Rocktober 2026: The Greatest Hits?

Rhino's annual Rocktober series covers a lot of ground.  While that's part of the fun, with dozens of records coming, we wanted to narrow things down a little...

Here are the most important Rocktober 2026 titles to us...

The Cramps – Flamejob (Rhino Reserve) LP

The Cramps are about as close to automatic Dead Tank territory as Rocktober gets.

Flamejob arrived in 1994, long after the band's original NYC punk moment, but Lux Interior and Poison Ivy still sounded gloriously detached from whatever respectable rock music was supposed to be doing at the time. Garage rock, rockabilly, punk, trash culture, horror movies and sexual menace all get thrown into the same room.

It also makes sense that this isn't another reissue of one of the obvious early Cramps albums. Flamejob is exactly the kind of slightly deeper catalog record we're happy to see back on vinyl.

Mudhoney – basically the whole pile

Rocktober went unusually deep on Mudhoney, and we're not going to argue with it.

There are new pressings of My Brother the Cow, Piece of Cake, Tomorrow Hit Today, Five Dollar Bob's Mock Cooter Stew / 4-Track Reprise Demos, and Live! 1993–1998.

Mudhoney have always occupied a useful place in the history of American underground rock. They were central to the Seattle explosion without ever seeming built for the superstar version of it. The records stayed dirty and funny. They stayed tied to garage punk even as the world around them started calling everything "alternative."

Glad these are all coming back. 

Ministry – Filth Pig and Dark Side of the Spoon Deluxe Editions

These might be two of the most interesting reissues in the entire collection, even though neither Ministry's Filth Pig nor Dark Side of the Spoon is the obvious entry point for this prolific industrial powerhouse. 

By the time of Filth Pig, Ministry's mechanical industrial-metal attack of the preceding records had mutated into something slower, uglier and considerably more suffocating. Dark Side of the Spoon pushed things into another strange corner a few years later.

Rocktober is giving both records deluxe 2xLP editions, and it's nice to see attention paid to this stretch of the catalog. 

For anyone whose record collection has a healthy intersection of industrial, punk and metal, these are easy recommendations.

Ramones – Ramones (Mono) LP

There isn't much we need to explain here. What's interesting this time is the mono presentation. A record built from short songs, enormous guitars and practically zero wasted movement doesn't exactly need embellishment. Hearing Ramones presented as one concentrated block of sound feels appropriate.

Forty-plus years of punk scenes splintering into hardcore, pop punk, garage punk, indie rock and a hundred smaller mutations still haven't diminished how ridiculous and effective this record is.

The Stooges – Fun House (Rhino Hi-Fi) LP

If we're talking about foundational records, this is probably the centerpiece.

It sounds like the beginning of several different things at once: punk, noise rock, garage rock and the general idea that a rock band can sound genuinely dangerous rather than merely heavy.  The first Stooges LP established the problem. Fun House sounds like the problem has escaped into the streets. 

Devo – Something for Everybody LP + Blue 7"

Devo are another band that fit Dead Tank almost too neatly, even if their place in the mainstream sometimes obscures how strange they actually were. By the time Something for Everybody arrived in 2010, the band had already spent decades turning punk, art-school theory, synths, and satire  into one long inside joke. The surprise is how well this record works as an actual Devo album, rather than a late-career victory lap.

To me,  Devo's whole trick was making pop music sound like it had been designed by people deeply suspicious of pop music.That tension is why they still make sense next to punk, post-punk, new wave and synth records instead of simply being filed away as an '80s nostalgia act. Something for Everybody is a good reminder that the weirdness never really left.

The included 7" is blue vinyl, although I honestly with they did the LP in blue. Next time....

 

The Chills – Submarine Bells (Rhino Reserve) LP

One of the less obvious picks, and one we're especially glad to see.

New Zealand's Flying Nun universe produced some of the greatest guitar music of the 1980s and early '90s, and The Chills were one of its defining bands. Submarine Bells took the chiming, melancholy sound Martin Phillipps had been refining through the band's earlier material and stretched it into something bigger without sanding away its personality.

For Dead Tank customers who move between post-punk, college rock, indie pop and the stranger corners of alternative music, this is one worth grabbing while it's available.

 

Motörhead – On Parole (The Alternative Mixes) LP

Motörhead have always belonged equally to punk people and metal people, even if nobody can ever quite agree about what to call them.

That's part of their appeal.

The early material captures the band before the Motörhead formula had completely hardened into something unmistakable. This new On Parole collection of alternative mixes is consequently a little more interesting to us than simply putting another copy of Ace of Spades into circulation.

Fast, dirty rock and roll that metalheads and punks can fight over forever. We'll take it.

 

Type O Negative – October Rust (Picture Disc) 2xLP

Type O Negative eventually became their own ecosystem.

Doom metal, goth, hardcore roots, enormous hooks, black humor and Peter Steele's impossible voice all coexist on October Rust. It's heavy without behaving much like a conventional metal album and romantic without becoming remotely normal.

The picture-disc treatment also makes perfect sense for an album whose visual identity is almost as instantly recognizable as its sound.

There's plenty more in this year's Rocktober collection, and we're carrying everything from Pretenders to Nada Surf, INXS, Alice Cooper, The B-52's and beyond.

Different decades, different scenes, but the same basic reason we still like slinging records: great music tends to make connections that genre sections can't quite contain.

All of the Rocktober 2026 titles are available to pre-order now from Dead Tank Records.