Euripides gave us a woman who burns her own house down and dares the audience to look away. Flame, an Edinburgh band barely two years into their existence, have borrowed her name for a debut live EP, and the gamble is a bold one. To invoke Medea is to promise fury, intelligence and a refusal to apologise. Happily, these six tracks, captured in a rehearsal studio in the middle of the city, keep that promise with room to spare.

Proxima b is a long way from the nearest kitchen table, which makes it an improbable setting for the most tender single of Vela Jones's career. Yet she has gone to the far edge of human settlement and come back with something rarer than a silver jumpsuit and a slogan: a song about missing your mother.

Pop music has always been better at falling in love than at surviving what follows. The charts are crowded with first kisses and last dances, but the long, grey Tuesday afternoon after a love has died gets far less attention. 2nd Magpie Project have moved into that Tuesday afternoon, hung some heavy curtains and turned the lights down low. *Divine Intervention*, their third single of 2026, is the most affecting thing they have made.

There is a particular kind of hip-hop record that arrives shouting, all chest-thumping and bank statements, and there is another kind that walks in quietly, takes off its hat and asks how your evening's going. "Chrysanthemum Flower" belongs firmly to the second category, and it is all the more disarming for it.

Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific in 1937, and the world has never quite let her go. She has been sighted on desert islands, in Japanese custody and, in the more excitable corners of the internet, aboard a flying saucer. One durable rumour even had her as the voice on the wartime airwaves that gave this song its title. Alan Grice, who records as Fierce Friend, has gathered up the whole tangle of searchlights, static and folklore and turned it into a piano ballad that begins politely and ends somewhere near the edge of the map.

Horizon Beyond has arrived at "Quiet Kind of Lost" with a rare kind of confidence: the confidence to underplay everything. This is a single that refuses the obvious gesture — no key change swelling toward redemption, no chorus engineered to detonate on a festival stage. Instead it moves like weather across a window, patient and slightly grey, and it's all the more affecting for it.

Andrew Marshall doesn't do metaphor for its own sake. On "Blessing In Disguise," the second single pulled from his forthcoming *No Promises* project, the man behind the Dru Melodics name sets his own psychiatric file to a beat and dares you to look away. It shouldn't work as pop music. It works magnificently as something else entirely: testimony.

Pop-punk has always been the music of bad decisions made at speed, and the genre's best songs know that regret can be made to sound like joy. Weekday Social, a London trio of Louise, Gavin and Ben, understand this thoroughly. "So Close," released last week, is a song about walking into a mistake with your eyes open, and the band sound delighted to be doing it.

Lancashire has a habit of producing bands who sound like they've been forged rather than formed, and Defined By slot neatly into that lineage with "Monopoly," a single that arrives less like a calling card and more like a clenched fist through the letterbox. Four musicians, freshly reconstituted, have spent the past couple of years road-testing this sound in rooms that matter more than their size suggests — Preston's Ferret, Burnley's Loom, a headline turn at Horwich's Ramp — and the graft shows. This is a band who've learned their craft on sticky floors rather than in spreadsheets, and "Monopoly" carries the calluses to prove it.

There's a particular kind of English melancholy that knows better than to wallow, and Paul Garside has bottled it rather beautifully on "Mariana Trench." This is a record that takes its title from the deepest, darkest, most crushing place on Earth and somehow turns it into a reason to punch the air. That paradox—darkness rendered as uplift—is the single's great trick, and Garside pulls it off with the sort of unforced conviction that can't be faked.