Twelve months is a short time to follow a debut with a second album, and a shorter one still to make it better. The Crystal Teardrop have done both. *The Crystal Teardrop Is Forming* arrived last May as a handsome calling card for a band steeped in jangle and Paisley Underground fuzz. *Love You More* is the sound of that band after a year of motorway miles, sweaty stages and nightly proof that the thing works.

Every so often a record turns up that has no business existing, and is all the better for it. *Holding On*, the debut album from The Snow Ponies, was recorded over twelve months by one man in the Waikato, who played every instrument himself. That man is Phil Dean. His CV includes thirty-odd years of gigging, a guard's uniform in *Rings of Power*, a thumping from Jason Momoa in *Aquaman 2*, and a head injury that has left him unable to tolerate bright lights and loud noise. This is not the usual route to a good guitar record, and yet here it is.

Molly Warburton has served her apprenticeship in public. Years of gigging around Lancashire and beyond, from Kendal Calling to The Great Escape, plus a national-competition slot on Lucy Spraggan's tour, have given her the kind of stagecraft that cannot be faked. *Eyes Wide Open*, five songs long and released this September, is that education turned into craft. It sounds like a record by someone who has watched a great many faces in a great many rooms and learned what they need to hear.

Concept albums have a reputation for pomp, for capes and wizards and side-long suites about dragons. Social Treble's debut keeps the ambition and drops the costume. Its hero is a software architect known to his employer as Token AS-1133, and its villain is a customer-service reflex: a wellness system that logs his distress, stamps the time, issues a reference number and sends him back to his task list. Nobody walks down the corridor. The record names this Timestamp Care, and it is the sharpest idea in progressive music for some years.

Synth-pop has a habit of arriving at the party in a rented tuxedo, all sheen and no stories. Segana, the Sydney duo of Blair Djuna and Josh Paltoo, turn up in denim and trainers, sit on a graffiti-scrawled wall, and then make the neon sound dangerous again. *Midnight Masquerade*, their ten-song after-hours confessional, is a record of real swagger and, better still, real nerve.

Heavy music has always been a refuge for people who feel things too loudly for polite company. The best of it doesn't pretend otherwise. It plugs the feeling into a wall of amplifiers and lets it howl. Escape The Box, the Anglo-electro-metal duo of Ziey Kizzy and Dreadf4ll, understand this in their bones, and on *Dead Ends & DayDreams* they have made a mini-album that howls, whispers, and occasionally does both inside the same four minutes.

Sixteen years is a long time for a record to spend in a pile of cuttings. Hamish's second album, the follow-up to 1999's *Picture In My Bag* (produced by Les Penning, best known for his work with Mike Oldfield), went missing, resurfaced, went missing again, and was finally rescued by a lodger. Chris Oldfield, late of Dreadzone, rented the cabin at the bottom of Hamish's Stroud garden and stayed to become the producer the songs had been waiting for. The result is a 15-track collection that sounds like a life's work assembled with love.

A rock band invited into a museum usually behaves like a guest who has been told not to touch anything. FORRM, recorded at New York's Museum of Arts and Design in December 2024, behave like people who have come to move the furniture, and the album that survives the night is bold, patient and quietly extraordinary.

Protest music has a habit of congratulating itself. It stands on a stage, clears its throat and informs the audience of what they already believe, while the rhythm section sits politely in the background doing as it is told. Sheykh Forever has no such manners. *Fire in the Master's House*, the fourteen-track debut-in-all-but-name from the London-based Iraqi-born Mostafa Al, drags the anti-war album onto the dancefloor and refuses to let it leave until everyone has sweated through their conscience.

Most records about recovery are written from the far bank, by someone dry and composed, pointing back at the river. *Only Human* is written from the water. Tallulah Rendall's seventh album, which follows a toxic relationship and the death of her father from Covid, keeps the wet hair and shaking hands in the frame. It is all the more affecting for it.