James Zero arrives from the rust-belt hollows of Gallitzin, Pennsylvania, carrying a record that sounds like grief wearing its Sunday best. "PAST IS PERFECT," the penultimate single from his forthcoming album *early2thou*, is the kind of song that gets under your skin before you've even realised it's started digging.

The moon has always been a presiding symbol of longing — that celestial body just close enough to see clearly and just far enough to remain perpetually out of reach. It is a fitting emblem, then, for a band named The Lunar Keys, who seem constitutionally incapable of reaching for anything less than the absolute and the all-consuming. Their new single, *Everything*, released with characteristic drama on the night of a supermoon, is a record that understands the texture of modern desire with an acuity that most contemporary guitar music has long since abandoned.

The desert has always known things the rest of us have been slow to learn. It knows patience. It knows the particular weight of silence before something enormous arrives. CMD.EXE, the Tucson-based electronic rock project that announced itself so compellingly with *love.language.model*, seems to have absorbed both lessons completely — and *Madam E.V.A.*, the second of two simultaneously released singles heralding the forthcoming album *Red Giant Protocol*, is proof that the band has not merely learned from the desert but has weaponised it.

Phoenix is not a city one typically associates with the kind of brooding, rain-soaked introspection that produces music like this. And yet Allan Jamisen — composer, painter, perpetual reinventor — has somehow conjured a record that feels more at home in the grey half-light of a Copenhagen November than beneath the relentless Arizona sun. "Closing In" is a haunting, beautifully disorienting piece of work, and it announces itself with the quiet confidence of someone who has earned every note through genuine suffering.

Tel Aviv has long occupied a peculiar position in the global musical imagination — simultaneously peripheral and ferociously alive, a city that absorbs everything and digests nothing wholesale. Shani Shavit, who has spent two decades navigating its studio corridors and live stages as bassist, arranger, and collaborator, understands this instinctively. *The Full Picture*, her debut album proper, is not so much a statement of arrival as a reckoning with everything that came before.

One of the more quietly radical acts a musician can commit is to return to their own work and find it unfinished — not flawed, but incomplete, as though the original recording captured only half of a conversation that was always meant to be spoken in more than one voice. Elana Sasson has done precisely that with this reimagined version of *"in between"*, the title track from her critically acclaimed 2025 album, and the result is not a revision so much as a revelation.

Canada has always been awkward territory for the rock and roll myth. Too polite, people say. Too sensible. And then someone like Bill Wood comes along and makes a complete nonsense of that particular received wisdom.

Some records announce themselves with a shove. Others — and these are the rarer, more interesting creatures — arrive like a cold hand laid quietly on your shoulder in a darkened room. *NineFortyFive*, the new single from Irish post-punk artist pMad, belongs emphatically to the second category. It does not demand your attention so much as it seduces it, drawing the listener into a space where the gothic and the genuinely human become, somehow, the same thing.

The finest songwriting always begins with a question the writer cannot answer alone. Johnny Cash ruminated on sin and redemption. Springsteen has spent five decades interrogating the American dream. And now Mark Winters, an aerospace engineer from Texas who moonlights — or perhaps it is the engineering that is the moonlight — as a singer-songwriter, poses his own quiet, essential question: Can I rise? Will my roots hold me down? That it takes a song co-written with his son to surface the question properly tells you everything you need to know about what "Can I Rise" is really doing.

There is a peculiar, almost anthropological pleasure in watching a band attempt the football song and get it right. The genre is a minefield — a graveyard of cynical cash-ins, trite terrace chants dressed up in three chords, records made to shift units in the fortnight before a tournament before being mercifully forgotten. Sombre Chairs, three lads from Brighton who really ought to know better, have walked straight into the explosion and emerged, impossibly, unscathed. *Can't Stop Spinning Around* is, against all reasonable odds, rather brilliant.