Every generation throws up an artist who makes the act of walking away feel like the most radical political statement imaginable. Dusty Springfield had it. Gloria Gaynor codified it. Lizzo briefly owned it before the narrative got complicated. And now, from the frost-bitten creative furnace of Toronto, Ekelle arrives with *(Turn Me) Loose* — a single so self-possessed, so immaculately constructed in its fury and its freedom, that it demands you pay attention whether you planned to or not.

*There are moments in music criticism when you encounter something so determinedly outside the prevailing conversation that you are forced, almost against your better instincts, to sit down, shut up, and actually listen. "Observer," the latest dispatch from The Lazz — the high-concept metal project helmed by San Diego guitarist and composer Ben Lazzaro — is precisely such a moment.*

Aberdeen is not a city that tends to dominate the conversation when people speak of Britain's great rock heartlands. Manchester gets the mythology, Liverpool gets the museums, Glasgow gets the credibility. Aberdeen gets the granite and the grey North Sea. And yet, from that particular cold and unforgiving corner of Scotland, The Adel Gomez Band have delivered a debut single that carries more warmth, more swagger, and more honest-to-goodness *belief* than almost anything to come stumbling out of a rehearsal room in the past several years.