Silver Spring, Maryland isn't exactly synonymous with cosmic disaster narratives set to a funk groove, but LunaRover have never been a band content to work within the confines of geography or genre. "Throw Me A Line" arrives as a gleaming, slightly unhinged single that manages the rare trick of sounding both meticulously engineered and gloriously off-kilter — a combination that shouldn't work nearly as well as it does.

Songwriting has a lousy track record when it comes to loss. Most who attempt it either drown the thing in strings until it becomes a funeral parlour advert, or they flinch at the last second and reach for a platitude instead of a truth. Scott Lowder does neither. "Ghost of You" is a song that had the patience to wait a decade for its author to be ready to record it properly, and that patience is audible in every bar.

A bedroom in Orange County has produced nine albums now, and on the ninth, something loosens. Guitars muscle their way to the front of the mix, elbowing the keyboards that once ran this operation unchallenged, and the result is a record that sounds less like a solitary hobbyist tinkering after midnight and more like a man finally letting the noise in his head off the leash.

Somewhere between the high passes of the Andes and the low, bone-crushing throb of a Marshall stack, Untold Jukebox have found a sound nobody asked for and everybody suddenly wants. "Empire of Stone," the towering lead single from their new six-track concept record of the same lineage, doesn't so much blend panflute and heavy metal as stage a coup between them — and metal, remarkably, loses gracefully.

There is a very specific kind of nerve required to write a song that treats the Almighty as just another mark to be worked, and Madeline Rosene has it in spades. "I'll Seduce God to Get Into Heaven" doesn't so much knock on the pearly gates as kick them off their hinges, saunter in, and start making eyes at the doorman.

Brandes writes songs the way a diarist writes entries he never expects anyone else to read, which is precisely why they land with such force when we do. On "Love In Two Degrees," the first taste of his forthcoming album *Still Life*, he takes the oldest subject in the songbook — love lost, love found again, love doubted — and refuses every shortcut a lesser writer would reach for.

Some records announce themselves with a fanfare. Others arrive quietly, almost apologetically, and then refuse to leave your head for a week. "My Life Is You," the debut single from Novo Grey, belongs firmly to the second camp — a song built not for spectacle but for staying power, and it earns that staying power through sheer emotional candour.