Hugo Sailer asks only one question on his debut album as Books Of Moods, and he asks it quietly, almost apologetically, as though afraid the answer might dissolve upon contact with daylight: *what if it was all a dream?* It is the kind of question that belongs to the small hours, to the half-lit space between waking and forgetting, and it is precisely that liminal territory that *Dreams* stakes out and inhabits for its thirty-five luminous minutes.

Picture the scene: a woman walks through her front door carrying the invisible tonnage of a day that has wrung her dry, only to find her boyfriend ready to crack open the same old wound — the ex, again, that ghost who won't stay buried. The frustration doesn't arrive like a thunderclap. It seeps up through the floorboards, slow and corrosive, the way accumulated grievances always do. She says nothing. She takes her keys, gets in the car, and turns the volume up until the glass hums. And for the first time in what feels like weeks, she can breathe.

Let us be honest about what the lo-fi label has become: a refuge for the indolent, a permission slip for the undercooked, a genre-tag that too often functions as a pre-emptive apology. Half the output on any given streaming platform hides its thinness behind tape hiss and a soft-focus filter, banking on ambience to do the work that melody and craft refuse to. Which is precisely why Koirah's debut EP, *Candles for the Chosen* — released under the rubric of the project he calls The Last Watchfire — arrives as something worth paying close attention to.

There is a particular kind of musical courage required to make an album almost entirely in a language that fewer than half a million people in the world speak — and to do so not as an act of ethnomusicological preservation, not as provocation, but simply because it is the truest tongue available. Tita Nzebi, born Huguette Leckat in the equatorial forests of Mbigou in southern Gabon, has been exercising that courage since 2006, and on *Réminiscence* it has ripened into something close to mastery.

The French six-piece Shooqa 22 have crafted a peculiar little gem with "Waaa (you make me slow)", a track that refuses to settle into any comfortable genre classification while somehow feeling entirely cohesive. This is music for those who've grown weary of the algorithmic predictability that plagues so much contemporary output—a song that demands your attention through its sheer compositional audacity.

Mark J Soler's "Walking in the City" arrives as a quietly confident statement of intent from an artist who understands that instrumental music's power lies not in what it proclaims, but in what it allows the listener to discover. This Paris-based composer, drawing from a rich palette that encompasses everything from Stevie Wonder to Pink Floyd, has crafted a piece that manages to feel both deeply personal and universally resonant.

The Alsatian duo have fashioned a genuinely unsettling piece of work. Where lesser acts might settle for pastiche—aping the neon-soaked aesthetics of synthwave without understanding its emotional architecture—Macrowave have constructed something altogether more substantial.

Paris has always been a city of amour fou and sartorial excess, so it's rather fitting that Hugo Sailer's Books Of Moods should emerge from that storied metropolis with a track that marries both obsessions so gleefully. "Fashion Romance" arrives as a fizzing, gloriously unhinged celebration of desire filtered through the prism of the boutique, and it's utterly irresistible.

Noctæra's second album 'Visions Through Amber' arrives with the kind of understated confidence that suggests an artist who has learned to trust her instincts, however unconventional they might be. This is music that refuses to announce itself with fanfare, preferring instead to seep into consciousness like a half-remembered dream that refuses to fade come morning.

Sylvain Spanu's second full-length offering under The Dawn Razor moniker arrives six years after his debut, and the Parisian multi-instrumentalist has clearly spent the intervening period refining his peculiar brand of romantic brutality. *In Sublime Presence* positions itself squarely within the melodic death metal tradition while reaching backward to plunder the aesthetic sensibilities of 19th-century Romanticism—a conceit that could easily collapse under its own pretensions, yet somehow maintains its balance across the album's runtime.