It takes a particular kind of nerve to name your band after the Greek paradise of the blessed before you've played a single gig, and yet that's precisely the gambit Mark Roos and James Shumway pulled off in 1994, recruiting a recent Arizona transplant named Kerri Murray on the strength of her voice alone. The result, "Definition," recorded the following year at Cliff Maag's Record Lab and only now finding its way to streaming services three decades late, is a record that wears its ambition lightly. This is mid-nineties Utah pop-rock with its sleeves rolled up and its heart, somewhat unfashionably for the period, worn very much on the outside.

Some records announce themselves. Others simply happen to you, the way weather happens to you, and "RIFF" belongs squarely to the latter camp. Released on 17 June, this single takes its cue from Bob Gramsma's land art monument of the same name — a hollow scooped out of the Flevoland polder, a wound in reclaimed earth that has spent years quietly arguing with the North Sea about who owns the ground beneath it. Vanschothorst, harpist and evidently something of a quiet excavator herself, has gone looking for the sound that hollow might make if it could speak, and the result is less a song than a séance.

There's a particular strain of doom that only the Greeks seem to get right — not the slasher-film dread of American horror synth, nor the polished melancholy of the Scandinavians, but something older, more theatrical, closer to tragedy than terror. Athens duo Hollow Shift have been quietly building a case for themselves as purveyors of exactly that strain, and on their new three-track single *WAR*, they cash the cheque in full.

Pop music has long had a soft spot for the troubadour who reads too much Hesse and not enough room. Andy Smythe belongs proudly to that lineage, and his new six-track companion piece to *Quiet Revolution* wears its bookshelf on its sleeve with the unblushing confidence of a man who has never once worried about sounding pretentious. The remarkable thing is how often he gets away with it.

Orlando's Kings County have arrived bearing the two things every aspiring hard rock band needs and almost none possess in equal measure: a producer with a genuine pedigree and a press kit that reads like a man trying very hard to convince you he's already made it. Chuck Alkazian, the studio hand behind Pop Evil and the late, great Chris Cornell, has been drafted in to give "What Now" its sheen, and credit where it's due — Pearl Sound Studios has clearly done the band more favours than five years of festival slots combined.

Three men from a Norwegian island of six hundred and ten souls have spent thirty-five years writing songs together, and on the evidence of "August Came," they have arrived at something close to wisdom about the particular ache of a season's turning. This is not nostalgia dressed up as a single; it is nostalgia *as* the single, worn openly, like a man who has stopped pretending the jacket still fits and decided to wear it anyway, sleeves and all.