**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.

Nostalgia, as any decent songwriter eventually discovers, is a trick of the light. It does not preserve what was — it burnishes it, rounds off its rough edges, renders the ordinary luminous. Anders Ekblad knows this instinctively. The Swedish artist's new single "Early Mornings" does not simply visit the past; it inhabits it, turns it over in both hands like something fragile and irreplaceable, and in doing so produces one of the year's most quietly devastating pieces of pop music.

The great lie of polished production is that it makes you feel something. Decades of industry sheen have taught us to confuse competence with emotion, technical precision with truth. tcr! — the exclamation mark doing considerable heavy lifting, a punctuation choice that feels simultaneously ironic and earnest, which is, of course, entirely the point — have no interest in that particular deception. *On Vancouver Island*, the lead single from their 2026 EP *Dear Rabbits*, arrives like a cassette tape found wedged behind a radiator: slightly warped, faintly warm, absolutely candid.

South Africa has long exported genius to an indifferent world — Miriam Makeba, Johnny Clegg, Die Antwoord — and the world has long taken its time catching up. With "Good Luck To Her," her bracingly confident new single, Anacy makes the strongest possible case that the wait is over, at least for her. This is pop music with genuine architecture behind it: load-bearing walls where other artists settle for wallpaper.