Albums of the Month - August 2026

Normally, August is the one month of the year when I take a break from these reviews. I am usually on holiday, new releases slow down a little, and even All of Acoustic needs some time off.

This year, however, I had to make an exception.

Two albums of this quality, released by two of my favourite independent artists, simply deserved one. Those albums are Days & Days by Jack Botts, whom you should probably know by now if you follow my happy acoustic playlists, and A Horse Named Friday by Theo Kandel.

And if there is one thing these two guys certainly know, it is what to do with a guitar in their hands.

The records actually make an interesting pair. Both are unmistakably acoustic and both are full of excellent guitar work, but they approach songwriting from rather different places. Days & Days feels like sunshine, movement, romance and the freedom of being somewhere else. A Horse Named Friday is more unpredictable and introspective, constantly moving between love, grief, humor and existential questions.

So, for the first time this year, I could not pick just one.

Jack Botts - Days & Days

Released on August 14, Days & Days contains ten songs across a compact 31 minutes. It is a folk record with the kind of warm, coastal atmosphere that has always made Jack Botts such a natural fit for my playlists. The acoustic guitar remains at the centre, but banjo, electric guitar, saxophone, trumpet, pedal steel and piano occasionally enter the picture and give individual songs their own character.

Still, the strongest instrument here might simply be Botts' ability to make you want to pack a bag and leave somewhere.

Much of Days & Days is obsessed with movement. Cars, roads, coastlines, oceans, sunsets and distant places appear everywhere. But travelling is rarely just travelling. It becomes a way of talking about relationships, freedom, uncertainty and figuring out where you belong.

The title track establishes that feeling immediately. Multiple acoustic guitars and banjo accompany a love story built around the idea that time spent with the right person can never really be wasted. The western coast, ocean, sundress and moonlight imagery make Days & Days feel almost like a collection of photographs from an endless summer.

That same carefree side of Botts appears throughout the first half of the record. Head Over Heart adds an electric guitar solo to the acoustic guitars and banjo and essentially argues that sometimes you simply have to stop overthinking and follow your feelings. Bonita might be the purest feel good moment on the album, with trumpet and banjo, including a proper banjo solo, accompanying a brief holiday romance that neither person was looking for. Little Love tells another fleeting romantic encounter, one that may not have lasted but apparently gave both people exactly what they needed at the time.

That last idea is important because beneath all the sunshine, Days & Days gradually reveals another side.

Love Could Be Lost is where that becomes impossible to ignore. The future had been planned, complete with kids, a beach house and dream jobs, but somewhere along the way the couple stopped working on the relationship itself. It is a simple observation, but an effective one. Sometimes love does not disappear because of one dramatic event. Sometimes people simply stop nurturing it.

What If? brings back the road trip mentality, this time turning it into a philosophy. Its protagonist leaves behind a small town, a part time job and a life that feels too small, without even knowing where she is going. The important thing is that she goes. With acoustic guitars, banjo and even saxophone behind the story, the song asks one of the album's recurring questions: what if leaving, trying and seemingly wasting time are actually necessary parts of finding meaning?

Then comes what I consider the emotional centre of the record.

Lifetime (one take) strips everything back to guitar and voice, and it is easily the most heartbreakingly relatable song on the album. There is no elaborate production to hide behind. Botts looks back at a relationship he genuinely believed would last through every season of his life and tries to understand how something that once seemed permanent could disappear. By the end, he is back where they first met with nothing but six strings and the memories of all the songs he once wrote about a love he thought could never die.

That makes Where I'm Meant To Be feel almost like an answer. A beautiful fingerstyle part gradually develops into strumming as banjo and piano make the arrangement more rhythmic. Lyrically, Botts admits that he still worries about where he is going and why he has not figured everything out yet, before reaching a much healthier conclusion: perhaps he never will, and perhaps that is okay.

Worlds Away returns to romantic distance, while the closing Spring Flowers provides what might be the album's most mature reflection. Fingerstyle acoustic guitar and pedal steel accompany Botts as he looks at the places he has been, the mistakes he has made and the invisible scars he carries. Growth, like spring flowers, cannot be forced. It needs time.

That is ultimately what I hear throughout Days & Days. Jack Botts' music still has the carefree energy that makes him perfect for a happy acoustic playlist, but this record understands that happiness does not mean the absence of heartbreak or uncertainty. Sometimes it simply means continuing to drive with the windows down anyway.

Theo Kandel - A Horse Named Friday

If Days & Days looks at life through the windshield of a car heading towards the coast, A Horse Named Friday feels more like stopping somewhere along the road and wondering how exactly you got there.

Released on August 21 through Nettwerk Music Group, Theo Kandel's second full length album contains eleven songs and runs for approximately 39 minutes. It was recorded throughout 2025 between Grand Street Recording in Brooklyn and Kandel's own bedroom setup. The instrumental palette is beautiful: fingerstyle acoustic guitar, banjo, pedal steel, strings and warm piano arrangements coexist with occasional electric guitars and fuller band moments.

More importantly, there is a reason the album feels so preoccupied with time, change and the strange coexistence of happiness and sadness. Kandel wrote it after losing two close childhood friends within a single year. Rather than making a straightforward grief album, however, he built the record around life's emotional extremes and the realization that none of them are permanent.

Even the title comes from the old riddle about a cowboy who rides into town on Friday, stays for three days and leaves on Friday because Friday is the name of his horse. Kandel connects that image to the Hero's Journey: life is full of detours that may feel as though they are taking us away from the path, while in reality we are still moving forward.

And that idea is everywhere on this album.

The title track could hardly introduce it better. It is stripped back to voice and some excellent fingerpicking as Kandel sings about movement, love and stepping into a river knowing that neither the river nor the person stepping into it will ever be exactly the same again.

From there, the album becomes much more colourful. She's Mad, She's Magic introduces banjo, electric guitar, drums and female backing vocals to portray the wonderfully chaotic attraction of being completely taken by someone. Right This Time layers several acoustic guitars before drums and strings gradually arrive, turning the determination to finally get life right into something increasingly expansive.

Then there is 7–10 Split, one of my favourite examples of Kandel's songwriting. Two intertwining acoustic guitars and mandolin accompany a failed marriage described through a bowling metaphor. A 7–10 split is notoriously difficult to convert, which makes it the perfect image for a relationship that has reached the point where giving everything you have still may not be enough. And once again, the fingerpicking is excellent.

The Station is one of the record's most energetic moments, with an almost gospel like chorus and, wonderfully, both a banjo solo and an acoustic guitar solo. Its chaotic story of a ridiculous night out with friends initially seems like comic relief, but in the context of the album those nights matter. Friendship and absurd memories become part of the same life that also contains loss.

Ghost Lives expands that idea beautifully. Kandel imagines all the lives he might have lived and all the people he might have become, only to realise that among all those hypothetical possibilities, the same person keeps appearing. Piano enters the album here, but the banjo continues to shine alongside acoustic and electric guitars.

And then comes Mourning Dove, which might simply be the most beautiful song on the record.

Acoustic guitar and fiddle accompany an intimate love song filled with small observations about life together, from the West Village to watching Fellini's 8½ and not really understanding it. What makes the song work is precisely how ordinary those details are. Love is not presented as some abstract grand statement. It is sharing places, jokes, movies, routines and eventually telling another person that what is mine is yours.

The second half becomes increasingly reflective.

A Little Weird (A Little High) moves closer to classic rock, using acoustic and electric guitars and drums to examine the strange gap between appearing like a functional adult and still feeling completely lost inside. About Dreams, the album's only collaboration, featuring Jackie Evans, begins from piano and grows to include acoustic guitar and an electric guitar solo. Its questions are distinctly modern: when did we become too busy, distracted or exhausted to talk about our dreams, our days and what we actually feel?

Whisper Music takes an even darker turn. Against acoustic guitar, banjo and pedal steel, Kandel openly thinks about mortality and the way his relationship with death has changed as he approaches thirty. Yet music itself becomes a kind of survival mechanism. New York, reunions, love, death and fragments of songs are the pieces he uses to hold himself together.

And finally, Sadness Is A Sine Wave brings the entire record into focus.

Musically, it is one of my favourite acoustic arrangements of the album, with another excellent fingerpicked guitar part joined by banjo, fiddle and pedal steel. Lyrically, it may also contain the clearest explanation of what A Horse Named Friday is about. Happiness and sadness do not move in straight lines. One moment you are playing beer pong or celebrating a friend's wedding, the next you receive a phone call that changes everything.

Kandel does not try to defeat sadness. He recognizes its shape. It rises, falls and eventually rises again, just like a sine wave. Loss is part of that movement, but so are friendship, love and the moments that make life worth experiencing in the first place.

Jack Botts and Theo Kandel have made two very different albums, but I think they complement each other beautifully.

Days & Days is the more immediate of the two. It is full of coastlines, road trips, sunsets, fleeting romances and the kind of acoustic arrangements that make you want to be outside somewhere. Yet underneath that warmth is a record about accepting that relationships end, plans change and none of us really knows exactly where we are going.

A Horse Named Friday digs deeper into that uncertainty. Theo Kandel looks directly at grief, mortality, adulthood, love and all the lives we could have lived, but somehow emerges with a reassuring message. Life does not move in a straight line. Neither does sadness. We get distracted, take detours, lose people, fall in love, make stupid decisions, change direction and keep going.

And from a purely acoustic guitar perspective, these records are a gift. Botts surrounds his songwriting with acoustic guitars, banjo and warm coastal folk textures, while Kandel once again proves himself to be one of the most interesting fingerstyle singer songwriters around right now.

So yes, I was supposed to be on holiday.

But these two guys really had to release these albums in August, didn't they?