After twelve years of silence, Liverpool's Secret Garden Gathering have emerged from their creative hibernation with Is-Y-Deri, a five-track EP recorded live beneath the Welsh oaks that give the collection its name. The band's return feels less like a resurrection and more like a natural awakening – as if they've been quietly nurturing these songs in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to let them breathe.

The sophomore effort from Minnesota's most enigmatic sonic architect arrives with all the weight its title suggests, yet carries itself with surprising buoyancy. "Forgiveness" finds Blunt Blade expanding upon the genre-fluid foundation established on his self-titled debut, crafting what can only be described as a masterclass in controlled chaos.

Ferdinando Ritrovato – who performs under the moniker Iberico – arrives with the weight of a circuitous musical journey behind him. Born in Calabria in 1989 and transplanted to Milan, his path to "Non fare rumore" reads like a cautionary tale about artistic persistence. From childhood performances of 883's "Come Mai" through university-imposed exile from live performance, Iberico spent years accumulating songs that existed only in notebooks and half-formed melodies rattling around his consciousness.

French photographer-composer Bastien Pons approaches his debut album with the same methodical precision he brings to his visual work. Blinded represents a rare synthesis of disciplines, where the monochromatic sensibilities of his photography directly inform the sonic architecture. Trained in musique concrète under Bernard Fort, Pons has developed a practice that treats sound as visual substance—digital grit becomes grain, harmonic shadows emerge like darkroom revelations.

Stripping music back to its most elemental form proves quietly revolutionary. On 'The Kiss', Izabela Kałduńska's fourth outing as The New Solarism, the Leipzig-based violinist-composer has crafted an album that feels both intimately personal and universally resonant—a rare achievement in our increasingly cluttered sonic landscape.

Andrea Pizzo's latest venture reads like a manifesto wrapped in ten minutes of audacious genre-hopping. We Are All Bots arrives as both a philosophical treatise and a sonic experiment, one that dares to compress the existential weight of human-machine symbiosis into three carefully sculpted movements.

While musical authenticity feels increasingly manufactured across the industry, Nothing Concrete have done something rather remarkable: they've disappeared into the Pyrenean foothills and emerged with an album that sounds like it was birthed from the very stones and streams of the Ariège. 'The Imperfectionist' is that rarest of creatures—a record that wears its eclecticism not as affectation but as honest expression of a collective unmoored from geographical and sonic constraints.

Lex Vervain's debut EP arrives like a perfectly timed confession whispered across a crowded room – intimate enough to feel personal, yet crafted with the precision of someone who understands exactly how words can cut through noise. This self-titled collection, shaped alongside the increasingly essential Joseph Futak, represents the full flowering of a songwriter who has spent 2025 honing his craft through a series of singles that hinted at this level of accomplishment.

There's something rather affecting about an album that begins with its own definition. Anemoia—from the ancient Greek for "wind" and "mind"—describes nostalgia for a time one has never lived. It's a concept that might sound pretentious in lesser hands, but Italian guitarist Andrea Zacchia wields it with the kind of understated authority that marks the difference between genuine artistic vision and coffee-table philosophy.

Genre boundaries have become more fluid than a spilled latte on a MacBook Pro, and Philadelphia's vidpoet (Chris) has conjured something genuinely intriguing with Addenda – a collection that operates less like a traditional album and more like a carefully curated expedition through what he aptly terms "indie hop." It's a neologism that shouldn't work but absolutely does, capturing the essence of beats that feel both handcrafted and cerebral.