Most songs about emotional difficulty are in a tearing hurry to resolve it. A key change arrives to heal the wound, and a chorus swells to announce that everything is fine now. Brian Kovacs, a Chicago-area bassist with 33 years in the trade, declines the transaction. "Holding Space" is a song about sitting with what cannot yet be mended, and it has the nerve to sound exactly like that: unhurried, low-slung and quietly stubborn.

There's a particular kind of alchemy that occurs when a musician stops treating a recording as a finished artefact and starts treating it as raw material — a photograph to be developed differently, a memory to be told from another angle. C'batch, the White Plains guitarist, producer and Stevette Music lifer, has built something genuinely absorbing out of exactly that instinct with "Our Little Pooh Pea (The Last Light) 4 - Cinematic," a track that began life as a guitar solo laid down over an entirely different song and has since been coaxed into an atmosphere all its own.

Six minutes and ten seconds is a long time to ask a listener to sit still, and Project D.S.F spends every one of them earning the privilege. "Transformation," the latest cut from the "Uncharted Networks" EP, is a piece that refuses to announce itself with a hook or a chorus, instead unspooling like a reel of film shot somewhere far beyond the reach of a satellite dish. It opens on hush and static, the kind of tentative electronic murmur you might associate with a control room going dark, before the strings creep in — not lush, not yet, but wary, as though they too are waiting to see what the silence contains.

Somewhere on a dead-straight stretch of road in outback New South Wales, a man behind the wheel of a Kenworth B-double watches a feedlot slide past his window and feels the hairs go up on his arms. Out of that unglamorous, faintly biblical moment of dread comes "Hells Gate," the third cut from Rob Fletcher's *Love Storm*, and easily the record's most persuasive argument for itself.

There is a particular breed of European prog band that treats the studio the way a cathedral mason treated stone: patiently, devoutly, and with an eye on something larger than the immediate commission. RSM, the Łódź-based trio steered by guitarist and keyboard player Rafał Szewczyk, belong unmistakably to that lineage. Their second full-length, *Life is…*, is a record built not for the algorithm but for the armchair — the kind of album you sit with, lights dimmed, from the needle-drop of track one to the last decaying chord of the closer, and emerge from thirty-odd minutes later slightly rearranged.

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 Viennese have always understood that music is architecture. You feel this immediately in "Vibrant Secrets," the lead single from Alexander Nantschev's album Half A Century — a record conceived, rather beautifully, as a 50th birthday letter to himself and to the half-decade of pandemic-born introspection that preceded it. From its opening bars, the track announces itself not as a song in any conventional sense but as a constructed space: enter it, and it rearranges the dimensions around you.

Paul Cogley — now trading simply as Cogley, a streamlining that suggests both artistic confidence and a healthy irritation with administrative confusion — has done something quietly remarkable with this re-release. He has taken an album that already carried genuine emotional weight, added four new songs, handed the masters to Robert L. Smith (a man whose CV reads like a roll call of rock's untouchable titans), and arrived at something that demands to be heard at volume, preferably in the dark.

Southern Germany has never been the most obvious cradle of progressive rock ambition — the genre's spiritual homeland remains stubbornly anchored to the English Midlands, to Californian studio excess, to the windswept conceptualism of a certain stripe of 1970s Teutonic experimentalism. And yet Kurt Seßler and Werner Zeeb, the duo operating under the pleasingly unfussy banner of Seßler / Zeeb, seem entirely unbothered by questions of geography or expectation. *Soul Free*, their latest single and the most fully realised statement of intent in their catalogue to date, arrives with the quiet confidence of musicians who have spent years learning exactly what they want to say — and, crucially, how to say it.

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.