Grief, it turns out, does not always arrive as a thunderclap. Sometimes it seeps in slowly — through the spaces left by a half-remembered voice, a chair that nobody sits in any more, the particular silence of a room after someone has stopped inhabiting it. Alex Tolm, the Belgian independent artist behind this remarkable debut, understands this with an acuity that most artists spend entire careers trying to locate. *Présence Absente* — "Absent Presence" — is exactly what the title promises: a meditation on the ghosts we carry inside us, rendered in piano, synth, and the kind of French-language poetry that feels wrung from genuine experience rather than assembled for effect.

**The Milwaukee jazz queen purrs her way through her tenth album with feline grace, swinging hard and sighing soft — and the results are rather irresistible.**

Let us dispense with pleasantries. Ian Leding is not making music for the algorithmically docile, for the passive consumer scrolling through curated playlists in search of something that will not disturb the dinner party. He is making music for the sleepless, for the ones who press their foreheads against cold windows and find themselves unable to explain precisely why. **WAKE UP!** — the title, defiantly imperative, almost confrontational — is his most fully realised statement yet, a record that demands your complete and undivided surrender.

The north of England has always had a particular gift for turning misery into art. From the moors that haunted the Brontës to the post-industrial grey that gave Joy Division their palette, there is a long tradition of finding the sublime precisely where comfort refuses to live. Vie, a twenty-something songwriter from Mirfield — a town so modest it seems to exist mainly to give Huddersfield somewhere to feel metropolitan by comparison — understands this instinctively. Her debut single "Harry" arrives not as an introduction so much as an accusation: here is a young woman who has been wronged, who has processed that wrongness in private, and who has now decided, with considerable poise, to make it everybody's business.

Dylan Wilson-Rogers has absolutely no business being this good at seventeen. That is the thought that lingers, persistent and slightly unsettling, long after the final notes of *My River Flows* have dissolved into silence. The Toronto-based artist, operating under the name Red Jacket, has delivered his fourth studio album — his *fourth*, mind you, before most of his peers have figured out how to properly tune a guitar — and the result is something genuinely startling: a record that sounds both like an old soul's confession and a young mind's restless, gorgeous overreach.