Consider the following thought experiment. Take Mozart — and teach him to play a chainsaw. Take Kurt Cobain — and have him get addicted to a sampler. Take the softest sound you can catch from an exploding amplifier, and turn it into a ballad. Take Jimi Hendrix, and have him come up with an instrument to play the noise of a much harsher era. If any of those propositions excite rather than alarm you, then Shortout Kid may be precisely the artist you have been waiting for. If they alarm you, he may be the artist you most need.

**Oxford's most precocious eighteen-year-old arrives fully formed, armed with jazz chords, a saxophone, and the audacity to mean every single word.** The debut album is, by tradition, the most treacherous of all musical formats. Too raw and you're dismissed as unfinished. Too polished and you're accused of corporate interference. Bethany Lyn, an Oxford teenager who wrote, produced, mixed, mastered and largely performed this entire eleven-track record herself, has somehow avoided both pitfalls — not through compromise, but through the kind of self-possession that most artists spend a decade trying to fake.

Some singles announce themselves. Others detonate. "Airspace," the lead single from PJ Abrol's *The Good Static*, belongs firmly in the second category — a track that opens its doors with the quiet confidence of someone who already knows they've won the argument before you've even sat down.

Some songs refuse to stay buried. They haunt the bands that made them, tugging at sleeves during soundchecks, whispering from the back of rehearsal rooms, demanding to be reconsidered. Marcus Gooda and his Bristol outfit The Yacht Club know this particular ghost intimately — "The Greatest Misadventure" has followed them for years, beloved and abandoned in equal measure, a song they apparently loved but, by their own admission, eventually forgot how to play. The anniversary edition, then, is less a reissue than an exhumation. And what they've pulled from the ground is still breathing.

There is a particular kind of album that can only be made by someone who has waited too long to make it. Not through laziness or indifference, but through the accumulation of lived experience — the sort that cannot be rushed, cannot be faked, and absolutely cannot be manufactured by an algorithm. *Resonance*, the long-gestating full-length from Greek-born, UK-based producer Alimba, is precisely that record. Delayed by the unglamorous machinery of real life — immigration, employment, the grinding practicalities of building an existence in a foreign country — it arrives in early 2026 not merely as an album, but as a document of survival.

Gothic metal has always been music that takes itself seriously — sometimes too seriously, collapsing under the weight of its own funereal grandeur. The genre is littered with the wreckage of projects that mistook darkness for depth and cathedral reverb for emotional truth. Cries of Redemption, the singular vehicle of Ed Silva, is a different proposition entirely. And *What Lies Beneath*, as interpreted by Argentine opera vocalist Martina Questa, makes the case with considerable force.

Pop-rock has long been the genre most willing to make a fool of itself in the service of emotional honesty, and Hailey Hermida, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter who began her craft at thirteen during the hollow quiet of a pandemic, understands this better than most of her contemporaries. Her new single "17" is not a polished meditation on adolescence. It is a scream recorded the day after a fight, a week before her eighteenth birthday, and it sounds exactly like that — raw, slightly dangerous, and absolutely alive.

Etta Heartfield's debut single is not a confession. It is something altogether more commanding — a reckoning rendered in sound, set to haunt you long after the last note dissolves.

Nobody asked Bristol to save the dancefloor. And yet here we are. Junonuno — the intergalactic pop project of Nuno and DJ Juno — have arrived with "Feeling Good," a track that does precisely what it promises and refuses, loudly, to apologise for it. Pop music about joy is the oldest game going, but pulling it off without condescension or cliché remains as difficult as ever. The fact that this duo manage it with such effortless swagger says rather a lot about the quality of what they've cooked up.

Grief, as any seasoned listener knows, rarely announces itself with a brass band. More often it arrives quietly, on a Tuesday morning, wearing the face of someone you used to love. State of Us, Bergen's quietly industrious indie pop outfit, understand this particular species of melancholy better than most acts currently occupying the melodic pop rock territory. "Adore," their new single, doesn't mourn. It remembers. And that distinction — subtle as the difference between rain and the smell of rain — is precisely what elevates this track above the considerable pile of breakup-adjacent songs cluttering streaming platforms this season.