Phoenix is not a city one typically associates with the kind of brooding, rain-soaked introspection that produces music like this. And yet Allan Jamisen — composer, painter, perpetual reinventor — has somehow conjured a record that feels more at home in the grey half-light of a Copenhagen November than beneath the relentless Arizona sun. "Closing In" is a haunting, beautifully disorienting piece of work, and it announces itself with the quiet confidence of someone who has earned every note through genuine suffering.

One of the more quietly radical acts a musician can commit is to return to their own work and find it unfinished — not flawed, but incomplete, as though the original recording captured only half of a conversation that was always meant to be spoken in more than one voice. Elana Sasson has done precisely that with this reimagined version of *"in between"*, the title track from her critically acclaimed 2025 album, and the result is not a revision so much as a revelation.

There is a peculiar, almost anthropological pleasure in watching a band attempt the football song and get it right. The genre is a minefield — a graveyard of cynical cash-ins, trite terrace chants dressed up in three chords, records made to shift units in the fortnight before a tournament before being mercifully forgotten. Sombre Chairs, three lads from Brighton who really ought to know better, have walked straight into the explosion and emerged, impossibly, unscathed. *Can't Stop Spinning Around* is, against all reasonable odds, rather brilliant.

Krefeld is not a city that announces itself. Nestled in the industrial western corridor of Germany, it is the sort of place that produces quiet ambitions and long memories — which makes it a fitting origin for AnTri, a rapper whose debut single operates entirely on the logic of the unforgettable. *Rendez-vous* is a record about someone you cannot stop thinking about, and it has the audacity to become, itself, something you cannot stop thinking about.

Koentakhinte — the performing name of Dutch singer-songwriter Koen — arrives on the British radar with Quiet Colors, a single of such disarming emotional honesty that one wonders quite how it slipped beneath the commercial machinery for this long. It is the sort of song that does not announce itself with fanfare. It settles, instead, like afternoon light through net curtains: soft, pervasive, and surprisingly difficult to ignore.

Rock and roll, at its most primordial, was always a class war set to a backbeat. From the Stones nicking Chicago blues to the Pistols screaming at the monarchy, the electric guitar has served historically as the working man's Molotov cocktail. Ermyte, four musicians from the sun-baked streets of Aix-en-Provence, understand this instinctively. Their debut single "Coup d'éclat" doesn't merely acknowledge that tradition — it detonates inside it.

Diasporic longing is among the oldest subjects in popular music and among the hardest to render without sentiment curdling into kitsch. Too many artists reach for the postcard and end up with a tourism brochure. Ïgor, the Portuguese-born, London-based artist behind Lisboa na Cabeça, does something considerably more interesting: he reaches inward, and what he finds is both intensely personal and bracingly universal.

**There's a particular kind of arrogance that only the very young — and the very good — can get away with. The Radio Addicts have it in spades.**

The opening seconds of *Down the West Coast* arrive like a half-remembered dream: distant guitars dissolving at the edges, a flute curling upward through a shimmer of synths, the whole construction so delicate it seems to breathe rather than play. You hold still. You wait. Olivier Cornu, the Lausanne-based multi-instrumentalist and producer who operates under the name Moon Construction Kit, knows precisely what he is doing with that silence. He is building a room and inviting you into it before you have quite realised the door was open.

The hardest thing to manufacture in heavy music is the sense that a band has already paid their dues before you ever press play. Living Theory, who have spent years replicating Linkin Park's hybrid grammar across European stages, bring exactly that quality to their debut original single — a kind of earned authority that sits in the groove before a lyric is sung.