Some bands arrive politely. They knock, they wait, they wipe their feet. Rubbish Party do not do this. They kick the door in — and if the press release is to be believed, vocalist Evan Zorn Von Berg has form with doors — and they demand you reckon with them on their own grotesque, magnificent terms.

**The finest songs are not written so much as excavated — pulled from somewhere deep and irreducible, where grief and gratitude have become indistinguishable from one another. Deborah Fitz knows this.**

Sheffield has long harboured a quiet genius for producing artists who refuse to be tidily categorised. The city that gave us the clipped electro-angst of the Human League and the baroque pop architecture of Pulp has, it seems, been quietly incubating something altogether more warm-blooded. Max Restaino — pronounced, lest you fumble it at a dinner party, REST-I-KNOW — is not the Sheffield you were expecting. And that, emphatically, is the point.

**The older you get, the less patience you have for silence. 50mething knows this. And frankly, so should you.**

*There are moments when a debut single announces itself not with a shout but with a slow, deliberate exhale — and Martin Tennant's "Forgotten Son" is precisely that kind of arrival.*

The Isle of Mull is not a place that rushes. Ferries run on their own schedule, weather dictates the terms of any given day, and the Atlantic has no interest in your deadline. It is perhaps the only fitting birthplace for a song like "Weight Will Unwind" — a piece so deliberately unhurried, so comfortable inside its own silence, that it feels less like a debut single and more like a letter discovered years after it was written, its ink still somehow fresh.

Some albums arrive. Others *return* — carrying the weight of decades, of roads taken and abandoned, of ghosts who never quite let go. *Destructor*, the long-delayed third full-length from London NWOBHM veterans MORE, belongs emphatically to the second category. And the ghost in question is one of rock production's most singular talents: Chris Tsangarides, the man who put the thunder into Judas Priest's *Screaming for Vengeance*, who understood better than almost anyone how to make a guitar sound like it was tearing the fabric of the physical world. He delivered the final mix of this record on the eve of his death in January 2017. Nearly a decade later, the rest of us finally get to hear what he left behind. The wait, it turns out, was worth every agonising year.

Some albums announce themselves. Others simply materialise, fully formed and quietly devastating, as if they had always existed and you were merely slow to find them. *Sole Music*, the debut long-player from Brighton's sole-trader, belongs emphatically to the second category. Released into the grey wash of a March morning, it is the kind of record that rewards the patient listener and confounds anyone expecting indie pop to stay neatly within its lane.

Pop music, at its most honest, has always been about one thing: the brutal, beautiful, occasionally humiliating experience of wanting someone who may or may not want you back. Mandybom knows this. She has built her entire artistic identity around that knowledge, and on *Dream It, Spell It, Feel It*, she distils it into something close to a minor masterpiece of modern longing.

Thirty years is a long time to sit on your hands. Long enough for the Britpop wars to flare and burn out, for guitar music to die its fourteen scheduled deaths, for streaming to eat the music industry whole and spit out the algorithm-shaped bones. Christopher Scott Brammer — the Australian-born songwriter at the heart of the Mister Chorister project — was absent for all of it. And yet, with "Brave," his debut single released February 2026, he arrives not as a man bewildered by the present but as one who has arrived precisely on time, carrying something the charts have been quietly starving for: genuine emotional weight.