**Berlin has always known how to make silence speak.** From the cold industrial hum of Bowie's Low-period experiments to the cavernous minimalism that still bleeds through the city's contemporary underground, the German capital has long understood that what a record *withholds* can be as powerful as what it delivers. Lawrence Timoni, the alternative artist currently calling Berlin home, has absorbed this lesson with considerable intelligence on his new single, a track that rewards patience and punishes the impatient in roughly equal measure.

Some albums arrive. Others *return* — carrying the weight of decades, of roads taken and abandoned, of ghosts who never quite let go. *Destructor*, the long-delayed third full-length from London NWOBHM veterans MORE, belongs emphatically to the second category. And the ghost in question is one of rock production's most singular talents: Chris Tsangarides, the man who put the thunder into Judas Priest's *Screaming for Vengeance*, who understood better than almost anyone how to make a guitar sound like it was tearing the fabric of the physical world. He delivered the final mix of this record on the eve of his death in January 2017. Nearly a decade later, the rest of us finally get to hear what he left behind. The wait, it turns out, was worth every agonising year.

Rock and roll has always been most itself when it smells faintly of spilled beer and amplifier heat. The great recordings — the ones that burrow under the skin and refuse eviction — were never the ones that emerged from months of Pro Tools fussing and vocal pitch correction. They were the ones that captured a room, a moment, four or five human beings combusting together and somehow getting it on tape before the magic evaporated. The Broken Vinyls, a quintet out of Bloomfield, New Jersey, understand this with a bone-deep instinct that most contemporary guitar bands have long since abandoned in favour of streaming-friendly sheen.

Certain songs arrive in the world already armoured in sentiment, draped in the heavy brocade of theatrical tradition, and dare you to do anything at all interesting with them. Stephen Schwartz's *For Good*, that sweeping farewell duet from *Wicked*, is precisely such a song — the kind of composition that has been belted across a thousand West End and Broadway stages by voices of seismic proportions, accompanied by orchestras the size of small armies. The melody has been wrung, polished, and performed into a state of near-mythological familiarity. To approach it with a single piano and nothing else requires either extraordinary nerve or extraordinary trust — ideally both.

Oklahoma has never been the first address that springs to mind when cataloguing the great geographies of rock and roll. Tulsa conjures oil derricks and vast prairie skies before it conjures thunderous guitar work. And yet here are Beggars Whisky, four determined souls from that very city, arriving with a single whose title borrows from Oppenheimer's infamous Bhagavad Gita quotation — and, to their considerable credit, very nearly justifying the grandiosity of the claim.

Gratitude, properly understood, is not a soft emotion. It is demanding. It insists you look backwards and forwards at once — at those who shaped you, at those you must still serve, at the living world that gifted you breath enough to sing. Azuka Moweta understands this with a depth that most recording artists of any tradition never approach, and *Kenechukwu*, his latest seven-track offering poured from the red earth of Asaba in Delta State, is gratitude rendered as groove, as ceremony, and as quiet, irresistible joy.

*There are songs that arrive fully formed, like a bruise you don't remember getting. "The Crack in My Heart," the debut single from Berlin-based duo Cosmic Anxiety, is precisely that kind of song.*

**The night of November 5th, 2024 produced many things — disbelief, dread, the queasy scrolling through exit polls that wouldn't resolve themselves into comfort. For Vincent Roose, the Belgian musician operating under the name Scopitone, it produced an album. Not immediately, not explosively, but with the slow, methodical compulsion of someone who had run out of other options.**

**The Victoria-based songwriter announces himself with a bedroom-recorded dispatch of aching intimacy that deserves to be heard well beyond the Pacific Northwest.** Some songs arrive fully formed, carrying the weight of everything unsaid. Blair Coyle's debut self-produced single, *Down The Line*, is precisely that kind of song — the sort that makes you pause whatever you're doing and simply sit with it. Released quietly, without fanfare or industry machinery behind it, this track from the Victoria, BC songwriter is a small, devastating miracle of economy and emotional precision.

Southern Germany has never been the most obvious cradle of progressive rock ambition — the genre's spiritual homeland remains stubbornly anchored to the English Midlands, to Californian studio excess, to the windswept conceptualism of a certain stripe of 1970s Teutonic experimentalism. And yet Kurt Seßler and Werner Zeeb, the duo operating under the pleasingly unfussy banner of Seßler / Zeeb, seem entirely unbothered by questions of geography or expectation. *Soul Free*, their latest single and the most fully realised statement of intent in their catalogue to date, arrives with the quiet confidence of musicians who have spent years learning exactly what they want to say — and, crucially, how to say it.