The Murdoch press spent the better part of two decades doing a particular kind of damage — not the damage of the outright lie, though there was plenty of that, but the more corrosive damage of the coded verdict. *Single mother.* Two words deployed like a sentence, a moral tribunal condensed into a tabloid font. JK Jerome has spent, one suspects, considerably longer than two decades working out what to do with that. *Profanity*, his debut single, is what happens when a songwriter finally finds the right room for that anger — and discovers it isn't anger at all. It's something stranger, sadder, and considerably more interesting.

Parenthood has always been music's great unexplored frontier. We have songs about falling in love, falling apart, losing friends, losing faith — but the particular, grinding, unglamorous weight of raising children while simultaneously trying to remain a functioning human being? That territory, rich as dark soil, is almost always left to the poets and the novelists. Amsterdam trio Tonneau have planted their flag in it, and what they've built on that ground is quietly extraordinary.

The anniversary reissue is, as a genre, deeply suspect. Too often it arrives draped in the self-congratulatory padding of liner notes nobody reads and bonus tracks nobody asked for — a monument to commerce masquerading as a monument to art. Russ Lorenson, to his very considerable credit, has done something rather more interesting with the twentieth birthday of his debut album: he has actually gone back inside it.

Ron Morven arrives with little fanfare and considerable nerve. *Paper Sun*, his debut single, does not ease you in. It drops you, blinking, onto a Los Angeles freeway at the precise moment the heat becomes something more than weather — when the asphalt stops being infrastructure and starts being a psychological condition. That is a bold gambit for any debut, let alone one aimed squarely at dance floors and streaming playlists. Morven pulls it off with the confidence of someone who has been writing long enough to know that the gap between a mood and a song is smaller than most producers are willing to admit.