In our traditional support of the Ukrainian rock scene, we would like to offer you a story about a remarkable event that took place in western Ukraine in the small town of Manevychi. Every year, at the end of May, all the world's museums hold a night at the museum, and such a night took place in Manevychi, where at the same time the soft opening of the first hall of the future Rock Capital museum took place. The hall is called The History of Ukrainian Rock and Roll and is the first of seven planned halls of the Rock Capital Museum. Perhaps it would not have been so attractive if the Rock Capital Museum had not truly been the first rock museum in Ukraine.

Somewhere in a London kitchen, very late at night, someone had an idea that refused to be quiet. That idea is now about four minutes of pure, serrated purpose, and it announces St. Jove as a band who understand that the best rock songs are not performances — they are emergencies. 'Gold' does not politely introduce itself. It arrives already moving.

The debut album arrives fully formed, which is either a miracle or a warning. With *Totemic*, the UK artist known simply as Keeble does something that ought to be more difficult than it sounds: he constructs a ten-track ritual, and makes you feel the heat of it.

Some songs arrive quietly and stay forever. "Caleb," the latest single from German-born, Ireland-based singer-songwriter Damien Cain, is precisely that kind of song — one that does not announce itself with fanfare, but settles into the memory like a photograph found at the back of a drawer. Produced by UK hitmaker Jay Dixie, whose credits span Meghan Trainor and Ella Henderson, this radio edit strips away any potential for excess and leaves something genuinely rare: a ballad that earns every second of your attention.

The name alone is a provocation worth sitting with. A spinor, as any physicist or pleasingly curious non-physicist will know, is a quantum object that defies commonsense reality: rotate it once and it does not return to where it started; rotate it twice and it does. It must be observed before it acquires a definite state. That Sergie Code — Argentine expatriate, restless songwriter, the driving intelligence behind this London-based trio — chose this particular piece of mathematics as his band's identity tells you immediately what sort of artist you are dealing with. One, it turns out, who means it.

There is a particular kind of song that arrives not so much as a piece of music but as a reckoning. *State of Mind*, the debut single from Warrington's WINACHI and the opening salvo of their forthcoming album, is precisely that kind of song — a three-minute act of self-examination from a band who spent the better part of two years dragging themselves across three continents and only recently stopped to ask whether they were still intact.

The pianist and composer Yulia Petrova arrives on record with a single that carries the quiet authority of an artist who has been waiting, deliberately and patiently, for the right moment. "Let's Agree To Love" is that moment, and she has seized it with both hands.

Let us dispense immediately with the pretence that electronic music cannot carry genuine emotional weight. RobbaDucky — the nom de guerre of a UK producer who appears constitutionally incapable of making anything loud or careless — has now, with his latest single, produced something that deserves to be heard in a darkened room with the volume turned up and the excuses turned off.

Metal has always been the genre most comfortable with its own contradictions. It traffics in beauty and ugliness simultaneously, in vulnerability dressed up as aggression, in the tender things men and women cannot quite bring themselves to say aloud without a wall of distortion to hide behind. Brussels five-piece Karma Noir understand this instinctively. On "This Is Her Time," their debut single, they have made something that announces itself with the force of a band who have been waiting — perhaps impatiently — to say exactly this.

There is a particular kind of audacity that British music has always respected above all else — not the audacity of volume or spectacle, but the audacity of *refusal*. The refusal to play by the given rules. The refusal to accept the terms of engagement handed down by those who profit from your compliance. The Clash had it. P.J. Harvey had it. M.I.A. had it so ferociously it terrified an entire industry. And now, arriving from an independent operation running out of London WC2H, Stephanie Happening — a system, an artist, a declaration of intent — stakes a very serious claim to that same lineage with *Unbroken Chains*.