Ben Rankin's "Rewind" arrives with the kind of emotional heft that contemporary metalcore demands, yet manages to carve out its own space within the crowded landscape of genre-blending heavy music. The Canberra-based artist, working alongside local collaborator Machine on a Break, has crafted a second single from his forthcoming fifth album 'In Memoriam' that demonstrates both technical proficiency and genuine emotional vulnerability—a combination that too often eludes artists mining similar territory.

Andy Smythe has never been one for small talk, and 'Leviathan' – the second single from his forthcoming eighth album *Quiet Revolution* – confirms that the British alt-folk artist remains resolutely committed to asking uncomfortable questions. While other songwriters content themselves with romantic platitudes or nostalgic reverie, Smythe tackles nothing less than the entire trajectory of human governance, from Hobbes to hypothetical AI overlords, all wrapped in a deceptively jaunty carnival arrangement that somehow makes philosophical inquiry feel like a funfair ride.

Twenty years into their career, Stockholm's The Plastic Pals arrive at their fourth album with the assurance of veterans who've earned their stripes on both sides of the Atlantic. *Keep it Burning* doesn't announce itself with fanfare or pretension—it simply delivers twelve tracks of finely-wrought guitar rock that knows exactly what it wants to be.

There's something rather touching about an artist who admits they spent sleepless nights wrestling with feedback, who confesses that "More Than Enough" still isn't quite right, who acknowledges their limitations whilst simultaneously transcending them. Frank, the Markkleeberg-based creator behind E.L.W.12, has fashioned something genuinely disarming with *Unfiltered* – an album that wears its imperfections not as badges of honour, but as honest markers of the creative struggle itself.

The most striking aspect of DIV1NE's 'talk2u' is how it subverts expectation. Where the title suggests vulnerability and the yearning for connection, the 21-year-old UK producer-vocalist has crafted a declaration of hard-won autonomy—a track that chronicles not the desperation of loss, but the peculiar clarity that emerges when you finally excise toxicity from your life.

The opening seconds of Alwyn Morrison's "Lenox Hill (Stefan Storm Remix)" arrive like headlights through rain-streaked glass: diffuse, luminous, and utterly transfixing. Swedish producer Stefan Storm—one half of The Sound of Arrows and a veteran hand behind hits for Alison Goldfrapp and Lady Gaga—has taken Morrison's original and refracted it through a prism of shimmering synths and pulsating basslines, creating a piece that feels simultaneously ancient and urgently contemporary. This is electropop as emotional archaeology, excavating memories of young love with the precision of a jeweler and the abandon of a romantic.