Nobody asked Portland's Earl Patrick to make this record. Nobody asked him to abandon the guitar, to set aside the singer-songwriter persona he has refined across six albums and a piano sonata, and to spend his airplane journeys tapping flute-and-piano compositions into an iPad app called Symphony Pro. Nobody asked him to then drag those compositions through the splintered architecture of nineties sample-based hip-hop, to press public domain film dialogue and Libravox audiobook readers into service as rhythmic texture. Nobody asked — and that, precisely, is what makes *Conditioned By Machines* one of the more genuinely disorienting and rewarding listens of the year.

Let us dispense, immediately, with the caveats. JD Hinton is not a new proposition. The press releases have been arriving for long enough to fill a small filing cabinet, and critics have been reaching for the same dog-eared comparison notes — Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, the brooding American male with a philosophically dented heart — long enough that the shorthand risks becoming wallpaper. And yet. *And yet.* "Someday Is Today" demands you put down the filing cabinet, sit in a chair, and reckon with something that functions, against all reasonable expectation, as a genuinely urgent piece of music.

Paul Cogley — now trading simply as Cogley, a streamlining that suggests both artistic confidence and a healthy irritation with administrative confusion — has done something quietly remarkable with this re-release. He has taken an album that already carried genuine emotional weight, added four new songs, handed the masters to Robert L. Smith (a man whose CV reads like a roll call of rock's untouchable titans), and arrived at something that demands to be heard at volume, preferably in the dark.

Gothic metal has always been music that takes itself seriously — sometimes too seriously, collapsing under the weight of its own funereal grandeur. The genre is littered with the wreckage of projects that mistook darkness for depth and cathedral reverb for emotional truth. Cries of Redemption, the singular vehicle of Ed Silva, is a different proposition entirely. And *What Lies Beneath*, as interpreted by Argentine opera vocalist Martina Questa, makes the case with considerable force.

Pop-rock has long been the genre most willing to make a fool of itself in the service of emotional honesty, and Hailey Hermida, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter who began her craft at thirteen during the hollow quiet of a pandemic, understands this better than most of her contemporaries. Her new single "17" is not a polished meditation on adolescence. It is a scream recorded the day after a fight, a week before her eighteenth birthday, and it sounds exactly like that — raw, slightly dangerous, and absolutely alive.

British music criticism has always reserved a particular reverence for the American singer who operates entirely outside the machinery — the one who builds her own house, furnishes it on her own terms, and then invites you inside without apology. MILYAM, performing under her own MILYAM EMPIRE imprint, is precisely that kind of artist. And *Intimacy*, her latest single, is the kind of record that makes you sit very still and reconsider whatever you were planning to do with the next four minutes of your life.

**The Miami-based songwriter steps boldly sideways, and the view from the edge is rather magnificent.** Kim Cameron has spent the better part of her career doing what the dance floor demands of her: moving forward, keeping the beat, never stopping long enough to breathe. Three Billboard chart entries will do that to a person. So it says something about the particular confidence — or perhaps the particular restlessness — of a truly gifted songwriter that she would choose this moment, at the height of her creative currency, to stop the pounding kick drum and simply… exhale.

*The Massachusetts teenager turns a party into a philosophical crisis, and somehow makes it sound like the most natural thing in the world.* Sixteen is a peculiar age to be writing about the tyranny of time. Most songwriters spend their teenage years cataloguing first kisses and Friday nights, saving their existential reckoning for the back half of their twenties, when the hangovers last three days and the career hasn't quite materialised. Ava Valianti, apparently, did not receive that particular memo.

**By the time A Floor Below have finished with you, you will not be entirely sure which side of the walls you are on. That is precisely the point.** The concept album has always been a dangerous gamble — a format littered with the wreckage of bands who confused ambition for architecture. *The Asylum*, the latest offering from A Floor Below, does something rather more interesting than merely avoid that fate: it makes the very concept of confinement feel liberating. This is a record that locks you in a room and hands you the key, then dares you to decide whether you actually want to leave.

The British music press has always reserved its sharpest knives for the moment a voice cuts through the noise and demands to be heard on its own terms. Katie Belle, with *People Pleaser*, reminds us precisely why that attention is warranted. This is not a single that shuffles apologetically into the room. It kicks the door in.