Tokyo's Aco Takenaka has delivered something genuinely arresting with *Ancient Seeds*, her third album and most ambitious statement to date. Working alongside composer Toshiyuki O'mori—known primarily for his anime and video game scores—Takenaka has crafted a collection that refuses the easy categorisations of world music or New Age, instead positioning itself as a serious meditation on the preservation and reanimation of endangered vocal traditions.

D. West's *Cathedrals Beneath the Black Mountain* arrives as a meditation rather than a manifesto, its instrumental architecture built from fingerpicked steel and pregnant silences. Released through Liverpool's Hollow Gesture Records—a label devoted to primitive and instrumental guitar works—this collection occupies territory where Bert Jansch's modal explorations meet the more austere corners of American primitive guitar, yet it resists easy categorization with a peculiar stubbornness.

Sydney-based artist Cassy Judy arrives with her latest release bearing the scars and celebrations of a life lived loudly. "The Cassy Judy Mixtape" represents a curious departure for an artist known primarily for her raucous live performances—those sold-out Sydney Comedy Festival shows where props proliferate and singalongs are mandatory. Here, working with longtime producer Derek J Turner at Quarterpipe Studios in Gymea Bay, she trades some of that theatrical irreverence for a more introspective register, though her fundamental refusal to be pigeonholed remains intact.

There's a particular brand of madness required to form a rock band solely to soundtrack your own film. That Ettecon—the husband-and-wife production team of Kevin and Juliette Short—have not only attempted this feat but emerged with a genuinely compelling record speaks volumes about their commitment to creative authenticity over commercial expedience.

The mystery surrounding Jaan feels less like affectation and more like necessity. This anonymous collective—or singular entity, the press notes coyly refuse to clarify—operates across continents with the restlessness of someone perpetually between destinations, and *Baghali* bears the dust and dislocation of that itinerant existence. Compiled from recordings made during a year spent navigating snowstorms, cancelled flights, and abandoned spaces stretching from Greenland to the Middle East, the album functions as both travelogue and fever dream, a collage of moments that refuse easy categorization.

There's something refreshingly unpretentious about David Palfreyman's latest offering, *Opening Time for the Battered*. The title alone suggests a pub-rock earthiness, a nod to the bruised and the weary seeking solace in song. Yet what Palfreyman delivers transcends such modest implications, presenting instead a richly textured album that draws from rock, folk, alternative, and pop traditions with the confidence of a seasoned craftsman who's earned his stripes the hard way.

The Bretons have always possessed a peculiar gift for melancholy, that Celtic strain of wistfulness that seeps through the bones like Atlantic fog. Johann Le Roux and his companions in Steel & Velvet understand this instinctively, and on *People Just Float*, they've fashioned six songs into a narrative as spare and haunting as the landscape they inhabit.

Cody Carlyle and Travis Jordan have spent three decades refining their musical partnership, and with *A Carnival of Reveries*, they've created something genuinely unsettling and magnificent. Released on the appropriately macabre date of October 31st, 2025, this isn't music for passive listening; it demands attention, lurking in shadows and dragging you through its murky, intoxicating world whether you're prepared or not.

Bror Lynge's experimental electronic persona Ani Even arrives with the force of a ritual incantation made flesh. Born from equal parts frustration and love, this Copenhagen-based project channels the artist's North Atlantic heritage—Greenland, Faroe Islands, Denmark—into eleven tracks of primal electronic intensity. The result occupies a singular space between ancestral memory and dystopian futurity, where Fever Ray's icy menace meets Wardruna's pagan solemnity, filtered through the kind of uncompromising sonic architecture that recalls Arca at her most confrontational.

Birmingham's Rebecca Downes has spent the better part of a decade carving out her territory in British blues-rock, and this sixth studio album arrives with the confidence of an artist who knows exactly what she's doing. *A Storm Is Coming* doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it doesn't need to—Downes and her long-time collaborator Steve Birkett have refined their craft to the point where every punch lands precisely where intended.