South Africa has long exported genius to an indifferent world — Miriam Makeba, Johnny Clegg, Die Antwoord — and the world has long taken its time catching up. With "Good Luck To Her," her bracingly confident new single, Anacy makes the strongest possible case that the wait is over, at least for her. This is pop music with genuine architecture behind it: load-bearing walls where other artists settle for wallpaper.

There's a particular kind of record that doesn't announce itself so much as it *accumulates* — one that you can't quite locate the moment it got under your skin, only that it has, and that you're not especially interested in removing it. Blueprint Tokyo's *Dark New Days* is precisely that sort of thing: compact, quietly devastating, and possessed of the kind of emotional intelligence that most bands spend entire careers trying to fake.

Let us be clear from the outset: *Thunderbird Lodge* is not an album that wants to be your friend. It will not bring you soup when you're ill. It will not text back. Madison, Wisconsin's The Flavor That Kills — a band whose very name reads like a coroner's verdict on good taste — have returned with their fourth record, and it is a genuinely strange, occasionally magnificent, deeply uncomfortable piece of work that demands full submission or nothing at all.

*What does it mean to make music nobody asked for, in a house nobody will visit, about feelings nobody can quite name? Sparky's Magic Piano have the answer, and it fizzes like citrus on a winter morning.*

Brisbane does not announce itself. It broods, sweats, hums with subtropical electricity, and apparently — if Clay Wakefield is to be believed — it ferments rage. Quiet, productive, home-studio rage. The kind that produces ten tracks of snarling industrial electro-rock and then sits back, deeply satisfied, waiting for the world to catch up.

The problem with most retro-leaning rock records is that they mistake nostalgia for vision. They excavate the past the way tourists visit ruins — snapping photographs, buying a fridge magnet, going home unchanged. Törner Cryda, five students from Lund University who apparently spent their formative years listening to Zeppelin bootlegs and reading medieval hagiographies, have the good sense — and the genuine talent — to do something altogether more alive with their influences. *Knight in Pieces*, their debut long-player, doesn't reconstruct the 1970s so much as cheerfully colonise them, plant a flag, and start issuing its own passports.