Few things are as difficult to render honestly in song as the experience of loving too generously — of extending empathy like a hand that keeps getting bitten. Remora Beach, the Los Angeles project of a songwriter who records under the alias with the quiet ferocity of someone who has been through something and come out the other side still bewildered, doesn't just attempt it on "Tired Heart." He nails it to the wall.

The great country songs have always understood one fundamental truth about human longing: that we are most nakedly ourselves not in our moments of triumph, but in the quiet, trembling instant when we reach out toward another person and hope, desperately, that they reach back. Grainville Train, arriving with the kind of unhurried confidence that only genuine artistic conviction can manufacture, have grasped this with both hands — quite literally, given the sun-drenched romanticism of their artwork — and produced a single that deserves to be heard on wide open roads and in the small, bruised hours of the morning alike.

The Western Australian town of Busselton sits at the end of a very long road — geographically, culturally, and in every sense that matters to the music industry. It is not Nashville. It is not London. It is not even Sydney. And yet, from a friend's music room somewhere in that coastal quiet, Mark Moule has assembled a debut EP that carries within it something genuinely, stubbornly worth your attention: the absolute refusal to be anything other than itself.

**Conformity has always had excellent PR.** It arrives not as a diktat but as a suggestion, not as a cage but as a kindness — *just smooth the edges a little, just sand down the parts that snag*. Most people comply. Most bands comply too, and we call the results "mature" and "accessible" and other words that mean the same thing as "defeated." Mosh Pit, with the controlled detonation of their new single "No Returning," have decided they'd rather not.

The Murdoch press spent the better part of two decades doing a particular kind of damage — not the damage of the outright lie, though there was plenty of that, but the more corrosive damage of the coded verdict. *Single mother.* Two words deployed like a sentence, a moral tribunal condensed into a tabloid font. JK Jerome has spent, one suspects, considerably longer than two decades working out what to do with that. *Profanity*, his debut single, is what happens when a songwriter finally finds the right room for that anger — and discovers it isn't anger at all. It's something stranger, sadder, and considerably more interesting.

Parenthood has always been music's great unexplored frontier. We have songs about falling in love, falling apart, losing friends, losing faith — but the particular, grinding, unglamorous weight of raising children while simultaneously trying to remain a functioning human being? That territory, rich as dark soil, is almost always left to the poets and the novelists. Amsterdam trio Tonneau have planted their flag in it, and what they've built on that ground is quietly extraordinary.

John Fogerty wrote "Fortunate Son" in about twenty minutes. He said so himself. Twenty minutes of white-hot fury — fury at draft dodgers with powerful fathers, fury at flags waved by people who'd never bleed beneath them, fury at a war machine that ran on other people's children. The song came out in 1969. It remains, fifty-seven years later, the most uncomfortably relevant piece of American rock and roll ever committed to tape. Which raises an obvious question: why would anyone bother covering it?

Some records announce themselves before a single note has been heard publicly. Not through hype — hype is cheap, and the streaming landscape is littered with its casualties — but through the accumulation of detail that surrounds a release: the rooms it was made in, the ears it has passed through, the story at its centre, and the quiet, unshowy confidence of a band that has simply decided to do things properly.

Rock music has always had a complicated relationship with prophecy. From the Clash's breathless urgency to the Libertines' romantically doomed manifestos, the great British and European rock tradition has never been shy about announcing that something — anything — is coming. TOTAL REVERENDS, that grimy, gloriously unfashionable collision of vintage rock instinct and garage punk nerve, have thrown their own proclamation into the ring with *The Revolution Is Inevitable*, and the remarkable thing is: they almost make you believe it.

Some records arrive fully formed, as though they've always existed somewhere in the electric ether, waiting only for the right hands to pluck them down. "Midnight Flow", the debut single from NEODYM — the project helmed in collaboration with German producer Sven Kuhlmann — is very much one of those records. It does not announce itself tentatively. It does not ease you in. It simply begins, and you find yourself already inside it, already moving, already half-lost in whatever neon-drenched reverie it has decided to construct around you.