Rock music has always been at its most vital when it carries the bruises of genuine experience — when the distortion is not mere aesthetic choice but the sound of something actually breaking and then, with considerable effort, being put back together. The Forrius understand this. Their title track and EP centrepiece, *Power of Rebirth*, is not a record that flatters the listener with easy catharsis. It earns its emotional conclusions.

**Conformity has always had excellent PR.** It arrives not as a diktat but as a suggestion, not as a cage but as a kindness — *just smooth the edges a little, just sand down the parts that snag*. Most people comply. Most bands comply too, and we call the results "mature" and "accessible" and other words that mean the same thing as "defeated." Mosh Pit, with the controlled detonation of their new single "No Returning," have decided they'd rather not.

Let us dispense with the formalities. Rock music has spent the better part of a decade apologising for itself — softening its edges, digitising its soul, feeding its rough hewn bones through the same antiseptic production pipeline that gave us a thousand bedroom-laptop albums indistinguishable from one another. "Torn," the new single from Savannah's Cries of Redemption, refuses this arrangement entirely. It arrives not as a polite request for your attention, but as a door kicked open at two in the morning.

Dustin Burkhard does not arrive at your door quietly. He does not knock politely and wait on the mat. He arrives with the full weight of a man who has spent fifteen years shepherding teenagers through their worst moments, who has held the hands of addicts in the small hours, who has watched his own father wrestle with demons that no amount of love alone could exorcise. When ONEWAY delivers *Breakdown*, you feel every last ounce of that biography in the grooves.

Twenty-five years is a long time to carry a wound. And Cayne — the Milan-born alternative metal outfit that has spent the better part of three decades navigating grief, lineup upheaval, and the perpetual shadow of their Lacuna Coil connections — arrive at "Outcast" with the particular authority of a band that has genuinely earned every scar advertised on the tin. This is not a comeback forged from nostalgia or commercial calculation. It is something rarer and considerably more interesting: a resurrection that sounds like it was always inevitable.

**By the time A Floor Below have finished with you, you will not be entirely sure which side of the walls you are on. That is precisely the point.** The concept album has always been a dangerous gamble — a format littered with the wreckage of bands who confused ambition for architecture. *The Asylum*, the latest offering from A Floor Below, does something rather more interesting than merely avoid that fate: it makes the very concept of confinement feel liberating. This is a record that locks you in a room and hands you the key, then dares you to decide whether you actually want to leave.

Luxembourg is not a city that looms large in the rock mythology — no Madchester swagger, no New York grime, no Berlin coldwave alienation baked into its postcode. And yet from this small, landlocked duchy comes one of the more quietly devastating debut singles you are likely to hear this year: *Devils and Demons*, a solo excavation of the self by Paul Gehl that makes geography feel entirely beside the point.

John, the singular force behind the For You Brother project, has spent the better part of three decades quietly filling notebooks and four-track cassettes with songs that the world, through a combination of bad luck and industry indifference, has conspicuously failed to hear. *Don't You Want Me* is his corrective — a bold, unhurried reassertion that the music always existed, always had worth, and will not be silenced by the bureaucratic whims of a distribution platform with the aesthetic sensitivity of a tax return.

Rock music has always functioned best as a declaration. Not a question, not a hedge, not a carefully worded disclaimer — a declaration. A fist through the plasterboard of whatever has been trying to contain you. And so when Lonely Wanderer — the anonymous, quietly extraordinary project that arrived with virtually no fanfare and considerable purpose late in 2024 — titles his second single *I Will Survive*, he is not borrowing from Gloria Gaynor's disco mythology, nor recycling the hollow motivational wallpaper that clutters lesser artists' catalogues. He means it. You can hear the meaning embedded in every bar like rebar in concrete.

Some albums arrive. Others *return* — carrying the weight of decades, of roads taken and abandoned, of ghosts who never quite let go. *Destructor*, the long-delayed third full-length from London NWOBHM veterans MORE, belongs emphatically to the second category. And the ghost in question is one of rock production's most singular talents: Chris Tsangarides, the man who put the thunder into Judas Priest's *Screaming for Vengeance*, who understood better than almost anyone how to make a guitar sound like it was tearing the fabric of the physical world. He delivered the final mix of this record on the eve of his death in January 2017. Nearly a decade later, the rest of us finally get to hear what he left behind. The wait, it turns out, was worth every agonising year.