The ocean has always been rock music's most reliable accomplice — vast enough to absorb any emotional projection, indifferent enough to reflect it straight back. M3G knows this, and on De-Anchored she makes the metaphor work not through sentimentality but through sheer sonic intelligence. This is a record about losing yourself, and it genuinely sounds like it.

Joseph Campbell spent the better part of his career arguing that every story worth telling is, at its marrow, the same story. The call. The refusal. The crossing of the threshold. The dragon. The return. He called it the monomyth, and he was right in the way that only the most irritatingly perceptive thinkers ever are — right enough that you can't unsee it once you've been shown, right enough that it has soaked into every corner of human expression from Homer to *The Lion King*. PRTLND — the project of Mathieu, a Frenchman who has made Dublin his proving ground — has now added his name to that long, strange lineage, and he has done so with a confidence that borders on the audacious.

The most honest thing a love song can do is admit it cannot do the thing it set out to do. That paradox sits at the very centre of Temper Lake's quietly devastating debut single, a piece of music that understands the geometry of tenderness — how it bends inward, resists performance, and dissolves at the exact moment you try to hold it still long enough to describe it.

**Some records announce themselves. Others detonate. "Heads on Fire," the blazing centrepiece of Ava Valianti's sophomore EP, belongs emphatically to the second category.**

Matt DeAngelis arrives not quietly. The New Jersey singer-songwriter — a veteran of casino stages, beach bars, and the kind of American circuit that breeds either resilience or resignation — plants his flag with "Helpless To The Fire," a single that announces itself with the confidence of a man who has been waiting, patiently and purposefully, for precisely this moment. And goodness, does it have something to say.

Let's get one thing straight from the off: the name is a provocation. adequate. Lowercase, deliberately modest, almost aggressively self-deprecating — the kind of title you choose when you know full well the music beneath it is anything but. It's the oldest trick in the rock and roll handbook, the shrug that conceals a clenched fist, and on the evidence of debut single "go," these smelly Wexford grungers — their words, worn like a badge of considerable honour — are playing the long game with considerable intelligence.

Some records arrive quietly. They slip beneath the door like a note slid under a hotel room at midnight — no fanfare, no machinery, just the thing itself. Daniel Trigger's comeback single 'Alone Tonight' is precisely that kind of record: unhurried, unfashionable, and almost defiantly itself. Which, depending on your appetite for melodic hard rock delivered with genuine conviction, is either the best news you've heard all year, or confirmation that certain corners of the musical universe remain gloriously immune to trend.

Somewhere between the cracked neon of a Route 66 dive bar and the clean severity of a desert midnight, Lancaster Rayne has built himself a peculiar and rather wonderful problem. He makes country music that sounds like it genuinely means something — and he does it entirely alone, in a private studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with no Nashville cheque to cash and nobody to answer to. The gall of it.

On the night of October 26th, 1999, a twenty-five-year-old railway worker named Małgorzata Ż. was murdered at the KD–1 signal box in the Silesian town of Czerwionka-Leszczyny. No arrest was ever made. No conviction, no closure, no name pinned to the act. The case calcified into one of those silences that provincial towns carry like a stone in the chest — present always, spoken of rarely. Twenty-six years on, a documentary and now this five-track EP have broken that silence with something approaching the force of a fist through glass.

Raw Soul — the nom de guerre of Vancouver-based hip-hop artist and practicing barrister Rawad — arrives not with a thunderclap but with the measured confidence of a man who has learned, through considerable difficulty, to trust his own counsel. *Still High…*, his nine-track original album released on the 12th of May, is the document of a mind that has survived its own turbulence and chosen, rather defiantly, to be grateful about it. That's a harder emotional register to pull off than most rappers attempt. Gratitude, after all, doesn't sell mixtapes. Raw Soul doesn't appear to care.