Start with the sleeve. A woman in sunglasses and scarlet lipstick sits beside a silver-moustached gent in a bottle-green suit, who pours red wine with the unhurried air of a man who has never been told to hurry. A tiny radio mast is stamped on the bottle. It looks like a Riviera holiday snap from a parallel 1978, and the music inside lives up to it.

A debut album that opens with a title like this one is either a provocation or a pratfall. Pridhvi Sunain Zoro, a Santa Monica-based singer-songwriter, composer and producer, has made something rarer: a record that wears a slogan lifted from the loudest corner of American politics and quietly turns it inside out. Where the acronym usually shouts, Zoro asks what it would take for a country to feel like a community again, then spends nine songs working toward an answer.

A Glaswegian who has spent two decades in Sweden occupies a peculiar position: too Scottish to be Swedish, too Swedish to be Scottish, and therefore perfectly placed to notice what the locals no longer see. Alastair Macduff, now based in Gothenburg, has spent that time looking at the abandoned houses that dot the Swedish landscape, the *ödehus*, with their sagging roofs and curtains left to rot. *Kåtebol*, his first solo album, is what came back from the looking. It is a small marvel, and it is 35 minutes long, which makes it a rarity in itself.

Start with the admission, because the label does: Onyx is an AI artist. Words, arrangements, mixing decisions and creative direction are human; the voice and the visuals are generated. Novaix stamps this on every release, and the honesty clears the air. Nobody is being fooled, so the question becomes whether the music is any good. On *CLOSE*, it is better than good. It is the most coherent debut statement from a synthetic performer so far, and it would be a sharp record whatever its provenance.

Plenty of musicians claim to heal. Few arrive with a Master's in jazz from Rome's Conservatorio Santa Cecilia, fifteen years restoring double basses, and the patience to build a seven-movement suite around the body's energy centres. Andrea Romanazzo, who records as Aner Andros, is one of the few. His debut is a serious, handsomely made piece of work. It asks to be heard from first bar to last, and it rewards anyone who obliges.

Ask Al Swainger what his music is and he will, with a bassist's patience, decline to tell you. The album's liner notes confess that the question is the hardest one he faces, and that every tidy answer shaves off the strange, fragile and unresolved parts that made the work worth doing. *Impure Imagination*, the third record from his Pointless Beauty project, is the sound of a man refusing to be filed. That refusal could be tiresome in lesser hands. Here it is exhilarating.

There is a particular kind of record that arrives in the dead of a Scandinavian winter and makes you feel, briefly and thrillingly, that the walls of your own house are thinner than you thought. *WORLD-ENDING FIRE*, the self-titled debut from the Uppsala duo of the same name, is one of those records. It is also, as it happens, one of the most quietly extraordinary things to come out of the Swedish forest in years.

Bristol has a long record of producing music that sounds as though it were made in a damp basement by someone who has seen through everything. Lucian Lacewing makes his in a bedroom, a smaller room with a better view of the ceiling, and this four-track mini-album is the sound of a man lying on his back and watching the plaster turn into weather.

Anthony Wayne Langston has chosen a stage name that sounds like a hedgerow philosopher, and the record behind it has the same unhurried, weathered wisdom. *Still, the World*, ten songs released on April Fools' Day with no foolery in sight, is the work of a Californian who understands that a good melody needs no apology and that a plain feeling, plainly sung, can hit harder than any amount of cleverness.

Debut albums usually arrive with a manifesto under one arm. *Cinder of a Fading Dream* arrives with a box of charred keepsakes. Chosen Undead, five musicians from Hainburg who only became a band in 2024, have built their first record from the wreckage of an earlier project and an album that never got to exist. They sifted the ashes, kept what still glowed, and bolted it to new material. The result is gloriously, unapologetically heavy, and more emotionally literate than the genre usually bothers to be.