Wes Carroll has the audacity to name his EP after a geological epoch that hasn't quite happened yet — or rather, one that is happening right now, all around us, in the receipts and the algorithms and the quiet despair of the checkout queue. It's a bold conceptual gambit, the sort of thing that could easily collapse under its own self-importance. That it doesn't is down to the fact that Carroll and his Confabulation are, first and foremost, musicians of considerable craft, and only second — a very close second, mind — are they polemicists.

Pat 'Doc' Dougherty and Haley Fleming did not walk into a recording studio with a brief. They walked in with a worldview — and the difference, on *The Chariot*, the debut album from Minneapolis duo Sawtooth Witch, is audible in every last creak of Dougherty's fingerstyle guitar and every yearning sweep of Fleming's fiddle. This is a record made by people who have driven the long roads, played the low rooms, and come out the other side not embittered but illuminated.

**Paul Reisler has spent a quarter-century doing something the music industry long ago decided was unprofitable: trusting children.** Not patronising them. Not writing songs *at* them from a great adult height, with condescending lyrics about bedtime and vegetables. Actually trusting them — handing over the pen, the melody, the raw material of lived experience — and then getting the hell out of the way. The results, on this seventh album marking Kid Pan Alley's 25th anniversary, are quietly staggering.

The bedroom studio has long been a site of mythmaking — from Trent Reznor building cathedrals of noise in his living room to Bon Iver conjuring ghosts in a Wisconsin hunting cabin. Mashal MN now enters this lineage not with guitars and confessional rawness, but with something altogether more architecturally ambitious: a full-blooded cinematic EP assembled entirely alone, note by painstaking note, in Saitama, Japan. The results are, depending on your patience for solitary grandeur, either quietly extraordinary or quietly everything.

There is a particular kind of band that arrives without ceremony, without a marketing budget or a carefully curated aesthetic rollout, and proceeds to make you feel things you had quietly filed away under *too complicated to revisit*. Dim Pinks, an Amsterdam-based outfit with a name that sounds like a paint chart entry for the emotionally indecisive, are precisely such a band. Their debut EP *Universe* is a small, ragged, quietly luminous thing — four songs that circle the same existential drain without ever quite falling in, and all the more compelling for it.

Picture two Italians who have spent years accumulating instruments the way other people accumulate regrets — methodically, passionately, and with total disregard for shelf space. Alex Baccari and Marzia Di Cicco, the intercultural duo who trade under the name Koradan, have arrived with a debut album that is less a collection of songs and more an act of civilisational archaeology, conducted in real time, with eighty-plus instruments from five continents and the focused intensity of people who have absolutely nothing to prove and everything to share.

The remix album has always been a confession of sorts. Strip away the original's skin and you reveal what the songwriter actually built underneath — scaffolding or cathedral, it rarely lies. M4TR, the Washington D.C. art-pop project helmed by the singular AJ Solaris, has had the courage — and the excellent fortune — to hand that confession to two producers who know precisely what to do with it. Reimagination: The Remixes, Vol. 1 does not merely repackage. It excavates.

*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.**