Kim Cameron has done something delightfully daft and completely disarming: she has built a children's dance album around the ghosts of modern art. *Who Drew That?* takes Dalí, Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Schulz, Chuck Jones, the graffiti pioneer Barbara 62, and the painter-survivor Gershon Iskowitz, and drags them all onto a sweaty, glow-stick-lit dancefloor built for toddlers and their exhausted parents. It sounds like a fever dream cooked up by a music supervisor who'd spent too long in a gallery gift shop. It also, somehow, works beautifully.

Carrie Schoenfeld has never been much interested in tidy answers, and *Invisible (Four Ways)* confirms it with something close to gleeful stubbornness. Rather than hand over a single, on the release, one composition gets split into four separate confessions — Synth-Pop, Lo-Fi, Cinematic, Indie — each one wearing the same lyrics like a different coat.

Jacob Klein has spent the past few years accumulating grief the way other people accumulate frequent flyer miles, and on *DOGSTAR 1* he finally cashes it all in. This is a record built from the wreckage of a very specific, very brutal stretch of one man's life — a dying dog, a dissolved decade-long relationship, a flood that swallowed his adopted city whole — and yet it never once curdles into misery tourism. That's the trick of it. Grief albums are two a penny; ones that actually earn their catharsis are rarer than a clear night sky over Asheville.

Independent pop records rarely arrive with this much self-possession. Dorian, already carrying more than two million streams into this release without the machinery of a major label behind him, has used that freedom wisely: *RECONNECTED* sounds like an artist who has stopped asking permission and started trusting his own instincts.

A bedroom in Orange County has produced nine albums now, and on the ninth, something loosens. Guitars muscle their way to the front of the mix, elbowing the keyboards that once ran this operation unchallenged, and the result is a record that sounds less like a solitary hobbyist tinkering after midnight and more like a man finally letting the noise in his head off the leash.

Loss makes strange architects. It tears down whatever you thought you'd built and leaves you standing in the rubble, wondering what to do with your hands. On their third record, Litvar's Rex Thurstan picks through that rubble with a Gibson J-45 and something like tenderness, and the result is the most persuasive thing this band has committed to tape.

Four musicians who met over a decade ago in Seattle have finally made the record their whole career seemed to be circling. *Black Whole* is the sound of a band refusing to be pinned down, and refusing beautifully.

Sam George has spent his career building cathedrals out of concept — an AI apocalypse rendered as a four-movement metal symphony, a collaboration with video-game demons that somehow won him Best Producer at the Elite Music Awards. Salt & Static is the opposite gesture: six tracks, one man, and nothing to hide behind. It's the sound of an architect setting down his blueprints and picking up a scalpel instead.

Tre Nash & Jenesis have done something quietly radical with "In Tandem": they've made a breakup record and a love letter simultaneously, and somehow neither cancels the other out.

Debut albums usually arrive apologetic, hedging their bets, unsure whether they're a mission statement or a demo tape with delusions of grandeur. Jeremy, a singer-songwriter working alone from a home studio in Banbury, has skipped that stage of adolescence entirely. Side One of "Scenes from a Well Worn Path" — six tracks, the first instalment of a larger project that will eventually span four sides — lands fully formed, confident enough in its own skin to open with a song about the exhaustion of performing a version of yourself for other people's comfort.