Miles Hewitt

It's tempting to stay small as a singer-songwriter in 2026. Gone are the days of the bard with his guitar surveying the landscape, squinting at ghosts in their hiding-places. No longer holding his privileged place at the center of a culture aswirl with short-form video and infinite subgenres, it's safer to remain humble, look inward, pick at his own insecurities in the hopes of finding a sliver of something universal there. Miles Hewitt must have been daydreaming when that memo went out. Vainglory, the Brooklyn artist’s second LP, is the sort of ambitious, outward-looking songwriter record they don't make much anymore, its subject no smaller than man's search for meaning in the age of ubiquitous data, late-capitalist rot, and the false mysticism of AI. The self-produced album is a marvel of texture and arrangement, weaving a holistic nocturnal atmosphere from the stately folk-rock of "Blackness is the Road" to the lithe digi-funk of "Say Goodbye". Elsewhere, Vainglory might remind you of Destroyer’s wild-eyed jeremiads, Neil Young's rawboned melodicism, Gene Clark's tortured symphonics, even Pink Floyd's psych-rock (in the sense of psychological rather than psychedelic). Vainglory is many things: a journey through the desert, a collection of nightmare visions set to beautiful tunes, a call to resist your soul's absorption by machines. It's also, Hewitt says, "a celebration of what people can do when they get together and work really hard." —Andy Cush