Most of us were handed a set of beliefs before we were old enough to inspect them. Plenty of rock bands have written songs about the moment the inspection begins. Few have made it sound like an eviction notice served by the sky. "MOTHER", the debut single from Chicago's CHANNELS, does exactly that, and it is a thrilling first word from a band with plenty more to say.

A rock band invited into a museum usually behaves like a guest who has been told not to touch anything. FORRM, recorded at New York's Museum of Arts and Design in December 2024, behave like people who have come to move the furniture, and the album that survives the night is bold, patient and quietly extraordinary.

Protest music has a habit of congratulating itself. It stands on a stage, clears its throat and informs the audience of what they already believe, while the rhythm section sits politely in the background doing as it is told. Sheykh Forever has no such manners. *Fire in the Master's House*, the fourteen-track debut-in-all-but-name from the London-based Iraqi-born Mostafa Al, drags the anti-war album onto the dancefloor and refuses to let it leave until everyone has sweated through their conscience.

Pop has always loved a girl in the passenger seat: the one who doesn't drive, doesn't explain, and somehow reads the map of your skull better than you do. suscie's new single takes that figure, gives her a cracked crown and a faraway stare, and sends her gliding through four minutes of sampled shimmer and chopped-up longing. It is a small record with a large ache, and it lands.

Most records about recovery are written from the far bank, by someone dry and composed, pointing back at the river. *Only Human* is written from the water. Tallulah Rendall's seventh album, which follows a toxic relationship and the death of her father from Covid, keeps the wet hair and shaking hands in the frame. It is all the more affecting for it.

Brian Idle is a name that invites the lazy joke, and the joke is the best argument for the man. Forty-six years in the business, played out in the clubs and theatres of the Midwest and then the Pacific Northwest, on bills alongside Nicolette Larson, Zapp and Con Funk Shun: no idler ever kept that schedule. Those three names deserve a moment. Larson's honeyed West Coast polish, Zapp's talk-box swagger and Con Funk Shun's silk-lined grooves make a stern finishing school for any performer, and anyone who has shared a stage with all of them has learned where the pocket is and how to stay in it. "Violets and Gum Drops" is the sound of that education paying out.

The first thing to go is the beat. Within seconds of "In the Silence of the Hills" opening, you notice what isn't there: no kick drum nudging you forward, no hi-hat ticking away the seconds like a nervous colleague. Moon and Aries, a duo whose records have usually carried at least a ghost of trip-hop pulse, have taken the drums out and left the room to breathe. It is a brave subtraction, and the single is the better for it.

There is a certain kind of pop song that arrives with a manifesto, a concept album's worth of gravitas and a press release as thick as a telephone directory. "Sunrise State of Mind" is not that song. It is built, by the artist's own admission, on two simple chords, and it is all the better for it. In an age of over-egged production and under-cooked ideas, Dave Hill Jr. has done something quietly radical: he has written a song about feeling good, and made it sound like he means it.

Rock'n'roll has always been a getaway car with the radio turned up, and Robert Allen, the writer and producer behind DownTown Mystic, knows exactly which road he's on. *Maybe Love's A Crime* is a single that declines to reinvent anything. It simply remembers how a rhythm section ought to behave, and the result is a good deal more thrilling than another round of knob-twiddling.

Start with the sleeve. A woman in sunglasses and scarlet lipstick sits beside a silver-moustached gent in a bottle-green suit, who pours red wine with the unhurried air of a man who has never been told to hurry. A tiny radio mast is stamped on the bottle. It looks like a Riviera holiday snap from a parallel 1978, and the music inside lives up to it.