*The Wheel Workers prove that the most honest music is made before anyone thinks to polish it.* Houston, Texas has never quite received its due as a crucible of American rock. The city sits awkwardly between the mythologised grit of New York and the sun-baked cool of Los Angeles, perpetually overlooked by the tastemakers who prefer their geography to come with a ready-made narrative. The Wheel Workers, then, are precisely the sort of band that serious listeners deserve to discover: two decades deep into a career built on genuine artistic conviction, releasing a live EP recorded in an attic — not as a gimmick, not as a stopgap — but as a statement of radical transparency.

Jung Jaemin does not arrive asking for your attention. He is not the kind of artist who announces himself with the anxious percussion of someone desperate to be heard above the noise. Instead, he opens a window — facing east, into a Seoul morning that has already turned grey before the light has finished deciding what it wants to be — and simply lets you stand there beside him. Whether you stay is, apparently, entirely up to you.

**There's a dry cleaner's on the cover of Chris Marksberry's second album. It's an inspired choice — unpretentious, rooted in place, faintly comic. It tells you everything you need to know before the needle drops.**

Peter Clarke named his band after an act of resurrection. The original *Mermaid Avenue* — Billy Bragg and Wilco breathing musical life into Woody Guthrie's unrecorded lyrics — remains one of the more audacious gestures of late-twentieth-century Americana: the idea that a song, properly stewarded, belongs not to any single moment but to all the moments it might yet inhabit. Whether or not Brisbane's finest five-piece consciously courts that philosophy, *Jacarandas*, their fourth album, makes a persuasive case that they have absorbed its central lesson. This is music built to last, made by people who understand that longevity in song has nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with truth.

**A debut of raw, unflinching emotional honesty from a singular new voice** The word *anodyne* means, of course, to soothe or relieve pain. It is a curious title for a record that does neither — or rather, does both simultaneously, the way only the very best music can. Cam Halkerston, operating under the name Satsuma, has produced a debut EP of such disarming directness that one is tempted to reach for hyperbole immediately. Resist it. The record earns its praise slowly, the way a bruise earns your attention: you don't notice it at first, and then suddenly it's all you can think about.

**The debut from this bi-coastal electronic duo is a remarkably assured statement of intent — austere, aching, and impossible to shake.** Geography has always haunted electronic music. Kraftwerk's motorways. Burial's sodden South London. The precise coordinates of a bedroom at 3am. Signal-23 — split between San Diego and New York, two cities that couldn't be more temperamentally opposed — have built their debut EP from that same kind of spatial tension. *Pillars* is a record about structures: the ones we construct, the ones that slowly fail us, and the ones we find ourselves standing inside long after we've forgotten how we got there.

Durham has never been the city that music journalists parachute into when filing dispatches from the North. That honour has historically fallen to Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield — places whose mythologies have been so thoroughly canonised they've become almost a burden to the bands born within them. Durham gets on with it quietly. Which is, perhaps, exactly the disposition required to make a record as assured and unhurried as *Peasants of the Show*.

**From a Sevillian power-pop trio to eighteen records of fearless independence — the long, extraordinary journey of Edu Campoy Molinero** Every serious musical project has a prehistory, and the prehistory of V.E.N! is itself a story worth telling. Before the Bandcamp page, before the collages, before the Virtual Emotions Network began transmitting, there was Club Radar: a Sevillian power-pop trio of the Nineties, led by a young guitarist and singer named Edu Campoy Molinero, whose live sets were built on direct melodic pop and garage guitars, soaked in Sixties roots and played with the kind of physical urgency that the decade demanded. Club Radar dissolved at the century's end, and Campoy turned, for a number of years, to another kind of work entirely. He ran a bookshop — Novalis, named presumably after the German Romantic poet who wrote about the blue flower of infinite longing, a detail that tells you rather a lot about Campoy's inner landscape. The shop consumed his days but, as it turned out, it also quietly funded his future: the proceeds went toward a home recording studio, and the hours spent among books and publishers left a permanent mark on the density and literary ambition of the lyrics he would eventually write.

There is a particular kind of artistic courage that announces itself not through bombast or polished grandeur, but through deliberate, almost confrontational *refusal*. The Black Plague Doctors — Atlanta's Jo-Fi and St. Gabe, operating here under the shadow of their experimental alter-ego ZIllA — have made a record that refuses quite a lot. It refuses tidy production. It refuses the safety net of a DAW. It refuses, most thrillingly of all, the creeping tyranny of perfection that has rendered so much contemporary hip-hop sonically immaculate and spiritually inert.

"A double album born from lockdown, obsession, and hospitalisation — Melbourne's finest hour arrives battered, brilliant, and utterly uncompromising." Nobody sets out to make a great album by halving their sleep, surviving on cigarettes and coffee, and driving themselves to a six-week hospital stay. And yet here we are. Soliloquy, the long-gestating double album from Melbourne's Reetoxa, is precisely the kind of record that could only have been wrested from genuine extremity — a work that carries the unmistakable scent of a man who went all the way to the edge and, rather than turning back, took notes.