Some records arrive with fanfare; others simply sidle up to you at closing time, order one more drink, and tell you the truth. "You Deserve Better Than Me" belongs firmly to the latter camp — a ballad that trades bombast for something far rarer: honesty delivered with a wink and a wince in equal measure.

Comfort, that band once suggested, might be the real enemy. On this three-track EP, Watch Me Die Inside make that argument with the conviction of people who've actually lived inside it, and the result is a record that unsettles far more than it soothes — deliberately, gorgeously so.

For nearly thirty years, Marcin Sanakiewicz has been the invisible hand steadying other people's careers: arranger, musical director, accompanist to Bartosz Chajdecki, Janusz Radek, and the storied cabaret Piwnica pod Baranami. It takes a particular kind of patience to spend a professional lifetime in the wings, and it takes a particular kind of confidence to finally walk to centre stage with nothing but a piano and a set of borrowed melodies. *Unfolked Piano. Some Polish Themes* is that walk, taken slowly, deliberately, and — this is the record's great trick — almost silently.

Goldtown is not, on the face of it, a breeding ground for demon hunters. But that is precisely the mythology Lil' Mike has built for himself on "Shuryo," the lead statement from his "HotDamn" EP, and by the second verse you believe every word of it.

Listen first, ask questions after. That's the dare TEANKO throws down with this single, and it's a dare that pays off handsomely. The premise sounds like the stuff of think-pieces rather than tunes: three decades of vocal recordings distilled into an AI model trained on nobody but the man himself, then folded back into a song about whether a voice can still land a gut-punch when machinery sits somewhere in the chain. It could have been a gimmick, a curiosity to be filed under "interesting but forgettable." Instead, TEANKO has built a record that earns its keep on melody and feel long before you start unpacking the concept behind it.

Every so often a record turns up that has no business sounding as assured as it does, given the circumstances of its making, and "Started Like That" is exactly that kind of pleasant ambush. Chris G, who spends his daylight hours on a construction site in Lago Vista, Texas, and his evenings hunched over a mixing desk in a home studio, has produced a single that would embarrass plenty of artists with proper budgets and proper studios behind them.

Phil Dean has spent three decades learning how to disappear inside a song, and on "Oh My God" he finally puts that skill to proper use. This is the fourth single lifted from a forthcoming album, and it arrives glittering with mirrorball confidence, a record that treats disco not as pastiche but as a language for saying something tender out loud.

Grief has always made for peculiar pop music. It arrives sideways, dressed up as nostalgia or seaside reverie, and it takes a canny songwriter to smuggle real devastation past the listener's guard. Kiey manages exactly that with "phan thiet," a single so gently disarming you barely notice it's broken your heart until the final chorus has already done the damage.