There is a particular strain of British rock criticism that has always preferred its anger served loud, its metaphors mixed, and its sincerity worn like a chip on the shoulder rather than a badge on the lapel. It's the tradition that turned three chords into a manifesto and treated the seven-inch single as though it might genuinely change something. Modern Neutrals, five souls out of Blackwood who have spent a handful of years scuffing up the underbelly of South Wales' live circuit, sound like they were raised on that tradition rather than merely taught it. *Beach Theatre*, their latest dispatch, doesn't so much arrive as detonate.

Alan Grice has spent two decades building a quietly remarkable CV — Electric Soft Parade, Foxes!, Octopuses, a debut Fierce Friend album that Stuart Maconie generously called sophistipop — and 'Put You Right' sounds like everything that experience was leading towards: a songwriter finally cutting loose with total confidence in his own instincts.

Debut albums tend to announce themselves with either a whisper or a roar. Kat Kikta opts for neither — she summons a deity instead. *Moldavite*, named after the olive-green tektite forged when a meteorite met the atmosphere and rained down across central Europe, arrives less like a record and more like an incident: alien, slightly molten, impossible to file neatly on a shelf.

Some records arrive trailing a press kit so neat you brace yourself for disappointment: primary school teacher by day, shy soul finds her nerve, falls for the producer, makes an album in the kitchen. It sounds like the pitch a publicist dreams up after three espressos. The remarkable thing about *Ready to Be Found* is that it earns every word of its own backstory, and then quietly outgrows it.

Some records announce themselves with a slammed door; this one saunters in through a side entrance, swirling a martini glass that probably contains rocket fuel. "Alien Jazz Girl" wears its homage on its sleeve and its tongue in its cheek with equal confidence — Andrei British borrows the loose-limbed swagger of the Cantina Band, strips out the slapstick, and lets a lounge singer from somewhere considerably further than Tatooine take the mic.

Gravesend has given the world precisely two things of cultural note: a fortress and, as of this week, a bedroom producer who believes he is the spiritual heir to Ralf Hütter. Whether "Electrophobia" earns him that lineage is the question worth asking, and the answer, delivered with the bluntness Kent deserves, is: not quite, but the wiring is interesting enough that you'll forgive the loose plug sockets.

There is a particular strain of British rock criticism that delights in catching a young band somewhere between aspiration and arrival — close enough to greatness to taste it, far enough away that the taste is mostly ambition. Matt Law's debut single "Made Up Construct" lives squarely in that bracket, and it does so with a swagger that suggests nobody in Strathaven told this lot they were supposed to be modest about it.

Ashley Wolfe has built a career out of refusing to behave herself, and "Say It Again" is the sound of an artist doubling down on that instinct rather than smoothing it out for easier consumption. As Blind Man's Daughter, Wolfe writes, performs, produces and records alone, which in pop music usually means one of two outcomes: a vanity project that collapses under its own indulgence, or a record that finally sounds like the person who made it. This single lands firmly in the second camp.

Mark Heffernan, recording under the name Pocket Lint, has always behaved like a man rummaging through a junk drawer for treasure, and on *Wunderkammer* he finally builds the cabinet to put it in. The conceit is a cabinet of curiosities, each song a glass case, each glass case holding something slightly unsettling that catches the light. It is a tidy organising principle for an artist whose previous work scattered its ideas like loose change, and it suits him. Heffernan has stopped emptying his pockets onto the table and started arranging the contents.

Subtlety was never going to be on the rider, and thank goodness for that. Leather Laces arrive masked, militarised and entirely without irony, and their second full-length swings its riot shield with the conviction of a band who know precisely what they're for. *Intercontinental Ballistic Music* is exactly the album its title promises: a nine-track bombardment delivered with such gleeful precision that it's hard not to surrender to it completely.