]
Dimmu Borgir: Enthrone Darkness Triumphant [Nuclear Blast]
John Edwards: Tin Man: The Unissued Second Aware LP [Kent/Ace]
*Eels: Meet the Eels: Essential Eels [PIAS]
Electric Wizard: Dopethrone [Rise Above]
Tim Finn: Before & After [Last Night from Glasgow]
*Fleetwood Mac: Greatest Hits (deluxe edition) [Rhino]
Fu Manchu: Daredevil [At the Dojo/RSD Essentials]
Marvin Gaye: Clap Your Hands: Zommerhappening, Live in Ostende, Belgium, 4th July 1981 [Outsider]
*Gentle Giant: In a Glass House (remix) [Alucard]
Philip Glass: Glassworks [Music on Vinyl]
Government Alpha: The Human Race Was Restored to Life Repeatedly [Urashima]
The Grateful Dead: Workingman’s Dead (retail release) [Rhino High Fidelity]
*Steve Hackett: Genesis Revisited [Inside Out]
David Hazeltine Trio: The Jobim Songbook in New York [Chesky]
*I Marc 4: Silver Music [Sonor Music Editions]
*Joan Jett: Bad Reputation [Blackheart]
Anthony Johnson: Reggae Feelings [Burning Sounds]
B.B. King & Eric Clapton: Riding with the King [Surfdog]
*The Kinks: Low Budget; Give the People What They Want [BMG/Sanctuary]
Korn: The Serenity of Suffering [Atlantic]
Laibach: Spectre [Mute]
Machine Head: The More Things Change… [Atlantic]
Mansun: Attack of the Grey Lantern [Kscope]
Marillion: Marillion.com [Earmusic]
Martyr: Hopeless Hopes; Warp Zone [Relapse]
Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’65: In Person at El Matador! [Culture Factory]
Merzbow: Yoshinotsune [Urashima]
Devin Morrison: Bussin’ [Dreamsoul]
New York Dolls: Live in 1973 [1960s]
Obscure Sighs: The Jar soundtrack [Cellar Dweller]
*Orgone: New You [Colemine]
The Alan Parsons Project: I Robot (45 RPM 2-LP half-speed master); Pyramid (half-speed master) [Cooking Vinyl]
Don Peake: The People Under the Stairs soundtrack [Terror Vision]
*Popol Vuh: Affenstunde; Einsjäger und Siebenjäger [Esoteric/Cherry Red]
Queensrÿche: The Warning; Rage for Order [Capitol]
Res: How I Do [Interscope]
Kate Ryan: Alive [Music on Vinyl]
RX Bandits: And the Battle Begun [Sargent House]
Neil Sedaka: The Definitive Collection [Neil Sedaka]
Sepultura: Arise: Rough Mixes [Atlantic]
*1619 Bad Ass Band: 1619 Bad Ass Band [Mr Bongo]
Solmania: H-A-D-A-Y-R-O [Urashima]
Los Straitjackets: The Further Adventures of Los Straitjackets [Yep Roc]
Tangerine Dream: Brussels 1976 [LMLR]
John Tchicai: Wigmore Hall 1968; I.C.P. [Formalibera]
Teenage Bottlerocket: They Came from the Shadows [Fat Wreck Chords]
Thievery Corporation: Radio Retaliation (wide release after RSD BF ’25) [Thievery Corporation]
Bryson Tiller: Trapsoul; Anniversary [Sony]
*Tirez Tirez: Story of the Year [Numero Group]
*Townes Van Zandt: Our Mother the Mountain [Charly]
Donnie Vie: Beautiful Things [Wicked Cool]
*Ween: 12 Golden Country Greats [Rhino]
Various Artists: Ariwa Sounds [Melodies International]
Various Artists: Motorway City: The Golden Age of Car Travel 1966–82 [Ace]
Various Artists: Surf-Age Nuggets: Trash & Twang Instrumentals [Rockbeat]
Various Artists: Watermelon Man Ska [Jamaican Gold]
