The Finnish have always understood silence better than most. Perhaps it is the long winters, the vast forests, the particular quality of Nordic introspection that resists sentimentality while never quite abandoning feeling. Mikko Järvenpää — recording as Introsoul — has made an album steeped in that silence. Not the silence of absence, but the productive, searching quiet of five o'clock in the morning, alarm clock still warm, family still dreaming, a man alone with his instruments and his unresolved questions.

Look at that cover art and you already know precisely what you're getting yourself into. Crimson and ochre triangles peeling apart like a wound refusing to close, the geometry of a star fracturing under pressure, the whole surface cracked and split as though the image itself has been left out in the cold too long. Whoever designed the sleeve for "My Hurt" — The Night & The Dirty's latest single — understood something fundamental: the packaging must carry the same honest damage as the music inside. This is not the airbrushed anguish of stadium rock confessional. This is the real, grubby, aching thing.

Delusion is an unfashionable subject. Pop music, in its perpetual race toward the hyper-confessional and the algorithmically optimised, tends to mistake self-deception for weakness — something to be overcome swiftly, narrated briskly, monetised and moved on from. Julie Paschke is having absolutely none of it. On Flying Above, her new single and accompanying visual, the Melbourne-based artist treats self-delusion not as a flaw to be corrected but as the very texture of human experience — the fog we agree, collectively and privately, to breathe every day. It is a quietly devastating proposition, and she handles it with the kind of unhurried confidence that most artists spend entire careers pretending to possess.