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.

Picture the scene: it is two in the morning somewhere on the Blue Ridge Parkway, fog pressing against the windscreen like a slow suffocation, the radio dead, and a young man receiving what he will later describe as a "direct download" from the void. Whether you find that sort of language romantically overwrought or genuinely prophetic rather depends on what RIOT SON — the bedroom alias of Justin Ridge Frissell — has actually managed to pull off with this debut three-track EP. The verdict, somewhat against the odds of expectation, is that he has pulled off quite a lot.

Somewhere between the West Midlands and the outer reaches of musical taxonomy, Shotgun Marmalade have spent years quietly refusing to be categorised. Punk? Broadly. Ska? Certainly. Folk? Occasionally. Pop? When it suits them. *Boomtown*, their third long-player, is the sound of a band that has stopped worrying about where to file itself and simply got on with the rather more important business of making records that crackle with life, purpose, and the particular kind of righteous indignation that only comes from genuinely paying attention to the world.