Soft as Hell — the project of a Brighton-based one-person operation with a cinematic imagination operating well above its budget — arrives with "I'd Rather Fly" like a tumbleweed rolling through a town that didn't know it needed visiting. This is music for the wide shot, for the long horizon, for the slow zoom onto a squinting eye beneath a hat brim. And yet, crucially, it never quite lets you get comfortable with that reading. Just when you think you've pinned it to the spaghetti western corkboard, the thing pivots and starts to groove in a manner that Ennio Morricone, God rest him, would have found genuinely perplexing and possibly magnificent.

Nine thousand miles is a long way to travel to make a record. It is longer still as a unit of emotional distance — the gulf between who you were and who the city is slowly, insistently remaking you into. Susan Style, London-based and Taipei-born, has made that crossing the explicit subject of her debut album, and the remarkable thing is that she has done so without a single moment of self-pity. Heartbreak, on this seven-track collection, is recast not as wound but as aperture. Break the heart wide enough, the logic runs, and the whole world rushes in.

The question posed by 2mindsas1's latest single is one of pop music's oldest and most reliably devastating — and yet Rory Flynn and Yannis Masouras manage to make it feel freshly urgent, like a note slipped under the door of a relationship that has run out of road but refuses to admit it. It is a question that has haunted the best of British guitar music for decades, and this South East England studio pairing arrive with the credentials and the instincts to do it genuine justice.

**There's a particular kind of English melancholy that no one has ever quite bottled properly. Not the miserabilism of Morrissey, too theatrical and self-regarding. Not the kitchen-sink grimness of early Pulp, too arch. Something quieter. Something that smells of damp wool and instant coffee and a window left open onto a grey-skied garden that you somehow love anyway. Johnno Casson, the Essex troubadour who records under the name Snippet, has been circling this feeling for thirty-odd years. On *Soft Lad*, he finally catches it.**

There is a particular kind of fury that doesn't announce itself with a scream. It arrives, instead, wearing a fixed smile and a to-do list. It shows up on time, does the housework, books the therapy, completes the workout, and somewhere in the grinding repetition of all that cheerful compliance, something snaps — quietly, almost politely — like a knuckle cracking under a velvet glove.

Reading, Berkshire has rarely been celebrated as a cradle of musical adventurism. It is, after all, a town more associated with a festival held in a car park and the quiet suburban anxieties of the Thames Valley commuter belt. Yet it is precisely that geography — the ring roads, the retail parks, the grinding ordinariness of a life lived on schedule — that seems to have pressed itself into the grooves of Lee Switzer-Woolf's remarkable new single.

Grief, they say, is love with nowhere to go. Jacob's Cry has located the equally devastating companion emotion — the one that has no tidy name — and built a song around it. "You Don't Know" is about the paralysis of witnessing someone you love in pain, standing at the threshold of their suffering with your hands full of useless words and an aching, wordless devotion that cannot cross the distance. It is an uncomfortable subject for a pop song. Jacob's Cry makes it feel completely inevitable.

Nick Page — Count Dubulah to those who knew his work through Transglobal Underground and a sprawling catalogue of over 200 recordings — died in May 2021 with unfinished business. Not the anxious, unresolved kind: the joyful, purposeful kind. He was, by all accounts, always making music right up until the end, and *Dub Will Keep Us Together*, completed posthumously by his life partner Cristina Morán (Dubulette) and collaborator Toby Mills, carries none of the valedictory gloom one might expect from an album conceived under such circumstances. It sounds, rather defiantly, like a party to which death was not invited.

**By the time the opening chord lands, you already know exactly what kind of people made this record. And you want to be their friend immediately.** Luke Mortimore and James Mcrea — operating under the gloriously deadpan banner of PILL-BOX — have arrived with the sort of debut single that makes you wonder why anyone bothers writing anything other than post-punk kitchen-sink comedy. *Cost Of Living* is three minutes or so of Berkshire-brewed agitation, a lovingly sarcastic dispatch from the frontline of modern British mediocrity, and it is, frankly, a bit of a triumph.

Pop music, at its most honest, is the art of the confessional dressed in its Sunday best. It is the ache beneath the melody, the longing that hides inside a good chorus, the peculiar bravado of a man who picks up an instrument and insists — against all probability — that the feeling he carries is worth your time. Max Restaino, the Sheffield-bred multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter whose Italian grandmother unknowingly launched a career by bringing a button accordion back from the old country, has built his entire artistic identity on precisely this proposition. And with *Girl of My Dreams*, he makes it stick.