There's something rather touching about an artist who admits they spent sleepless nights wrestling with feedback, who confesses that "More Than Enough" still isn't quite right, who acknowledges their limitations whilst simultaneously transcending them. Frank, the Markkleeberg-based creator behind E.L.W.12, has fashioned something genuinely disarming with *Unfiltered* – an album that wears its imperfections not as badges of honour, but as honest markers of the creative struggle itself.

Hollow Shift have always understood that darkness isn't just an aesthetic—it's a topology. Their previous work mapped the contours of post-punk melancholia with a precision that recalled the best of the genre's gothic inclinations, but *RELOAD* suggests a band less interested in tracing old maps than redrawing them entirely. The duo have tilted decisively toward the floor, toward pulse, toward the kind of rhythmic insistence that forces the body into complicity even as the mind recoils.

Blue Sinclair's debut arrives with the kind of quiet confidence that belies its self-recorded origins. *When the Disco Ball Crashed Down* presents itself as both confession and manifesto, a collection that refuses to settle into any single groove whilst maintaining a remarkable cohesive vision throughout its runtime.

The first thing you notice about Kathi Deakin's *Perennial* is how it refuses to offer comfort. This debut album, arriving after a year of carefully dispersed singles, sits uncomfortably in your chest—a gorgeous, aching thing that maps the geography of grief, desire, and the peculiar violence of feeling too much. Deakin, a British-German artist who emerged this past summer with the shimmering "Fairy," has constructed eleven tracks that function less as songs and more as emotional ecosystems, each one teeming with contradiction and alive with the messy truth of being human.

Cyprus-based solo artist Aleph has fashioned something genuinely arresting with *Infinity Fall I*, the latest salvo from his Watch Me Die Inside project. This three-track EP represents a marked evolution in heavy music—not through reinvention of the wheel, but through the audacious melding of seemingly incompatible sonic vocabularies into a coherent, emotionally resonant whole.

K6R6NZ6N arrives not with a manifesto but with a malevolent whisper, and *War Against Reality* feels less like a musical statement than a deliberate act of sonic sabotage. This is witch house stripped of any remaining romanticism, its occult trappings traded for something closer to genuine menace. Where the genre's early practitioners—Salem, oOoOO—flirted with darkness as aesthetic choice, this anonymous producer treats it as ontological fact.

Twaang's *Zone* arrives like a controlled detonation of the psyche—five tracks that map the contours of consciousness with the precision of a cartographer charting unexplored territories. This is music that demands you meet it halfway, that refuses to simply wash over you in a pleasant haze. Instead, it pulls you through a series of emotional airlocks, each one pressurizing or depressurizing your expectations until you emerge, disoriented but somehow clearer, on the other side.

The story of Atsushi Matsumoto's debut EP begins not with grand ambition but with quiet discovery: an abandoned upright piano gathering dust in his family home, a broken double bass salvaged along uncertain paths. These instruments, relics of neglect and decay, became the foundation for a four-year musical journey that culminated in *Études*, released this March from Osaka. The narrative alone might tempt one toward romantic cliché, yet Matsumoto's achievement transcends its origin story through sheer sonic conviction.

The story behind *Gloria Pegasus* reads like a particularly vivid fever dream: a Greek musician busking in Berlin, inspired by statues of winged horses and the ghost of Augustin Barrios Mangoré, returns to his hometown of Florina armed with nothing but a ZOOM H4n recorder and an impossibly ambitious vision. What emerges is that rarest of things—a genuinely eccentric album that earns its strangeness through sheer force of conviction.

The opening salvo of Creative Vibrations' new record arrives with all the subtlety of a philosophical treatise wrapped in a three-minute pop song. "The Way" establishes the album's central thesis—that existence itself, with all its grotesque beauty and beautiful grotesqueness, demands our full participation. It's a bold gambit, positioning *Sunday Bummer* not merely as entertainment but as a kind of secular scripture for the perpetually anxious.