There is a particular sort of courage required of the American independent artist in the current moment — not the swaggering bravado of the major-label machine, with its algorithmic playlists and demographically optimised drops, but something quieter and therefore considerably braver: the willingness to be genuinely, nakedly, uncomplicatedly honest. Stefanie Michaela, a Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter who is also, we are informed, a mother of five including two sets of twins (a biographical detail that alone implies a woman who has long since dispensed with the luxury of artifice), understands this instinctively. Her new single arrives not as a calculated career move but as something that feels more like a confession — and therein lies its considerable power.

The thing about songs rooted in place is that they either smell authentic or they don't. You know within eight bars whether a songwriter genuinely inhabits the geography they're invoking, or whether they're renting it for colour. With "So Moseley," Crane inhabits it entirely — the Moseley of junk shops and retro clothing emporiums, of antique spectacles and art school posture, of a particular kind of Birmingham bohemia that never quite made the history books but shaped the people who passed through it more profoundly than any NME cover story ever could.

Sleep, Freud once argued, is the royal road to the unconscious. Pop music, rather less often, gets anywhere near that road — let alone travels it with any conviction. Kat Kikta, the multi-disciplinary artist, singer and sonic architect who has been quietly assembling one of the more genuinely peculiar catalogues in the contemporary independent scene, does not merely visit that territory on *Dreamer*. She sets up residence there.

**Peaches, as any decent poet will tell you, bruise easily.** They demand to be handled with something approaching reverence — too firm a grip and the whole thing collapses into sweetness and ruin. Mary Knoblock understands this. *PEACH*, her latest offering from Portland via the quietly formidable Aurally Records, is an album that holds its own tenderness with extraordinary care, and dares you to do the same.