Luxembourg is not a city that looms large in the rock mythology — no Madchester swagger, no New York grime, no Berlin coldwave alienation baked into its postcode. And yet from this small, landlocked duchy comes one of the more quietly devastating debut singles you are likely to hear this year: *Devils and Demons*, a solo excavation of the self by Paul Gehl that makes geography feel entirely beside the point.

Love songs are a minefield. For every transcendent declaration of human connection, popular music has gifted us a thousand soggy greeting cards set to a strummed G chord. The genre demands either total commitment or total reinvention, and most artists — confronted with that choice — quietly choose neither, hovering instead in some beige emotional middle distance where nothing is risked and nothing is truly felt. Rooftop Screamers, the Portland-based outfit whose name suggests considerably more chaos than their music delivers, have done something rather more admirable: they've chosen honesty. Radical, unfashionable, quietly devastating honesty.

Nine thousand miles is a long way to travel to make a record. It is longer still as a unit of emotional distance — the gulf between who you were and who the city is slowly, insistently remaking you into. Susan Style, London-based and Taipei-born, has made that crossing the explicit subject of her debut album, and the remarkable thing is that she has done so without a single moment of self-pity. Heartbreak, on this seven-track collection, is recast not as wound but as aperture. Break the heart wide enough, the logic runs, and the whole world rushes in.