Welcome to a New Year!

Each week, 8 new releases are selected to go head to head, with one weekly winner which will then go up against future weekly winners later in the year at the end of each quarter of the year, and then again at the end of the year to determine the ultimate winner of 2026.

Our 2025 winner is still to be decided! Vote in Quarter Final 4 now.

There's not loads of new releases this week, but enough for a poll I think - and I've included releases from the final week of 2025.

Here are this week's contenders:

Artemas - time alone w u

Cavetown (feat. chloe moriondo) - Sailboat

James Marriott - California Rain

Joji - LOVE YOU LESS

Kula Shaker - Lucky Number

Ladytron - Caught in the Blink of an Eye

mgk - times of my life

Seafret - Signal Fire

Went with Artemas but new Ladytron is cool

More votes please!

Voted Ladytron. Very similar to their previous song 'I See Red' which is even better I think.

Another very spread out week! 😅

Nothing I really love on the first listen - voted James Marriott as I think this may be the only song growing for me.

My vote goes to Seafret!

Ladytron was the only song I wanted to hear about second time, so got to be that.

Last day to vote!

Frustratingly didn't get my vote in on time for this week, despite plenty of notice. I'll try and do better next week.

1 Cavetown

2 Ladytron

3 Joji

4 Artemas

5 Kula Shaker

6 mgk

7 Seafret

8 James Marriott

I thought I could get away with being fashionably late voting in this as the poll didn't have a specified closing time but you appear to have manually closed the poll between the time I started and finished listening to the songs (my vote wouldn't have affected the winner anyway tho)

New year = new attempt to keep up with these polls anyway and off to a great start with me technically missing the deadline on this one xo Bolded songs I am adding to my 2026 playlist which I will hopefully not abandon after a few weeks like my 2025 one

Wasn't expecting a gecs-esque banger from Cavetown but I see it's produced by underscores so checks out.

The James Marriott song may be the most amateurish and uncanny one I've heard from him to date, I'm really trying to shake off the bias against his music career but I can't do it x (I'm fairly confident I'd have thought this song was mediocre no matter who sung it though).