Delusion is an unfashionable subject. Pop music, in its perpetual race toward the hyper-confessional and the algorithmically optimised, tends to mistake self-deception for weakness — something to be overcome swiftly, narrated briskly, monetised and moved on from. Julie Paschke is having absolutely none of it. On Flying Above, her new single and accompanying visual, the Melbourne-based artist treats self-delusion not as a flaw to be corrected but as the very texture of human experience — the fog we agree, collectively and privately, to breathe every day. It is a quietly devastating proposition, and she handles it with the kind of unhurried confidence that most artists spend entire careers pretending to possess.

**Peaches, as any decent poet will tell you, bruise easily.** They demand to be handled with something approaching reverence — too firm a grip and the whole thing collapses into sweetness and ruin. Mary Knoblock understands this. *PEACH*, her latest offering from Portland via the quietly formidable Aurally Records, is an album that holds its own tenderness with extraordinary care, and dares you to do the same.

Klas Jonsson does not come to you. This is perhaps the first thing worth understanding about the Gothenburg-based musician who has spent the better part of two years releasing music with the unhurried confidence of someone who has already made peace with the fact that the algorithm will not save him. Versions, his new EP and first release of 2026, is a collection of four remixed tracks pulled from his existing catalogue — a document less of reinvention than of revelation, the kind of record that turns a light on in a room you thought you already knew.

Norway has always kept its own counsel. While the rest of the continent chases trends with the desperate energy of a dog after a bus it has no intention of boarding, Scandinavia tends to arrive quietly, set something extraordinary down on the table, and wait. Tonje Gravningsmyhr — musician, songwriter, classical trumpeter turned pop architect from Moss — does precisely this with *Maze*, the title single from her second album.

Grief, when it arrives properly, has a way of reorganising everything — the furniture of the self shifted overnight so that you keep walking into doorframes you'd navigated for years. What meelu has managed with *candlelight* is the rarer, harder thing: not merely to document that disorientation, but to find — painstakingly, honestly — the exact moment when loss begins its slow negotiation with living.

**The bravest thing a person can do, Albert Eno seems to believe, is simply remain.** Not conquer. Not escape. Not reinvent. Just stay — feet planted, eyes open, present in the difficult, complicated, irreducibly human mess of loving someone. It's an unfashionable sentiment, perhaps, in a cultural moment that prizes self-optimisation and clean breaks. Which is precisely why *Stay*, Eno's first single since his 2021 debut *Dark'n'Stormy*, lands with the quiet force of something genuinely necessary.

**The Norfolk troubadour greets spring with a song of uncommon warmth and craft** Picture the scene: dawn breaking over the flat, wide skies of rural Norfolk, mist retreating from the treeline, the first brave wood anemones shouldering up through the leaf litter. Paul Thompson, ensconced in his Cabin Studios, has been watching this slow annual miracle unfold across the fields and woods visible from his studio window — and rather than simply witnessing it, he has done the thing that separates poets from passengers. He has made a song of it.

Twenty-odd years is a long time to wear a cowboy hat without it becoming a joke. Hi Ho Six Shooter have somehow pulled it off — not by abandoning the sartorial absurdity of their Richmond, Virginia origins, but by letting the music grow quietly enormous underneath it. Close as Kin, the second of two newly minted singles from this long-dormant outfit, is the sound of a band returning not because they felt nostalgic, but because they actually had something to say.

**There is a particular kind of English songwriter who understands that the smallest rooms contain the largest feelings. John Arter, it turns out, is very much one of them.** Folk music has always been, at its restless heart, a music of movement — of roads taken and roads regretted, of the hearth abandoned for the horizon and the horizon abandoned for the hearth. It is a tension as old as the ballad form itself, and one that has sustained everyone from Richard Thompson to Frank Turner through decades of worthy endeavour. On "Homegirl," the third single from his forthcoming LP *Small Wonder*, Surrey's John Arter doesn't so much reinvent this tension as hold it gently up to the light and turn it, slowly, until something new catches the eye.

**Oxford's most precocious eighteen-year-old arrives fully formed, armed with jazz chords, a saxophone, and the audacity to mean every single word.** The debut album is, by tradition, the most treacherous of all musical formats. Too raw and you're dismissed as unfinished. Too polished and you're accused of corporate interference. Bethany Lyn, an Oxford teenager who wrote, produced, mixed, mastered and largely performed this entire eleven-track record herself, has somehow avoided both pitfalls — not through compromise, but through the kind of self-possession that most artists spend a decade trying to fake.