Despite the Wane have made something quietly ruthless with "All in Vain" — a single that earns its drama instead of borrowing it. The band still operates around its two architects: Mir Kollins, who handles vocals, synths, writing, and arrangement, and Max Dury, on lead guitar. Between them they write, play, and produce everything, which goes some way toward explaining why the sound feels so unified rather than assembled from parts.

It takes a particular kind of nerve to name your band after the Greek paradise of the blessed before you've played a single gig, and yet that's precisely the gambit Mark Roos and James Shumway pulled off in 1994, recruiting a recent Arizona transplant named Kerri Murray on the strength of her voice alone. The result, "Definition," recorded between 1994 and 1995 at Cliff Maag's Record Lab and only now finding its way to streaming services three decades late, is a record that wears its ambition lightly. This is mid-nineties Utah pop-rock with its sleeves rolled up and its heart, somewhat unfashionably for the period, worn very much on the outside.

Every decade or so, a record arrives that makes the gap between releases feel entirely worthwhile — not because absence has manufactured mystique, but because the artist has simply lived enough to earn the weight of what they're saying. Clay DuBose's Father Time & Mother Nature is precisely that kind of album: the work of a man who stepped away from the spotlight not in defeat, but in pursuit of the very experiences that would eventually give his music genuine gravity.

The great paradox of the love song — and it is a paradox that has kept songwriters honest or dishonest since Cole Porter first sat at a piano — is that the best ones are never really about a person. They are about the *idea* of a person, the ghost of feeling that lingers after the object of desire has been replaced by something more durable: longing itself. Anthony Casuccio, a man who has spent thirty years in the engine room of professional music-making, seems to have understood this intuitively. His new single, "Love Song for No One," does exactly what the title promises, and the audacity of that promise is precisely where the record's considerable power lives.

Some songs announce themselves with the quiet confidence of someone who has nothing left to prove. *Hold On*, the latest single from Tucson-bred singer-songwriter Brian Fate, is precisely that kind of record — unhurried, undecorated, and yet somehow impossible to dismiss. It arrives not with fanfare but with the soft certainty of a hand placed on a shoulder at the exact right moment.

The Los Angeles collective Road Movie are about to deliver something genuinely unsettling — and, if the signs are right, rather magnificent.**

The great lie perpetuated by the rock and roll machine is that vulnerability is weakness. Spottiswoode has never believed it. For years the New York-by-way-of-London singer-songwriter has been making records that wear their hearts on their sleeves like medals — messy, wilful, intelligent records that the mainstream press consistently failed to notice and the independent music world quietly adored. Now, on his most nakedly personal work to date, he has done something genuinely radical: he has written an album about his daughter. Not a song. Not a touching bonus track. Twelve songs, front to back, one long love letter dressed in twelve different costumes.

Rock music's most persistent lie is the one it tells about spontaneity — the myth that the best recordings arrive fully formed, blurted into a microphone at two in the morning between cigarettes, raw and reckless and magnificent. Casey Brandt and Jason Fletcher, the two men who constitute Mattock, have spent enough years in enough rooms — CBGB's sweat-soaked floors, the cluttered rehearsal spaces of the DMV scene — to know better. "Daughters," the title track from their sophomore album, is a record that understands the difference between rawness and carelessness. It has the former in abundance. It contains none of the latter.

John Fogerty wrote "Fortunate Son" in about twenty minutes. He said so himself. Twenty minutes of white-hot fury — fury at draft dodgers with powerful fathers, fury at flags waved by people who'd never bleed beneath them, fury at a war machine that ran on other people's children. The song came out in 1969. It remains, fifty-seven years later, the most uncomfortably relevant piece of American rock and roll ever committed to tape. Which raises an obvious question: why would anyone bother covering it?

Picture the scene: a musician standing at the intersection of two worlds — the Pacific coastline of Quilpué, Chile, and the fog-laced hills of the San Francisco Bay Area — trying, with enormous urgency, to make sense of both. That is precisely the geographic and emotional cartography from which Chungungo, the eighth studio album by Chilean-born, SF-based Stefan Elbl, dramatically emerges. Eight albums is a significant body of work by any measure. What is startling about this one is how fiercely, how unapologetically, it refuses to sound like a man running out of things to say.