The curious thing about melodic metalcore in 2025 is how difficult it has become to distinguish genuine emotional heft from mere technical proficiency dressed in atmospheric window-dressing. ALL I LIVE FOR's latest offering arrives amid a glut of bands wielding identical production values and compositional templates, yet manages to carve out territory worth defending.

The husband-and-wife duo Suris arrive with their album *Pertinax* bearing the weight of decades spent refining their craft in relative obscurity. Lindsey and David Mackie's journey from Norwich's post-punk scene through major label interest, personal tragedy, and the unglamorous realities of parenthood has forged something rather remarkable: an album that refuses easy categorization whilst maintaining an unwavering commitment to emotional authenticity.

The Lunar Keys have arrived at a curious juncture with 'Pure As Your Protocol', a single that manages to feel both claustrophobic and expansive, intimate yet algorithmically distant. This is pop music refracted through the prism of our digital malaise, a track that understands implicitly that modern romance unfolds as much in the ghostly glow of screens as it does in the corporeal world.

Skar de Line has crafted a piece of electronic darkness that cuts deeper than its surface melancholy might suggest. "The Screen" arrives as a meditation on modern isolation, wrapped in production that manages to feel both claustrophobic and expansive, a trick few artists pull off with such assurance.

The husband-and-wife duo Glory Company arrive at a curious juncture with their latest single, a devotional exercise that positions itself somewhere between the contemplative hush of contemporary worship and the textural ambitions of art-pop. After a seven-year hiatus—a sabbatical born of necessity rather than indulgence, one suspects—Matthew and Pearl Nagy have returned with *My Ears Are Attentive*, a track that announces itself with considerable restraint yet refuses to apologise for its spiritual directness.

Richard Green's "Sea of Memories" arrives as the closing statement of his "A Journey" EP, a composition that attempts to grapple with mortality, retrospection, and the weight of lived experience through the language of contemporary classical music. Released in April 2024, this Milan/London-based composer's latest offering features the considerable talents of Italian pianist Irene Veneziano and the Archimia strings quartet, recorded at Studio Elfo near Piacenza.

Bristol has always possessed an uncanny ability to birth music that exists in the spaces between—genres bleeding into one another like watercolors in rain. From Massive Attack's blueprint melancholy to Portishead's cigarette-smoke soul, the city's musical DNA runs thick with atmospherics and unease. RYDE, the duo comprising Arran Glass and Brontë Shande, arrive as natural inheritors of this legacy, though "Winter" suggests they're less interested in reverence than in carving their own path through the gloom.

Five men well past the first flush of youth, convening over Zoom during lockdown to make blues-rock records about their collective existential bruising, sounds precisely like the sort of proposition that ought to fail spectacularly. Yet Glasgow's Bison Hip have managed to pull off a minor miracle with their third album *Everything That Came Before Was Just Leading Up To This*, and nowhere is this more evident than on 'Chemicals', the record's standout single and a track that deserves far more attention than it's likely to receive.

There's a particular brand of madness required to form a rock band solely to soundtrack your own film. That Ettecon—the husband-and-wife production team of Kevin and Juliette Short—have not only attempted this feat but emerged with a genuinely compelling record speaks volumes about their commitment to creative authenticity over commercial expedience.

The cigarette as metaphor has been exhausted to the point of cliché in confessional songwriting, yet decede manages to resurrect it with genuine poignancy in the opening line of "Leave It All Behind." Perhaps it's because the gesture here feels less like affectation and more like documentary – the actual ritual of someone sitting alone, parsing through the wreckage of a relationship with nothing but tobacco smoke and memory for company.