Let's get one thing straight from the off: the name is a provocation. adequate. Lowercase, deliberately modest, almost aggressively self-deprecating — the kind of title you choose when you know full well the music beneath it is anything but. It's the oldest trick in the rock and roll handbook, the shrug that conceals a clenched fist, and on the evidence of debut single "go," these smelly Wexford grungers — their words, worn like a badge of considerable honour — are playing the long game with considerable intelligence.

Some records arrive quietly. They slip beneath the door like a note slid under a hotel room at midnight — no fanfare, no machinery, just the thing itself. Daniel Trigger's comeback single 'Alone Tonight' is precisely that kind of record: unhurried, unfashionable, and almost defiantly itself. Which, depending on your appetite for melodic hard rock delivered with genuine conviction, is either the best news you've heard all year, or confirmation that certain corners of the musical universe remain gloriously immune to trend.

Somewhere between the cracked neon of a Route 66 dive bar and the clean severity of a desert midnight, Lancaster Rayne has built himself a peculiar and rather wonderful problem. He makes country music that sounds like it genuinely means something — and he does it entirely alone, in a private studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with no Nashville cheque to cash and nobody to answer to. The gall of it.

On the night of October 26th, 1999, a twenty-five-year-old railway worker named Małgorzata Ż. was murdered at the KD–1 signal box in the Silesian town of Czerwionka-Leszczyny. No arrest was ever made. No conviction, no closure, no name pinned to the act. The case calcified into one of those silences that provincial towns carry like a stone in the chest — present always, spoken of rarely. Twenty-six years on, a documentary and now this five-track EP have broken that silence with something approaching the force of a fist through glass.

Raw Soul — the nom de guerre of Vancouver-based hip-hop artist and practicing barrister Rawad — arrives not with a thunderclap but with the measured confidence of a man who has learned, through considerable difficulty, to trust his own counsel. *Still High…*, his nine-track original album released on the 12th of May, is the document of a mind that has survived its own turbulence and chosen, rather defiantly, to be grateful about it. That's a harder emotional register to pull off than most rappers attempt. Gratitude, after all, doesn't sell mixtapes. Raw Soul doesn't appear to care.

Let's get one thing straight before we go any further: the story of Frank Gusenberg is not one that invites subtlety. Shot fourteen times in a Chicago garage on the morning of 14th February 1929, he was found breathing by police who arrived expecting nothing but bodies. "Who shot you?" they asked. "Nobody shot me," he replied. He was dead within hours. The man took fourteen bullets to the chest, refused to name Al Capone's hitmen, and died with his loyalty intact and his lips sealed. If that story doesn't demand a song that rattles the walls, nothing does.

Dublin has always been a city that understands the particular poetry of the comedown. From the grey Liffey mornings that inspired a generation of writers to nurse their hangovers into literature, there is something in the damp Irish air that transforms suffering into art. It is into this grand tradition that Adrian Sood quietly, almost shyly, deposits "My Junky Friend" — a track that announces the arrival of a genuinely interesting songwriting sensibility with considerably more grace than its title might initially suggest.

The perfect comeback always arrives too late. You're in the shower, the water going cold, replaying some social humiliation from six hours ago — and only then do the right words finally assemble themselves, elegant and lethal and completely useless. Passing Grade have built their finest song yet out of exactly that sensation, and the result is three minutes of such precise emotional archaeology that you may find yourself reaching to turn it off simply because it knows too much about you.

Fifteen years is a long time to do anything with the same people. Fifteen years of sharing the same rehearsal room air, of tolerating each other's tuning habits and tempo disagreements, of hauling equipment into venues that smell faintly of spilled ambition — this is not a small thing. Most bands collapse under the weight of far shorter acquaintances. Lotus Grove, the Atlanta quintet whose bonds stretch back to the fluorescent-lit corridors of middle school, have not collapsed. "Ordinary People," their second single from a sprawling twelve-track project, is the proof.

Every so often, a record arrives that feels less like a song and more like a manifesto stapled to your front door. *CONTROL*, the new single from Olie N. — the fiercely independent electro-pop provocateur out of Québec City — is precisely that kind of document. It does not ask for your attention. It takes it.