New vinyl reissues: October 9, 2026
Salutations—it’s time once again for another big week in the world of vinyl reissues. Before we get into all the fancy new pressings, let’s look, as we usually do, at the latest announcements for upcoming stuff.
Obviously the biggest announcement this week was for Record Store Day’s Black Friday event on November 27. You can read my hastily typed, quick-reaction thoughts to the 186-album-strong list in Tuesday’s post, but I hope to have a more thorough, considered RSD Black Friday preview in the days to come. My knee-jerk takeaway is that there’s a good amount of interesting stuff as usual, especially in the jazz category, but most of the titles are tailored for specific fans of the individual artists rather than more generalist record buyers who are interested in a broader scope of music. If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, that probably includes you.
Other things this week: Interscope-Capitol’s Definitive Sound Series has been on a tear recently, and there’s no pause in sight. Their latest one-step edition is for Billy Idol’s 1983 album Rebel Yell, in which the Rod Stewart of punk makes an unambiguous bid for mainstream pop acceptance via the title track and “Eyes Without a Face.” The DSS pressing was cut from analog tape by Chris Bellman and comes with the usual accoutrements in a limited edition of 3000; it’s due November 20.
Fontana’s Thousand Club series has also announced two more titles for November: The Human League’s 1986 album Crash, which included the UK synthpop band’s huge hit “Human,” which was written and produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis rather than the band itself. I would rate Crash as a less significant work than the Human League’s first three albums (especially 1981’s Dare), but this series has proved to be pretty unpredictable thus far. The other title seems more in keeping with how the Thousand Club launched: a thorny prog obscurity for which original pressings are devastatingly expensive. This one is the 1970 self-titled debut from Egg, an eclectic trio featuring future members of Hatfield and the North, the Groundhogs, and National Health. Both reissues are cut from analog tape and pressed in a limited edition of 1000. (More on Thousand Club in just a minute.)
Also coming soon: Elton John’s 1975 album Rock of the Westies—the album that includes “Island Girl,” “Grow Some Funk of Your Own,” and “I Feel Like a Gun (In the Bullet of Robert Ford)”—is getting a slightly belated 50th-anniversary reissue with a second disc of all the album tracks in stripped-down "piano and vocal” versions. It comes out on blue vinyl on November 20 on UMe; a single-LP version on multicolored vinyl is also available.
Additionally, the Smashing Pumpkins are reissuing their 1996 CD-single box set The Aeroplane Flies High, which collected the singles and numerous B-sides from their Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness period. This 30th-anniversary 5-LP set comes out December 18 via UMe, and is the collection’s first time on vinyl in 13 years; it comes on colored or black vinyl.
Lastly, the Frank Zappa reissues keep a-comin’, with a 50th-anniversary pressing of 1976’s Zoot Allures (also from UMe). The single LP has been expanded to a 2-LP edition, featuring Zappa’s intended, unreleased “Night of the Iron Sausage” double-album configuration, and a 3-LP version with an extra disc of highlights from the mammoth CD box that is also coming out on December 4.
Here’s the new playlist for paid Vinyl Cut subscribers, with tracks from all the new vinyl reissues coming out this week, providing a sampler platter of the vast smorgasbord that hits record racks on Friday. Paid-tier subscribers not only get these invaluable weekly playlists, they also get full access to the site’s complete archives, with every record review we’ve ever published, as well as commenting privileges on each one of those articles. They also are eligible to enter our monthly vinyl giveaways, which in some cases are for records worth more than a full year’s subscription.
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And now, let’s get into the week.
Genesis: From Genesis to Revelation [Esoteric/Cherry Red]
While we’re all debating the new Rubber Soul mix, another remixed album from the ’60s is about to get fans all in a whirl. Actually, this one should be much less controversial: From Genesis to Revelation, the 1969 debut album from Genesis, has gotten a complete overhaul, and the results—at least the preview tracks—are nothing short of miraculous. The album was recorded during the summer holidays of 1968 when the members of Genesis were still teenaged schoolboys, and their producer Jonathan King concocted an altogether daffy stereo mix that crammed the band into one speaker, forced to combat the drippy, Mantovani-type orchestra into the other speaker. (King’s original mix was a crime, of course, but one that paled in comparison to his many awful deeds in later years. Don’t Google him if you want to have a pleasant rest of your day.) All these years later, the multitracks have been relocated, and Stephen W Tayler has worked absolute magic with them, putting the band’s performances, and Peter Gabriel’s precociously sage-like vocals, back at the center of the mix, revealing that Genesis—even in this embryonic state—was a much more powerful and assertive band than anyone would have guessed. The album has always been thought of as a callow if charming bit of juvenilia by a band that went on to much greater things, but perhaps now From Genesis to Revelation can be rehabilitated as a worthy part of the group’s canon. A 4-CD box with Blu-ray includes a Dolby Atmos mix with the original stereo and mono mixes alongside the new mix and a batch of demos; on vinyl, the 2-LP set merely includes the new mix and a 12-inch EP with Tayler’s new mixes of four non-album tracks. Your options are clear or black vinyl.
Small Faces: Small Faces [Fontana Thousand Club]
The first Small Faces album, their 1966 self-titled debut on Decca, remains a slice of mod heaven, with the London four-piece filtering blues, R&B, and British pop through a hard-rocking prism, resulting in some of the most energetic and exciting British rock ’n’ roll ever played. Fontana’s Thousand Club series pressed up 1000 copies of this classic album from the original analog master tapes and packaged it with an art card signed by drummer Kenney Jones; naturally, it sold out almost instantly. So while there’s zero chance for you to still grab a copy, it’s a nice reminder of how great the Small Faces were. And Jones’s own label, Nice Records, is reissuing the Small Faces catalog via incredibly well-appointed and terrific-sounding new pressings, so perhaps there’s a chance that this analog cut will see a second life at some point. (It would be a crime to go to all the trouble of running that precious master reel just to press up a mere thousand copies, I say.) By the way, stay tuned for a review of some of those excellent Nice Records reissues coming to The Vinyl Cut in the very near future.
Hole: Live Through This [Definitive Sound Series]
Hole’s second album, 1994’s Live Through This, came out one week after the suicide of Kurt Cobain, and it’s subsequently become one of the most mythologized and misunderstood albums of the 1990s. The most persistent canard is that Cobain secretly wrote all the songs while his wife, Hole frontwoman Courtney Love, was merely a mouthpiece. That’s patently untrue, and while Live Through This was indelibly colored by the tragedy of Cobain’s death, it can more than carry its own weight as a powerful, cathartic, and era-defining alternative rock album. The new Definitive Sound Series one-step pressing is the first vinyl version to be cut from the analog master (previous editions came from a digital transfer), with Chris Bellman of Bernie Grundman Mastering manning the cutting lathe. It was pressed at RTI on fancy Neotech vinyl and should be nothing short of a revelation.
The National: Boxer [Mobile Fidelity]
The National’s 2007 album Boxer was an exercise in elegance and subtlety, realigning the disaffected Joy Divisionisms of their fellow New Yorkers in Interpol into something a bit more vulnerable and humane. Of course, repressed emotions were still very much the National’s lingua franca—as they remain for large swaths of indie rock—with singer Matt Berninger taking his mumbled cues from Leonard Cohen and the rest of the band (two pairs of brothers, Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Scott and Bryan Devendorf) evoking the softer sides of U2 and the E Street Band. Nevertheless, Boxer felt like an arrival moment for both the National and the New York indie-rock scene, which had evolved beyond the Strokes’ braggadocio to encompass a wider range of music, including the earnestness of the Hold Steady and the art-skewed liturgy of Grizzly Bear. Mobile Fidelity is reissuing Boxer as a 45 RPM double LP, cut from the original 16/44.1 digital master—the same fidelity as a CD, so it will be interesting to hear how MoFi engineer Krieg Wunderlich handles the sound for this premium pressing.
Barbara Moore: Bedazzled! TV, Film and Studio Work 1965–81 [Ace]
Barbara Moore was much more than a session singer. Although her voice graced the theme for TV show The Saint and appeared alongside Peter Cook in the Bedazzled movie theme, she also worked as a composer and arranger for the De Wolfe library music service and led the choir on Elton John’s self-titled album, alongside countless other singing, arranging, and composing credits, including a couple of jazz albums under her own name. Ace Records are releasing the first definitive compilation of Moore’s entire oeuvre, with tracks from her session days, her De Wolfe compositions, and tracks like the Pick of the Pops theme song, which made Moore’s voice recognizable to generations of Brits even if they didn’t know the woman behind it. The double LP was curated by Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley and film professor and author Mark Goodall.
Judas Priest: Sad Wings of Destiny [Exciter]
There were two big bangs in heavy metal. The first was Black Sabbath’s 1970 debut album. The second was Judas Priest’s second album, 1976’s Sad Wings of Destiny, which alchemized the seared riffage of Sabbath, the iron-hard impact of Deep Purple, and the stratospheric shrieking of Queen’s Roger Taylor into a style that changed the course of heavy music for decades to come. It’s still astonishing how prescient Judas Priest sounds on Sad Wings, more or less creating the full blueprint for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal out of whole cloth. Judas Priest have remixed the album for a new 45 RPM version out November 6, but before that, they are releasing what they’re calling the “Original 1976 Masters”—i.e., the original album mix but swapping Sides 1 and 2 to reflect the band’s desired track order, with “Prelude” up top and “Victim of Changes” leading off the second side. This new pressing is half-speed-mastered and comes on “solar flare” colored vinyl inside a tip-on jacket.
Ziad Rahbani: Ana Moush Kafer [Wewantsounds]
Parisian label Wewantsounds have been doing choice reissues of the works of French art-chanteuse Brigitte Fontaine and Japanese pop/film star Meiko Kaji, but a bit less prominent has been their campaign to reissue the works of Lebanese musician Ziad Rahbani. Ana Moush Kafer was a cassette-only release from 1985, recorded during the Lebanese Civil War and blending traditional Lebanese elements with funk, jazz, and bossa nova, with Rahbani’s lyrics detailing the strife and conflict that afflicted his home country. Wewantsounds’ reissue is the first time the album has been released on vinyl and comes with liner notes by Mario Choueiry of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
Various Artists: Antiyano Progresivo: Musical Experiments from the Former Dutch Caribbean, 1968–1986 [Soundway]
The music included in this new compilation album of Caribbean music runs a surprising gamut. There isn’t as much reggae or calypso as you might expect—rather, there’s samba, rhumba, funk, and some really wild psychedelic rock, cherry-picked by the excellent curators at the venerable Soundway label. The recordings all hail from the Dutch constituent nations of Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten, although it sounds like all of the musical influences floated north from Brazil, Venezuela, and other parts of South America, and southeast from Cuba, rather than southwest from the Netherlands. The double LP set comes with a jumbo fold-out insert containing artist bios.
John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers: Guitar Heroes: The Decca Years [Fontana]
This 4-LP set includes the first four albums of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, whose guitarists included Peter Green, Eric Clapton, and Mick Taylor. The set kicks off with the 1965 live debut, John Mayall Plays John Mayall, when guitarist Roger Dean (not that Roger Dean) was in the band. 1966’s Bluebreakers brought Clapton on board, while 1967’s A Hard Road featured Peter Green (later to form Fleetwood Mac with the Bluesbreakers rhythm section), and then 1967’s A Hard Road swapped in Mick Taylor (who would go on to replace Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones). These albums were seminal in the British blues movement, which ran parallel to psychedelia in Britain in the mid- to late ’60s. This new set includes a 40-page hardcover book and purports to be cut from analog tape at Abbey Road.
Jazz Alley
Verve Vault is one of the best jazz vinyl series going, with excellent analog cuts by Ryan K. Smith and a very nice price point. The two new ones this month are Bill Evans’s double live album California Here I Come, recorded in 1967 at the Village Vanguard (decidedly not in California) and posthumously released in 1982, with Eddie Gómez on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums. And Ahmad Jamal ’73 was first released on 20th Century Records in 1973, featuring Jamal on electric piano and with backing from an orchestra conducted by Richard Evans, featuring of-the-moment songs like “The World Is a Ghetto” and “Superstition.”
In case you forgot, we’re not done with the Miles Davis and John Coltrane centennial year just yet. Craft’s Original Jazz Series continues with another installment of the ’56 Miles Davis Quintet recordings, this time with a new analog cut of Relaxin’, as well as John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio, a 1958 set with Coltrane and Garland (obviously), Paul Chambers on bass, and Art Taylor on drums. Also, OJC has a new cut of Vince Guaraldi’s unkillable A Charlie Brown Christmas, cut at 33 RPM from the original master tape. This thing gets reissued 83 times every damn year, but could this new cut—again, from tape—be the definitive edition? Since these OJCs feature Fidelity pressings and tip-on jackets and are generally as good as new vinyl gets, maybe so. Charlie Brown was cut by Matthew Lutthans (who also cut the Analogue Productions 45 RPM pressing) while the Davis and Coltrane discs were cut by Kevin Gray.
Lastly, the Verve Essentials series kicks off with super-cheap digital cuts of five of their biggest albums: John Coltrane’s Ballads, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s Ella and Louis, Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto’s Getz/Gilberto, Billie Holiday’s Body and Soul, and Charles Mingus’s Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus. Great albums all, but better pressings are out there.
OTHER REISSUES OF NOTE:
(*star denotes inclusion in this week’s paid-subscriber playlist)
David Arnold: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader soundtrack [Music on Vinyl]
The Bloody Beetroots: Live at Montreux 2017 [Mercury Studios]
Boogsie: Phase 2 [Mr Bongo]
*Cabaret Voltaire: Code [Mute]
Carnifex: Die Without Hope; Graveside Confessions [Arising Empire]
Cheap Trick: Dream Police; All Shook Up [Music on Vinyl]
*Chicken Shack: Imagination Lady [Music on Vinyl]
Cold: Year of the Spider [Music on Vinyl]
Rosinha de Valença: Apresentado [Sowing]
Do or Die: Picture This [Rap-a-Lot]
The Dopamines: Soap and Lampshades [Radgirlfriend]
Dub Specialists: Dub to Dub Break to Break [Partial]
Eternal Tears of Sorrow: Children of the Dark Waters; Saivon Lapsi [Svart]
The Fabulous Thunderbirds: Butt Rockin’ [Last]
*Fatback: Hot Box [Southbound/Ace]
*The Felice Brothers: The Felice Brothers; Yonder Is the Clock [Chrysalis]
Foreigner: Records [Friday]
Bobby Franklin’s Insanity: Bobby Franklin’s Insanity [Funky Delicacies]
*Gong: Angel’s Egg [BYG/Charly]
James Grauerholz: Life’s Too Good to Keep [Lotuspool]
*Richard “Groove” Holmes: Six Million Dollar Man [Flying Dutchman/Ace]
John Lee Hooker: Jealous [BMG]
*Horse Jumper of Love: Horse Jumper of Love [Run for Cover]
Howling Bells: Howling Bells [Nude]
The Hydroponics: Let the Light Shine [Partial]
*Ida: I Know About You [Numero]
Jay-Jay Johanson: Best of 1996–2026 [Music on Vinyl]
Lady Jane: Here I Am Baby [Athens of the North]
Madlib: Low Budget High Fi Music [Madlib Invazion]
Pedrinho Mattar Trio: Bossa-Nova Bossa-Nova Bossa-Nova [Sowing]
*The Maytals: Bla-Bla-Bla [LMLR]
Loreena McKennitt: The Mask and the Mirror [UMe]
Milky Way: Milky Way [Art of Groove]
*Cahalen Morrison & Eli West: The Holy Coming Storm; Our Lady of the Tall Trees; I’ll Swing My Hammer with Both My Hands [Free Dirt]
Klaus Nomi: Encore… (Nomi’s Best) [Omnivore]
Alan Parsons: Try Anything Once [Music on Vinyl]
Peach Pit: Sweet F.A. EP [Sony]
John Prine: Found Dogs [Oh Boy]
Quicksand: Manic Compression [Iodine]
*Ruben Rada: La Yapla Mata [Little Butterfly]
*Karl Richter, Münchener Bach-Orchester, Münchener Bach-Chor: Bach: Mass in B minor [Deutsche Grammophon Original Source]
Shakatak: Night Birds [Secret]
Bim Sherman: Lovers Leap Showcase [Lantern]
16 Volt: Letdowncrush [Metropolis]
The Slackers: Better Late Than [Pirates Press]
Soleil: My Name Is Soleil [Jet Set]
*Starsailor: Love Is Here [Parlophone]
*Swervedriver: Raise [Sony UK]
Ross Taggart: Thankfully [Cellar]
Masayoshi Takanaka: Rainbow Goblins Story: Live at Budokan 1981 [Universal Japan]
Tank: Power of the Hunter [Cleopatra]
Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Precious Memories [Bear Family]
Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers: Vive la Revolution: Live in Paris 1977 [Jungle]
Voodoo Glow Skulls: Firme [Music on Vinyl]
Zeds Dead: Northern Lights [UMe]
