Costa Rica is not, on paper, a natural home for Galician folk music. And yet Terra Nai — Diego Alfaro on voice, gaita and acoustic guitar, Keith Guerrero on violin and illustration — have spent the past three years proving that geography is no obstacle to devotion. Their reading of "Foliada de Berducido," the traditional tune from the Galician village of Berducido best known through Milladoiro's celebrated 1980s arrangement, arrives as a small triumph of cross-continental fidelity: a Costa Rican duo bottling the spirit of northwestern Spain and somehow losing none of the original's mist and mischief in transit.

Psychedelic jazz-rock fusion is a genre tag that tends to promise more than it delivers, a shorthand for noodling indulgence dressed up in kaftans and reverb. Dan Webb, mercifully, ignores the tag entirely and just gets on with the business of making something genuinely strange and genuinely good.

Rock and roll doesn't need reinventing this year — not when a BC guitar man with two decades of mileage under his belt can plug in, count off, and remind everyone why the format never needed fixing in the first place. *Living the Dream Right Now* is Steve Montgomery's ninth studio outing under the SkipRock Music banner, and it lands like a bar-room encore: sweaty, grinning, and utterly unbothered by fashion.

Folk-rock built for optimists doesn't come along often enough, and when it does, it tends to arrive wrapped in irony, as if genuine cheerfulness were somehow embarrassing. Paul Martin refuses that particular hedge. On "A Beautiful Thing," the New Zealand songwriter commits fully to warmth, and the record is all the sturdier for it.

Some records announce a band. Others confess one. *Wicked Din*, the debut full-length from Knoxville's ChameleouS, does both at once, and it does so with a patience that younger acts simply do not possess — because, as it turns out, this band isn't young at all. Frontman Mac Bartine has been sitting on these eight songs since the late nineties, and you can hear the sediment. This is music that has been rained on, dried out, rewritten, and rained on again. It has weather in it.

Composers who take on "Greensleeves" invite an unenviable comparison: the tune has been arranged, pillaged, sentimentalised and simplified so thoroughly across four centuries that fresh treatment risks sounding either reverent to the point of dullness or clever to the point of self-parody. Peter Xifaras avoids both traps with a confidence that borders on cheek. Rather than treating the melody as a museum piece to be dusted off and displayed, he dismantles it, scatters the fragments across eight movements, and lets a genuine narrative — courtship, hesitation, longing, refusal — carry the listening experience from start to finish.

A debut single that arrives already knowing what it wants to be is a rarer thing than the industry likes to admit, and "In It Together" carries itself with exactly that kind of quiet certainty. Behind the name sit two musicians, Amie Penwell and Vicente Rodriguez, who met nine years ago at a benefit concert and only recently decided to make something together rather than in service of somebody else's vision. Penwell had already released a full album and an EP through the conventional studio route, chasing a producer's clock. Rodriguez had spent years as a session drummer, most notably behind Chuck Prophet, paid to find the fastest right answer rather than the truest one. What they've built together sounds like two people finally allowed to work at their own pace, and it shows.

Cobbs Creek gets a proper song this month, and Philadelphia's West Side finally has the chronicler it deserves. DAPS arrives on "Down wit dat (cold killa)" sounding less like a newcomer angling for attention and more like a man settling an old score with his own neighbourhood — writing it down before anyone else gets the chance to flatten it into cliché.

Trois-Rivières isn't exactly punk rock's ancestral home, but Jim Giguère and his band of scarred romantics have spent a decade proving that geography means nothing when the songs are honest enough. *A New Frame of Mind* arrives not as a victory lap but as a confession booth with a Marshall stack bolted to the door, and it's the finest thing this outfit has committed to tape.

There is a particular kind of quiet that only a solo guitarist can conjure, and Martin Lloyd Howard has bottled it whole on "Highland Mist." This is not music that shouts for your attention; it insinuates itself, the way fog creeps down a glen before you've quite registered that the light has changed. From the opening bars, you sense you're in the hands of a player who has spent a lifetime with wood and string — and indeed you are: Howard trained classically before wandering, magpie-like, through folk, blues and rock, picking up textures from Bream's precision, Simpson's earthiness, and a dash of the acoustic mysticism Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore reserved for their quieter, campfire-adjacent moments.