Hot Work Permit arrive fully formed with "Go Sign", a debut single that announces its intentions with the confidence of a band that's already mapped out their musical territory. This London quartet understand the weight of their influences—Neil Young's mid-seventies malaise, Dinosaur Jr's fuzzed-out sprawl, Paul Rodgers' golden-throated bombast—yet they resist the temptation to simply genuflect before rock's altar.

Éric Vercelletto's ambitious new two-track EP arrives with the quiet confidence of a musician who has found his voice precisely by refusing to claim just one. Kelc'h Digor – "Open Circle" in Breton – unfolds across its brief but considered duration as a cohesive statement that defies easy categorisation while remaining wholly coherent in its vision.

Norwegian artist Formoe has crafted something rather special with "Always," a track that demonstrates how effective pop songwriting can elevate familiar themes into something genuinely moving. The collaboration between Formoe's lyrical and compositional instincts produces a song that feels both immediate and lasting—no mean feat when dealing with the well-trodden ground of romantic dissolution.

BŠĀR—the stage name of classically trained composer Ben Royston—has built a reputation on genre-agnostic experimentation, mining the edges of pop, jazz, R&B, new wave, hip-hop and alt-rock with an "anything is possible" approach that treats musical boundaries as suggestions rather than rules. What's immediately striking about 'Venus' is how this omnivorous musical appetite serves the song's emotional core rather than overwhelming it. This is synthpop with a philosophical bent, wrapped in enough glossy production sheen to slip past your defences before delivering its more sobering observations about contemporary human frailty.

Holly Holden's third full-length album arrives as both a geographical and spiritual homecoming. After years of musical wandering through Mexico and Colombia, the London-based artist returned to Britain "a little broken and bereft" in 2022, carrying notebooks full of compositions written on a Venezuelan cuatro. The resulting record, 'al andar', transforms those fragments of experience into her most cohesive and emotionally resonant work to date.