There is a particular kind of Englishman — or in this case, a particular kind of Northern Irishman — who spent his school years convinced that greatness was simply a matter of waiting to be discovered. He didn't need to do the work; he only needed to *be*, aloofly, magnificently, and let the material of his own existence arrange itself into art. Rumour Den's Steve Simms and AJ Gilmore know this man intimately. They may well have sat next to him in double English. And on "Chapter & Verse," the fourth dispatch from their forthcoming album *Relapse*, they finally give him the song he's always assumed the world owed him — then quietly, devastatingly, take it away again.

There is a very specific kind of nerve required to write a song that treats the Almighty as just another mark to be worked, and Madeline Rosene has it in spades. "I'll Seduce God to Get Into Heaven" doesn't so much knock on the pearly gates as kick them off their hinges, saunter in, and start making eyes at the doorman.

Oxford's Shaven Primates have never been a band content to sit still, and their fourth outing arrives with the subtlety of a brick through a shop window. Where "Chasing The Dragon" traded in desire and "Child Of Dirt" wallowed handsomely in trauma, "Kill The Algorithm" turns its gaze outward, training its scope on the machinery that now governs how we think, feel, and doomscroll ourselves into oblivion. It is a record built on anxiety and control, and it wears both like a stained leather jacket — proudly, defiantly, a little unwashed.

Once in a while a pop record arrives with its knives already sharpened, and Piper Connolly's "body bag" belongs squarely in that lineage of songs written not to soothe but to settle a score. This is a track built on spite refined into craft, and it is all the better for it.

Grief has a house style, and most of pop's practitioners furnish it the same way: candles, string arrangements, a single tasteful tear. Wax Bird burns the place down instead. "Misery's Valet," released on 13th September 2025 as part of the EP *Mood Swings & Middle Fingers*, refuses every polite convention of the confessional song, and in doing so becomes one of the more genuinely unsettling pieces of songwriting to surface this year.

Some records arrive like a tip-off from a mate who knows a guy who knows a guy. "South Florida Police" arrives like a squad car with its lights already spinning, kicking the door clean off its hinges before you've even decided whether you wanted company. Andrei British has built a single that doesn't so much court the listener as cuff them, bundle them into the back seat, and drive off at 142 beats per minute with the windows down and the radio cranked past sensible.

Orlando's Kings County have arrived bearing the two things every aspiring hard rock band needs and almost none possess in equal measure: a producer with a genuine pedigree and a press kit that reads like a man trying very hard to convince you he's already made it. Chuck Alkazian, the studio hand behind Pop Evil and the late, great Chris Cornell, has been drafted in to give "What Now" its sheen, and credit where it's due — Pearl Sound Studios has clearly done the band more favours than five years of festival slots combined.

The word "raw," when affixed to a single as a qualifier, usually functions as an apology — a whispered disclaimer that the machinery wasn't quite ready, that what you are about to hear is provisional, unfinished, apologetically underdressed. Savannah-based project Cries of Redemption, the vehicle of the artist known as Silva, uses the word differently. For them, rawness is the point. It is the argument.

Some records arrive quietly. They slip beneath the door like a note slid under a hotel room at midnight — no fanfare, no machinery, just the thing itself. Daniel Trigger's comeback single 'Alone Tonight' is precisely that kind of record: unhurried, unfashionable, and almost defiantly itself. Which, depending on your appetite for melodic hard rock delivered with genuine conviction, is either the best news you've heard all year, or confirmation that certain corners of the musical universe remain gloriously immune to trend.

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.