The needle drops — or rather, the string bends — and within seconds you understand that you are not being entertained. You are being addressed. Joel 'Veena' Eisenkramer's twenty-stringed Indian slide guitar opens *Reminder* with the kind of tonal authority that makes you sit up straighter, as though a very old and very wise presence has entered the room and is waiting, patiently, for your full attention.

Pop music has always had a complicated relationship with the body. Too often it fetishises it, punishes it, or drapes it in aspirational misery — the before-and-after narrative dressed up in a four-four beat. It takes genuine nerve, then, for a Stockholm-based powerlifter operating under the alias m0n0 jay to stride onto the dancefloor, chalk on her hands and a xylophone hook in her pocket, and refuse entirely to play that game. *L.L.L. (Lift, Lift, Lick It)* is not a redemption song. It is something far more interesting: a celebration of the body mid-effort, mid-sweat, mid-joy — unconcerned with where it's headed and thoroughly delighted with where it already is.

**By the time the opening synth line of Rhys Hurd's comeback single has finished unfurling itself into the room, you already know exactly where you stand — and more importantly, where Hurd wants to take you.** That place is somewhere between a rain-slicked Tokyo arcade circa 1987 and the fluorescent fever dream of a Tron sequel nobody commissioned but everybody secretly wanted. *Who the Hell Am I?* is Hurd's boldest statement yet: a Synthwave broadside wrapped in the glittering armour of vintage video game soundtracks, arriving just as the conversation around modern masculinity has grown both louder and considerably more confused.

Let us dispense, immediately, with the caveats. JD Hinton is not a new proposition. The press releases have been arriving for long enough to fill a small filing cabinet, and critics have been reaching for the same dog-eared comparison notes — Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, the brooding American male with a philosophically dented heart — long enough that the shorthand risks becoming wallpaper. And yet. *And yet.* "Someday Is Today" demands you put down the filing cabinet, sit in a chair, and reckon with something that functions, against all reasonable expectation, as a genuinely urgent piece of music.

The word *agaki* translates from Japanese as struggle — a writhing, desperate kind of movement against constraint. It is a word that carries weight in its syllables, a compressed coil of effort and futility. KHROTO, the Tokyo-based producer who lends his name to this collaboration with U250, has chosen his title wisely. Nothing here is gratuitous. Nothing here is wasted. And that restraint alone marks "AGAKI" as something worth sitting with.

Consider the following thought experiment. Take Mozart — and teach him to play a chainsaw. Take Kurt Cobain — and have him get addicted to a sampler. Take the softest sound you can catch from an exploding amplifier, and turn it into a ballad. Take Jimi Hendrix, and have him come up with an instrument to play the noise of a much harsher era. If any of those propositions excite rather than alarm you, then Shortout Kid may be precisely the artist you have been waiting for. If they alarm you, he may be the artist you most need.

Some singles announce themselves. Others detonate. "Airspace," the lead single from PJ Abrol's *The Good Static*, belongs firmly in the second category — a track that opens its doors with the quiet confidence of someone who already knows they've won the argument before you've even sat down.

Some songs refuse to stay buried. They haunt the bands that made them, tugging at sleeves during soundchecks, whispering from the back of rehearsal rooms, demanding to be reconsidered. Marcus Gooda and his Bristol outfit The Yacht Club know this particular ghost intimately — "The Greatest Misadventure" has followed them for years, beloved and abandoned in equal measure, a song they apparently loved but, by their own admission, eventually forgot how to play. The anniversary edition, then, is less a reissue than an exhumation. And what they've pulled from the ground is still breathing.

Pop-rock has long been the genre most willing to make a fool of itself in the service of emotional honesty, and Hailey Hermida, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter who began her craft at thirteen during the hollow quiet of a pandemic, understands this better than most of her contemporaries. Her new single "17" is not a polished meditation on adolescence. It is a scream recorded the day after a fight, a week before her eighteenth birthday, and it sounds exactly like that — raw, slightly dangerous, and absolutely alive.

Etta Heartfield's debut single is not a confession. It is something altogether more commanding — a reckoning rendered in sound, set to haunt you long after the last note dissolves.