Let us be clear about what should not work here. Take a song built on brass-stabbed swagger and pelvic certainty, strip out the horns, bolt on a wall of Sub Pop-grade distortion, and hand the microphone to a man doing his best impression of a Memphis icon fronting a Seattle power trio. On paper it reads like the setlist of a stag do that has gone badly, gloriously wrong. On record, it is a small triumph of bad taste executed with impeccable judgement.

There's a moment in every artist's evolution when ambition either curdles into cliché or hardens into something worth hearing. On "Raise," the lead single from the forthcoming EP of the same name, Simmy lands firmly on the right side of that line, and does so with the kind of unshowy conviction that British drill has been crying out for.

There's a particular kind of British pop joy that arrives fully formed, glitter first, and asks no permission — and "Heels" by LJ & The Ray Band struts through the door like it already owns the place. This is a record that understands something too many of its po-faced contemporaries have forgotten: that pop music's first duty is to make you feel ten feet tall in shoes you can barely walk in.

Writing convincingly about pleasure is a harder trick than writing about heartbreak. Misery hands a songwriter its own scaffolding — the minor key, the slowed tempo, the lyric that trails off into silence. Joy has to build its own architecture from nothing, and most attempts collapse into syrup within thirty seconds. Which is why the 2026 remaster of "Feel Like This" deserves a longer look than a single spin on the radio would suggest: this is a record that understands exactly how much sugar a summer song can carry before it curdles, and stops just short of the line.

Songwriters who dare to rhyme "colonial" with anything at all deserve applause before the needle even drops, and Last Night Watchman — the recording alias of a Herefordshire-based veteran of Birmingham's indie underground — clears that bar and keeps climbing. *Old Blighty*, the title track and centrepiece of this new EP, takes its cue from the toppling of Edward Colston's statue in Bristol, and turns a moment of street theatre into something far more durable: a genuinely unsettled meditation on inheritance, guilt and the stories a nation tells itself to sleep at night.

Infidelity has always made for better pop music than fidelity ever could, and Mandybom knows it. "Tango," her second single, doesn't so much confess to an affair as choreograph one, and the result is the most seductive act of self-sabotage you'll hear this year.

Grief rarely announces itself politely, and Blade of Thorns understand this better than most bands currently working the industrial-rock furrow. "Deep Waters" arrives not as a single polished for radio rotation, but as a confession dragged up from somewhere cold and unlit, then set to music that refuses to flinch.

Andy Smythe has spent the better part of 2026 proving he can do difficult. *Quiet Revolution* and its companion EP were dense, needling things — theatrical art-pop records that wore their intelligence like a well-cut overcoat, all wit and social bite. So it comes as something of a relief, and frankly a surprise, that his new single trades the barbed commentary for something disarmingly simple: a love song, unashamed and unguarded, called "Beautiful Day."

There is a particular kind of English pleasure in watching a band take a decade to finish an album and somehow arrive at exactly the right moment. *This Monologue Conversation*, the third full-length from I Plead Irony, is not a record that was rushed to market to catch a trend. It is a record that outlasted a pandemic, a change of career, several thousand miles of separation, and — one suspects — more than a little bickering in rehearsal rooms, and emerged sounding entirely unbothered by any of it.

Moonlight has always been rock and roll's cheapest trick and its most reliable one — ask anyone from Van Morrison to The Killers — and Tom Minor knows it. Rather than pretend otherwise, he leans into the cliché with a smirk, dressing up a song about slipping, stumbling and self-sabotage in a coat of vintage guitar pop so shiny you could see your own bad decisions reflected in it.