There is a glint of silver and gold in the atmospheric webs of ambient guitar spun by the albums featured in this round up of new ambient music you won’t want to miss. Blending drones, loops, textures, hypnotic melodies, and occasional loving nods toward folk & country music, each one is its own captivating inward journey. Featuring Dave Masters, Michael Scott Dawson & anthéne, Pan American, Raúl Cantizano & David Cordero, Suss, and Weareforests together with Six Missing.
Dave Masters – Quiet Branches
https://davemasters.bandcamp.com/album/quiet-branches
Many readers have likely heard the guitar work of Dave Masters as a 20-plus year member of the highly regarded instrumental post-rock band Signal Hill. Having started to create ambient and drone music during the early days of the Covid pandemic, 2026 sees Masters pivoting from a prolific stream of singles to a cohesive, full-length album. His penchant for melody and narrative elements can still be heard, but the eleven tracks that span Quiet Branches are steeped in stillness, quietude, and gentle atmospherics that make a spellbinding listen. Worth noting is that one of the tracks features an appearance by Tom Honey aka Good Weather for an Airstrike, who also mastered the album.
Quiet Branches was released May 22, 2026, on limited edition cassette & digital by Better Looking Records.
Michael Scott Dawson & Anthéne – Broadcast Colours
https://homenormal.bandcamp.com/album/broadcast-colours
This album marks the first appearance of sound artist & multi-instrumentalist Michael Scott Dawson on the Home Normal imprint as he teams up with fellow Canadian Brad Deschamps, aka anthéne to create a warm ambient record with an exquisite attention to detail that becomes more apparent with each listen. The rural scene on the cover bathed in the glow of twilight, and the descriptive liner notes that accompany the album help incline the ear of the listener toward the faint signals of longing, nostalgia, and memory that echo through the tender, tape saturated melodies and interwoven field recordings.
From the flickers of tone, soft melodic traces, distant resonances, and the feeling that something meaningful is always trying to reach us on the melodic horizon, the music guides and signals us through in celebration of this magical moment between worlds. Indeed, there is a moment near sunset when the world becomes almost unbearably tender. Light lowers. Windows glow. Roads, fields, rooms, and faces take on a new kind of colour…
Home Normal
Broadcast Colours was released May 15, 2026, on limited edition CD & digital by Home Normal. The album was mastered by Ian Hawgood and features photography by Evan Parsons.
Pan American – Fly the Ocean In a Silver Plane
https://panamerican.bandcamp.com/album/fly-the-ocean-in-a-silver-plane
Mark Nelson, aka Pan American, describes Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane as “a reflection of journeys and travel” both real and metaphorical. The image on the cover is one of the artist’s mother, head wrapped in a scarf and face full of nervous anticipation for a journey through the skies, but the silver plane is not just a literal one. Referential of both personal and cultural history, the album is also a meditation on the journey through life itself and the unknown that lies beyond it. Often beautiful, sometimes playful and even occasionally unsettled, it is a multi-faceted and compelling musical excursion that works on many levels.
Having experienced the arrival of my children, the decline and departure of my parents, and the many years of venturing out and returning home in my own life, travel feels like the perfect tropology to consider the mysteries we inhabit. Travel and Its impressions, rituals, superstitions-the possibilities and risk-all open up onto the landscape of our biggest questions, fear and wonder.
Mark Nelson (Pan American)
Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane was released March 27, 2026, on CD, vinyl LP, & digital by Kranky.
Raúl Cantizano & David Cordero – Aunque llegue la mañana Refracted
https://norayrecords.bandcamp.com/album/aunque-llegue-la-ma-ana-refracted
It would not technically be wrong to call this an album of reworks of material that originally appeared on the album Aunque llegue la mañana by guitarist Raúl Cantizano and ambient sound artist David Cordero, but ‘Refracted’ is a much more expressive way of describing what this album is about. Eleven musicians from around the globe bend and reshape the songs through the prisms of their own artistic styles to create an entirely new listening experience rich in added layers, textures and sonic colors while preserving the shimmering beauty of the original. Guest artists on the album are Ian Hawgood, Wil Bolton, Rhucle, Kenji Kihara, zakè, Warmth, Tomotsugu Nakamura, Haruhisa Tanaka, Miguel Otero, Carlos Ferreira, and anthéne.
Aunque llegue la mañana – Refracted was released digitally on June 26, 2026, by Noray Records. The album was mastered by Ian Hawgood and features artwork by El Señor Gómez.
Suss – Counting Sunsets
https://suss.bandcamp.com/album/counting-sunsets
Embracing pedal steel, National guitar, mandolin, harmonica, baritone guitar, and harmonium blended with synthesizers and loops, New York based trio SUSS have been pioneering a sound they call “ambient country” for the last decade. Described as “a quiet preoccupation with memory and the slow erosion of time”, Counting Sunsets finds the band in an especially meditative mode as they offer ten painterly musical vignettes that the evoke the captivating, ephemeral beauty of horizons ablaze with fading light.
Counting Sunsets was released May 15, 2026, by Northern Spy Records on CD, digital, and limited edition “Sun Slip” colored vinyl LP.
Weareforests & Six Missing – Pigment of the Forms
Weareforests Bandcamp | Six Missing Bandcamp
Pigment of the Forms marks the first collaboration between Colorado-based artist Weareforests and Six Missing who is based in Texas. The album is aptly described as one that “feels less like a collection of songs and more like a shared environment”. Webs of guitar mesh with field recordings and modular synths to create the kind of organic sense of immersion one might experience exploring a secluded forest or lush woodlands.
Rainfall and river sounds ripple through the tracks, creating the sensation of stumbling upon a creek, laying down a blanket, and letting the world fade into a half-dazed dream…
Pigment of the Forms was released April 24, 2026, by We All Speak in Poems in a limited vinyl LP edition that comes in random colours along with digital download & streaming. The album was mastered by Taylor Deupree and features artwork by Matt Sage.
