Punk died. Grunge died. Alternative rock, we were told with the weary authority of a dozen retrospective documentaries, got swallowed whole by streaming playlists and politely filed somewhere between "nostalgia" and "premium gym background." Nobody told Alex Yacovelli. And quite frankly, thank God for that.

London has always been a city that manufactures longing. Its grey skies, its perpetual drizzle, its commuters sealed inside themselves on the Tube — all of it conspires to make you desperately, almost violently, want to be somewhere else. Somewhere warm. Somewhere where the air smells of salt and the horizon is an unbroken blue. Melanie Georgiou understands this. More than that, she's bottled it.

Garage punk has never been a particularly subtle art form, and St. Divine have spent the better part of their career making absolutely certain it stays that way. "30 Dolls," their latest self-released single, arrives timed to coincide with another No Kings protest day — a piece of scheduling that is either masterful agitprop or the most gloriously obvious move in the band's history. Possibly both. Probably both. The beauty of St. Divine is that they've never much cared which.

The story a song tells about itself is rarely the whole story. Press releases are, by their nature, acts of seduction — little paper valentines sent ahead of the music to soften the listener's critical instincts before the first note lands. And yet, occasionally, the myth and the music meet. Occasionally, the backstory isn't spin but archaeology — the unearthing of something that was genuinely always there.

To write about grief is one thing. To compose it — to catch it mid-air and pin it, still living, to a piece of music — is quite another. Esvan Du Quador attempts precisely that on "Yvette," the latest offering from his *Famille* series, and the sheer tact with which he succeeds ought to silence every producer currently reaching for another synthetic drop or borrowed hook. This is music made the difficult way: through feeling rather than formula, through absence rather than accumulation. It is, quietly and without fuss, extraordinary.

The ocean has always been rock music's most reliable accomplice — vast enough to absorb any emotional projection, indifferent enough to reflect it straight back. M3G knows this, and on De-Anchored she makes the metaphor work not through sentimentality but through sheer sonic intelligence. This is a record about losing yourself, and it genuinely sounds like it.

Joseph Campbell spent the better part of his career arguing that every story worth telling is, at its marrow, the same story. The call. The refusal. The crossing of the threshold. The dragon. The return. He called it the monomyth, and he was right in the way that only the most irritatingly perceptive thinkers ever are — right enough that you can't unsee it once you've been shown, right enough that it has soaked into every corner of human expression from Homer to *The Lion King*. PRTLND — the project of Mathieu, a Frenchman who has made Dublin his proving ground — has now added his name to that long, strange lineage, and he has done so with a confidence that borders on the audacious.

The most honest thing a love song can do is admit it cannot do the thing it set out to do. That paradox sits at the very centre of Temper Lake's quietly devastating debut single, a piece of music that understands the geometry of tenderness — how it bends inward, resists performance, and dissolves at the exact moment you try to hold it still long enough to describe it.

**Some records announce themselves. Others detonate. "Heads on Fire," the blazing centrepiece of Ava Valianti's sophomore EP, belongs emphatically to the second category.**

Matt DeAngelis arrives not quietly. The New Jersey singer-songwriter — a veteran of casino stages, beach bars, and the kind of American circuit that breeds either resilience or resignation — plants his flag with "Helpless To The Fire," a single that announces itself with the confidence of a man who has been waiting, patiently and purposefully, for precisely this moment. And goodness, does it have something to say.