Restraint is the hardest thing to sell. Rock and pop have long rewarded the big gesture: the key change, the stadium chorus, the guitar solo flung skywards like a hat at a graduation. New Sunday, a band from Hafnarfjörður whose members have never occupied the same room, have built something sturdier on a different principle. Their fourth single, "Here I Am Meant To Be," shows that restraint, practised with conviction, can hit harder than bombast.

Quarter of a century is a peculiar gestation period for three minutes and change of song, and yet here we are: a family affair twenty-five years in the waiting room, finally allowed through the studio door. The temptation with a backstory like this is to treat the record as a curiosity, a heartwarming footnote dressed up as music. Resist that temptation. *Last Rodeo* earns its keep on its own terms, quite apart from the mythology of its making.

Third singles have a habit of revealing what a band actually is, once the introductions have been made and the small talk dispensed with. "The Empty Street" arrives as exactly that kind of statement from New Sunday: quieter in its ambitions than a debut, surer in its instincts, and all the more affecting for it.

Reykjavík has always bred musicians who understand the value of silence, and on "Staring at Nothing," Bardi Johannsson and David Antonsson prove themselves fluent in that particular dialect of restraint. This is a debut collaboration that arrives fully formed, unhurried, and confident enough to let its atmosphere do the heavy lifting rather than reaching for anthemic gestures.

The Icelanders have always understood something the rest of the world periodically rediscovers: that music is not manufactured but excavated, drawn slowly from the sediment of lived experience. MONORA's debut EP *99* arrives having spent two decades waiting for the right moment, and the patience — involuntary though it largely was — has done it nothing but good.

Reykjavík's Gugga Lísa—the performing name of Guðbjörg Elísa Hafsteinsdóttir—has fashioned a quietly devastating piece of work with 'Virgin', a single that dares to whisper when the rest of contemporary pop bellows for attention. This is music constructed from negative space, from the pauses between breaths, from the kind of restraint that feels almost extinct in our oversaturated sonic landscape.

Guðmundur Óli Pálmason's latest missive from the Nordic void arrives bearing manifestos and metaphors in equal measure. "Interglacial" functions simultaneously as darkwave meditation and artistic declaration of independence, its creator positioning himself as a human holdout against the encroaching algorithmic permafrost.

While countless artists chase commercial success with formulaic production, Iceland's Silja Rós offers something altogether more substantial with her third studio album, "...letters from my past". The Reykjavík-born artist, who has been steadily building her reputation since her 2017 debut, delivers what is undoubtedly her most accomplished work to date – a collection that marries neo-soul warmth with pristine Scandinavian pop sensibilities.

Kahnin is an Icelandic talented musician and songwriter who creates original, thoughtful music with a clear bias towards the art environment. His latest single 'Hollystick' is a great testament to his abilities as a charismatic artist who releases music to watch out for.

Spouses is the music project of Joel Durksen, a Canadian musician and songwriter who has become an integral part of Liverpool's indie scene. 'Indian Summer' is the second official single from Spouses, which tells about a new period that comes to return us to the world of nostalgic memories of childhood and youth.