Brighton has always been England's most entertainingly deluded city — a place that genuinely believes it is both New York and Ibiza simultaneously, and somehow makes you believe it too, at least until your train back to Victoria delivers you to reality. It is fitting, then, that the town's finest sonic exports tend to carry this same quality of gorgeous, slightly disorienting conviction. Fierce Friend — the long-running solo project of one Alan Grice — is exactly that kind of proposition. *Blood Red Hills* is the sound of a man who has paid his dues quietly and at considerable length, and has now decided, with impeccable timing and zero apology, to make some actual noise.

The bedroom studio has long been a site of mythmaking — from Trent Reznor building cathedrals of noise in his living room to Bon Iver conjuring ghosts in a Wisconsin hunting cabin. Mashal MN now enters this lineage not with guitars and confessional rawness, but with something altogether more architecturally ambitious: a full-blooded cinematic EP assembled entirely alone, note by painstaking note, in Saitama, Japan. The results are, depending on your patience for solitary grandeur, either quietly extraordinary or quietly everything.

Picture the scene: a woman walks through her front door carrying the invisible tonnage of a day that has wrung her dry, only to find her boyfriend ready to crack open the same old wound — the ex, again, that ghost who won't stay buried. The frustration doesn't arrive like a thunderclap. It seeps up through the floorboards, slow and corrosive, the way accumulated grievances always do. She says nothing. She takes her keys, gets in the car, and turns the volume up until the glass hums. And for the first time in what feels like weeks, she can breathe.