16 of the best podcasts of 2026 so far

From a docuseries about enigmatic hip-hop artist MF Doom, here are the best new podcasts for you to listen to and watch.

1. Intrigue: To Catch a King

This is the follow-up to 2024’s award-winning podcast To Catch a Scorpion, which saw journalist Sue Mitchell and ex-soldier and aid worker Rob Lawrie investigating the traffickers who send dangerously overcrowded dinghies across the English Channel, often with tragic consequences. Their work led to the arrest of the “scorpion” in question: trafficking kingpin Barzan Majeed.

Now Mitchell and Lawrie have another smuggler in their sights, who operates under the false name Kardo Ranya. The presenting team are relentless and dogged, and their investigation is tense, difficult and full of surprises. But they also never lose sight of the stories of individuals undertaking dangerous journeys for the promise of a better life.  

2. Only Fantasy

A thoughtful and compelling investigation into the rise of the online subscription site OnlyFans, OnlyFantasy tells a thoroughly modern story of the changing nature of sex work, pornography and human intimacy.

The seven-parter is hosted by Brooklyn-based journalist and podcaster Leon Neyfakh, and Gracie Canaan, a comic, writer and sometime OnlyFans creator. They make a terrific double act: Canaan is open-minded and empathetic, while Neyfakh is analytical yet amusingly awkward. The pair examine what they broadly see as a mirage being peddled to subscribers and creators: while creators are told they can build a lucrative business on their own terms, subscribers get to form make-believe relationships away from prying eyes.

3. Sisters of Defiance

Podcasting has yet to tire of the celebrity interview format, even though lots of shows seem to have the same guests on rotation. Sisters of Defiance, hosted by Anita Rani – also presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour – aims higher as it focuses on women who have faced obstacles or taken risks to get where they are.

Rani’s first guest is Meera Syal – British-Asian screenwriter, novelist and star of BBC Television’s Goodness Gracious Me – who reveals how, as a youngster, she felt invisible, and was a product of both her “mother culture and this new culture we were forming”. Future guests include Gisèle Pelicot and musician Anoushka Shankar.

4. Hit That Perfect Beat: The London Records Story

Hit That Perfect Beat is the story of London Records, a British label which launched The Communards, Bananarama, Shakespears Sister, Fine Young Cannibals, Goldie, Orbital, All Saints and many more. But it’s really the story of the wider music industry in the 1980s and 90s, and a culture of hedonism, money and chart domination that flourished until streaming devastated the business.

Presented by former Smash Hits journalist Siân Pattenden, the podcast is a delightful, nostalgia-soaked hopscotch through the history of this once overachieving company and its biggest signings. Wild stories of egotism and excess abound.

5. The Idiot

This narrative series from Serial Productions – the company founded by the creators of true-crime behemoth Serial – tells the story of Allen, described by the series’ host M Gessen as “a clown, a blowhard, a pompous ass”.

Allen is Gessen’s first cousin and, we learn, a world-class show-off given to bragging about his jet-setting lifestyle. But when he turns up at his uncle’s house in Cape Cod with his five-year-old son in tow, Gessen suspects Allen has taken the boy from his mother against her wishes. What begins as a run-of-the-mill family drama turns into an in-depth and atmospheric character study of a man high on entitlement and a misplaced sense of injustice.

6. The Girlfriends: Trust Me, Babe

Never underestimate the power of women talking amongst themselves. This is the main takeaway from The Girlfriends: Trust Me, Babe. Hosted by the reporter Anna Sinfeld, the series tracks the case built against the Minnesota romance scammer Derek Alldred by the women he conned out of thousands of dollars.

The crimes recounted in Trust Me Babe are unsettling, but this is ultimately a feel-good tale and a rousing paean to female solidarity. It shows women overcoming their trauma and police indifference to stop others from enduring the same nightmare.

7. History’s Greatest Fails

A mash-up of two already-popular podcasts, Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail and This is History with Dan Jones, this limited series finds Day and Jones pondering the great debacles of the past and how they have shaped the course of history. The hosts, who are old university pals, have a clear chemistry and storytelling flair.

But that’s not to say they agree on what constitutes failure. In the opening episode, they look at Richard III, the 15th-Century monarch who ruled for just under three years. While Jones believes he made one terrible decision after another – including the probable murders of the princes in the tower – Day takes a more sympathetic view.

8. A History of the United States in 100 Objects

Fans of the US podcast 99% Invisible, about the hidden inventions that help the world run smoothly, will know the concept behind this podcast, which aims to document the seemingly innocuous artefacts that tell the story of the US as it reaches its 250th birthday.

As with 99% Invisible, the host is Roman Mars, the journalist and podcaster known for his gently quizzical style. Rather than examining museum pieces, he focuses on lesser-known items such as a screw thread – the spiral groove on the outside of screws that became standardised during World War Two – and the Century Safe, a time capsule that was sealed in 1876 and opened a century later.

9. Get Birding with Sean Bean

Birdwatching podcast Get Birding has been around for several years, capitalising on the vogue for slow radio: gentle and meditative audio that is the antidote to our often hectic and noisy lives. Now the series has relaunched with a new host, the Yorkshire-based actor Sean Bean, star of Game of Thrones. Bean has been a keen birdwatcher since childhood and now spends many happy hours in his garden gazing at the wildlife.

Each episode has a loose theme, from bird-friendly gardening to the joy of nest boxes. There are also assorted guests, including folk singer Sam Lee, Elbow’s Guy Garvey and YouTuber Kwesia aka City Girl in Nature. But the greatest delight lies in hearing Bean waxing lyrical about our feathered friends. His reading of Blackbird, the poem by John Drinkwater, is truly a balm for the soul.

10. Shadow World: Impulsive

It might seem a tall order to ask listeners to empathise with people afflicted by urges that are harmful to themselves and others. But in Impulsive, the latest in the BBC’s Shadow World strand, which shines a light on hidden or untold stories, Noel Titheradge does just that. The series reveals how dopamine agonist drugs, a medication prescribed for people living with Parkinson’s, can cause impulse control disorders and lead users to compulsively shop, gamble, steal or fixate about sex.

It’s a reflection of Titheradge’s careful reporting and interviewing style that he has managed to persuade those affected to put aside any shame and tell their stories. We meet Steve, who began staying up all night talking to cam girls; Freddie, whose father suddenly blew his life savings on overseas property; and Lucy, who began an affair with a stranger she met online. 

11. Blood Memory

While serving a life sentence for double murder, Californian Michael Lynne Thompson joined the neo-Nazi prison gang Aryan Brotherhood, though later left and testified against its members. He remains one of the few to have done so who has lived to tell the tale. Blood Memory finds Thompson telling his story almost uninterrupted, save for the testimony of a prosecutor and court mitigator.

This intimate, detailed and richly sound-designed mini-series features on Nick van der Kolk’s Love + Radio, a podcast about the vastness of human experience and featuring in-depth conversations with unusual people. Van der Kolk is the interviewer, though he keeps his interjections to a minimum. Thompson is a complex figure: a man of rare charisma who was born into a life of neglect and poverty and claims to have lived a life of violence as a means of survival. Is he a victim of circumstance or a skilled self-publicist and master manipulator?

12. The Book Club

Goalhanger, the production company behind podcasting juggernauts The Rest is Politics and The Rest is History, has turned its attention to literature with The Book Club. Tabby Syrett and Dominic Sandbrook are our hosts, poring over old classics and contemporary titles, especially those having a cultural moment, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell.

Literary pods can be a tough sell: how to engage listeners who haven’t read the book in question? The Book Club navigates this by digging into the books’ backstories and those of the authors (come for the story about Emily Brontë punching her dog). Sandbrook and Syrett have an easy chemistry, and their series is smart yet accessible (so much so that we can forgive Syrett’s habit of bellowing into the mic). 

13. MF DOOM: Long Island to Leeds

BBC 6 Music DJ Afrodeutsche and journalist and producer Adam Batty examine the life and legacy of the enigmatic hip-hop artist MF Doom – real name Daniel Dumile – who died in 2020 aged 49 after having a rare reaction to prescription medication. This five-part series is part of the BBC’s Audio Labs initiative, dedicated to giving a platform to rising podcasting and audio creative talent, and features a gorgeous original score by the Arctic Monkeys’ Matt Helders.

We learn how rumour and myth clung to the London-born, New York-raised Doom, who, inspired by his love of comic books, wore a custom-made mask and became a hero of the alternative rap scene; not for nothing is he described here as “your favourite rapper’s favourite rapper”. But a mystery persists which our hosts set out to answer: how was it that this shape-shifting hip-hop pioneer came to spend his final years in Yorkshire?  

14. Creation Myth

When the Belgian audio producer Helena de Groot got together with her American partner, David, she told him emphatically that she didn’t want children. She told him again just before they got married in San Francisco. David seemed to accept her decision, saying he wanted to be with her more than he wanted a baby. But as the years went by, he began trying to change her mind.

In Creation Myth, De Groot ponders the question: to breed or not to breed? A compellingly raw audio memoir, it moves from present to past and back again as it documents its creator’s innermost anxieties about motherhood. Now, from the vantage point of her forties, De Groot finds herself questioning her own convictions and weighing the impact of her decision on herself, her friendships and her marriage.

15. The Best is Yet to Come

Older people have been ill-served by podcasts in the last decade, but change is in the air. The runaway success of 76-year-old Bill Nighy’s podcast Ill Advised has revealed an appetite for the wisdom of society’s elders. Enter The Best is Yet to Come, the new podcast from 90-year-old Sir John Tusa, the BBC journalist who launched TV’s Newsnight and was managing director of the BBC World Service. Tusa conducts lengthy interviews with fellow nonagenarians about their lives, careers and their plans for the future: guests have included author and historian Lady Antonia Frasier and former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine. There is warmth and depth to these conversations, which avoid the cackling informality found in chat casts pitched at younger listeners.

16. City of Lights

In 2002, in Aurora, Illinois, Al and Mary Ann Signorelli’s 21-year-old son Jeff was shot dead at a social gathering in what seemed a random act of violence. No arrests were made, and the case remains unsolved, but this podcast, which is written, produced and hosted by Willy Nast, isn’t a whodunnit. Decades in the making, City of Lights is a thoughtful and empathetic account of the aftermath of a murder and what happens to those left behind.

For the Signorellis, coming to terms with their grief meant trying to fix the apathetic political and social systems that had allowed violent crime to flourish in their city. Nast is no impartial observer: he grew up in Aurora and knew Jeff Signorelli, albeit vaguely. That he is so embroiled in the story makes for a heartfelt portrait of a city and a couple whose determination and resilience take your breath away.