The story a song tells about itself is rarely the whole story. Press releases are, by their nature, acts of seduction — little paper valentines sent ahead of the music to soften the listener's critical instincts before the first note lands. And yet, occasionally, the myth and the music meet. Occasionally, the backstory isn't spin but archaeology — the unearthing of something that was genuinely always there.

The most instructive thing about *Not Over* is what it doesn't sound like. It doesn't sound like *Letters to the Absent*, the 2012 debut that earned By Million Wires comparisons to skyscraping guitar psychedelia and established them as a band of genuine atmospheric ambition. It doesn't sound like the transitional instrumental work that followed Anna's departure — that more decisive, harder-edged post-rock that suggested the band might retreat entirely into wordlessness. And it doesn't sound like a band trying to sound like anything in particular. For a record fourteen years in the making, *Not Over* carries almost no anxiety about its own identity. That, more than any individual moment of brilliance, is what makes it worth your time.

To write about grief is one thing. To compose it — to catch it mid-air and pin it, still living, to a piece of music — is quite another. Esvan Du Quador attempts precisely that on "Yvette," the latest offering from his *Famille* series, and the sheer tact with which he succeeds ought to silence every producer currently reaching for another synthetic drop or borrowed hook. This is music made the difficult way: through feeling rather than formula, through absence rather than accumulation. It is, quietly and without fuss, extraordinary.

The ocean has always been rock music's most reliable accomplice — vast enough to absorb any emotional projection, indifferent enough to reflect it straight back. M3G knows this, and on De-Anchored she makes the metaphor work not through sentimentality but through sheer sonic intelligence. This is a record about losing yourself, and it genuinely sounds like it.

Joseph Campbell spent the better part of his career arguing that every story worth telling is, at its marrow, the same story. The call. The refusal. The crossing of the threshold. The dragon. The return. He called it the monomyth, and he was right in the way that only the most irritatingly perceptive thinkers ever are — right enough that you can't unsee it once you've been shown, right enough that it has soaked into every corner of human expression from Homer to *The Lion King*. PRTLND — the project of Mathieu, a Frenchman who has made Dublin his proving ground — has now added his name to that long, strange lineage, and he has done so with a confidence that borders on the audacious.

The most honest thing a love song can do is admit it cannot do the thing it set out to do. That paradox sits at the very centre of Temper Lake's quietly devastating debut single, a piece of music that understands the geometry of tenderness — how it bends inward, resists performance, and dissolves at the exact moment you try to hold it still long enough to describe it.

**Some records announce themselves. Others detonate. "Heads on Fire," the blazing centrepiece of Ava Valianti's sophomore EP, belongs emphatically to the second category.**