Two of the century's biggest guitar bands release on the same Friday — into a summer with nowhere to play them.

Tomorrow, two records arrive that would once have set the tone for a British summer. Muse, Devon's loudest sons and arena-rock's last great maximalists, release a new album. So do The Strokes, the New York band who, a quarter of a century ago, made every guitar group in Britain want to buy a leather jacket and mean it. Both land on the same New Music Friday, alongside Beth Orton and a clutch of others. On paper it is a vintage week.

And yet there is an odd hollowness to where these records are landing, because the rooms that used to carry them aren't open. This is a fallow year at Glastonbury, the farm resting, no festival, the last weekend of June quiet for the first time in a long while. The World Cup, the summer's other great communal soundtrack, is being played four and five time zones away, kicking off at ten and eleven at night. The two big spaces a summer record traditionally fills — the festival field and the tournament highlight reel — are dark or distant this year.

It is worth saying what those rooms did. A summer album used to become a summer album together: tens of thousands singing it back in a field, or a broadcaster welding it to a goal you watched at the same second as everyone else. The record was the same; the experience was shared. That shared layer is thin this year, and these two albums arrive into the quiet of it, to be heard mostly on headphones, one listener at a time.

That is not a tragedy. Some of the finest listening is solitary, and to my ear there is something fitting about two bands who built their names on communal euphoria releasing into a summer that asks you to find the euphoria yourself. But it does say something about the hours that are ours. We have spent a decade unbundling everything — work from the office, the meal from the table, the night out from the night — and music unbundled earliest of all, from the shared broadcast to the private stream. A new Muse record in 2002 was an event you had with other people. A new Muse record in 2026 is a notification, then a playlist, then your own evening.

The bands have not changed much; the room has. What is left is the oldest pleasure in the catalogue, stripped back to its private form: you, a record you have waited for, and an hour that belongs to no one else. In a summer with no field to stand in, that might be the whole point — the communal moment gone, the personal one still entirely yours to take.

So take it. Put one of them on tonight, properly, start to finish, the way these bands were built to be heard.

Listen tonight: both albums land at midnight into Friday on the usual platforms. Pick one, give it the full run-through with the phone in another room, and if you can, buy it direct from the band rather than only streaming — the difference to the people who made it is real.