Listen "Out" music reviews for October 2026

Tove Lo – Estrus

Tove Lo has never been particularly interested in behaving herself, but Estrus may be her most gloriously unruly record yet. Its title invokes the biological cycle of sexual receptivity, an apt metaphor for an album obsessed with instinct, desire, emotional volatility, and the messy business of wanting incompatible things at once. I’m Your Girl Right? establishes the mood immediately: seductive, needy, and just a little unhinged. Elsewhere, Des Fleurs, featuring Stromae, adds an unexpected continental flourish, while Are We on a Break and Idiot turn romantic confusion into something approaching an art form.

Yet Estrus isn’t merely a collection of clever pop provocations. Beneath its glossy surfaces is an artist reckoning with transformation, family, and the uncomfortable distance between what the mind knows and what the body wants. Tove Lo’s stated philosophy is “a lot of feelings, no solutions,” and that is precisely the appeal. Estrus doesn’t solve the mess. It revels in it.

Orville Peck – Mule

Orville Peck has always understood that a cowboy is as much a fantasy as a profession. On Mule, he seems determined to make that fantasy stranger, darker, and considerably more seductive. The masked crooner expands his familiar country noir into something broader and more cinematic, where dusty highways, doomed romance, and queer longing coexist comfortably with the grandeur of classic pop.

Peck’s baritone remains the great weapon, simultaneously tender and imposing, but Mule works because he understands restraint. The songs don’t need to shout their sexuality or melancholy. They linger.

There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about Peck’s commitment to atmosphere, yet nothing nostalgic about the way he inhabits masculinity. His cowboy is neither macho caricature nor camp costume. He is vulnerable, sensual, and occasionally lonely as hell. Mule ultimately feels like Peck refining his mythology rather than abandoning it, proving that the queer cowboy still has plenty of road left to travel.

Rebecca Black – Age of the Exhibitionist

Rebecca Black has spent more than a decade turning other people’s expectations into raw material, and Age of the Exhibitionist may be her most convincing act of reclamation yet. The title alone suggests an artist who has stopped worrying about being watched and started controlling the gaze.

What began with the internet’s most infamous pop punchline has evolved into something considerably more interesting: an artist fascinated by performance, sexuality, identity, and the complicated pleasure of being seen. Black’s music has increasingly embraced electronic excess and left-field pop, and here that sensibility feels less like experimentation for its own sake than a natural extension of her story.

There is vulnerability beneath the provocation, but also a healthy amount of fuck-you defiance. Age of the Exhibitionist understands that visibility can be both weapon and wound. Black no longer sounds like someone trying to prove she belongs in the room. She sounds like someone who knows exactly why she’s there, and intends to make you look.

Ellie Goulding – I Know Too Much

Ellie Goulding’s I Know Too Much finds an artist looking backward without sounding trapped by her past. Across ten tracks, acoustic textures and guitar-driven pop sit alongside flashes of club music, creating a record that feels simultaneously intimate and restless.

Goulding has always occupied an interesting space between bedroom vulnerability and dance-floor release, and I Know Too Much returns to that tension with considerably more emotional mileage behind it. The album’s title suggests knowledge gained the hard way, and its songs draw heavily from personal change and relationships, but Goulding wisely avoids turning confession into spectacle.

Instead, the record’s appeal comes from its sense of movement: heartbreak becomes reflection, reflection becomes acceptance, and occasionally acceptance becomes something you can dance to. After years of increasingly polished pop machinery, there is something refreshing about hearing Goulding lean into guitars and the grain of her own voice. I Know Too Much isn’t a reinvention so much as a recalibration, and it suits her beautifully.

The Gayly online. 10/17/26 @ 6:42 p.m. CST.