**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.

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.

Nine thousand miles is a long way to travel to make a record. It is longer still as a unit of emotional distance — the gulf between who you were and who the city is slowly, insistently remaking you into. Susan Style, London-based and Taipei-born, has made that crossing the explicit subject of her debut album, and the remarkable thing is that she has done so without a single moment of self-pity. Heartbreak, on this seven-track collection, is recast not as wound but as aperture. Break the heart wide enough, the logic runs, and the whole world rushes in.

**There's a particular kind of English melancholy that no one has ever quite bottled properly. Not the miserabilism of Morrissey, too theatrical and self-regarding. Not the kitchen-sink grimness of early Pulp, too arch. Something quieter. Something that smells of damp wool and instant coffee and a window left open onto a grey-skied garden that you somehow love anyway. Johnno Casson, the Essex troubadour who records under the name Snippet, has been circling this feeling for thirty-odd years. On *Soft Lad*, he finally catches it.**

**The American desert has always been fertile ground for the imagination — vast, indifferent, ancient. Jana Pochop has made it her instrument.** Released on the kind of date that feels almost cosmically deliberate — the 25th of March, the very cusp of spring — *Powerlines* is the Albuquerque singer-songwriter's most audacious statement yet, a seven-track record that collapses the distance between place and person, between landscape and lyric, until the two become indistinguishable. This is music that smells of red earth and cold desert night.

Ed Silva has never made music for you. He has made it, apparently, for the castaways — the bruised, the misfits, those who arrive late to every party and leave early. With *Patterns*, the latest dispatch from his long-running project Cries of Redemption, he makes a record that sounds precisely like that constituency feels: half-formed memories alchemised into something rawer and more alive than polished intention ever manages.

Nick Page — Count Dubulah to those who knew his work through Transglobal Underground and a sprawling catalogue of over 200 recordings — died in May 2021 with unfinished business. Not the anxious, unresolved kind: the joyful, purposeful kind. He was, by all accounts, always making music right up until the end, and *Dub Will Keep Us Together*, completed posthumously by his life partner Cristina Morán (Dubulette) and collaborator Toby Mills, carries none of the valedictory gloom one might expect from an album conceived under such circumstances. It sounds, rather defiantly, like a party to which death was not invited.

There is a particular kind of longing that has no clean translation in English. The Portuguese have *saudade*. The Welsh have *hiraeth*. Odd Little Thrills — a Prague-based dreampop duo whose members hail from Istanbul and Arkansas — seem to have built a whole sonic architecture around exactly that feeling, a feeling the rest of us have been fumbling to name for years. On *There Was, There Wasn't*, their quietly stunning debut EP, they don't bother naming it. They simply play it back to you, slow and close, like a home video you don't remember making.

John, the singular force behind the For You Brother project, has spent the better part of three decades quietly filling notebooks and four-track cassettes with songs that the world, through a combination of bad luck and industry indifference, has conspicuously failed to hear. *Don't You Want Me* is his corrective — a bold, unhurried reassertion that the music always existed, always had worth, and will not be silenced by the bureaucratic whims of a distribution platform with the aesthetic sensitivity of a tax return.

The curriculum vitae of David Penn reads like a lost chapter from the golden book of American jazz apprenticeship. Mainly self-taught, he sharpened his craft under the tutelage of the great Cecil McBee, cut his teeth alongside Cecil Bridgewater and Charlie Persip, and — perhaps most formatively — spent crucial seasons on the road with the inimitable Betty Carter. That last association alone would distinguish a lesser musician; for Penn, it appears to have instilled something close to a philosophy. Carter, famously, had no patience for the merely decorative. She demanded that every note justify its presence. Listening to *Next Step*, the lessons have evidently taken root.