Let's be honest about what pop music owes the world right now: a little hope. Not the saccharine, focus-grouped kind that arrives pre-packaged with a corporate sync licence and a strategic TikTok rollout — real, messy, guitar-strummed hope. The kind that catches you off guard on a Tuesday morning and makes you feel, briefly, like everything might actually be alright. cadzo, a four-piece out of Denver, Colorado, seem to understand this with a clarity that is almost embarrassing given how rarely it's achieved.

The word "raw," when affixed to a single as a qualifier, usually functions as an apology — a whispered disclaimer that the machinery wasn't quite ready, that what you are about to hear is provisional, unfinished, apologetically underdressed. Savannah-based project Cries of Redemption, the vehicle of the artist known as Silva, uses the word differently. For them, rawness is the point. It is the argument.

Carrie Schoenfeld and her New York collaborator Grant have the nerve to ask the question that most pop music is far too comfortable to even approach: not whether we can save this planet, but whether we ever truly believed it needed saving at all. "Planet B" — the latest transmission from their project Energy Whores — arrives not as a protest song, not as a lament, but as something considerably more unsettling: a diagnosis delivered with a synthesiser and a smirk.

The silence before the first note has always been the most honest moment in music. It is the moment before the artist can hide behind a vocalist's charisma, before a hook rescues an arrangement from its own shortcomings. R3b3l I, a London-based producer operating somewhere in the rich overlap of lo-fi, jazz and soul, understands this implicitly. On *A Different Frequency*, his debut album, he inhabits that silence and then populates it with twelve compositions of considerable emotional intelligence.