Nine tracks in, and the record still refuses to sound like anyone's homework. That's the first thing worth saying about OM Mare Shangri-la, the debut vocal statement from a composer who has spent a decade letting piano pieces arrive to her fully formed, as though dictated rather than written. Karen Salicath Jamali has finally picked up a microphone, and the results carry the strange, unhurried confidence of someone who has nothing to prove and everything to offer.

Subtlety, one gathers, was never on the shopping list. "Bang Bang Zoom Zoom" arrives less like a single than a controlled demolition, and 12 Days Dead detonate it with a grin you can practically hear through the speakers. This is a band uninterested in the polite fade-in, the tasteful build. They kick the door clean off its hinges and invite the whole street inside.

Bedroom pop has a habit of sounding exactly like what it is: modest, a little threadbare, honest about its limitations. Ricky Earlywine's "the grace code" declines that bargain outright. Recorded in the same room where every previous release was made, mixed alone in BandLab, built from an AI-generated instrumental sketch that Earlywine then bullied into something altogether more human — the track arrives sounding less like a demo and more like a small, glittering production number that has wandered in from a Disney soundstage and decided to stay for the R&B.