Pop music has always harboured a secret fear of sincerity. Somewhere between the knowing irony of Britpop and the algorithmic hedging of the streaming era, the straightforwardly joyful song became a suspicious object — too earnest, too exposed, too liable to embarrass itself in polite company. Bijons, apparently, have not received this memo. And thank God for that.

Eugene Smozhevsky has done something rather sly. He has made a virtue of malfunction — and pulled it off with the quiet conviction of someone who never doubted it would work.

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.

Love, as any honest songwriter will eventually confess, is not a single sustained note. It bends. It wobbles. It rises to frequencies that make the body ache and then, without warning, drops away entirely, leaving only the ringing silence of aftermath. On *Helium*, the gravitational centrepiece of 37 Houses' unflinching new record *When and How It Happened*, Erin Sydney and Jeremy Rosenblum do something that most artists with a microphone and a publishing deal would never dare: they document the exact sensation of floating away, and the terrible cost of being pulled back to earth.

There is a particular alchemy that separates electronic music from mere electronic sound — that invisible threshold between a producer arranging frequencies and an artist genuinely *conjuring* something. Melbourne's ABRAXON, a name that already carries the weight of its own mythology, crosses that threshold on *I Fade Into You* with the quiet confidence of someone who has spent a very long time listening to dark rooms breathe.

The ghazal has always been a form that demands surrender — from both its performer and its listener. Across its centuries-long journey from the courts of Persia to the mehfils of Lucknow and Lahore, it has survived precisely because it refuses shortcuts. Every couplet is a small reckoning; every *radif* a returning tide. With *Nuqoosh* (Imprints), the young Indian vocalist Kavya Limaye steps into that exacting tradition and, on the evidence of these three ghazals, carries it with a composure that belies her years.

The Damascene conversion is among the most arresting images in the Western canon. Blinding light, a fallen horseman, the voice of God cutting through the dust of the ancient road — it is the definitive metaphor for transformation so violent and complete that the self that arrives at the journey's end bears little resemblance to the self that began it. It is, then, a bold thing for a songwriter to lay claim to. Most who try mistake the word *spiritual* for *vague*, and produce something so airless and non-committal that it might serve equally well as a loyalty card jingle. Don Sechelski, with this quietly devastating new single, does not make that mistake.

The name is almost too perfect. Gee Whiz! — that exclamation mark doing considerable heavy lifting — suggests a band constitutionally incapable of playing it cool, a gang of enthusiasts who've never once considered whether their love of melody might be embarrassing. And honestly, thank God for them.

There is a particular kind of audacity required to open a record with the implicit suggestion that everything which preceded it — every morning you have ever shuffled through, every grey Tuesday of half-hearted living — was merely prologue. Eric Folino, a Toronto-based singer-songwriter whose roots reach back to the uncanny quietude of Oakville, Ontario, possesses precisely that audacity, and he wears it with the easy confidence of someone who has thought very carefully about what he wants to say and has decided, finally, to say it at full volume.

**Paul Jenner, the independent artist operating under the wonderfully self-aware moniker 50mething, has done something genuinely difficult with his fifth single: he has made urban anxiety feel intimate.**