British music criticism has always reserved a particular reverence for the American singer who operates entirely outside the machinery — the one who builds her own house, furnishes it on her own terms, and then invites you inside without apology. MILYAM, performing under her own MILYAM EMPIRE imprint, is precisely that kind of artist. And *Intimacy*, her latest single, is the kind of record that makes you sit very still and reconsider whatever you were planning to do with the next four minutes of your life.

**The Miami-based songwriter steps boldly sideways, and the view from the edge is rather magnificent.** Kim Cameron has spent the better part of her career doing what the dance floor demands of her: moving forward, keeping the beat, never stopping long enough to breathe. Three Billboard chart entries will do that to a person. So it says something about the particular confidence — or perhaps the particular restlessness — of a truly gifted songwriter that she would choose this moment, at the height of her creative currency, to stop the pounding kick drum and simply… exhale.

*The Massachusetts teenager turns a party into a philosophical crisis, and somehow makes it sound like the most natural thing in the world.* Sixteen is a peculiar age to be writing about the tyranny of time. Most songwriters spend their teenage years cataloguing first kisses and Friday nights, saving their existential reckoning for the back half of their twenties, when the hangovers last three days and the career hasn't quite materialised. Ava Valianti, apparently, did not receive that particular memo.

**By the time A Floor Below have finished with you, you will not be entirely sure which side of the walls you are on. That is precisely the point.** The concept album has always been a dangerous gamble — a format littered with the wreckage of bands who confused ambition for architecture. *The Asylum*, the latest offering from A Floor Below, does something rather more interesting than merely avoid that fate: it makes the very concept of confinement feel liberating. This is a record that locks you in a room and hands you the key, then dares you to decide whether you actually want to leave.

The British music press has always reserved its sharpest knives for the moment a voice cuts through the noise and demands to be heard on its own terms. Katie Belle, with *People Pleaser*, reminds us precisely why that attention is warranted. This is not a single that shuffles apologetically into the room. It kicks the door in.

The title is a dare. *Enough.* Not a question, not a plea — a full stop dropped into the middle of a song that refuses to behave like one. Thiago Barlanza, the Brazilian producer behind We As Gods, has built his project on a philosophy of deliberate restraint, and with this latest single he tests that philosophy to its limits, pressing hard against the point at which withholding becomes its own form of excess.

**There are bands that evolve, and bands that merely change their wardrobe. The Youngers, bless them, have done something considerably braver: they have dreamed.** Twenty-six years is a long time to be anyone, let alone a band. It is long enough to outlast three record labels, two cultural reckonings with Americana, one pandemic, and the collective patience of every A&R man who ever told you that roots music was "having a moment." The Youngers have been having their *own* moment since 1999, quietly accumulating the kind of devoted following that doesn't trend on social media but does turn up in the rain, every single time. So when a band of such longevity walks into Wilco's Loft in Chicago, hands the desk over to Tom Schick — a producer of considerable instinct whose credits include Wilco themselves and the immortal Mavis Staples — and emerges with something called *Dreaming*, you pay attention. You sit down. You turn the bloody thing up.

British music criticism has always had a particular weakness for the confessional — for the raw nerve laid bare beneath the studio polish, for the moment when artifice collapses and something genuinely human comes tumbling through the speakers. radicalove, the Los Angeles-based artist born of Bay Area roots and hard-won reinvention, delivers precisely that with *Higher Power*, a single of such brazen emotional ambition that one almost forgives it for wearing its heart not merely on its sleeve but emblazoned across its chest in forty-foot neon.

Somewhere between the gamelan-haunted fever dreams of their earlier work and whatever unholy compulsion drove Michael van Gore to construct an electric violin from raw components in what one imagines was a sweat-damp Jakarta workshop, Anatomy of the Heads have produced something genuinely, stubbornly difficult to dismiss. *Unholy Spirits Light Divine* is a record that should not work. It is the product of musicians deliberately playing instruments they cannot fully master, operating within a conceptual framework so deliriously specific — Southeast Asian vampires making a pilgrimage to Romania to inflict what the band cheerfully terms "Eastern cruelty" upon unsuspecting peasants — that it risks collapsing entirely under the weight of its own mythology. It does not collapse. It broods. It lurks. It occasionally makes the hairs on the back of your neck perform duties they did not volunteer for.

Soft as Hell — the project of a Brighton-based one-person operation with a cinematic imagination operating well above its budget — arrives with "I'd Rather Fly" like a tumbleweed rolling through a town that didn't know it needed visiting. This is music for the wide shot, for the long horizon, for the slow zoom onto a squinting eye beneath a hat brim. And yet, crucially, it never quite lets you get comfortable with that reading. Just when you think you've pinned it to the spaghetti western corkboard, the thing pivots and starts to groove in a manner that Ennio Morricone, God rest him, would have found genuinely perplexing and possibly magnificent.