The Catalan artist Masadi announces herself with "SOMA", the opening salvo of her forthcoming conceptual trilogy EL CICLO, and what an entrance it proves to be. This is pop music that understands the seductive danger of its own beauty—atmospheric, hypnotic, and laced with the kind of vulnerability that makes you lean closer even as warning bells sound in the distance.

Flat Moon have arrived with all the subtlety of a saucepan dropped in a library, and thank goodness for that. Their debut album *Cookin' Up a Groove* is a sprawling, gloriously messy celebration of musical omnivory that manages to feel both meticulously crafted and refreshingly spontaneous. This six-piece collective from across the UK have clearly spent their formative years mainlining everything from Parliament-Funkadelic to King Crimson, from Fela Kuti to The Clash, and rather than attempting to hide their influences, they've thrown them all into a blender and hit the pulse button until something extraordinary emerged.

There's something wonderfully anachronistic about Cantoria do Amor's "Nunca Mais," a single that arrives with the quiet insistence of a street philosopher in an age of algorithmic attention spans. The Basel-based duo of Daniel Messina and Daniel Somaroo have crafted what might be the most necessary piece of music you'll hear this season—a song that dares to suggest we're all running toward a finish line that doesn't exist.

Sylvain Spanu's second full-length offering under The Dawn Razor moniker arrives six years after his debut, and the Parisian multi-instrumentalist has clearly spent the intervening period refining his peculiar brand of romantic brutality. *In Sublime Presence* positions itself squarely within the melodic death metal tradition while reaching backward to plunder the aesthetic sensibilities of 19th-century Romanticism—a conceit that could easily collapse under its own pretensions, yet somehow maintains its balance across the album's runtime.

The Gotland-based outfit Stainvarp arrives with "Complete," a hard rock offering that wears its heart so prominently on its sleeve that one might worry it could get damaged in the mosh pit. Released this December, the single tackles the monumental subject of parental love with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and the sincerity of a handwritten letter—which, depending on your tolerance for emotional directness in heavy music, will either move you to tears or have you reaching for the skip button.

Two years is a long time to be away from the recording studio, particularly for an artist still early in their career. For Sophie Penman, the Edinburgh-based singer-songwriter whose 2023 debut album *Written in the Books* showcased a broad palette of pop influences, that absence appears to have been less a retreat than a recalibration. Her return, "Albert Street," arrives not with fanfare but with the quiet confidence of someone who has found precisely what they wanted to say and exactly how to say it.