The title looks like a password. Or a typo. Or the kind of thing you'd scrawl on a rizla at 3am when language has more or less packed up and gone home. **FrGrry** — say it aloud and the vowels arrive eventually, ghosting in between the consonants like bass frequencies filling a room — is the debut single from D3PRT, a UK independent electronic artist who has clearly decided that the underground is not a destination but a methodology.

**By the time the opening chords of "Wide Open Spaces" resolve themselves into something that feels simultaneously familiar and startling, you already know ABFAB are playing a longer game than the usual three-minute pop transaction.** This is a band that has spent fourteen years learning the rules — gigging, covering, watching audiences, absorbing the mechanics of what makes a room move — and now, with the quiet confidence of people who have nothing left to prove to anyone except themselves, they are breaking those rules in precisely the right places.

The great tradition of the pop rock anthem demands one thing above all others: conviction. Not the polished, label-manufactured facsimile of it, but the real, breathing, unglamorous kind — the sort that cannot be coached into existence because it must be lived. With "That's the Story of My Life," the closing track to her debut concept album, the independent artist Exzenya delivers exactly that kind of conviction, and does so on her own uncompromising terms.

Let us be honest about the state of psychedelic rock in 2026: it has, for the most part, become a genre that mistakes reverb for revelation. Bands slather their guitars in chorus pedals, mumble something vaguely cosmic, and expect the listener to connect the dots to Syd Barrett by sheer force of association. Against this backdrop, Hallucinophonics arrive with "Afternoon of Acid Rain" like a thunderclap from a sky nobody was watching — and the result is genuinely, disarmingly strange in all the right ways.

The guzheng does not negotiate. Stretched across its twenty-one strings is something older than most of the world's musical traditions combined — a voice that shimmers, weeps, and exults with a physical directness that no synthesiser has ever quite replicated. The risk, when pairing such an instrument with contemporary electronic production, is that one world inevitably colonises the other: the ancient gets smoothed into exotica wallpaper, the modern gets rendered quaint by proximity to antiquity. *Two Moons*, the collaboration between Los Angeles-based guzheng virtuoso Bei Bei and London producer Paul Elliott, avoids this pitfall not through compromise but through a kind of principled stubbornness — and the result is genuinely remarkable.

Let's dispense with the throat-clearing and get straight to the point: Banquet Darling have arrived with the kind of brazen, boot-heeled swagger that most British acts spend entire careers pretending to have. 'Dynamite Daddy' is a song that doesn't so much enter a room as detonate inside one — and given the Newcastle outfit's penchant for occult theatrics, the explosion leaves sulphur in the air long after the reverb fades.

There is a long and honourable tradition in British music of songs that refuse to let the powerful off the hook. From the Clash's furious dispatches from the frontline of Thatcher's Britain to the quiet devastation of Robert Wyatt's "Shipbuilding," the best of our songwriters have understood something that politicians and newspaper editors too often forget: that music can hold grief and anger simultaneously, and that sometimes only a melody can carry what no public inquiry ever will.

The Isle of Lewis is not a place that forgives pretension. Battered by Atlantic gales, shaped by centuries of hardship and quiet endurance, it is a landscape that demands honesty from anyone who dares record within its borders. That HitherFurther chose Black Bay Studios on this remote Hebridean outpost to lay down 'A Man Amongst the Ruins' — his second single from a forthcoming album already drawing whispered excitement — speaks volumes about the Irish musician's artistic intentions. He has not come to play games. He has come to mean it.