**Let us begin with the venue, because the venue matters.** The Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone is not a room that flatters the mediocre. Renzo Piano's magnificent complex on the Viale Pietro de Coubertin holds up to 2,800 souls and carries with it the gravitational weight of Morricone's own name — a building that exists, architecturally and spiritually, as a monument to the very highest standards of live musical craft. Bands do not merely play the Auditorium; they audition before it. Which makes the sold-out triumph of Mardi Gras at the Teatro Studio Borgna all the more remarkable, and all the more worthy of serious consideration.

**By the time the opening chord lands, you already know exactly what kind of people made this record. And you want to be their friend immediately.** Luke Mortimore and James Mcrea — operating under the gloriously deadpan banner of PILL-BOX — have arrived with the sort of debut single that makes you wonder why anyone bothers writing anything other than post-punk kitchen-sink comedy. *Cost Of Living* is three minutes or so of Berkshire-brewed agitation, a lovingly sarcastic dispatch from the frontline of modern British mediocrity, and it is, frankly, a bit of a triumph.

Few artists dare to excavate the truly undefended territories of the self — not the performative wounds so fashionable in contemporary folk, but the kind of raw, pre-verbal terror that lodges itself in the body before language has a chance to explain it away. With *Tapestry*, Fish And Scale — the artist name under which German-born Roland Wälzlein has quietly built one of the more compelling independent folk catalogues of recent years — does precisely that, and the results are quietly, stubbornly extraordinary.

Rock criticism has always had a complicated relationship with the live recording. The studio album is a controlled argument; the live document is a confession. Microphones catch what the mixing desk cannot — the breath before a difficult line, the slight hesitation of a musician finding something unexpected in familiar material, the audience's silence, which is its own kind of instrument. The video for "With Who," filmed at THEARC in Washington DC on the 28th of February, understands all of this instinctively. It does not dress itself up. It does not need to.

**If pop music has a responsibility — and the best of it always has — it is to take the unsayable and make it undeniable. barDe, on this gloriously impertinent debut single, does exactly that.**

The Ancient Unknown arrive with a chip on their shoulder and a grievance worth nursing. 'Separated', the second single from a debut album recorded at Steel City Studios — the Sheffield facility responsible for shaping the sonic architecture of Bring Me The Horizon, among others — is a song born of fury. Not the performative, market-tested fury of a band chasing algorithmic approval, but the kind that keeps you awake at three in the morning composing arguments to no one.

Pop music, at its most honest, has always been about one thing: the brutal, beautiful, occasionally humiliating experience of wanting someone who may or may not want you back. Mandybom knows this. She has built her entire artistic identity around that knowledge, and on *Dream It, Spell It, Feel It*, she distils it into something close to a minor masterpiece of modern longing.

*There are songs that arrive like a text message at 2am — you weren't expecting it, you're not sure what it means, but you cannot look away.* Aurealis understands this. The studio project, which has made something of a quiet vocation out of mapping the emotional fault lines where human connection trembles and shifts, returns with "Shadow of a Doubt" — a single that does something genuinely difficult in contemporary pop: it makes ambivalence feel urgent.

Eugene Smozhevsky has done something rather sly. He has made a virtue of malfunction — and pulled it off with the quiet conviction of someone who never doubted it would work.

Ivor van Beek has never been a man easily categorised, and "Eyeball" — the first foray from Non-Divine's long-gestating second album *Alters* — makes abundantly clear that seven years of silence has only sharpened his appetite for controlled chaos. The Dutch musician, sole surviving member of a band that once toured Europe with Flotsam and Jetsam and shared stages with Testament and Queensrÿche, has returned not with a statement of relief, but a statement of intent. And it is a disquieting one.