Robyn Hitchcock - The Confuser

Robyn Hitchcock's first collection of new songs in four years arrived in July 2026, cut in Nashville with Brad Jones co-producing. Ten tracks, and by Hitchcock standards an unusually direct one, though "direct" for a man who has spent five decades writing about insects, ghosts and the sea still means opening the second track with the words "My Dead Astronaut."

The band is the story. Kimberley Rew, his old Soft Boys bandmate, was flown in from the UK to play electric guitar, making this the closest thing to a Soft Boys reunion in years and putting a specific kind of jangle back into Hitchcock's music that has been missing for a while. Jeremy Fetzer plays guitar alongside him, Todd Bolden is on bass, Eric Slick drums throughout. Gillian Welch sings on "Ghost In Sunlight." The writing sits in folk-rock territory with the psychedelia used as seasoning rather than as the meal, and "Yesterday's Rain," "The Vanishing Kind" and the closing "Wasted" are the ones that lodge.

Hitchcock has been reliably good for so long that it is easy to let a new album pass. This one deserves better than that. The playing is loose and warm, the songs are among his most immediately tuneful in years, and Rew's presence gives it a lineage the last few records did not have.

Single LP, mastered and lacquer cut by John Baldwin at Infrasonic Nashville. On Tiny Ghost Records.