Now and again a record arrives that seems to have been assembled out of spite for the studio manual. "Almost Nothing," the new single and video from the Kansas solo project NO IDENTITY, is exactly that kind of record: a three-and-a-half-minute act of controlled sabotage, built almost entirely from a handclap that has been beaten, filtered, and dragged through enough distortion pedals to emerge sounding like a bass guitar dredged out of a septic tank. It shouldn't work. It works anyway, and works with a swagger that plenty of better-funded productions never manage.

Occasionally a piece of instrumental music arrives that refuses to explain itself, and thank heavens for that. "Bent Out of Shape," the second single from Peter Manning Robinson's forthcoming album *Excursions*, is one of those rare, disarming things: a piano piece that grins its way through the wreckage rather than wallowing in it.

Healing, as a subject for pop and soul music, tends to arrive either oversold or undercooked: the grand gesture that mistakes volume for depth, or the whispered platitude that mistakes vagueness for tenderness. Keesha Blair's "Peaceful Power" manages the considerably harder trick of sounding both intimate and assured, a record that treats self-acceptance not as a slogan to be draped over a chorus but as a genuine emotional architecture, built line by line and held together by a voice that never once raises itself to prove a point.

Twenty years is a long time to sit on a story, and longer still to sit on a chorus. JT Catalano has done both, and the wait shows in the best possible way: "Felon Angels" arrives not as a debut single trying to prove something, but as a reckoning that has already proved itself, over and over, in a cell, on a bunk, in the space between a chess piece and a clenched fist.

Down South Pepper Band hail from Kvalsund, a speck of a village deep in Norway's Arctic north, and yet nothing about "Shady Road" sounds like it was written under the midnight sun. This is dust-bowl storytelling with a Nordic postmark, and it works precisely because the band refuses to treat that contradiction as a gimmick. Instead, they lean into the outlaw country tradition with the conviction of players who have logged their hours studying the greats and figured out how to make the idiom their own.

Something has shifted in The Pixel Rain's world, and you can hear it in the first thirty seconds of "Last." The Southeast London project, born from a self-titled 2023 debut EP and quietly building a reputation on industrial rhythm and synthetic dread, has finally let the guitars off the leash. The result is the most confident thing Áron Siegler has put his name to yet — a single that snarls where The Pixel Rain's earlier work merely hummed.

There is a particular species of R&B record that arrives not to seduce you, but to shake you gently by the shoulders and remind you that you are, in fact, alive. ShanDaria's "Livin'" belongs unmistakably to that lineage, and it announces itself with the unhurried confidence of an artist who has waited long enough to know exactly what she wants to say.

Grief has a habit of arriving dressed for a party it was never invited to, and John Miller understands this better than most. "Sexy Blueberry," his new single out of Paris, doesn't so much announce heartbreak as let it walk in wearing champagne on its breath and mascara already smudged. The title alone tells you everything about the record's method: sweetness stitched to bruising, seduction laced with rot at the edges.

There is a particular kind of music writing — born somewhere between the inkstained fervour of the late-seventies weeklies and the wide-eyed generosity of the blogosphere at its best — that knows a small, strange, brilliant thing when it hears one. "Parlin Papito," the solo debut from Bromsen frontman Karlo Bromsen, is exactly that kind of thing: a record so disarmingly modest in its ambitions that it sneaks past your critical faculties entirely, and by the time you've noticed what's happened, you're already three plays deep and grinning like an idiot.

Every so often a record arrives that refuses to be filed under the usual headings. "The Real Yuee" is one of those. On paper it reads like a straightforward hip-hop single with an accompanying video, courtesy of a New Haven newcomer with a producer credit for Rico Got That Fye and studio time booked at James Grant's QVR. On the strength of what actually plays through the speakers, it is something far stranger and more affecting: a document of a young man cataloguing his own unravelling, weeks before circumstance would rewrite the terms of his life entirely.