New vinyl reissues: June 12, 2026
Welcome back to another week in vinyl reissues. It’s a bit of a slow week, all things considered—but there’s absolutely nothing to complain about, as there are a few things hitting stores this week that are among the most exciting reissues of the year. But I don’t have a Jazz Alley for you this week and there are not as much of the all-analog tip-on stuff from the usual heavy hitters. All the better for the cream of this week to rise to the top.
Here is the week’s playlist as well, available exclusively to our paid subscribers via Apple Music, Tidal, and Spotify. It features a track from each of the reissues that have written previews below, plus several bonus cuts that are denoted by an asterisk in the long list of reissues down at the bottom.
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Let’s get into the week!
Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band: Express Yourself [Rhino Reserve]
“Express Yourself” by Charles Wright and the 103rd Street Rhythm Band is one of the greatest recordings ever made, a bolt of sheer ecstasy delivered inside a jangling funk-parade groove, proffering one of the finest messages a pop song can convey. (It was so potent that Madonna plundered it wholesale 20 years later.) Its host album—1970’s Express Yourself—is just as good; Wright and the Rhythm Band’s version of soul-funk incorporated the best of Memphis and New Orleans soul, James Brown’s lockstep funk, hints of gospel, and the expansive worldview of Sly and the Family Stone, all blended into a unique South Central LA version of R&B. The album’s a joy from start to finish, with its only weak spots being the two extended renditions of “High as Apple Pie,” which are certainly righteous enough but taken together are perhaps a little too much of a good thing. Having this gem reissued as part of the Rhino Reserve line is a magnificent occasion, as it’s cut from the analog master by Matthew Lutthans and will surely sound warmer and more embracing than it ever has. This one’s looking to be absolutely crucial.
This Heat: This Heat [Superior Viaduct]
With each passing year, This Heat sounds more and more staggering. Just how on earth did this London trio manage to make these remarkable, world-shattering sounds? Recorded largely in their Brixton studio—a former cold storage room inside a meat pie factory—it ushered in a new era of post-punk experimentalism upon its belated release in 1979, sounding all the more prophetic since it was recorded during the three years prior. Taking their cue from German groups like Faust and Can as well as the proggers of the Canterbury Scene, This Heat eschewed conventional instrumentation in favor of tape loops, drones, ominous synth whirrs, and Charles Bullen’s viola. The band grew out of Ray Manzanera’s Quiet Sun project—whose self-titled album is also getting a reissue later this year—but This Heat soon mutated into its own remarkable entity, finding an entirely new musical language that the rest of the world wouldn’t fully reckon with until decades later. This Heat is being reissued by the band in Europe and by Superior Viaduct in North America, making its first appearance on vinyl in 10 years. For such a crucial album, that is far too long between pressings, but at last the drought has ended.
Joseph Jarman & Famoudou Don Moye: Black Paladins [Dead Currencies]
Recorded in Italy in December 1979, Black Paladins is the work of saxophone and wind player Joseph Jarman and percussionist Famoudou Don Moye, both of the legendary avant-garde jazz collective the Art Ensemble of Chicago; the duo is joined on record by South African bassist Johnny Dyani. It’s a dense, fecund collection of musical ideas, using both minimalism and maximalism in its explosion of musical conventions. The title track features the poetry of Henry Dumas, a Black poet who was murdered by a New York City police officer in 1969. Meanwhile, “Ode to Wilbur Ware” pays homage to the jazz bassist who played with Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, and Sun Ra and recorded his own album for Riverside Records in 1957 called The Chicago Sound; Ware had died earlier in 1979 after his career was derailed by drugs and incarceration. Black Paladins has been reissued by Dead Currencies on black-smoke vinyl inside a handsome new package in a very limited, hand-numbered edition of 200. We’ll have a full-length review of the vinyl in the coming days; a CD is also available.
Roy Ayers Ubiquity: Vibrations [Vampisoul]
Coming mere months after 1976’s Everybody Loves the Sunshine, Roy Ayers’ Vibrations is a continuation of his terrific blend of jazz, funk, and R&B, with the bandleader playing a good amount of piano on this record as well as his usual vibraphone. The material embraces the then-current disco wave in surprising ways, finding room for invention within disco’s often rigid mechanics and pushing its parameters outward to unexpected places. Quite simply, it’s a phenomenal album, both wholly approachable from a pop perspective and delightfully strange with its sonic curveballs and genre-agnostic sound. It loosens its grip on the laidback sound Ayers explored on Sunshine in favor of a more in-your-face sound that’s reminiscent of what Parliament-Funkadelic were up to. Spanish label Vampisoul is reissuing this absolute gem on vinyl, so there’s no need for you to live without it in your collection for one second longer.
Cluster: Sowiesoso [Bureau B]
The fourth album from Cluster, the German duo of Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, exhibits the influence of their recent collaborations with Brian Eno and Neu!’s Michael Rother, with a more lyrical sound approaching the pulsating waves of Tangerine Dream rather than the subterranean-sounding drones of their earlier work. The turn toward pastoral showed how Cluster had adapted to their bucolic surroundings along the Weser River in Lower Saxony, using tempos, tones, and temperatures that evoked nature even as they were emitted from and processed through electronic boxes. The 1976 album celebrates its 50th anniversary via a new vinyl reissue from Bureau B in a limited numbered edition of 1000.
Cream: Wheels of Fire: In the Studio [UMe]
Today a 5-CD deluxe edition of Cream’s 1968 double album Wheels of Fire hits stores, with expansions of both the studio LP and the live LP from the original album. On vinyl, things are a bit more convoluted. A 3-LP set with the live stuff was already released back on Record Store Day (including tracks that had already been released on the posthumous Live Cream and Live Cream Volume II sets from 1970 and 1972). Today a 3-LP collection of the studio material comes to vinyl. The real selling point is the new master of the studio disc. When Wheels of Fire was released in 1968, it underwent Haeco-CSG processing, which was meant to make stereo records playable on mono equipment. The overall sound suffered, of course, and so this new master removes the CSG processing to allow for correct phasing on the recordings. The set also includes two LPs of alternate mixes and outtakes. All told, when the RSD live set and this one are put together, there is still about an hour’s worth of material on the 5-CD box that isn’t seeing a vinyl release. Perhaps it’s overkill in any format. Regardless, the studio LP of Cream’s Wheels of Fire was the trio’s artistic peak in my view, as they wielded a psychedelic sound that evolved their heavy blues firepower into a brand-new style of rock music that would dominate the decades to come. With deep cuts like “Passing the Time” and “Deserted Cities of the Heart,” Wheels of Fire is an essential ’60s rock record. Is it even better for not having the bloated live LP attached to it? No comment.
Effigy: Burnt Offerings [Sealed]
There’s not a ton of online info about the Aylesbury, UK, goth-punk band Effigy, and while it seems like they were briefly a local sensation in Buckinghamshire in 1983—having opened for bigger touring bands at the legendary Aylesbury club Friars—they never left their immediate surroundings and therefore never leapt up to the big time. Their five-song demo from 1983 never received a wide release, but listening to it some 40-plus years on, it’s a total blast, with female vocals (by the mysterious “Nett”) and raw, blistering, pop-friendly guitar riffs making it sound like true buried treasure. It’s being released, finally, by the band on vinyl that can be copped on the band’s Bandcamp page and at Forced Exposure, or you can test-drive it on any streaming service and then ask your local to get it for you. Don’t sleep on this one.
Albert King: I'll Play the Blues For You & Eddie Kirkland: It's the Blues Man! [Bluesville/Craft/Acoustic Sounds]
Two new titles have arrived from Craft’s Bluesville line, which is produced in conjunction with Acoustic Sounds. Albert King’s I’ll Play the Blues for You first came out on Stax in 1972, and it features backing from the Bar-Kays, the Movement, and the Memphis Horns; it finds King in the role of consummate showman, with a commercial blues approach that had toes in the soul, R&B, and funk sounds that were blossoming out of Stax at the time. But it also features plenty of Albert King guitar shredding, as it should be. Eddie “Blues Man” Kirkland’s It’s the Blues Man! was the 1962 debut full-length of the journeyman bluesman, released on Prestige’s Tru-Sound subsidiary label and featuring the backing of King Curtis’s band. On this album, Kirkland married a contemporary danceable R&B sound to his raw, thumb-picked blues guitar. Both LPs were mastered from analog tape by Matthew Lutthans and pressed at QRP; the tip-on jackets feature obi strips containing brief liner notes by Scott Billington.
Iggy and the Stooges: Metallic ’KO [Jungle]
When Metallic ’KO came out in 1976, it claimed to be a recording of Iggy Pop and the Stooges’ final gig, taken from 1974 in Detroit. In actuality, the LP came from two separate sources: that shambolic final Stooges show from February 9, 1974, recorded at the Michigan Palace nightclub in Detroit, and an earlier show from the same venue recorded on October 6, 1973. The 1973 recording is really rough, with the 1974 songs rendered in a bit more clarity, but both shows are performed by a band falling riotously apart at the seams. The ’74 half is particularly infamous, as the band lurches in and out of time while the audience heckles and throws beer bottles at them. Despite the sloppiness, or perhaps because of it, the album became a vital punk document, and was the last word on the Stooges until their 2003 reunion. The album was eventually expanded to include longer portions from each show, but this 50th anniversary vinyl edition recreates the original tracklist, now pitch-corrected for the first time on vinyl.
Tony Banks: 18 Pieces for Orchestra [Naxos]
Forty years ago this week, there were five Genesis-related songs in the US Top 40: Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” Mike + the Mechanics’ “All I Need Is a Miracle,” Phil Collins’ “Take Me Home,” GTR’s “When the Heart Rules the Mind” (featuring former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett), and of course Genesis’s own “Invisible Touch.” Although Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks was represented via “Invisible Touch,” he was the only member of the classic five-piece lineup not to have his own single in the charts. That’s kind of representative of Banks’ solo career, which for many years ran parallel to the larger band; Banks never had the breakout success outside of Genesis that virtually all of his bandmates enjoyed. But his artistic imprimatur always dominated the group’s material, with his dense layers of keyboards and rich chordal voicing becoming some of Genesis’s key traits. Still, Banks must have been discouraged by the lack of pop success for his solo work, and in 2004 he had more or less put the idea of a pop solo career to bed, recording a classical album, Seven, which was then followed by 2012’s Six and 2018’s Five. Those three orchestral recordings were issued on vinyl for the first time by Naxos for this year’s Record Store Day in the UK and EU, and now the 4-LP box is receiving a worldwide release. It certainly won’t reverse history in terms of Banks’ solo success, but it is an appropriate summing up of Banks’ classical inclinations, which were always just under the surface in his best work with Genesis.
Creedence Clearwater Revival: Chronicle [Craft]
Whether or not you need a new copy of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s greatest hits collection Chronicle on vinyl—which, in its CD form, is the greatest bar jukebox disc of all time—comes down to how many Creedence albums you already own. All of them? Then you’re probably set. Anything less than that and you might need to pick this bad boy up. Although 1972’s Mardi Gras is pretty dire, this set has the best two songs from it, not to mention 18 other slam-dunk classics that you already know by heart. Sadly, I think this new reissue from Craft replicates the original LP version, in that CCR’s fantastic cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” is severely edited down, but everything else here is solid gold. The new “Celebration” pressing comes on colored vinyl with a Creedence slipmat, if that’s what your heart’s been after.
Look Outside Your Window: Look Outside Your Window [LOYW]
[This is getting a wide release in a plethora of colors after its limited release on Record Store Day. Here’s our RSD preview from earlier this year.] During the recording sessions for Slipknot’s 2008 album All Hope Is Gone, four members of the nine-piece band—vocalist Corey Taylor, guitarist Jim Root, percussionist Shawn Crahan, and turntablist Sid Wilson—would nip out to a second studio and lay down tracks that were more song- and melody-oriented that Slipknot’s typically aggressive fare. The foursome wanted the band to include the tracks on All Hope Is Gone but got decided pushback from the other members, which must have been pretty intimidating if they were wearing their spooky clown masks at the time. At any rate, those Slipknot-lite tunes were set aside for many years, but the legend around them has grown in Slipknot fan circles, and now they’re finally being released as Look Outside Your Window. One of the songs, “’Til We Die,” was released as a bonus track on a special edition of All Hope Is Gone, and it’s a fairly unremarkable nü-metal ballad, so let’s hope the rest of Look Outside Your Window has a bit more going on.
OTHER REISSUES OF NOTE:
(*star denotes inclusion in this week’s paid-subscriber playlist)
Age of Chance: BBC Sessions 85–87 [Precious Recordings of London]
Ian Anderson: The Secret Language of Birds [Madfish]
The Audition: Controversy Loves Company [Parting Gift]
Angel Witch: Angel Witch [Music on Vinyl]
*Audioslave: Out of Exile [Geffen]
Chet Baker Trio: Mr. B [Music on Vinyl]
Bob Bert: Beach Bongo Bloodbath [Bar/None]
Art Blakey: A Night in Tunisia [Music on Vinyl]
Blink-182: Buddha [Kung Fu]
James Brown: Collected [Music on Vinyl]
*Master Wilburn Burchette: Occult Concert [Numero Group]
Stephen Cogle & Peter Stapleton: An Afternoon with Victor Dimisich [Siltbreeze]
*Bill Connors: Of Mist and Melting [ECM Luminessence]
Dead Boys: Time Warp Baby [Cleopatra]
Dead or Alive: Sophisticated Boom Boom [Music on Vinyl]
Dub Crusaders: Universal Spirit Warrior [Partial]
Earth Crisis: Neutralize the Threat [Brutal Planet]
Duke Ellington: The 1953 Pasadena & 1954 Los Angeles Concert [BHM/ZYX]
Eloy: Hidden Treasures [Made in Germany Music]
Escape the Fate: There’s No Sympathy for the Dead [Epitaph]
The Expanders: Merciless Dub: The Expanders Dubwise of J’s [Easy Star]
The Feeling: Twelve Stops and Home [Integral]
Furniture: The Wrong People [Music on Vinyl]
Golden Earring: The Naked Truth [Music on Vinyl]
Harley Poe: Have a Great Life [Chain Smoking]
Hawkwind: Psychedelic Selection [Cherry Red]
Jascha Heifetz, Charles Munch & Boston Symphony Orchestra: Mendelssohn & Prokofiev Violin Concertos [Analogue Productions RCA Living Stereo Series]
The Hellacopters: Cream of the Crap! Collected Non-Album Works Volume 3 [Warner Bros]
James Horner: Back to Titanic [Music on Vinyl]
Immolation: Failures for Gods; Close to a World Below picture discs [Back on Black]
*Iron Maiden: Live After Death [BMG]
Kaleo: A/B [Rhino]
*Boy Katindig: After Midnight [Sama Sama]
King G and the J Krew: The Indestructible Songs of the Humpback Whale [Solid Brass]
Koudlam: Goodbye [Diggers Factory]
Laaz Rockit: City’s Gonna Burn; No Stranger to Danger [Massacre]
Lizzy Borden: The Murderess Metal Road Show [Brutal Planet]
The Mamas and the Papas: Collected [Music on Vinyl]
Eric Martin Band: Looks Can Be Deceiving [Metallic Blue]
Mayhem: Live in Bischofswerda 21st June 1997 [Soulseller]
Pablo Moses: Best of [Baco]
Mr. Big: Hey Man [Evoxs]
Idris Muhammad: Kabsha [Evosound]
David Oistrakh: Prokofiev/Shostakovich Violin Concertos [The Lost Recordings]
Jon Pardi: California Sunrise [Capitol Nashville]
Prefab Sprout: When the Angels in Munich: TV Broadcast 1985 [Out-Sider]
*Chalino Sánchez: El Pávido Návido [Craft]
Hiroshi Sato: Orient [Universal Japan]
Seventh Avenue: Between the Worlds [Retroactive/Brutal Planet]
The Summer Set: Love Like This [Parting Gift]
*Sun Ra: Do the Impossible soundtrack [Sundazed]
System of a Down: System of a Down; Toxicity; Steal This Album!; Mesmerize; Hypnotize [Sony]
Talk Talk: Tomorrow Started: Live in London 1986 [Out-Sider]
Therion: Of Darkness… [Peaceville]
George Thorogood and the Destroyers: The Baddest Show on Earth: Greatest Hits Live [Craft]
*Tiger & Woods: Through the Green [Running Back]
*Triumph: The Best of Triumph [Craft]
Larry Wallis: I’m Not an Archivist: The Legendary Lost Recordings [Cleopatra]
Young Dolph: King of Memphis [Paper Route Empire]
Zelda: Zelda [Universal Japan]
Various Artists: Calypso: Musical Poetry in the Caribbean 1955–69 [Soul Jazz]
*Various Artists: Classic Blues from Smithsonian Folkways [Smithsonian Folkways]
Various Artists: Gipsy Rhumba: The Original Rhythm of Gipsy Rhumba in Spain 1965–74 [Soul Jazz]
Various Artists: Treasure Island Ska [Charly]
*Various Artists: Venezuela 70: Cosmic Visions of a Latin American Earth - Venezuelan Experimental Rock in the 1970s [Soul Jazz]
