There is a particular kind of longing that has no clean translation in English. The Portuguese have *saudade*. The Welsh have *hiraeth*. Odd Little Thrills — a Prague-based dreampop duo whose members hail from Istanbul and Arkansas — seem to have built a whole sonic architecture around exactly that feeling, a feeling the rest of us have been fumbling to name for years. On *There Was, There Wasn't*, their quietly stunning debut EP, they don't bother naming it. They simply play it back to you, slow and close, like a home video you don't remember making.

John, the singular force behind the For You Brother project, has spent the better part of three decades quietly filling notebooks and four-track cassettes with songs that the world, through a combination of bad luck and industry indifference, has conspicuously failed to hear. *Don't You Want Me* is his corrective — a bold, unhurried reassertion that the music always existed, always had worth, and will not be silenced by the bureaucratic whims of a distribution platform with the aesthetic sensitivity of a tax return.

The curriculum vitae of David Penn reads like a lost chapter from the golden book of American jazz apprenticeship. Mainly self-taught, he sharpened his craft under the tutelage of the great Cecil McBee, cut his teeth alongside Cecil Bridgewater and Charlie Persip, and — perhaps most formatively — spent crucial seasons on the road with the inimitable Betty Carter. That last association alone would distinguish a lesser musician; for Penn, it appears to have instilled something close to a philosophy. Carter, famously, had no patience for the merely decorative. She demanded that every note justify its presence. Listening to *Next Step*, the lessons have evidently taken root.

Some albums arrive. Others *return* — carrying the weight of decades, of roads taken and abandoned, of ghosts who never quite let go. *Destructor*, the long-delayed third full-length from London NWOBHM veterans MORE, belongs emphatically to the second category. And the ghost in question is one of rock production's most singular talents: Chris Tsangarides, the man who put the thunder into Judas Priest's *Screaming for Vengeance*, who understood better than almost anyone how to make a guitar sound like it was tearing the fabric of the physical world. He delivered the final mix of this record on the eve of his death in January 2017. Nearly a decade later, the rest of us finally get to hear what he left behind. The wait, it turns out, was worth every agonising year.

Gratitude, properly understood, is not a soft emotion. It is demanding. It insists you look backwards and forwards at once — at those who shaped you, at those you must still serve, at the living world that gifted you breath enough to sing. Azuka Moweta understands this with a depth that most recording artists of any tradition never approach, and *Kenechukwu*, his latest seven-track offering poured from the red earth of Asaba in Delta State, is gratitude rendered as groove, as ceremony, and as quiet, irresistible joy.

**The night of November 5th, 2024 produced many things — disbelief, dread, the queasy scrolling through exit polls that wouldn't resolve themselves into comfort. For Vincent Roose, the Belgian musician operating under the name Scopitone, it produced an album. Not immediately, not explosively, but with the slow, methodical compulsion of someone who had run out of other options.**

Fifty years. Half a century of stages, studios, tour buses, broken strings, broken deals, and presumably a fair few broken hearts. When a musician with that kind of mileage on the clock decides to strip away the band and stand alone under the spotlight, the result is either a vanity project dressed in nostalgia's comfortable clothes, or something far more dangerous — a genuine reckoning. Brian Bee Frank's debut solo EP *Chasing the Dragon* lands, with considerable conviction, in the latter camp.

Some albums announce themselves. Others simply materialise, fully formed and quietly devastating, as if they had always existed and you were merely slow to find them. *Sole Music*, the debut long-player from Brighton's sole-trader, belongs emphatically to the second category. Released into the grey wash of a March morning, it is the kind of record that rewards the patient listener and confounds anyone expecting indie pop to stay neatly within its lane.

Half a century is a long time to keep a secret. Pete Scales — psychologist by vocation, songwriter by compulsion — has spent the better part of fifty years writing songs that circulated only among the bar rooms, coffeehouses and church halls of the Syracuse-to-Ithaca corridor. *Blue Without You*, his career retrospective spanning recordings made between 1970 and 2001, arrives not with the fanfare of a comeback but with the quiet dignity of a man finally letting people into a room he has long kept to himself. The result is, rather unexpectedly, one of the more compelling singer-songwriter documents of recent memory.

Seoul's most restlessly cerebral duo have done something quietly radical. At a moment when the music industry is falling over itself to genuflect at the altar of algorithmic efficiency, moonsomoon have retreated — defiantly, deliberately — into the warm, imprecise chambers of the analogue world, and emerged with an album that feels less like a record and more like an act of civil disobedience.