James Zero arrives from the rust-belt hollows of Gallitzin, Pennsylvania, carrying a record that sounds like grief wearing its Sunday best. "PAST IS PERFECT," the penultimate single from his forthcoming album *early2thou*, is the kind of song that gets under your skin before you've even realised it's started digging.

The desert has always known things the rest of us have been slow to learn. It knows patience. It knows the particular weight of silence before something enormous arrives. CMD.EXE, the Tucson-based electronic rock project that announced itself so compellingly with *love.language.model*, seems to have absorbed both lessons completely — and *Madam E.V.A.*, the second of two simultaneously released singles heralding the forthcoming album *Red Giant Protocol*, is proof that the band has not merely learned from the desert but has weaponised it.

Phoenix is not a city one typically associates with the kind of brooding, rain-soaked introspection that produces music like this. And yet Allan Jamisen — composer, painter, perpetual reinventor — has somehow conjured a record that feels more at home in the grey half-light of a Copenhagen November than beneath the relentless Arizona sun. "Closing In" is a haunting, beautifully disorienting piece of work, and it announces itself with the quiet confidence of someone who has earned every note through genuine suffering.

The finest songwriting always begins with a question the writer cannot answer alone. Johnny Cash ruminated on sin and redemption. Springsteen has spent five decades interrogating the American dream. And now Mark Winters, an aerospace engineer from Texas who moonlights — or perhaps it is the engineering that is the moonlight — as a singer-songwriter, poses his own quiet, essential question: Can I rise? Will my roots hold me down? That it takes a song co-written with his son to surface the question properly tells you everything you need to know about what "Can I Rise" is really doing.

The most subversive thing about *Fun Intended*, the debut album from Chicago's DadJoke, is how completely it refuses to condescend. Not to children, obviously — children's music that talks down to its audience is so commonplace as to be unremarkable. No, what Reminick refuses is the more pernicious condescension: the kind that assumes "music for small people" must therefore be small music. This album is enormous. Ludicrously, thrillingly, almost aggressively enormous.

There is a particular kind of album that refuses to announce itself. It doesn't arrive with a manifesto or a provocateur's flourish. It simply appears, quietly, like a letter pushed under a door — and you only realise its weight after you've already read it twice.

The Washington, D.C. skate scene has always had a peculiar relationship with sound. Concrete parks and parking garage sessions carry their own acoustics — the crack of a board on a ledge, the clatter of wheels down a staircase, the distant throb of a Bluetooth speaker somebody dragged out from a backpack. What Geese Da Goon has done with *Let Me Take You to Snap City EP* is bottle that ambience and make it sellable, portable, and — on his best days here — genuinely thrilling.

The sophomore record is the great test of nerve. Any artist with half a pulse can stumble into a debut — accident, urgency, and luck conspire to create something irreducible. The second album is where intention is revealed: does the artist know what they are, or were they simply discovered by their own sound? With *Devil May Care*, Valley Lights answers that question without flinching, and the answer, delivered with considerable swagger and no small amount of craft, is an emphatic yes.

Washington, DC has long nurtured a particular kind of artistic honesty — from the go-go rhythms of the city's streets to the confessional fury of its punk basements. WiLL, born and raised in Northeast DC, carries that legacy forward on "IG Love," a single that cuts through the noise of contemporary R&B with the precision of someone who has grown quietly furious at how hollow the language of modern affection has become.

Mary Margaret Klein lived for ninety minutes. That is not long enough to hear music, not long enough to recognise a face, not long enough for the world to register her presence in any of the ordinary ways. It is, however, long enough to be loved — and long enough, as Jim Klein and Ian Jamison have now demonstrated, to inspire a work of genuine and lasting beauty.