The problem with most retro-leaning rock records is that they mistake nostalgia for vision. They excavate the past the way tourists visit ruins — snapping photographs, buying a fridge magnet, going home unchanged. Törner Cryda, five students from Lund University who apparently spent their formative years listening to Zeppelin bootlegs and reading medieval hagiographies, have the good sense — and the genuine talent — to do something altogether more alive with their influences. *Knight in Pieces*, their debut long-player, doesn't reconstruct the 1970s so much as cheerfully colonise them, plant a flag, and start issuing its own passports.

Grief, it turns out, does not always arrive as a thunderclap. Sometimes it seeps in slowly — through the spaces left by a half-remembered voice, a chair that nobody sits in any more, the particular silence of a room after someone has stopped inhabiting it. Alex Tolm, the Belgian independent artist behind this remarkable debut, understands this with an acuity that most artists spend entire careers trying to locate. *Présence Absente* — "Absent Presence" — is exactly what the title promises: a meditation on the ghosts we carry inside us, rendered in piano, synth, and the kind of French-language poetry that feels wrung from genuine experience rather than assembled for effect.

**The Milwaukee jazz queen purrs her way through her tenth album with feline grace, swinging hard and sighing soft — and the results are rather irresistible.**

Let us dispense with pleasantries. Ian Leding is not making music for the algorithmically docile, for the passive consumer scrolling through curated playlists in search of something that will not disturb the dinner party. He is making music for the sleepless, for the ones who press their foreheads against cold windows and find themselves unable to explain precisely why. **WAKE UP!** — the title, defiantly imperative, almost confrontational — is his most fully realised statement yet, a record that demands your complete and undivided surrender.

Dylan Wilson-Rogers has absolutely no business being this good at seventeen. That is the thought that lingers, persistent and slightly unsettling, long after the final notes of *My River Flows* have dissolved into silence. The Toronto-based artist, operating under the name Red Jacket, has delivered his fourth studio album — his *fourth*, mind you, before most of his peers have figured out how to properly tune a guitar — and the result is something genuinely startling: a record that sounds both like an old soul's confession and a young mind's restless, gorgeous overreach.

There is a particular kind of American bedroom auteur who operates in proud defiance of the music industry's machinery — no label advances, no A&R vultures circling, no producer with a Neve console and a cocaine habit steering the ship. Thomas Young, the singular intelligence behind Victims of the New Math, is precisely that creature. And *The Stories That You Weave*, his latest dispatch from the lo-fi underground, is the work of a man who has spent two decades quietly perfecting an art form the mainstream gave up on long ago.

Patience, as any serious listener eventually learns, is not passivity. To sit with a record and allow it to unfold on its own terms — resisting the urge to reach for a verdict before the kettle has even boiled — is an act of genuine discipline. Oliver Robinson's *Forever and Ever* demands precisely that kind of attention, and rewards it handsomely.

The cosmological ambition announced by this album's title is not mere affectation. Tamer Sağcan, the Ankara-based composer, guitarist, and novelist, has named all thirteen of his new compositions after concepts drawn from the physics of creation — and he means it. *Home: Universes* is not an album that uses space as wallpaper. It is an album that actually attempts to hear it.

The title alone is a manifesto. A middle finger extended not with rage but with the quiet, devastating confidence of people who have absolutely nothing to prove and know it. Luxury Fruit — the Knoxville trio of Brett Cassidy, Jeff Caudill, and Gray Comer, veterans of the fondly remembered Westside Daredevils — have delivered their third four-song EP with the unhurried ease of craftsmen who learned long ago that the best work happens when you stop caring what the room thinks.

**Somewhere between Birmingham and the earth's lower crust, two people have figured something out.** The history of rock and roll is, when you strip away the mythology and the merchandise, a history of reduction. Take away what isn't needed until only the essential remains — the nerve ending, the blunt instrument, the thing that makes the neighbours complain. The Velvet Underground knew it. The White Stripes knew it. And now, lurking in a garage somewhere in the West Midlands with nothing more than drums, a Bass VI and two voices that sound like they've been gargling gravel soaked in righteous fury, dredge — lower case, thank you — know it too.